Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  Coffee is as black as meteoric iron, and produces little impression upon the eye. Tea, on the other hand, is glistening and transparent like a precious stone, and by its mere aspect promotes cheerfulness. The wakefulness that radiates from the aroma of coffee invites to spiritual adventures; the aroma of tea encourages a distinguished relaxation. In the mouths of men and of nations, each of these two beverages plays its own peculiar symphony. There is no notation for gustatory experiences, or we could read the respective tastes from a score.

  Trimethyldioxypurin, no matter whether it be imbibed in the form of coffee or in the form of tea, has like effects upon the central nervous system, the brain, and the blood-vessels. But there are obvious differences in the intellectual consequences. The Japanese writer Okakura, who enjoys “the sweet reserve of Confucius and the Path of Lao-tze” in the “fluid amber of tea,” sees a vision of an extensive landscape when he looks into a teacup. For him “the aromatic tea-leaves hang like a cloud in the serene skies, or float like water-lilies upon the gentle emerald-green stream.” Amiability, politeness, and kindliness invade the body of the drinker; the fourth cup produces a gentle perspiration, and all the evils and injustices of life are extruded through the pores of his skin. With the fifth cup, the purification is complete. The sixth cup summons him to ultra-mundane regions; and, with the seventh cup, a wind from that remote land bellies in his sleeves . . . No one could write in that way of coffee.

  The natural modesty of tea has won the heart of all the nations with which it has come into close contact during recent centuries: the Chinese, the Russians, the British. Is not tea the most faithful of companions? Is it not like a watch-dog on the steppes of cold and heat? For the Tibetans, tea is the fundamental energy of motion. They use a cup of tea as a measure of time and space. Sir Francis Younghusband, in the Central Asiatic highlands, asked a peasant lad how far it was to the next village. “Three cups of tea,” replied the youngster. This meant five miles. And just as in those regions tea has become a measure of distance and time, so among the nomads it is currency, in place of silver. Indispensable, divine, and precious.

  The English have long been closely allied with this trustworthy companion. For two hundred years, now, tea has been the cornerstone of their mental life and of their empire. There were economic reasons why tea drove out coffee towards the year 1730. The conquest of India was beginning, and the British were becoming the owners of a tea-growing country. Hindustan belonged to Britain, and tea bore the same sort of relation to Greater Britain that hops bore to London.

  Coffee was in a very different position. Since the English did not own Arabia, nor had the monopoly of the Levantine trade, coffee was not a British Empire commodity like tea.

  In part, similar reasons explain why the French remained true to coffee when the English were being unfaithful to it. The more the French had to yield ground before the English in Farther Asia, the less fondness they had for tea. In the year 1766, the Chinese export of tea to England amounted to six million pounds, but in France only to two million. Since then, Paris and France have worshipped the gift of Araby, whereas London has become devoted to the gentle, yellow, Chinese god.

  BOOK THREE

  Planters, Traders, and Rings

  11

  The Island Realm of the Dutch

  THE modern age begins, not only with Columbus, but also with Vasco da Gama. In 1492 Columbus set sail westward to find the sea-route to the Indies, and by chance discovered America. In 1498, Vasco da Gama set sail to the south, circumnavigated Africa, and actually discovered the eastern sea-route to the Indies.

  India! Throughout the Middle Ages, Europeans had been content to trade with Persia and Hindustan by means of Arab caravans. The Venetians, and subsequently the French, carried the Mediterranean part of the traffic. Then came the Turks, who thrust a huge barrier between Europe and the East. Thereupon trade with the Levant became more perilous and was greatly reduced. “How can we circumvent this obstacle imposed by the Turks?” grumbled the people of the West. “How can we get, as we used to do, spices and gold from the distant East without the Turks seizing them on the way?” That was the motive of the expedition from Spain, commanded by Columbus, the Genoese. Vasco da Gama, the Portguese, set forth on the same quest six years later, and this time the venture was successful. Round the huge continent of Africa, tawny and arid as a lion’s skin, round the mountains, the deserts, and the forests, he made his way into the ocean which lies southward from Araby.

  The miracle had been performed. Christians in European vessels, men of the Cross, thus got behind the men of the Crescent. If the world was less amazed than it might have been at Vasco da Gama’s exploit, this was because people’s minds were fully occupied with the American miracle of Columbus.

  To the Mohammedans, who had overthrown the eastern empire half a century before and had installed themselves at Constantinople, it came as a thunderclap that Portugal, lying so far off in the West, had sent an armada to the East. Great was the alarm in Mecca. Jidda, the port of the Holy City, was hastily fortified by a sea-wall. But the Christians made no attack upon the metropolis of Islam. They left Arabia well to their left, landed on the coast of Hindustan, took tribute, and sailed yet farther east. At length they reached an archipelago, a medley of islands like scattered fragments of a world jutting out of the lukewarm sea. They discovered Sumatra, Java, the Celebes, surrounded by a swarm of smaller islands, atolls, reefs, and rocklets. This was an India of Indias, a garden of fruit, a paradise. The Portuguese cast anchor. Here they would stay, the God-sent masters of the Malay Archipelago.

  The adventurous spirit of the Portuguese carried the name of Lisbon to the margin of the habitable earth, at the same time that the Spaniards were extending their dominion over the new continent in the West. But the earth had no margin, for it was a globe. It seemed as if the Spaniards and the Portuguese, the former sailing steadily westward, and the latter steadily eastward, would come into conflict one with the other. There would be jealousy and enmity between two Christian nations.

  Both applied to the Holy Father as arbiter. Alexander VI divided up the earth. This was in 1493, when the American continent was still unknown (for Columbus landed only in the West Indian islands), and years before Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope. By the papal bull of May 4, 1493, a meridian was drawn “one hundred leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands,” giving to Spain the right of conquest to the west of it, and to Portugal the same right to the east. Portugal protested this as unfair, and next year, on June 7, 1494, was signed the Convention of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal, by which “the line” was shifted two hundred and seventy leagues farther west, so that it lay along the fiftieth degree, west longitude. Thus, when the South American continent swam into their ken, Brazil, from the mouth of the Amazon to Punto Alegre, lay to the east of the Tordesillas meridian and was clearly in the area assigned to Portugal, but was ignored by that power until 1532, during the reign of John III. Meanwhile, under Cortez and under Pizarro, the Spaniards made extensive conquests in the Americas, the northern and the southern continents respectively. Eventually they also seized the Philippines, which were clearly within the domain assigned to the Spanish by the Pope. The Portuguese, on the other hand, never established themselves effectively in the Malay Archipelago, and in time their East Indian empire became a dream, commemorated in The Lusiads of Camoens.

  Portuguese ships and navigators were not the first to reach the Malay Archipelago. The primitives of Sumatra, Java, and the lesser islands had already endured several foreign dominions. As early as the third century A.D., the Hindus had arrived from the Ganges, and among the Malayan islands had founded two empires for the Indian gods, Madyapahit and Crividyaya. They introduced Hindu architecture, poetry, and music. The natives, who were little more than children in intelligence, were taught how to cultivate rice and which were the best seasons for field-work. Planting should begin when the constellation of the Plough rose at sunset, that
is to say, on December 15. As long as the Seven Stars were ploughing in the heavens, the tropical earth was in fit condition for its tillers. But the Hindus brought the Malays and the Javanese other arts, even more wonderful. They taught barter so that goods could be exchanged for other goods, voluntarily and without deception. A new art of dyeing was disclosed. Melted wax was poured on white linen; the wax was skilfully removed here and there, so that when a dye was applied it stained all parts except those that were still covered with wax. These “colour-prints” are still known in that part of the world by the Malay name of batik. Such ingenuities pleased the simple-minded folk, but they laughed awry when the Indian princes imposed a heavy poll-tax. They could offer no resistance. First of all, their weapons were much less effective than those of their conquerors; secondly the Hindus had gods of wonderful power, Ganesa, the elephant-god, for instance. As a rule he was sculptured in a seated position, lord of reflection and cunning, with his trunk peacefully rolled to one side; but if Ganesa were to stand up, were to raise his trunk and to trumpet, probably Java and Sumatra would sink beneath the level of the sea.

  Yet, after a thousand years, the dominion of the Hindu god collapsed. A much mightier god appeared on the scene. He made his way into the country with the Arab traders, and was far more terrible than the other gods because he was invisible. Allah! This Allah was invisible, he could be everywhere at once. Attacking from the topmost heaven and from the depths of the earth, from the forest and the jungle, he destroyed the elephant-god and the temples of the Brahmans. The fires of religious war ravaged Java and Sumatra. New Mohammedan realms were formed, to carry on war against the old established kingdoms. Again and again pirate raiders came, as the rumour of the wealth of the Malay Archipelago spread. To the men from the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Persian Gulf it seemed like a fabled paradise. The Chinese came, too, and were astonished. When the north wind blew steadily, they voyaged southward for weeks on junks with dragons as figure-heads. They landed upon these islands which, with their towns and their mountains, were at once so homelike and so uncanny. In this volcanic region, the ocean channels varied from spring to spring. Many islands had vanished after a year’s absence, and new ones had appeared.

  One bright morning in the year 1510, a little Chinese fleet encountered some Arab traders or pirates who were taking a consignment of cloves from the clamorous natives. After a long dispute, the three parties drew their knives to settle the question of ownership. Then, of a sudden the yellow men from the North, the light-brown Arabs, and the dark-brown natives lowered their weapons. Something fearful had happened. Big vessels with white sails, vessels like huge sea-birds, were coming on a main from the West. Majestically they advanced. It was the Portuguese fleet.

  These first Europeans to visit the Malay Archipelago stole more than cloves. Their nostrils dilated with covetousness as they inhaled the aromatic odours; and just as the Spaniards had sailed westward to the “isles of gold,” so had the Portuguese sailed eastward to the “spice islands.” Gold and spices amounted to much the same thing. Pepper could be converted into gold; so could nutmegs, which, in the Moluccas (still known as the Spice Islands), could be bought for one-twentieth of the price they commanded elsewhere. The Arab traders, whose business had in any case been interfered with by the spread of the empire of the Turks, who in 1517 conquered almost the whole of Arabia, now found their enterprises threatened from another quarter. They had formidable rivals in the transport of goods to the Mediterranean coast, where the Venetians took over the freight. The Portuguese conveyed the wares of eastern Asia to Europe by the cheaper sea route round the Cape of Good Hope.

  The local sovereigns, who were at war with one another, appealed severally for aid to these mighty strangers. With their heavy guns, the Portuguese established order and founded trading-stations of their own. Everywhere forts were erected. By 1522, they had not only secured a monopoly of the spice trade, but on the island of Timor, for instance, the handling of sandal-wood was in their control. They were told that the Chinese used this odorous wood for religious purposes, and so they carried shiploads of it northward. In the very decade when Martin Luther renounced allegiance to the Pope and founded the great Protestant schism in Germany, the Catholic faith won over millions of Malays in the East. High on the poop of the Portuguese galleon, above the account-book and above the musket, stood the Cross.

  One day, however, the colonists who were fighting for trade and dominion in this far country heard tidings of grave confusion in their homeland. The greatness of Portugal had passed its zenith. To the conquistadores, the news came like the rumble of a distant earthquake; the power of Lisbon, for which the national heroes Vasco da Gama, Antonio d’Abreu, and d’Albuquerque had fought, was on the wane. The energy of the Portuguese nation, squandered in distant seas, was exhausted. Within a few decades, among the Malay islands where the power of the Portuguese had loomed so large, the war-fleets of another land were sailing. A new marine empire was spreading over the bulge of the southern ocean—the empire of the Dutch.

  One needed only to look at the Dutch in order to be convinced that they were likely to stay wherever they set their feet. They possessed far more patience than the livelier Portuguese; though they thought more slowly, they thought with more fixity and concentration. They were men of Teutonic stock, living in the delta of the Rhine, and beside the lower waters of the Schelde and the Meuse. One day, to their own astonishment, they found themselves a nation, and immediately brushed back their blond hair from their foreheads and began to launch ships. Broad of girth, solidly built in mind as well as in body, the Hollanders were untroubled by doubts, and within a few decades they had become unrivalled navigators and sea-fighters. The noise of the shipwrights’ hammers was unceasing in Rotterdam. Vessel after vessel glided down the soaped wooden slipways into the sea. When Christian Europe was trembling before the Turks, the Dutch, had they wished, might well have made short work of the sultan. Anyhow, with their navy, which was the mightiest on earth, they could have attacked him by way of the Red Sea.

  For while impoverished Germany was finding it a great effort to relieve the siege of Vienna, the power and the wealth of Europe had flowed away to the northwest, to the Dutch capital and seaport of Amsterdam. In 1683, the year when Vienna was invested by the Turks, the three chief western powers, Holland, England, and France, had, in all, a mercantile marine comprising of twenty thousand ships. Of these, the Dutch had sixteen thousand, England thirty-five hundred, and France no more than five hundred. If the Hollanders had cared, by attacking Islam from the east they could have made the onslaught of the Ottomans against Central Europe an anachronism. But they did not care. Their vessels were sailing round the Cape of Good Hope to the Persian Gulf and the Indies. Not with the object of seizing Arabia, or of shaking the power of the Crescent. Their goals were Hindustan, Malacca, and Java. They wanted to dispossess the Portuguese. The Dutch flag soon replaced that of Portugal above the forts in the Malay Archipelago.

  When the Hollanders landed in Sumatra, Celebes, and the Moluccas, they felt, as the Portuguese had felt before them, that they were entering a new world. These great islands were a warm garden, a polychrome intermingling of land and water. The mellow horizon was never without a landfall. Here conical islands projected; there mountain chains loomed over the sea, all thickly grown, the slopes slipping down into red, green, and golden waters. Those who were approaching land could smell its aromatic and effervescent waters miles upon miles away. The primeval forests were full of strange mammals, reptiles, and birds.

  On many of the hitherto undiscovered islands, the life of the natives was still pleasant enough. As in the legendary Garden of Eden, the earth brought forth its fruits without any need for human labour. The gods of the air had planted the trees. There they stood, enormous in height, surrounded by a vigorous undergrowth, and the winds saw to the dissemination of their seed. Mango-trees flourished, grapefruits in plenty, palms abounded, among them the bountiful breadfruit tree. Th
en there was the durian, a huge spiny fruit with an offensive odour but a taste that is ambrosial to those who have acquired a liking for it. Coco-nut palms in profusion. In Sumatra, the natives had trained monkeys to climb the trees and throw down the huge nuts. Dates, bananas, pomegranates, and many other fruits grew without the trouble of cultivating them. The Javanese, as aforesaid, had long since been made acquainted the art of rice-growing. The damp, hot-house lands of the Malay Archipelago were not pestilent marshes like those of Africa. The Javanese climate was one of eternal summer, though troubled by daily rainstorms and frequent thunder. The countless island peaks gathered the vapours that the Indian Ocean gave off from its glowing mirror. Frequently the clouds discharged their waters, and the murmuring rain moistened the humus of the forests and washed down fertilizing mineral salts from the sides of the volcanoes. The foot-hills were terraced, and the waters were distributed to the terraces by canals and sluices. In this brown and variegated landscape, across which the heavy, grey clouds of the monsoon blew, rice prospered abundantly. In the “nursery,” before it was planted out, the young rice-plant made emerald-green plots, contrasting strongly with the violet background of the hills so that the Hollanders were startled thereby. But for the prevailing heat, which made them sweat unceasingly, they might have believed themselves, at the river-mouths, to be among the green polders of their fertile native country.