coffee colonises the world

One possible theory of how coffee started it’s journey is that when Ethiopia invaded the Arabian Peninsula in 525 A.D. they brought coffee with them and established the first coffee plants in Arabia at this time.

Other suggestions include that coffee may have been taken to Arabia by Sufti monks. Grand master, Ali ben Omar al Shadili had been living in Ethiopia for many years before founding a monastery in the Yemeni port of Al Muckha. ( Mocha)

It is known that between ad 575 – 850 African tribes migrated from Ethiopia and northwards to the Arabian Peninsula. It would make sense that a food source that was commonly used by the tribes at that time would travel northwards with them, and be cultivated where they stopped. The coffee plant went from Ethiopia to Arabia (possibly carried by tribes people as they migrated. The African settlers where later driven back to Africa by the Persians, but I believe that the coffee they had planted was left behind.

Islam came to Yemen around 630ad.(during Muhammad’s lifetime). Thereafter Yemen was ruled as part of Arab-Islamic caliphates, and Yemen became a province in the Islamic empire.
An oasis in Yemen on the Red Sea, called Al Muckha (Mocha), became the world’s major provider of coffee. Coffee beans from Mocha’s high plain were shipped to the capitals of the Muslim world. Mocha was the main port for the sea route to Mecca, and was the busiest place in the world at the time. Mocha soon became synonymous with coffee.

The Arab rulers of Mocha insured that the cultivation of coffee would not spread. The coffee bean is the seed of the coffee tree, but when stripped of its outer layers it becomes infertile. All coffee beans where scalded in boiling water before they were shipped.

In 1616 the Dutch broke the Arabs monopoly of coffee when a ship from the Dutch East India Company put in to Mocha and took on a load of green coffee. The captain also managed to smuggle a few cherries aboard and they were taken back to Amsterdam and planted in the Botanical Gardens.

In 1714 the Dutch gave a coffee plant to the French government.

In 1723 a French naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, took one of the Dutch seedlings from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, he then nursed this delicate plant on a trans-atlantic journey, sharing his limited supply of water with the coffee plant. Upon arrival in Martinique he planted this seedling which flourished, the cherries produced in its first yield were distributed on the island and also to Guadeloupe and Santo Domingo. Jamaica, Haiti. The countries of Central America were soon to follow as producers of coffee.

Three years later coffee was introduced to Brazil due to a border dispute between French & Dutch Guiana. Francisco de Melho Palheta, a Portuguese Brazilian official was asked to adjudicate, whilst there he seduced and slept with the French governor’s wife, upon his departure he was presented with a bunch of flowers, with some coffee seeds disguised in side.
The coffee seeds he planted in his home region of Para flourished. Coffee started to spread southward and by 1845, Brazil was the largest coffee producer in the world this is still true today, accounting for approximately 35% of the world’s coffee.

In the 1750s the Dutch sent some Arabica shoots from the plants grown in the Botanical Gardens in Amsterdam to their colonies of Ceylon, (now Sri Lanka) India, Java and Celebes (now Sulawesi)

The worldwide demand for coffee soon gave rise to the slave trade. Slaves from Africa were shipped to Haiti by the French, to Surinam by the Dutch, and to Brazil by the Portuguese. There were a half million Africans working in Haiti by the time of the Insurrection in 1791, when the island was set ablaze. Until then half of the world’s coffee had been produced there.

In 1878 the story of coffee’s journey around the world came full circle when the British laid foundations of Kenya’s coffee industry by introducing plants to British East Africa right next to neighbouring Ethiopia, where coffee had first been discovered a 1,000 years before.