Black Gold. Antony Wild

collected fresh water, and gathered fruits. Da Nova left a number of goats, and thus the untouched Eden that had first exploded out of the ink-blue waters of the South Atlantic some sixty million years previously commenced the inexorable fall from grace that only contact with man’s intrusive ways can bring.

      The goats bred rapidly, and herds of hundreds, huge and fat, roamed the island eating young trees. Rats had escaped from the Portuguese ships and proliferated, along with great poisonous spiders from Africa, and there were packs of feral cats and dogs. The island continued to be the secret solace of Portuguese sailors, but as other European nations began to flex their maritime muscles it was inevitable that the secret of St Helena would out. An English adventurer, James Fenton, came across it by accident in 1582, and hatched a suitably piratical plot to oust the Portuguese and have himself proclaimed King, from which he had to be dissuaded by William Hawkins, his second-in-command. In 1583 three Japanese princes stopped there en route for Rome, on an embassy inspired by the indefatigable Jesuits. By chance, two other Japanese, captured off California from a Spanish ship, the Santa Ana, by Thomas Cavendish on his round-the-world voyage, would also have visited St Helena when the captain stopped there in 1588. He had been able to locate the island by taking prisoner the navigator from the Santa Ana. He stayed twelve days on the island, surveying it meticulously, observing the herds of goats nearly a mile long, the Persian partridges and Chinese pheasants, and stands of imported fig, lemon, and orange trees, as well as herbs and vegetables.

      St Helena, despite its isolation, already bore the heavy stamp of man. Having finally been put on the map by Cavendish, it was inevitable that St Helena should become the unfortunate battleground of later European rivalries. A Dutch pilot in the service of the Portuguese, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, put in on the way back from India a year after Cavendish had left and heard stories of the Englishman’s sojourn. He described the island as ‘an earthly Paradise for the Portuguese ships’, so well placed in the vast wastes of the South Atlantic as to appear to be evidence of God’s beneficence. In those early days, there was virtually no piracy and no rival European navies to worry about, so the Portuguese ships sailed their own course from India to convene in St Helena before making the voyage home together. St Helena’s very isolation made it a uniquely valuable piece of real estate, in a bizarre sense obeying the estate agent’s mantra of ‘Location, Location, Location’. There was literally nowhere else to go.

      Cavendish’s discovery that the island was the gathering place for the returning Portuguese East India fleet meant that it quickly became the haunt of English warships in search of easy – and lucrative – prey, to such an extent that, by 1592, the fleet returning from Goa had specific orders to avoid St Helena at all costs. Captain James Lancaster stopped on the island in 1591 on the first English commercial voyage to the Indies. He was to be the commander of the first East India Company fleet ten years later, using Portuguese maps of the Spice Islands which, ironically, had been stolen by van Linschoten from the Archbishop of Goa. These maps had excited so much interest in Holland and England that they gave the initial impetus necessary for the formation of merchant companies to exploit the knowledge they revealed. St Helena had already started to be the stage upon which many of the main characters of the coming European dominance of the East were to be first seen.

      European sailors returning from the Cape of Good Hope, the Arabian Sea, and the East Indies beyond could run before the south-easterly trade winds that blow almost unceasingly from the Cape across the expanses of the South Atlantic. To avoid running into the same winds, outgoing ships mostly swung out towards the Brazilian coast, eventually making a much more southerly passage to the Cape. Frequently, the boats that had made the long journey to the trading ports of the East were in poor shape by the time they returned, and St Helena became a sanctuary for battered, weary sailors and their broken ships. The island’s history at the beginning of the seventeenth century reflected the waxing and waning of European fortunes in the East. Portugal, after it had become united with Spain in 1580, became embroiled in a war of attrition against the Dutch, who in turn flexed their muscles upon achieving independence at the conclusion of that war and lost no time in filling the vacuum left by the decline in Portuguese trading activity in the East by sending large well-financed fleets to the Spice Islands. This thwarted similar ambitions harboured by the English, who set up the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ (to become known as the East India Company) in 1600 with precisely the same aim. The First Voyage (as each individually financed fleet was termed) of the Company came to St Helena after a particularly gruelling passage of the Cape, during which the Commander, James Lancaster, having lost the rudder of his flagship, the Red Dragon, ordered the accompanying Hector to sail on, writing poignantly in his log: ‘I live … at the devotion of wind and seas.’ Fortunately for Lancaster, the captain of the Hector refused to obey the order, and the two ships eventually limped into St Helena for repairs.

      For most English people, the East India Company is principally associated with the tea trade with China, which indeed it initiated in the 1660s and which largely sustained it until 1833, when it ceased to be a trading company and effectively became the managing agency of India. However, from the earliest years of the Company, its factors (as the merchants were known) had identified coffee as a potentially interesting trading commodity, and by the 1620s were actively trading coffee from Yemen throughout the Arabian Sea at a time when coffee was virtually unknown back in England. As St Helena became a vital safe haven for the increasing number of Company voyages that put in there, so it also became part of the intricate web of connections created by the coffee trade. The involvement of the Company in the trade pre-dated the period of rapid expansion of European coffee consumption, but coincided with the first reports of the beverage. The traveller Leonhard Rauwolf from Augsburg went to Aleppo in 1573 where he observed the use of ‘a very good drink, by them called chaube’. Another early reference to ‘this drink called caova’ was by Prospero Alpini, a physician from Padua who travelled to Egypt in 1580 and published a book on the plants of the country in 1592. Padua’s university was at the centre of European medical learning at the time, and knowledge of the new drink thus disseminated rapidly. Preceding this was the report made by the Venetian Gianfrancesco Morosini to the Senate in 1585. He had been living in Constantinople and said that the Turks ‘drink a black water as hot as they can suffer it, which is the infusion of a bean called cavee, which is said to possess the virtue of stimulating mankind’. Coffee was well established in the Ottoman Empire by the time these observations were made, and was also being widely consumed in Persia and Moghul India. Where did all the coffee to fill the cups of Islam come from?

      It is common for the coffee industry to assert that, whilst Ethiopia was the cradle of coffee, Yemen, having imported plants from Ethiopia, was the first country actively to cultivate and trade in the new beverage. In fact, until the mid sixteenth century, the demand for coffee was met by Ethiopia entirely. Evidence of coffee exports from Zeila, near Djibouti on the western Red Sea coast, can be found in reports of the jurist Ibn Hadjar al-Haytami of Mecca in the late fifteenth century as well as in an account of a boat captured by the Portuguese in 1542 on the way to Shihr in Arabia.

      According to some sources, exported coffee was harvested from the wild bushes in Kaffa province in the western highlands. However, recent genetic research into the spread of coffee plant species has suggested that the source of the Yemeni coffee strain was not the type found in Kaffa province, but that found in the east near Harar. As it is clear that the Harar type evolved from the Kaffa type, this would imply that there had been a migration of the plant to the Arab province of Harar before the plant went on to be cultivated in Yemen. This strongly suggests that the original domesticated (cultivated) coffee plant came from Harar, and that this would also have been the source of the Ethiopian coffee traded in parallel to that of Yemeni origin through the port of Mocha. This places Harar securely at the epicentre of the genesis of the world coffee trade: its cultivated varietal was the source of coffee traded in the earliest days. The strain of coffee plant produced there today is still the original type, Harar longberry, which is close in flavour to its Yemeni progeny and, although ‘unwashed’ (generally considered to be a less satisfactory method than wet processing), is one of the world’s most prized coffees.

      There is no clue to suggest how the coffee plant came to be cultivated in Harar, although there is some anecdotal evidence that the slave routes from the Oromo