The Devil's Cup

by Stewart Lee Allen

  Writers tend to portray docks as romantic, mysterious places, and perhaps they once were. The modern ones, however, more closely resemble parking lots, and the ships, skyscrapers. The SS Pisa measured almost two hundred yards long and floated five stories high (there were an additional six below sea level). The dock was littered with huge steel boxes painted primary blues and reds. To load sixty thousand pounds of coffee in the 1800s required three hundred trips by a stevedore with two hundred pounds on his shoulder. Today it’s done in one trip by a single man hidden in a crane.

  The only people in sight that day were my fellow passengers, eight in total, most in their early seventies. No one spoke English. After two hours, a crew member led us into the ship’s hold. We were shipping tractors. An Italian man with false teeth made me promise to sit at his dinner table. Then we were led to our cabins. Everything was painted flat blue. As I began to unpack, the baby down the hall began screaming. A huge crash came from below.

  INTRODUCING NONNATIVE PLANT SPECIES TO DIFFERENT PARTS OF the world was among the most significant activities of the early European explorers. They originally concentrated on bringing New World exotica, like tomatoes, to Europe. Sugar from Africa to Brazil was the first major transplant from the Old World to the New. Coffee was second. There appear to have been two or three earlier attempts to plant coffee in the Western Hemisphere, one possibly by De Clieu himself. Whatever the case, by the time he approached Louis XV for a pair of plants, the king was unenthused. This Louis loved coffee. He personally harvested, roasted, and brewed his cup with beans from the garden (acquired from the mayor of Amsterdam, they were direct descendants of the plants smuggled out of Mocha a century earlier), and his coffee-roasting soirées with his royal mistress Madame Du Barry were something of a scandal.

  “I made many trips in my attempts to obtain a sprig of a coffee plant from the royal garden, where they had been kept for some years,” wrote De Clieu. “I returned over and over without success.” After months of waiting, De Clieu finally got smart and employed “a lady of quality” to entreat the royal physician, Monsieur De Chirac, to hand over some buds. The name and skills of the lady are unknown, but in the fall of 1720 the doctor sent two seedlings to the garden in Rochefort to acclimatize themselves to the sea air. On October 8 they were loaded onto a ship appropriately named Le Dromedaire, “the Camel,” and set sail for the West.

  1 Dieppe’s significant role in coffee’s history might explain why it is traditional here to toast weddings and baptisms with coffee and not wine.

  At Sea

  The discovery of coffee was, in its way, as important as the invention of the telescope or of the microscope… For coffee has unexpectedly intensified and modified the capacities and activities of the human brain.

  Heinrich Eduard Jacob

  SEA VOYAGES AND PRISON terms have a number of characteristics in common. There is no escape. Meals are served at fixed times. The food is awful. You have no choice about whose company you keep. All the passengers on the SS Pisa took their meals together at three side-by-side tables. The first table was dominated by a Swiss biologist named Christian, his Brazilian wife, and their three-year-old daughter. Another table held an older Italian couple, a seventy-nine-year-old French-Swiss woman named Jacqueline, and her admirer, Bruno. I shared a table with two Italian men, Sergio and Franco. Meals were chaos. The engine’s vibrations made our chairs crawl away from the table, and it was so loud we had to yell. The food, if not too good, was plentiful: first a huge bowl of pasta, then a fish, then a meat, then a vegetable, and finally a rancid orange. The wine came from cardboard cartons. The coffee was unspeakable.

  “Bellissimo!” exclaimed my table companion Sergio at the first dinner. “I love this bread! Don’t you love it? Isn’t this the best bread? It’s the best bread. I love the sailing life. Ahhhhhhh!”

  Sergio was a handsome old man with slicked-down gray hair and pale eyes. Supposedly quite charming, if you spoke his language, as a dining companion, he left a little to be desired. If he didn’t care for whatever he was eating, he simply spat it out, discreetly wrapping it in his beloved bread rolls. By the end of every meal there was a pile of half-chewed meat-and-bread wads decorating his plate. He was also a tan fan and by the end of the voyage had burned himself a bright pink. His eyes were permanently bloodshot.

  That first night, though, he seemed all right. Definitely upbeat. He loved the bread, the food, the sea, the Brazilian girls. Everything was wonderful!

  “I am speaking before the rotary club of São Paulo,” he bragged.

  “The rotary club?” I teased. “Isn’t that part of the Mafia?”

  He grew suddenly serious. “We don’t discuss the Mafia at dinner.”

  I was to discover that Italians never discuss controversial subjects at meals. The pope was out. So was the secession of northern Italy. European union was verboten. Ditto for Mussolini. It all upset the digestion, although, considering the food we were eating, it seemed a lost cause.

  Fortunately, we had Sergio to find a silver lining in everything, including my destination.

  “Santos! You are going to Santos? The coffee port? You are a lucky man. The route has changed. Santos is now the last stop.” He paused to spit out another mouthful of half-chewed veal. “You will have six weeks to enjoy the sea and delicious food.”

  “Six weeks? I thought it was supposed to take fourteen days.” “Not any more.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “But you don’t have to pay a penny extra. The captain told us today at the meeting. Didn’t you listen?”

  “Is that what he was talking about?” I felt like throwing up. “My Italian is not so good.”

  Sergio nodded happily. “Ahh, it must be a pleasant surprise.”

  The SS Pisa crawled across the Ligurian Sea and then down Spain’s Costa Brava, stopping only at Valencia, where I spent the afternoon watching eighty-year-old drunken sailors scream songs in a local bar.

  We entered the Strait of Gibraltar. The strait is the sole connection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and once through we’d be in a real ocean. The thought mortified me (I have a horror of becoming seasick), so I took a double dose of Dramamine that night. I awoke at four in the morning to find my cabin doing somersaults. Bottles fell, books tumbled. I downed some more Dramamine and passed out again.

  The sea was calm when I awoke. Africa was pouring by to starboard, but haze kept the continent invisible. Around sunset I saw some Moroccan fishing boats. One that appeared just at dusk struck me as odd. It flew no flag. No crew was visible, nor were there any fishing nets. I was sitting in the prow when it cut across our bow, with only fifty yards to spare, so I got a pretty good look at it before it disappeared into the night.

  At dinner I asked Captain Vitello, a string bean of a man who seemed more maître d’ than sailor, if he thought the ship I’d seen might have been a Moroccan pirate checking us out.

  “No, no.” He gave me one of his trademark I’m-about-to-have-a-nervous-breakdown smiles. “Not here. In a few days maybe there will be pirates.”

  “Tomorrow? We have pirates tomorrow?”

  “Perhaps. Nigeria has pirates. And Togo.”

  Modern pirates prefer to pick on private yachts. But in De Clieu’s day they went after everybody. In fact, everybody was a pirate, and even the most respectable of captains made an occasional raid. Buccaneers caught up with De Clieu’s ship a few weeks after they’d set sail. De Clieu claims they were Tunisians who struck during a dead calm in the middle of the night. Fortunately, the Dromedaire’s twenty-six cannons convinced them to look elsewhere.

  We did not have the luck to be raided by pirates. No pirates, no whales, not even the sight of land. We sailed past Morocco, then mysterious Mauritania, and then the almost legendary country known as Western Sahara, one of the few places on earth lacking any form of government. If only we were on the Qasid Karin, my boat to Yemen, I thought over and over. We would doubtless get shipwrecked and be able to do some exploring. The Pisa
, however, just kept plodding ahead at fifteen miles an hour.

  The problem with the SS Pisa, at least from my point of view, was that it was neither uncomfortable enough to qualify as an adventure nor luxurious enough to be a pleasure.

  “Oh, but last time it was so different,” replied the elderly French-Swiss woman, Jacqueline, when I mentioned my qualms one morning. “There was music and dancing all night. Why, there was a concert violinist among the passengers, and every night he would come to my cabin and play for me.”

  I’d begun lingering over my morning coffee and panetonne with Christian, the boyish Swiss biologist, and Jacqueline. Jacqueline was a sweet old lady, always dressed in a faded sweater and flowered head scarf. I quite liked her and admired her gumption in traveling alone at her age.

  “Ah, Jacqueline,” I teased, “is the violin the only instrument he played in your room?”

  “Ahhh, Stew-ar!” she tittered. Then she moaned. “But it is no funny thing when you get old like me, traveling by yourself.”

  I impolitely agreed. “Yes, it does get harder to travel with age.”

  Christian came to her rescue. “No! I think it is marvelous that you get out and travel, Jacqueline! You should!”

  “But of course,” she said. “What, now that I have had the children and raised the family, I should stay home and cook the spaghetti?” She mimed stirring a pot with a doleful expression. “No! Never! I want to go out and see the world and learn, eh? Traveling opens your eyes, non? What, I should stay in the cellar and become another moldy potato?”

  “Not at all,” I agreed. “Not another moldy potato, please.”

  “I shall go and visit my friend in Recife,” she said. Recife is an old port town in northern Brazil. “He is such a dear friend.”

  “More than Bruno?” I teased. I had noticed our fellow passenger, a red-faced Italian, making goo-goo eyes at her.

  “Oh! Bruno!” She laughed. “Speak of moldy potatoes!”

  HAVING SURVIVED THE TUNISIAN PIRATES, DE CLIEU BECAME AWARE that the Dutch government had planted a spy on board the Dromedaire. Dutch colonies in Java were beginning to produce large quantities of the bean, and they, like the Arabs before them, were going to great lengths to maintain their monopoly. Unfortunately, very little is known about the spy. De Clieu modestly shrugs aside this early case of international economic espionage by saying, “It is useless to recount the difficulties I had in saving my delicate plant from the hands of a man who, basely jealous of the joy I was about to taste through being of service to my country,” attempted to destroy the seedlings.

  It appears that the spy’s attempts to uproot De Clieu’s treasures forced the Frenchman to sit with the plants by day and lock them in his cabin at night. The Dutchman might very well have succeeded if it hadn’t been for the special containers De Clieu had constructed for transporting his protégés. Prior to De Clieu, plants had been transported in baskets covered with a reed cage, allowing limited light and also exposing the plants to a great deal of corrosive sea air. De Clieu built the first portable glasshouse, essentially a wooden box sealed with wire and a glass front. The wire kept rats out and let air in, while the glass preserved the day’s heat. It became the model container for moving plants by sea. For this voyage, it also hindered the Dutch spy, when he finally managed to get his hands on the plants during an unguarded moment. The wire-and-glass container prevented the saboteur from simply uprooting the little bud, and he only managed to tear off a branch before being caught red-handed.

  AROUND JANUARY 20, THE SS PISA TOOK A SHARP RIGHT AND headed into the center of the Atlantic Ocean. The flocks of seagulls that had been following us disappeared, and for the next six days we saw almost no living thing. I spent most of my time in the prow reading Moby Dick and listening to the sea crash against our hull. Aye, I’m an adventurer just like Ahab, I’d think. Tonight I will eat the veal!

  Most of the passengers hung around the minuscule swimming pool near the engines. Only Christian and his three-year-old, Luanna, ventured forward on the chance they might see a whale. They saw only a hammerhead shark. We all saw flying fish. There were only twenty people on the SS Pisa and I often went half a day without seeing anyone on deck. Three days out, a lone seagull hung about the vessel. We all thought an island was near. But there was nothing. Stars filled the sky every night to overflowing. My tablemates, Sergio and Franco, had a fight and stopped speaking to one another. I began skipping dinner to watch the sunsets. Most were unmemorable, if you exclude the fact that they were uniquely mine—with everyone else inside, and no other humans for thousands of miles, I was the only person who saw at least five of the world’s sunsets that January.

  On the morning of the twenty-sixth we woke to find seagulls dive-bombing into the sea and coming up with flying fish writhing in their beaks. The lush green island of Pendeos de São appeared on our bow. We were crossing the equator. Captain Vitello summoned the passengers up to the pool, where we were given diplomas for having “graduated” the equator. Then the first mate, dressed as Neptune, baptized the passengers by painting us with melted chocolate and tossing us into the pool.

  “Strange graduation ceremony,” I said to Christian afterward.

  “I am Swiss. We like anything with chocolate.” He gave Luanna a squeeze. “You like chocolate too, eh, Luanna?”

  “I’m surprised Luanna didn’t insist on being thrown into the pool.”

  I watched the pool, now dark brown from the chocolate, being drained. Luanna began to wail.

  “I hope they fill it again soon,” said Christian, as the last drop gurgled away. “Luanna will miss her swims.”

  DE CLIEU MAY NOT HAVE HAD A SWIMMING POOL ON THE Dromedaire, but he would have related to Luanna’s dismay because it was somewhere near here that he suffered his famous water shortage. It happened when the Dromedaire, only a few hundred miles from Martinique, had its hull split during a tropical storm. The storm passed, but the breach could not be sealed. The Dromedaire began to sink. Anything unnecessary was thrown overboard, including most of the drinking water.

  The storm was followed by a dead calm. A week passed. Then two. Still no wind. Tossing out their drinking water began to seem shortsighted; calms like this were known to last up to a month. Everyone was limited to half a cup of water per day, barely enough for one person, and definitely not enough for a teenage plant. So, in one of the noblest sacrifices in the Caffeinated Age, De Clieu shared his water ration with his precious pet.

  “I would have died of thirst to keep alive the plant they had given me,” De Clieu wrote. “But listen, you know what glory this precious little plant promised me! If I died, then so be it! But I knew coffee held a glorious destiny for me.”

  The aristocrat’s sacrifice drove the over-caffeinated romantics of the eighteenth-century wild. Poems were written about it, all bad, as per this sample by Charles Lamb:

  When’er I fragrant coffee drink

  I on the generous Frenchman think,

  Whose noble perseverance bore

  The tree to Martinico’s shore….

  But soon, alas! His darling pleasure

  In watching this, his precious treasure

  Is like to fade—for water fails

  On board the ship in which he sails….

  Even from his own dry parched lips

  He spares it for his coffee slips.

  Artists painted the scene, and in 1816 a Dutch merchant had a special coffee set made commemorating De Clieu’s “noble sacrifice.” There’s a botanical garden named after our chevalier in Martinique and even a species of the plant bearing his name, Coffea declieuxias. The best tribute that I’ve read, though, comes from a class of ten-year-olds whom De Clieu’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-daughter, Madame Cotelle, met with a few years ago:

  A notre chevalier (To our poppy)

  Amateur de café (lover of coffee)

  Allant en Martinique (Went to Martinique)

  pres de l’Amerique (near to Amerique)


  Sur un grand bateau (On a big boat)

  il sacrifia son eau (he sacrificed his water)

  Gabriel De Clieu (Mr. De Clieu)

  leur fit dises adieux (we bid you adieu)

  I may mock, but De Clieu took a serious risk. People completely deprived of water die within four days. Moreover, damage from consuming less than normal amounts of water is cumulative, and his ration was considerably less than half the eight ounces required. His body would at first have compensated by using liquid stored in his cells. This would lead to kidney failure, and as toxins built up in his blood, he would begin to experience stiffness, light-headedness, and eventually hallucinations and death.

  None of this happened to Gabriel. The wind picked up, and on an unknown day in an unknown month of a doubtful year, his sole surviving plant reached the island of Martinique. It was the size of a pinky. De Clieu planted it in his garden and put a twenty-four-hour guard on it. Within five years there were over two thousand plants growing on the island. Within fifty years there were eighteen million, and their descendants now supply over 90 percent of the world’s coffee.

  De Clieu himself proved less fruitful. Although he married four times, only one of his half-dozen children survived, and he eventually passed away in France, landed but poor. Since he was an aristocrat, his tomb at St. Suplice was defiled by the sans culottes of the French Revolution. You can view his anonymous remains today for a mere fifteen francs at the Paris Catacombs, where they lie mingled with countless others.