Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  Still there was a spirit of evil and of death abroad among the islands. Amid the tree-ferns, he displayed the symbols of his destructive supremacy, blocks of vitreous black obsidian. Or a crater which for hundreds of years had been quiescent exhaled whitish-yellow clouds of sulphurous vapour. This volcanic deity, who had created the whole region, could destroy it when the fancy seized him; and often he agitated it with earthquakes.

  In Java he produced lakes of warm liquid mud. A porridge-like pale-blue milky substance boiled in great mountain cauldrons. Birds that winged their way amid the vapours rising from these cauldrons fell dead into the seething mass. “The volcano swallows birds,” said the natives with a shudder, as they stood bare-footed, painfully enduring the heat emanating from the adjoining rocks. But the Dutch were not frightened. They had thick soles to their leather boots, so that their feet were not scorched. Their eyes were blue and steadfast, and were not to be intimidated by any sight of horror.

  The Dutch were anything but dreamers, being distinguished in that from all other peoples. Distinguished from the Spaniards, the French, and the Germans, and especially from the Portuguese, who, when engaged in the most concrete activities, are accustomed to mingle in their undertakings the energy of dreams. The Dutch did not dream of fame or of world dominion; they did not dream the mystical dream of extending the realm of Christ. All they wanted was to pursue a profitable trade.

  They were a calculating race, these men who had grown up under the damp and heavy skies of Amsterdam; black-clad Mynheers, such as Rembrandt has depicted for us. The noises of the seaport did not intrude into their council-chamber, where the long and empty table symbolized the greatness of the world. Outside, the seasons seemed to be perpetual autumn, and harsh winds blew falling leaves into the canals. There they sat smoking long clay pipes–“churchwardens,” the English call them—while billet after billet of wood was consumed in the big tiled stove. Here the merchants reckoned up the capital that would be needed for the long voyage to the East Indies, for which the Portuguese had broken trail. Here shipping companies were founded, to run joint-stock enterprises. Weapons were shipped as well as merchandise. The captains insisted that their sailors must be armed. To begin with, of course, no one thought of war. But when the men in possession, the Portuguese owners of the archipelago, received the Dutchmen with cannon-fire, the merchants gave them a Roland for their Oliver. Then, just as the Dutch had learned in Brabant that Spaniards could be killed, so did they learn in the East Indies that the cousins of the Spaniards, the Portuguese, were likewise mortal men.

  Business throve, and an increasing number of mercantile competitors equipped new fleets. Then, in 1602, the State took a hand in the game. It united the private competitors into an “imperialist” joint-stock company, giving these organized merchant-adventurers not only legal protection, but also sovereignty in the lands they were trading with and settling. On March 20, 1602, the Dutch East India Company was formed. It was not the first of its kind, for the English had been beforehand in the field, founding the English East India Company incorporated by Queen Elizabeth on December 31, 1600, under the title of “The Governors and Company of Merchants of London trading with the East Indies.”

  Pro-coffee engraving (about 1730)

  The Townswoman’s breakfast (1780)

  Frau Kaffeeschwester and Herr Bierwanst (about 1790)

  State coffee-pot of Augustus the Strong (1701)

  English coffee-pot (1681)

  Coffee-mills, pot, and sugar bowls and tongs (Louis-Quinze)

  The relation of the Dutch East India Company to the homeland was that of a private trading association which had bought the monopoly of carrying on commerce eastward of the Cape of Good Hope. But on the great islands on either side of the Strait of Sunda, it ruled as a sultan who does not buy the produce of his subjects, but demands its surrender without compensation. The suzerainty of the rulers of Holland did not extend into these island realms. It was met half-way by the home-flowing current of gold, and, as long as this current continued, the Dutch government was glad to renew the rights of the company. Every twenty-one years a fresh charter was granted.

  The Javanese had welcomed the coming of the Hollanders with songs and dances, but their joy was short-lived. The Dutch were ruthless exploiters, until, at length, the gentle Javanese were stimulated into showing their discontent. One morning the new rulers found that the palisades of a fort they had just built had been destroyed. The natives thought there were more than enough strongholds in the archipelago. Inquiry, trial, and judgment followed. The rebellious Javanese, it seemed, had been stirred up by English agents—and there can be no doubt that English ships, expectant, were anchored in the neighbourhood.

  But before a rising could occur, the Dutch took measures to retain their grip on the islands. No chance of freedom was left for the natives. Soon there were no more Malays or Javanese who were not compelled to serve their European overlords.

  The policy of the planters was determined by the directors of the Dutch East India Company in Amsterdam. The guiding motives were not the development of the crops in the archipelago, not an increase or diminution in this product or that, but the conditions that prevailed in the home exchanges. The amount of land put under cultivation was determined by the prices that ruled in Amsterdam. The Javanese could not understand this. For them it was too subtle a distinction that one year they must slave to produce a bumper crop, and next year must burn their harvest as useless. They knew nothing of the old rule in accordance with which “civilized” men strove to produce now a glut and now a deficit, now to increase supplies and now reduce them. The natives could not possibly understand this, and regarded as mere caprice what was the outcome of careful calculation.

  Out of what did the Mynheers make their money? First of all from the clove-tree, a crop that the Javanese watered with their sweat; a laurel-like shrub of the myrtle family with red, fleshy calyces. The flowers were picked, and were then roasted over a slow fire. The heat developed the aromatic oil. Nothing could be more agreeable to the palate, the pharynx, the stomach. Vast quantities of the half-dried cloves were shipped to the colder climes of Europe. In those days people were much more hearty eaters than are their descendants. Oil of cloves promoted appetite and digestion.

  Then there was pepper. Who would have thought that Piper nigrum, with its inconspicuous reddish berries, had golden roots? Man is a strange animal. Pepper burns his tongue; and yet, this substance, which works upon the taste-buds as if the sunlight had been concentrated on them by a burning-glass, is highly prized, and, being rare at that time, and, moreover, widely used as a preservative, commanded good prices.

  But the Dutch found their main source of wealth in coffee. Before the arrival of the men from the Low Countries, hardly anyone in the Sunda Isles knew anything about coffee. At most, the Arab traders had brought supplies with them for their own daily use. No one had hitherto dreamed of planting it in the Malay Archipelago. It was to the Dutchman, Willem van Outborn, that the idea first occurred to start coffee-plantations in Java and Sumatra. The natives of those parts had hitherto drunk tea as a sobering drink, having learned its use from the Indians; as intoxicants they used arrack and palm-wine.

  Certain Dutch sailors, anchoring off the coast of Arabia, had, in 1690, cut a few shoots from coffee-shrubs. At first they were brought to Amsterdam as curiosities, and planted in hot-houses, where, to the delight of botanical specialists, they flourished. Then arose the idea of conveying shoots to a country with a tropical climate. Thus it was that living plants were shipped from Arabia to Batavia. They took root in the hot soil, which was always damp and porous. As if the Sunda archipelago had only been waiting for this immigrant, the coffee-shrubs soon multiplied a hundredfold in Java. They grew abundantly, swiftly, and showed increasing fruitfulness.

  Here was an unexpected revolution in natural processes. The Arabian plant, from which an aromatic drink could be made, was added to all the other spice-plants of the “spice islan
ds.” There was a revolution, too, in the market, when supplies began to arrive from new sources. As early as 1696, the Paris Mercure galant had spoken of the coffee-trade with the Arabs of the Levant as if it were a fixture for all time. “Coffee is harvested in the neighbourhood of Mecca. Thence it is conveyed to the port of Jidda. Thence it is shipped to Suez, and transported by camels to Alexandria. There, in the Egyptian warehouses, French and Venetian merchants buy the stock of coffee-beans they require for their respective homelands.”

  A few years later, Arabia occupied a second place in the production of coffee. This commodity was no longer shipped by way of Suez, but took the long sea-route round the Cape of Good Hope. It was carried in Dutch bottoms, not being touched by any other hands than those of the Hollanders from the time it was shipped in Batavia to the time of being landed at Rotterdam. From 1700 onwards, for many, many years, the Dutch East Indies controlled the price of coffee in the world market.

  The Dutch Indies became a stable concern. What the Teutons of the folk-migrations had failed to achieve (the occupation of any tropical or sub-tropical land: for instance, the permanent settlement of the northern coast of Africa), was now achieved in the Malay Archipelago by the northwestern Teutons. True, the Netherlanders who dwelt under equatorial skies were compelled to abandon their industrious habits. They could not go on working as they had been used to work at home. For persons of their build, this would have been fatal in so hot a climate.

  The lean Malays and Javanese, acclimatized to the tropics, worked for the Dutch. Their masters built themselves habitations that recalled those of the homeland, yet met the special demands of a tropical clime. They were constructed of stone, with a wide veranda, and set upon mushroom-shaped stone “stilts,” so that the air circulated freely between the floor of the house and the earth, while serpents and other venomous beasts were kept at a distance. The house proper consisted exclusively of dwelling quarters. Whatever might pollute the air–kitchens, bathrooms, and store-rooms—stood apart in out-houses. During the frequent, heavy rains, access to these out-houses could be gained by paved and covered ways. There were no ornaments on the walls, no pictures, nor anything else that could break the surface, for in the shadow of such objects poisonous spiders would make their nests, and mosquitoes would lurk.

  ROASTING COFFEE IN AN OPEN PAN

  (Dutch East Indies)

  The white lords of the islands stirred for only a few hours every day. They spent most of their time in reclining chairs, with hardwood frames, rattan seats and backs, and prolonged arms on which they rested their outspread legs. Although they ate, and continue to eat, more heartily than is wholesome for white men in the tropics, they could not indulge their appetites as freely as they had been wont to do at home. As for drowsiness, they had a means for keeping that at bay. Mohammed had extolled it long ago! For the lords of the isles were not merely traders in coffee; they had learned to consume the beverage themselves. These heavy-footed children of the mouths of the Rhine and of the Schelde drank it gladly in their homeland, and even more gladly in the tropics; for the beverage was a magic potion which, in the north, warmed their bodies, and in the tropics relieved them from the lethargy the climate is likely to induce in whites. Of course they drank a good deal else besides coffee, being blond and vigorous Nordics with a confirmed taste for beer. The fleets of coffee-freighters, sailing southward and westward to the Cape of Good Hope and then northward to the Netherlands, often spoke outward-bound ships laden with beer. Not ordinary beer of the Low Countries, which would have gone sour beneath the tropical sun. It was Brunswick beer, specially prepared for use in hot climes by the nearest neighbours and kin of the wealthy Hollanders. Who had discovered it? A German chemist, in the same year that Columbus discovered America, a chemist who had been moved by the desire to brew a beer that would withstand the heat of the tropics. Christian Mumme was his name; and the beverage is still known as “Mumme” or in English as “mum”—a thick and sugary malt-beer, which, stored in tin-lined cases, can be safely shipped across the Line.

  For the first time in the history of coffee, its free-born aroma was mingled with the heavy scent of the sweat of slave labour. The Arabian peasants had been freemen, who, three thousand feet above sea-level, cultivated the “fruit of eternal wakefulness.” “O coffee!” said Abd el Kader, apostrophizing the sacred beverage, “you, friend of Allah, dispeller of sorrow! You provide health, wisdom, and truth, and you resemble gold because wherever you are obtainable the best of men will be found!”

  Coffee now resembled gold in another fashion. It was increasing slavery on earth.

  Hitherto the Malays had done forced labour for their native princes alone. Now they underwent a harder lot. The Hollanders compelled princes to let their arable land on lease; the inhabitants, bound to the soil, went with the land, and became bond-slaves under harsher masters.

  Often enough the native princes as well as the lords of the Dutch East India Company gained much money. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, throughout western Europe, literature and custom made the demand for coffee exceed the supply. Under the stimulus of rising prices, the Dutch and the Mohammedan princes who were their dependents greatly extended the cultivation of coffee in the Dutch Indies. But as soon as the European market began to be sated, the old fears of falling prices and over-production made the Dutch planters destroy the coffee-crop. The natives were incapable of grasping fine distinctions. Imagining that their masters’ wrath was directed against the plants as such, they were not content to cut down the shrubs before the berries ripened, but uprooted them as if to drive out demons. Thereupon the poor wretches were executed as malefactors, and thus new terrors were the fruit of the silent coffee-shrub. Blacker and bitterer than ever became the beverage!

  Then, as the Dutch had come like a tidal wave sweeping away the Portuguese, so rumours of a new tidal wave came across the seas to the ears of the mighty Dutch. The ocean had given birth to a Triton. The North Sea had been in labour, and Britain, the future lord of the seas (and of many lands), began to take a leading place among the nations of the north. The young marine giant was quick to challenge the naval supremacy of Holland. The young leviathan had founded an East India Company two years before the Lowlanders, and now challenged the Dutch. The Navigation Act of 1651 was tightened up. “No foreign product shall be conveyed to an English harbour in a foreign ship!”

  This was a blow directed, not against the produce of the Dutch colonies, but against the shipping trade of Amsterdam. Under the aegis of the Navigation Act, British shipbuilding was greatly intensified; nor was it long before these “peaceful traders” began to carry artillery. Along the distant ocean routes between London and Amsterdam on the one hand, and on the other, the Cape of Good Hope and thence across the Indian Ocean to the Malay Archipelago, sea-fights were fought. Huge piles of coffee lay in the Javanese store-houses, coffee that could no longer be conveyed to Amsterdam across waters that had become unsafe. Still, wars do not last for ever, and a swift frigate was dispatched from Rotterdam to Batavia conveying orders to destroy the accumulated stores, lest, when peace was signed, a glut in the European market should force down the price. This decision had been made in the board-room of the Dutch East India Company; but the planters, who lived in the sunshine, amid tropical vegetation, did not believe in the wisdom of the European exchanges. Often enough, before, they had obeyed the commands of their directors; this time they proved unruly. Perhaps they were afraid of arousing a revolt among the natives by ordering a fresh destruction of the crops; perhaps, for once, they had come to consider that wealth consisted of goods and not of a variable medium of exchange. Anyhow, they refused to obey. Immediately peace had been signed, they shipped enormous quantities of coffee to the Amsterdam market. Prices came down with a rush, and the brokers were ruined. Never had coffee been so cheap in Holland as it was in the year 1782.

  12

  Coffee and Absolutism

  DURING the first decade after its introduction into w
estern Europe, coffee was no more than an article of fancy; it had not yet come to play an important part in economic life. Not until consumption and production had simultaneously increased to an enormous extent, did this “fancy” compel the state to take it into account. Coffee had become an important commodity; it stimulated the interest of States and potentates who were able, and upon whom it was incumbent, to protect goods and trade.

  The attitude of the states might vary, but obviously they had to assume one attitude or another. No matter whether these states were republics, parliamentary monarchies, or absolute monarchies after the model dear to Hobbes, they were forced to canalize and regulate the influx of goods from lands many of which were new to history.

  The most interesting (I do not say the most successful) directions were those taken by such regulations in France, the earliest of truly modern States. French absolutism, though it went bankrupt in the end, was the first form of government to attempt the planning of a nationalist economy.

  The economic director of France in the age of Louis XIV was Colbert.

  Philosophers and reformers, especially in the political domain, are not guided exclusively by the intention of reaching some particular goal. Unquestionably they are moved also by the longing to avoid certain things regarded as undesirable. The vigorous industrial France that Colbert wished to create was, in a measure, to be the antithesis of Spain and the counterpart of the Netherlands. By the discovery of America and the extensive import of the precious metals, Spain had become the richest country in Europe, and had acquired hegemony over half the globe. But within a few decades it became plain that gold and silver were not bearing fruit in Spain. The Spanish grandees, whose eyes were not directed towards worldly aims and whose bodies were lean and ascetic, despised that arduous toil without which gold and silver remain barren dross. No doubt there were Spanish merchants, able and successful ones; but they were few. The Spaniards produced a far greater number of avaricious conquistadores, high-handed robbers; for people are always more ready to rob those with whom they have no intimate relationships. The horticultural metaphor of the “frutti di arte monetaria” could have occurred only to an Italian. The Spaniard was temperamentally unable to devote himself affectionately and laboriously to an occupation that seemed to him degrading, to the laborious cultivation of money and wealth. Wealth had come from the Americas in plenty, thanks to the (perhaps?) undesirable discoveries of Christopher Columbus, and promptly the nation in which every beggar was an aristocrat began to doubt the value of this wealth. Must not its possession be stabilized by labour and by wearisome toil? But the offspring of the Goths and the Iberians refused to toil. They were willing to fight or to beg; to live by plunder, and if no plunder were to be had, they would draw their belts tight.