As we explained in our previous issue,an 18th-century legend has it that a chief called Omar discovered a few coffee berries while he was in exile. Fed up with having the same foodstuff, he boiled those berries and sipped off the liquid. He noted the fast recovery of some ill people he’d given the drink to. As soon as he came back from exile he took the plant with him. Coffee used to be drunk in Aden in the mid 15th century. In 1454, the civil ruler of Aden visited Ethiopia and brought home a few plants that helped him heal from his disease and stay awake. In the second half of that century, the plant got to Mecca –banned sometimes and allowed others during a whole century.Yet in the early 17th century it has already caught on in the entire Muslim world.

ARRIVAL IN EUROPE

Venetian merchants loaded up on this crop and introduced it in Europe in 1615. In the mid 1600s, it was said to be in Paris and London, Europe’s two most influential capitals at the time, shrouded by a halo of exoticism and recommended as a medication and aphrodisiac beverage. In 1616, the Dutch managed to take a coffee plant to the Netherlands, this one hailing from Moka, the capital of Yemen. The French failed to found a coffee plantation in the outskirts of Dijon in 1670 because the region’s cold weather wasn’t good for it.

Holland burgomaster Nicolas Witson panned out to be a key player in the development of coffee. He ordered Commander Malabar to carry coffee to Java, a Dutch colony at the time. Though the plants never grew roots, a few scions were replanted years later and sooner rather than later they all bore fruits. That marked the onset of many other plantations that came afterwards. In 1706, the first coffee plants were sent to Amsterdam and seeds were doled out among planters from all across Europe.

During the course of those years, the Dutch spread the plant all over Indonesia, a country that eventually became the world’s number-one coffee exporter. All attempts by the French had backfired until Louis XIV received a five-feet-tall coffee plant from Amsterdam. This was the known harbinger of many coffee plantations that popped up across the French colonies, especially in the central and southern Caribbean areas, from that moment on.