Against wind and tide, the grain of gold came from Europe to stay in Central American lands
By Amalia del Cid
Coffee came to America in a glass box. Crossing the Atlantic it survived a pirate attack, a storm, and a fight on board the ship on which its carrier, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, a French naval officer, was traveling. The little plant with which this story begins was, possibly, a descendant of those that came out of the Botanical Gardens of Amsterdam to be given to the French King Louis XIV; its journey to the New World occurred in 1720.
Mathieu was on leave in Paris when he acquired that coffee tree that would change history. He got it using “some help and not a little charm” – says the web portal of the International Coffee Organization – and took it with him on the trip back to Martinique, the Caribbean island where he served the Crown. The plant was installed in the glass box so that the salt water would not damage it since it had to travel on deck to maintain a good temperature.
Up until then everything went without a hitch, but the crossing of the coffee in no way could be so simple. It was an odyssey. Or at least that’s how Gabriel told it in his traveler’s diary, a testimony that has made him a hero. First, the ship was chased by Tunisian pirates; Then a violent storm broke out and the coffee tree had to be tied down so that it would not fall overboard. Then the French captain staged a fight against an envious crewman who tried to sabotage the bush and in the brawl, the plant lost a branch, but, although somewhat battered, it survived.
As if all this hadn’t been enough, suddenly the wind died down and the boat was left motionless, so it was necessary to ration the drinking water. The captain, however, had his priorities clear and saved the life of his treasure by sharing most of his ration. Thus the coffee tree arrived healthy at its destination and was planted in Preebear-Martinique, where it was fenced in with thorns and cultivated by slaves.
Then the coffee prospered and multiplied. In 1726 the first harvest was ready and by 1777 between 18 and 19 million coffee trees had grown in Martinique, thanks to the little plant that the officer jealously cared for. From there the new crop traveled to the Dutch colony of Suriname, then to French Guyana to Brazil, and Cuba.
It seems to have arrived in Costa Rica from Havana in 1779. By then agriculture in the Costa Rican province was that of subsistence. Its history took a turn as of 1808, “when the cultivation of coffee began to take root, which has deeply penetrated the Costa Rican work and identity”, says the text, History of Coffee in Costa Rica. Then its cultivation would spread enthusiastically throughout Central America, facing all kinds of obstacles, such as the lack of transportation and those bad roads that led to the despair of more than one producer, as until today.
According to history, in Central America the first ones to establish the grain of gold industry were the Costa Ricans
Warner Villegas, from the Coffee Institute of Costa Rica
The first plots
According to history, in Central America the first ones to establish the grain of gold industry were the Costa Ricans, says Warner Villegas, from the Coffee Institute of Costa Rica. The sowing of the first plots is attributed to a priest named Felix Velarde Umaña, born in Carthage in 1758 and graduated in León, Nicaragua, around 1783.
Velarde earned the title of the first coffee grower in Costa Rica thanks to the fact that in his will, an “incontrovertible document” signed on February 12, 1816, gave evidence of having been the owner of a “plot planted with coffee, (…) enclosed by adobe walls “in the heart of San José (just a hundred meters from the Metropolitan Cathedral), the newspaper La Nación writes in the article” Between adobe walls and coffee trees: the first coffee plantation in Costa Rica “.
In the case of Guatemala, the matter is less clear. Some say that coffee entered the country at the time of Carlos III (1759-1788) and others claim it was around 1750, around, 1760, or between 1750 and 1760. Some historians argue that the plants traveled from the Antilles to Guatemalan territory and, other experts maintain that coffee cultivation began in the Jesuit gardens of Antigua, from whence the seeds were taken by people who planted them in different regions of the country.
As already noted, religion played an important role in the establishment of coffee both in Costa Rica and Guatemala. And the same in Nicaragua.
An ornamental plant: After the French captain brought that coffee tree to Martinique, the crop went to Haiti, a prosperous French colony where “95 percent of the population was made up of blacks,” says Eddy Kühl, a Nicaraguan historian and coffee producer. “In Haiti, the blacks rebelled and those who were close to the French stole sailing boats in Port-au-Prince. They arrived in Cuba and there they were turned away; in Honduras, it was the same. Then the church in Nicaragua gave them asylum. They came by mule crossing Honduras and settled in the lands they were given in Mateare. That’s where it all began, with the black slaves invited by the church. In 1796, “says Kühl, author of the book “Nicaragua and its Coffee”.
However, the crop did not have a grandiose entrance. And neither did the drink. If in Guatemala at the beginning the plant was used as medicine, in Nicaragua it was used for ornamental purposes in the gardens. “The locals did not drink it, because it was bitter,” explains the historian. They didn’t start drinking it “until the peninsular priests came, who were already aware of it”.
Commercial coffee, on the other hand, entered Nicaraguan soil until a few years after Central America’s Independence, back in 1825. It happened that a student from Jinotepe, named Manuel Matus Torres, became friends with the Costa Rican Francisco Oreamuno. “In Costa Rica coffee was already being sown, so Oreamuno promised to send him some little plants, and he kept his promise. He sent them on a ship to San Juan del Sur. Manuel took them to his farm and gave seeds to his neighbors, “says Kühl. This is how the coffee era began.
The drink of travelers: It is believed that the first coffee beans entered Honduras brought from Costa Rica by Palestinian peddlers and were planted in Manto, a town of Olancho that was once a departmental capital, says the Honduran Coffee Institute (Ihcafe).
However, data on the coffee crop during the Spanish Colony seems to contradict this version. In the Statistical Yearbook of Honduras, published from 1889 to 1893, it is stated that in the year 1804, Honduran coffee was of “as excellent quality as that of Moka”. Therefore, it is believed that the first plants were planted in small quantities “by some curious people” and that by 1804 there were already high-yielding coffee trees with more than five years of age, says Ihcafe.
By those years El Salvador was also beginning to take steps in the coffee adventure. Although the coffee industry would not grow until more than half a century later, some historians maintain that the cultivation of the bean was introduced to Salvadoran lands between 1779 and 1796, according to data from the Salvadoran Coffee Council.
Those first plants were found in the plots of two peasants of Ahuachapán, in the west of the country. And it is known that they obtained the seeds in Jutiapa, Guatemala. The development of coffee occurred almost simultaneously throughout the region, with a few years of difference. In Nicaragua, for example, the reign of the golden grain did not begin so quickly. While coffee was already installed in other countries of Central America, Nicaraguans did not begin to see it with real interest until the discovery of rich gold deposits in California in 1848 caused the incessant passage of adventurers and ore miners who demanded this drink in the hostels and eateries that sprang up along the Transit Route.
Such was the fever for gold in California, that chronicles of those times calculate ten thousand travelers who crossed each year through Nicaragua looking for the West Coast of the United States. The passengers came seeking food, bed, and coffee, which stimulated the local consumption of the drink and also motivated the establishment of plantations in Carazo, Managua, and Rivas.
When there was no more land for coffee plantations in the Pacific, the State, and the producers looked to the northern region of the country, known as Las Segovias, where there are better climate conditions for coffee cultivation, but that suffered from a serious lack of roads and means of transport. By then, in the Nicaraguan north, there was a largely indigenous population that only sowed beans and corn in the lowlands. The discovery that the altitude was perfect for coffee cultivation was rather an accident, says the historian. And the person responsible for the discovery is a woman.
“A couple came in 1865. Luis Elster and his wife Katharina Braun were headed to California, looking for gold, but they were carrying a child and people told them, ‘It is not in your best interest to go to California. Go to the gold mines of Matagalpa.’ They came by wagon and settled in Matagalpa,” says the author of “Nicaragua and its coffee,” Eddy Kühl. Luis was a miner and Katharina owned a botanical garden. One day he traveled to Managua to sell some gold nuggets and when he came back he brought shoes, fabrics, needles, and an arroba (measurement of value for goods) of coffee so that his wife could prepare the tea. But she planted the beans and soon realized that the altitude favors the quality of the coffee because it slows the maturation of the seeds.
Thus, little by little, overcoming difficulties such as the scarcity of transportation, Central America was experiencing and improving in the industry that today produces one of its main export items.
In the nineteenth century, the century of coffee, the Central American governments took measures such as the elimination of taxes and the delivery of rewards to incentivize cultivation, and when exportation began, the descendants of the coffee tree of Captain Mathieu crossed the Atlantic, back to Europe.
Says Kühl, the National War that in 1857 united the Central American nations against William Walker, won thanks to coffee, because by then Costa Rica already exported it to England and had sterling pounds to buy weapons… But that is another story.
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