Black Gold

4

THE MOCHA TRADE

Traces of the history of the expansion of European maritime nations into the East, their adoption of coffee drinking at home, and their involvement in the trade itself can all be found on the tiny South Atlantic island of St Helena. To the visitor, who must approach by sea, the island looms out of the dawn, its high peaks swathed in funereal clouds, and the enormous, bare, red-black basalt cliffs glisten with the remorseless damp of aeons of isolation, creating a seemingly impregnable fortress. As the boat draws closer and skirts the cliffs around the island towards the miniature capital of Jamestown on the north coast, the impression is of an unfathomable gloom.

This is partly because St Helena is further from anywhere else than anywhere on the planet. If the island were the size of the earth, the nearest land would be four times the distance of the moon away. Ascension Island, some seven hundred miles away, is closest – ‘another meer wart in the sea’, as a Dr Fryer noted in 1679. Madame Bernard was to remark during Napoleon’s exile: ‘the devil sh-t this island as he flew from one world to the other’. St Helena wears its remoteness like a damp, suffocating cloak.

The fierce, naked cliffs of basalt defy the heavy, sluggish swell of the South Atlantic and the unending battering of the south-east trade winds. It is hard to believe from the sea that, in 1502, the 47-square-mile island was regarded by its discoverer, the Portuguese Admiral Juan da Nova, as a veritable Eden. It was densely forested all over with gumwood, oak, and ebony, with no large animal inhabitants except sea-lions, sea-birds, seals, and turtles; it had no predators, no snakes, no poisonous insects, but 120 endemic kinds of beetle. The only usable access to the interior lay through the narrow valley that now contains Jamestown, where the early visitors built a small chapel, collected fresh water, and gathered fruits. Da Nova left a number of goats, and thus the untouched Eden that had first exploded out of the ink-blue waters of the South Atlantic some sixty million years previously commenced the inexorable fall from grace that only contact with man’s intrusive ways can bring.

The goats bred rapidly, and herds of hundreds, huge and fat, roamed the island eating young trees. Rats had escaped from the Portuguese ships and proliferated, along with great poisonous spiders from Africa, and there were packs of feral cats and dogs. The island continued to be the secret solace of Portuguese sailors, but as other European nations began to flex their maritime muscles it was inevitable that the secret of St Helena would out. An English adventurer, James Fenton, came across it by accident in 1582, and hatched a suitably piratical plot to oust the Portuguese and have himself proclaimed King, from which he had to be dissuaded by William Hawkins, his second-in-command. In 1583 three Japanese princes stopped there en route for Rome, on an embassy inspired by the indefatigable Jesuits. By chance, two other Japanese, captured off California from a Spanish ship, the Santa Ana, by Thomas Cavendish on his round-the-world voyage, would also have visited St Helena when the captain stopped there in 1588. He had been able to locate the island by taking prisoner the navigator from the Santa Ana. He stayed twelve days on the island, surveying it meticulously, observing the herds of goats nearly a mile long, the Persian partridges and Chinese pheasants, and stands of imported fig, lemon, and orange trees, as well as herbs and vegetables.

St Helena, despite its isolation, already bore the heavy stamp of man. Having finally been put on the map by Cavendish, it was inevitable that St Helena should become the unfortunate battleground of later European rivalries. A Dutch pilot in the service of the Portuguese, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, put in on the way back from India a year after Cavendish had left and heard stories of the Englishman’s sojourn. He described the island as ‘an earthly Paradise for the Portuguese ships’, so well placed in the vast wastes of the South Atlantic as to appear to be evidence of God’s beneficence. In those early days, there was virtually no piracy and no rival European navies to worry about, so the Portuguese ships sailed their own course from India to convene in St Helena before making the voyage home together. St Helena’s very isolation made it a uniquely valuable piece of real estate, in a bizarre sense obeying the estate agent’s mantra of ‘Location, Location, Location’. There was literally nowhere else to go.

Cavendish’s discovery that the island was the gathering place for the returning Portuguese East India fleet meant that it quickly became the haunt of English warships in search of easy – and lucrative – prey, to such an extent that, by 1592, the fleet returning from Goa had specific orders to avoid St Helena at all costs. Captain James Lancaster stopped on the island in 1591 on the first English commercial voyage to the Indies. He was to be the commander of the first East India Company fleet ten years later, using Portuguese maps of the Spice Islands which, ironically, had been stolen by van Linschoten from the Archbishop of Goa. These maps had excited so much interest in Holland and England that they gave the initial impetus necessary for the formation of merchant companies to exploit the knowledge they revealed. St Helena had already started to be the stage upon which many of the main characters of the coming European dominance of the East were to be first seen.

European sailors returning from the Cape of Good Hope, the Arabian Sea, and the East Indies beyond could run before the south-easterly trade winds that blow almost unceasingly from the Cape across the expanses of the South Atlantic. To avoid running into the same winds, outgoing ships mostly swung out towards the Brazilian coast, eventually making a much more southerly passage to the Cape. Frequently, the boats that had made the long journey to the trading ports of the East were in poor shape by the time they returned, and St Helena became a sanctuary for battered, weary sailors and their broken ships. The island’s history at the beginning of the seventeenth century reflected the waxing and waning of European fortunes in the East. Portugal, after it had become united with Spain in 1580, became embroiled in a war of attrition against the Dutch, who in turn flexed their muscles upon achieving independence at the conclusion of that war and lost no time in filling the vacuum left by the decline in Portuguese trading activity in the East by sending large well-financed fleets to the Spice Islands. This thwarted similar ambitions harboured by the English, who set up the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ (to become known as the East India Company) in 1600 with precisely the same aim. The First Voyage (as each individually financed fleet was termed) of the Company came to St Helena after a particularly gruelling passage of the Cape, during which the Commander, James Lancaster, having lost the rudder of his flagship, the Red Dragon, ordered the accompanying Hector to sail on, writing poignantly in his log: ‘I live … at the devotion of wind and seas.’ Fortunately for Lancaster, the captain of the Hector refused to obey the order, and the two ships eventually limped into St Helena for repairs.

For most English people, the East India Company is principally associated with the tea trade with China, which indeed it initiated in the 1660s and which largely sustained it until 1833, when it ceased to be a trading company and effectively became the managing agency of India. However, from the earliest years of the Company, its factors (as the merchants were known) had identified coffee as a potentially interesting trading commodity, and by the 1620s were actively trading coffee from Yemen throughout the Arabian Sea at a time when coffee was virtually unknown back in England. As St Helena became a vital safe haven for the increasing number of Company voyages that put in there, so it also became part of the intricate web of connections created by the coffee trade. The involvement of the Company in the trade pre-dated the period of rapid expansion of European coffee consumption, but coincided with the first reports of the beverage. The traveller Leonhard Rauwolf from Augsburg went to Aleppo in 1573 where he observed the use of ‘a very good drink, by them called chaube’. Another early reference to ‘this drink called caova’ was by Prospero Alpini, a physician from Padua who travelled to Egypt in 1580 and published a book on the plants of the country in 1592. Padua’s university was at the centre of European medical learning at the time, and knowledge of the new drink thus disseminated rapidly. Preceding this was the report made by the Venetian Gianfrancesco Morosini to the Senate in 1585. He had been living in Constantinople and said that the Turks ‘drink a black water as hot as they can suffer it, which is the infusion of a bean called cavee, which is said to possess the virtue of stimulating mankind’. Coffee was well established in the Ottoman Empire by the time these observations were made, and was also being widely consumed in Persia and Moghul India. Where did all the coffee to fill the cups of Islam come from?

It is common for the coffee industry to assert that, whilst Ethiopia was the cradle of coffee, Yemen, having imported plants from Ethiopia, was the first country actively to cultivate and trade in the new beverage. In fact, until the mid sixteenth century, the demand for coffee was met by Ethiopia entirely. Evidence of coffee exports from Zeila, near Djibouti on the western Red Sea coast, can be found in reports of the jurist Ibn Hadjar al-Haytami of Mecca in the late fifteenth century as well as in an account of a boat captured by the Portuguese in 1542 on the way to Shihr in Arabia.

According to some sources, exported coffee was harvested from the wild bushes in Kaffa province in the western highlands. However, recent genetic research into the spread of coffee plant species has suggested that the source of the Yemeni coffee strain was not the type found in Kaffa province, but that found in the east near Harar. As it is clear that the Harar type evolved from the Kaffa type, this would imply that there had been a migration of the plant to the Arab province of Harar before the plant went on to be cultivated in Yemen. This strongly suggests that the original domesticated (cultivated) coffee plant came from Harar, and that this would also have been the source of the Ethiopian coffee traded in parallel to that of Yemeni origin through the port of Mocha. This places Harar securely at the epicentre of the genesis of the world coffee trade: its cultivated varietal was the source of coffee traded in the earliest days. The strain of coffee plant produced there today is still the original type, Harar longberry, which is close in flavour to its Yemeni progeny and, although ‘unwashed’ (generally considered to be a less satisfactory method than wet processing), is one of the world’s most prized coffees.

There is no clue to suggest how the coffee plant came to be cultivated in Harar, although there is some anecdotal evidence that the slave routes from the Oromo region (the Harar Arabs were incorrigible slavers) were lined with coffee plants discarded by the coffee-chewing Oromo captives. This would not account for the domestication of the plant, however, which required the application of specific skills. As there was a sudden surge in demand for coffee in the first half of the sixteenth century, it would have made the cultivation of coffee commercially worthwhile, and Harar was in any case a great deal more convenient for Arab traders than distant Kaffa. The presence of a domesticated coffee plant in the Arab-controlled Harar region would have made the transplanting of that variety to Yemen virtually inevitable as Mocha consolidated its position as the chief coffee port.

Although the coffee trade remained relatively insignificant, and the records concerning its usage remarkably thin in the era up to 1550, it would appear that the groundwork, in the form of tacit social acceptance, along with religious and imperial approval, had been done on the basis of Ethiopian coffee alone, and that the cultivation of the plant had first commenced in the Harar region. The pretensions of Yemeni coffee to hold the monopoly on the early coffee trade are hollow indeed.

However, the switch of the principal source of coffee production from Ethiopia to Yemen can be dated with some confidence. In 1544 the Imam banned the cultivation of qat in the Jabal Sabir region of Yemen and introduced coffee plants ‘from which the population will derive great benefit’. The same date is ascribed to the introduction of coffee in a later Arabian chronicle. The Ottomans took the neighbouring city of Ta’izz in the following year, and it is under their auspices that the cultivation of coffee became a significant feature of the economy. Indeed it was in many ways a classic colonialist venture: cultivated in a conquered country, coffee was principally consumed in the main cities of the conqueror. The only element missing from the later European model was the use of slaves, for it appears that the rapid expansion of coffee drinking throughout the Ottoman Empire had created a golden opportunity for Yemeni farmers. The mountains overlooking the Tihama – the coastal plain which had previously been relatively uncultivated – proved to be perfectly suited to coffee growing. Farmers from the Tihama and inland plateau moved there: an immense project of terrace building and irrigation works was implemented, financed by the burgeoning coffee trade throughout the Ottoman Empire.

Situated at the south-west corner of the Arabian peninsula, Yemen defies any mistaken preconceptions of unrelenting heat and equally unrelenting sand dunes. It is as if the peninsula had been stood upon, like a sheet of ice, in the north-east, raising the south-west Yemeni portion into ranges of mountains sliced through with precipitate gorges strewn with rocks and vegetation and watered by seasonal streams. The Tihama, bordering the Red Sea, is intensely hot and humid, but only thirty kilometres inland the mountains soar straight out of the plain to heights of well over three thousand metres. Whereas the Tihama remains relatively dry almost throughout the year, the mountains catch the monsoon clouds, and short, intense bursts of rain are frequent, resulting in sayl – flash floods in the dry river beds. From this dramatic landscape the coffee farmers fashioned a yet more dramatic way of life; to catch the sporadic rainfall, the precipitate hillsides are covered from peak to trough with terraces held in place by stone walls. It may take a wall five metres high, snaking around the craggy contours, to create a cultivatable terrace two metres wide. Looking up from below, it sometimes seems as if the whole mountain is one gigantic man-made dry stone wall stretching into the clouds. In order to harness the rainfall in an elaborate system of irrigation channels and tanks, Yemeni villages are deliberately built away from the terraces – the only such place available being on top of the mountains. Since the vernacular architecture favours houses in the form of five- or six-storey square-built stone mini-skyscrapers, the total effect is unique and astounding. Villages of perhaps ten of such houses are perched in the most improbable clusters on the top of jagged mountainsides, whilst below them row after row of terracing planted with windbreaks of wolf’s wood and screw pine fall into the infinity of colossal ravines, home to wild roses and prickly pear, baboons, rock hyrax, leopards, and weaver birds.

There are no records concerning the terrace building project. However, the mass migration to the coffee mountains is still recalled in many oral family histories in the country. It was in its time as significant as the California gold rush. By the end of the sixteenth century, Arabia Felix was universally seen to be the origin of coffee production, totally eclipsing Ethiopia in a matter of half a century. When Europeans first heard of coffee, and when their merchants gathered intelligence regarding the trading potential of the mysterious new drink, it was to Yemen they looked. Yemen had usurped the Ethiopian claim to be the unique source, and farmers brought coffee to the busy entrepôt of Bait-al-Faqih at the foot of the mountains, from whence it was transported in camel trains down the Tihama to the port whose name soon became synonymous with the coffee trade: Mocha.

The name Mocha is so enmeshed with that of coffee itself that it appears on everything from Ethiopian coffee to a variety of brewing machines, to coffee blends, or coffee made in myriad ways, including, in the case of one coffee bar, ‘espresso, steamed milk, chocolate, richly blended, topped with fresh cream’, which would seem about as far removed from the austere majesty of the Yemeni original as it is possible to be. The reason for this ubiquity is simple: for a hundred and fifty years Mocha was celebrated as the sole port supplying the world’s coffee, at a time when coffee drinking was booming in the Islamic world and Europe. Today, it is hard to believe that the town was very prosperous, with six thousand houses and a stone-built Governor’s mansion ‘with very fayre and large stayres’. It is now a godforsaken, fly-blown spot, strewn with the inevitable mounds of plastic bags and mineral-water bottles that are the unfortunate detritus of Yemen’s qat chewing habit. The sand dunes have reclaimed much of the town, and the most permanent buildings are made from redundant shipping containers. Even in the mid nineteenth century it was described as ‘a dead-alive mouldering town’. However, one can still find some signs of its former glories: the ruinous brick walls that have not been buried by the sand show signs of having been richly decorated with ornate plasterwork – these would have been the villas in which the wealthy coffee merchants lived. Likewise the mosque dedicated to Shadomer Shadhili, patron saint of the town, rises like a pearly mirage in the distance through the hot, dusty air, and the curving stairs of the ruins of what is said to have been the lighthouse, marooned half a mile from the sea, can still be visited, as long as the smell of human dung can be endured. This is one feature of Mocha that has not changed since the first descriptions by Europeans, who found it handsome and whitewashed along the waterfront, but ‘unbearably filthy within’. The other is the unrelenting heat and humidity. The Tihama is as airless and humid a place as can be imagined, and early European merchants who ventured there in their doublets and fustian must have been horribly uncomfortable. The squalor and the heat contributed to the town’s reputation for being an unhealthy place, ‘a hell of heat and humid air, of infected drinking water and without a breath of wind’. The villa owners built verandas on the top of their houses, shaded by reed screens and designed to admit the slightest of breezes.

Mocha, according to one early account, ‘standeth hard by the waterside in a plaine sandye field’. The local soil was barren because of salt contamination, and the only thing that grew there was date palms, from which toddy was made. It was hardly an ideal place for a port, but it was the best that was on offer on the Tihama coast. Aden, one of the world’s great natural harbours around the corner on the Arabian Sea, was too far away from the coffee-producing mountains to be of use. Although fourteen fathoms deep, Mocha’s anchorage was ‘open and dangerous with very shoali water a mile off the town’. These shallows were eventually to be the death of the port as they accreted silt and became increasingly treacherous: today the water is only four fathoms deep as far as four miles off the town. This natural tendency to silt up was not helped by American trading ships in the early nineteenth century dumping their ballast in the anchorage before taking coffee on board.