HISTORY OF ITS INTRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION.
Coffee, although taking its common and specific names from Arabia, is
not a native plant of that country, but of Abyssinia, where it is found
both in the wild and cultivated state. From that country it was brought
to Arabia, in comparatively very recent times. Mr. Lane states that it
was first used there about the year 1450. It was not known to the Arabs,
therefore, for more than eight hundred years after the time of Mahomed,
and was introduced only between forty and fifty years before the
discovery of America. The Arabians called coffee kăhwăh, which is an old
word in their language for wine. The unlucky word gave rise to a dispute
about the legality of its use among the Mahomedan doctors, who,
mistaking the word for the thing it represented, denounced as a narcotic
that which was anti-narcotic. They were beaten, and coffee has ever
since become a legitimate and favourite potable of the Arabs.
In a century its use spread to Egypt and other parts of the Turkish
empire. For two centuries from its introduction into Arabia, the use of
coffee seems to have been confined to the Mahomedan nations of Western
Asia; and, considering its rapid spread and popularity among the
European nations, it is remarkable that it has not, like tobacco,
extended to the Hindus, the Hindu-Chinese, the Japanese, or the tribes
of the Indian Archipelago, who no more use it than the Europeans do the
betel preparation. The high price of coffee and the low cost of tobacco,
most likely afford the true solution of the difference. One striking
result of the use of coffee first, and then of tobacco, among the
Mahomedan nations is well deserving of notice. These commodities have
been in a great measure substituted for wine and spirits, which had been
largely, although clandestinely, used before, and hence a great
improvement in the sobriety of Arabs, Persians, and Turks. I give this
interesting fact on the authority of Mr. Lane, who mentions it in the
notes to his translation of the Arabian Nights.[1]
From Turkey coffee found its way to Europe. It came in use in England
before either tea or chocolate. A Turkey merchant of London, of the name
of Edwards, is said to have brought the first bag of coffee to England,
and his Greek servant to have made the first dish of English coffee
about 1652. But it is stated in the Life of Wood, the antiquary, that
“in 1651, one Jacob, a Jew, opened a coffee-house at the Angel, in the
parish of St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxon; and there it was, by some who
delighted in noveltie, drunk. When he left Oxon, he sold it in Old
Southampton-buildings, in Holborne, near London, and was living there in
1671.”
Coffee-houses were soon after opened in various parts of the metropolis,
as also in other parts of the kingdom, for vending it. The excise
officers visited the coffee-houses at fixed periods, and took an account
of the number of gallons of the liquid that were made, upon which a duty
of 4d. per gallon was charged until 1689.
Three years after the first introduction of coffee upon the statute
books, the increase of houses for its sale had become so great, that by
the Act passed in 1663, “For the better ordering and collecting the duty
of excise, and preventing the abuses therein” (15 Chas. II., cap. 11,
sect. 15), express provision is made for the licensing of all
coffee-houses at the quarter sessions, under a penalty of 5_l._ for
every month during which any person should retail coffee, chocolate, or
tea, without having first procured such license from the magistrates.
From that time to the revolution, coffee-houses multiplied so rapidly
that, when Ray published his “History of Plants” in 1688, he estimated
that the coffee-houses in London were at that time as numerous as in
Cairo itself; whilst similar places of accommodation were to be met with
in all the principal cities and towns in England.
There are now in London alone more than 1500 coffee-houses, besides
confectioners’ shops, and other places where coffee is vended.
For half a century at least Arabia furnished all the coffee that Europe
consumed, which, therefore, must have been very trifling. It was, in
fact, long the luxury of a few fashionable people, with whom, however,
it must have been in general use sixty years after its introduction, as
we find from the well-known passage of the “Rape of the Lock,” published
in 1712, in which politicians are described as seeing through it “with
half-shut eyes.”
Le Grand d’Aussy, in his “Vie Privée des Français,” gives a curious and
interesting account of the first introduction of the use of coffee in
France. As early as 1658 some merchants of Marseilles introduced the use
of coffee into that city, and Thévenot, after his return from his
Eastern travels, about the year 1658, regaled his guests with coffee
after dinner.
“This, however,” says Le Grand, “was but the eccentricity of a
traveller, which would not come into fashion among such a people as the
Parisians. To bring coffee into credit, some extraordinary and striking
circumstance was necessary. This circumstance occurred on the arrival,
in 1669, of an embassy from the Grand Seigneur Mahomet IV. to Louis
XIV. Soliman Aga, chief of the mission, having passed six months in the
capital, and during his stay having acquired the friendship of the
Parisians by some traits of wit and gallantry, several persons of
distinction, chiefly women, had the curiosity to visit him at his house.
The manner in which he received them not only inspired a wish to renew
the visit, but induced others to follow their example. He caused coffee
to be served to his guests, according to the custom of his country; for
since fashion had introduced the custom of serving this beverage among
the Turks, civility demanded that it should be offered to visitors, as
well as that those should not decline partaking of it. If a Frenchman,
in a similar case, to please the ladies, had presented to them this
black and bitter liquor, he would be rendered for ever ridiculous. But
the beverage was served by a Turk--a gallant Turk--and this was
sufficient to give it inestimable value. Besides, before the palate
could judge, the eyes were seduced by the display of elegance and
neatness which accompanied it, by those brilliant porcelain cups into
which it was poured, by napkins with gold fringes, on which it was
served to the ladies; add to this the furniture, the dresses, and the
foreign customs, the strangeness of addressing the host through the
interpreter, being seated on the ground, on tiles, &c., and you will
allow that there was more than enough to turn the heads of French women.
Leaving the hotel of the ambassador with an enthusiasm easily imagined,
they hastened to their acquaintances, to speak of the coffee of which
they had partaken; and Heaven only knows to what a degree they were
excited.”
The extravagant price of coffee, notwithstanding that the fashion of
drinking it was established, prevented it from coming into general use.
It was only to be had, according to Le Grand, at Marseilles, and even
there not in any quantity. Labat, quoted by him, states that the price
at this time was the enormous one of forty crowns a pound. In 1672, an
Armenian opened in Paris the first coffee-house, on the plan of those he
had seen at Constantinople. Pascal was followed by a crowd of imitators,
whose numbers became so great in 1676, that it was found necessary to
form them into a society by statute.
As to the European names of coffee, they are all, observes Mr. Crawfurd,
from the same source, the old Arabic word for wine, kăhwăh, which is
composed of a very guttural _k_, unpronounceable by Europeans, except by
an awkward effort, of the labial _w_, and of two short vowels ă, with an
aspirate at the end of each syllable. The Turks have changed the labial
_w_ into _v_, and the European nations, who took the word directly from
them, have corrupted the word by converting the labial _v_ into the
labial _f_, by substituting an ordinary _k_ or hard _c_ for the Arabic
guttural, by omitting both the aspirates, and by converting the last
short ă into ĕ, or as with ourselves, always the greatest corruptors of
orthography, changing both the vowels.
The Mahomedans distinguish three kinds of kăhwăh--wine, or anything that
inebriates; the extract from the pulp which contains the coffee-berry;
and that from the berry itself. The deep brown colour of the liquor
occasioned its being called the syrup of the Indian mulberry, under
which specious name it first became fashionable in Europe; and some who
imported the pulp called it the “flower of the coffee-tree,” but it
failed in use. Coffee is used in vast quantities by the Turks and
Arabians, and with peculiar propriety, as it counteracts the narcotic
effects of opium, to the use of which they are so much addicted.
The history of the cultivation of coffee by European nations in their
colonies is singular. The old Dutch East India Company carried on some
traffic with the Arabian ports in the Red Sea; and about the year 1690,
the Dutch Governor-General of India, Van Hoorne, caused some ripe
coffee-seeds to be brought to Java; they were planted, grew, and
produced fruit. He sent a single plant home from. Batavia to Nicholas
Witsen, the Governor of the East India Company, which arrived safe, was
planted in the Botanic Gardens of Amsterdam, where it prospered,
produced fruit, and the fruit young plants. From the Amsterdam garden
plants were sent to the Dutch colony of Surinam, and the planters
entered on the cultivation of coffee in 1718. The authority for this is
the celebrated physician and botanist, Boerhaave, in his Index of the
Leyden Garden. In ten years after its cultivation in Surinam it was
introduced from that colony by the English into Jamaica. It was sent to
Martinique from France in 1720. The first coffee-plant cultivated in
Brazil, now the greatest producing country in the world, was reared by a
Franciscan monk, of the name of Vellosa, in the garden of the convent of
San Antonio, near Rio Janeiro; it throve, and the monk presented its
ripe fruit to the viceroy, Lavrado. He judiciously distributed it to the
planters, who commenced its cultivation in 1774. From Java the
coffee-plant was conveyed to Sumatra, to Célèbes, to the Philippines,
and in our own times to Malabar, Mysore, and Ceylon. The few
coffee-berries brought from Mocha to Batavia are the parents of the vast
quantity now produced, all the coffee now consumed (exceeding
500,000,000 lbs.), save the trifle yielded by Arabia, has the same
origin, and the great cultivation and commerce in coffee has all sprung
up in less than one hundred and seventy-five years.