SUGAR, COFFEE, CACAO, COCA.
Progress of the Sugar Cane throughout the Tropical Zone—The Tahitian Sugar Cane—The enemies of the Sugar Cane—The Sugar-harvest—The Coffee Tree—Its cultivation and enemies—The Cacao Tree and the Vanilla—The Coca Plant—Wonderful strengthening Effects of Coca, and fatal consequences of its Abuse.
Sugar is undoubtedly one of the most valuable products of the vegetable world, and may be said with truth to be only surpassed in importance by the nourishing meal of the cereals, or the textile fibres of the cotton-plant. Our garden fruit owes its agreeable taste to the sugar which the ripening sun developes in its juices. The sap of many a plant—the palm, the birch, the maple, the American agave—is rendered useful to man by175 the sugar it contains. It is this substance which imparts sweetness to the honey gathered by bees from flowers, and, after undergoing fermentation, changes the juice of the grape into delicious wine.
But although sugar is of almost universal occurrence throughout the vegetable world, yet few plants contain it in such abundance as to render its extraction profitable; and even the beet-root requires high protective duties to be able to compete with the tropical sugar-cane, a member of the extensive family of the grasses. The original home of this plant—for which, doubtless, the lively fancy of the ancient Greeks, had they been better acquainted with it, would have invented a peculiar god, as for the vine or the cereals—was most probably south-eastern Asia, where the Chinese seem to have been the first people that learnt the art to multiply it by culture.
From China its cultivation spread westwards to India and Arabia, and the conquests of Alexander the Great, first made Europe acquainted with the sweet-juiced cane, while sugar itself had long before been imported by the Phœnicians as a rare production of the Eastern world.
During the dark ages which followed the fall of the Roman Empire, all previous knowledge of the Oriental sugar-plant became lost, until the Crusades, and, still more, the revival of commerce in Venice and Genoa re-opened the ancient intercourse between the Eastern and the Western world. From Egypt, where the cultivation of the sugar-cane had meanwhile been introduced, it now extended to the Morea, to Rhodes, and Malta; and at the beginning of the twelfth century we find it growing in Italy, on the sultry plains at the foot of Mount Etna.
After the discovery of Madeira by the Portuguese, in the year 1419, the first colonists added the vine of Cyprus and the Sicilian sugar-cane to the indigenous productions of that lovely island; and both succeeded so well as to become, after a few years, the objects of a lively trade with the mother country.
Yet, in spite of this extension of its culture, the importance of sugar as an article of international trade continued to be very limited, until the discovery of tropical America18 by Columbus176 opened a new world to commerce. As early as the year 1506 the sugar-cane was transplanted from the Canary Islands to Hispaniola, where its culture, favoured by the fertility of a virgin soil and the heat of a tropical sun, was soon found to be so profitable that it became the chief occupation of the European settlers. The Portuguese, in their turn, conveyed the cane to Brazil; from Hispaniola it spread over the other West Indian Islands; thence wandered to the Spanish main, and followed Pedrarias and Pizarro to the shores of the Pacific. Unfortunately, a dark shade obscures its triumphal march, as its cultivation was the chief cause which entailed the curse of negro slavery on some of the fairest regions of the globe.
Towards the middle of the last century, the Chinese or Oriental sugar-cane had thus multiplied to an amazing extent over both hemispheres, when the introduction of the Tahitian variety, which was found to attain a statelier growth, to contain more sugar, and to ripen in a shorter time, began to dispossess it of its old domains. This new and superior plant is now universally cultivated in all the sugar-growing European colonies; and if Cook’s voyages had produced no other benefit than making the world acquainted with the Tahitian sugar-cane, they would for this alone deserve to be reckoned by the political economist among the most successful and important ever performed by man.
The sugar-cane bears a great resemblance to the common reed, but the blossom is different. It has a knotty stalk, frequently rising to the height of fourteen feet, and produces at each joint a long, pointed, and sharply serrated leaf or blade. The joints in one stalk are from forty to sixty in number, and the stalks rising from one root are sometimes very numerous. A field of canes, when agitated by a light breeze, affords one of the most pleasing sights, particularly when, towards the period of their maturity, the golden plants appear crowned with plumes of silvery feathers, delicately fringed with a lilac dye.
The sugar-cane is liable to be destroyed by many enemies. Sometimes herds of monkeys come down from the mountains by night, and having posted sentinels to give the alarm if anything approaches, destroy incredible quantities of the cane by their gambols as well as their greediness. It is in vain to set traps for these creatures, however baited; and the only way to177 protect a plantation and destroy them, is to set a numerous watch, well armed with fowling-pieces, and furnished with dogs.
The rat, which the extension of commerce has gradually spread over the world, is still more destructive to the sugar-cane, and great pains are taken to keep it in check by poison or by its arch-enemy the cat.
The sugar-cane is also subject to the blast—a disease which no foresight can obviate, and for which human wisdom has hitherto in vain attempted to find a remedy. When this happens, the fine broad green blades become sickly, dry, and withered; soon after they appear stained in spots, and if these are carefully examined, they will be found to contain countless eggs of an insect like a bug, which are soon quickened, and cover the plants with vermin; the juice of the canes thus affected becomes sour, and no future shoot issues from the joints. The ravages of the ants concur with those of the bugs in ruining the prospects of many a sugar-field, and often a long continued drought or the fury of the tornado will destroy the hopes of the planter.
The land crabs are also very injurious to the sugar-fields, some of the species being particularly fond of the cane, the juice of which they suck and chiefly subsist on. They are of course narrowly watched, and no opportunity of catching them is lost sight of; but such is their activity in running, that they are almost always enabled to escape. They seldom go far from their burrows in day-time; and their watchfulness is such that they regain them in a moment, and disappear as soon as a man or dog comes near enough to be seen.
Harvest-time in the sugar-plantations is no less a season of gladness than in the corn-fields of England. So palatable, wholesome, and nourishing is the fresh juice of the cane, that every animal drinking freely of it derives health and vigour from its use. The meagre and sickly among the negroes exhibit a surprising alteration in a few weeks after the mill is set in action. The labouring oxen, horses, and mules, though almost constantly at work during this season, yet being indulged with plenty of the green tops and some of the scummings from the boiling-house, improve more than at any other period of the year. Even the pigs and poultry fatten on the refuse, and enjoy their share of the banquet. The wholesome178 effects of the juice of the sugar-cane has not escaped the attention of English physicians, and many a weak-breasted patient, instead of coughing and freezing at home over what is ironically termed a comfortable fireside, now spends his winter in the West Indian Islands, chewing the sweet cane and enjoying in January a genial warmth of seventy-two degrees in the shade.
The mountain regions of Enarea and Caffa, which the reader, on consulting a map of Africa, will find situated to the south of Abyssinia, are most probably the countries where the coffee-tree was first planted by Nature, as it has here not only been cultivated from time immemorial, but is everywhere found growing wild in the forests.
GENERAL FRASER’S COFFEE ESTATE AT RANGBODDE, CEYLON.
Here also the art of preparing a beverage from its berries seems to have been first discovered. Arabic authors inform us that about four hundred years ago, a learned mufti of Aden, having become acquainted with its virtues on a journey to the opposite shore of Africa, recommended it on his return to the dervises of his convent as an excellent means for keeping awake during their devotional exercises. The example of179 these holy men brought coffee into vogue, and its use spreading from tribe to tribe, and from town to town, finally reached Meccah about the end of the fifteenth century. There fanaticism endeavoured to oppose its progress, and in 1511 a council of theologians condemned it as being contrary to the law of Mahomet, on account of its intoxicating like wine, and sentenced the culprit who should be found indulging in his cup of coffee to be led about the town on the back of an ass. The sultan of Egypt, however, who happened to be a great coffee-drinker himself, convoked a new assembly of the learned, who declared its use to be not only innocent but healthy; and thus coffee advanced rapidly from the Red Sea and the Nile to Syria, and from Asia Minor to Constantinople, where the first coffee-house was opened in 1554, and soon called forth a number of rival establishments. But here also the zealots began to murmur at the mosques being neglected for the attractions of the ungodly coffee divans, and declaimed against it from the Koran, which positively says that coal is not of the number of things created by God for good. Accordingly the mufti ordered the coffee-houses to be closed; but his successor declaring coffee not to be coal, unless when over-roasted, they were allowed to re-open, and ever since the most pious mussulman drinks his coffee without any scruples of conscience. The commercial intercourse with the Levant could not fail to make Europe acquainted with this new source of enjoyment. In 1652, Pasquia, a Greek, opened the first coffee-house in London, and twenty years later the first French cafés were established in Paris and Marseilles.
As the demand for coffee continually increased, the small province of Yemen, the only country which at that time supplied the market, could no longer produce a sufficient quantity, and the high price of the article naturally prompted the European governments to introduce the cultivation of so valuable a plant into their colonies. The islands of Mauritius and Bourbon took the lead in 1718, and Batavia followed in 1723. Some years before, a few plants had been sent to Amsterdam, one of which found its way to Marly, where it was multiplied by seeds. Captain Descleux, a French naval officer, took some of these young coffee-plants with him to Martinique, desirous of adding a new source of wealth to the resources of the colony. The180 passage was very tedious and stormy; water began to fail, and all the gods seemed to conspire against the introduction of the coffee-tree into the New World. But Descleux patiently endured the extremity of thirst that his tender shoots might not droop for want of water, and succeeded in safely bringing over one single plant, the parent stock whence all the vast coffee-plantations of America are said to have derived their origin.
On examining the present state of coffee-production throughout the world, we find that the European markets obtain their chief supplies from Brazil, Java, Ceylon, and the West Indies; but with regard to quality, Mocha coffee, though comparatively insignificant in point of quantity, is still prominent in flavour and aroma.
When left to the free growth of nature, the coffee-tree attains a height of from fifteen to twenty feet; in the plantations, however, the tops are generally cut off in order to promote the growth of the lower branches, and to facilitate the gathering of the crop. Its leaves are opposite, evergreen, and not unlike those of the bay-tree; its blossoms are white, sitting on short foot-stalks, and resembling the flower of the jasmine. The fruit which succeeds is a green berry, ripening into red, of the size and form of a large cherry, and having a pale, insipid, and somewhat glutinous pulp, enclosing two hard and oval seeds or beans, which are too well known to require any further description.
The seeds are known to be ripe when the berries assume a dark red colour, and if not then gathered, will drop from the trees.
To be cultivated to advantage, the coffee-tree requires a climate where the mean temperature of the year amounts to 68°, and where the thermometer never falls below 55°. It is by nature a forest tree requiring shade and moisture, and thus it is necessary to screen it from the scorching rays of the sun by planting rows of umbrageous trees at certain intervals throughout the field. These also serve to protect it from the sharp winds which would injure the blossoms. It cannot bear either excessive heat or a long-continued drought, and where rain does not fall in sufficient quantity, artificial irrigation must supply it with the necessary moisture.
181 In Java the zone of the coffee-plantations extends between 3,000 and 4,000 feet above the level of the sea; and the primitive forest is constantly receding before them. Frequently, on felling the woods, a part of the original trees is left standing to shade the tender coffee-plants; but oftener the rows are made to alternate with those of the sheltering dadab. Thus a new and luxuriant grove replaces the old thicket of nature’s planting. Straight paths, kept carefully clean, lead through the dense, dark green shrubbery, under whose thick cover the wild cock hastily retreats when surprised by the wanderer. When the trees are in flower, the branches seem to bend under a weight of snow, from the number of dazzling white blossoms, which form a pleasing contrast to the dark and lustrous foliage, while high above, the dadabs extend their airy crowns, whose light green leaves are agreeably interspersed with flowers of a brilliant red. A few months later, when the fruits are ripening into carmine a scene of the............