Anthony Wilder
Many people are accustomed to drinking coffee every day, but the amazing capital exploitation and colonialism surrounding the coffee industry are little known. British historian and coffee trader Anthony Wyre peeled back the mysteries woven by alchemical, political, scientific, poetic, slavery and other clues, linked the past of the coffee colonial era to its important role in the world today, and gathered the secrets hidden behind the small coffee beans and the five-hundred-year history of coffee into the "Secret History of Black Gold".
With the permission of the publisher, this article excerpts an anecdotes between Napoleon and coffee, as well as the bitterness of the French emperor's years of exile on st. Helena.
Black Gold: The Secret History of Coffee, by Anthony Wilder, translated by Yifeng Zhao, Peking University Press, April 2022
On 21 May 1502, a Portuguese fleet under the command of Captain João da Nova was heading north from the Cape of Good Hope through the vast waters of the South Atlantic, when an unexpected patch of land appeared before them.
João da Nova Official website of the Galician Ministry of Culture
The fleet docked along a small bay with fresh water, the only beach on a previously unknown 47-square-mile island with cliffs on all sides. Da Nova named the newly discovered place Saint Helena — the name of the day of the naming of Constantine the Great's mother.
Sailors conducted a simple search of the island and found it to be an uninhabited garden of Eden without any large predators or poisonous insects. The steep hills are covered with thick volcanic ash and covered with ebony, rubber and fruit trees. According to the customary practice of the navigators at that time, before leaving there to return to their homeland, they left some goats on the shore so that future visitors could be used.
Around the same year, in Yemen, South Arabia, a new drink emerged, made from the fruits of plants native to Ethiopia, which was coffee. Coffee then quickly became popular in the Islamic world. By the standards of the time, the consumption of coffee was already large, and in 1511 there was a fierce conflict over coffee in Mecca. By the end of the 16th century, European merchants and travelers had carefully embarked on expeditions into the Ottoman Empire, and reports of this "Arabic wine" had spread to the West. Soon, Europeans also began to drink coffee. By the 17th century, coffee was already very popular in Europe, especially in England, France and the Netherlands. Europe's maritime powers understood that if they started growing coffee in their new tropical colonies, they could weaken yemen's monopoly on the coffee trade in the port of Muha. So, first the Dutch, then the French, managed to get the seedlings of coffee in Yemen. The British East India Company did not hesitate, and managed to get some seeds from Muha, which it brought to St. Helena in 1732. The seeds grew unattended there and were not rediscovered until recently.
By the mid-18th century, European colonies dominated the world coffee trade, satisfying the country's keen demand for coffee consumption with plantation products, often operated under conditions of slave labor or similar to slave labor. Meanwhile, St. Helena, the world's most remote island, played a huge strategic role in Britain's efforts to maintain its eastern hegemony. Due to its remote location, many important people returning to Europe from Indian colonies and elsewhere visited the island, and the island was also favored by the British government as the most suitable place for Napoleon' exile at The Defeat at Waterloo in 1815.
Landscape of St. Helena wiki
Today, one of the world's rarest and most expensive coffees comes from St. Helena, a tree species brought there by the East India Company in 1732. The island is still a British Overseas Territory, an anachronistic remnant of the declining Empire of the Rising Sun.
St. Helena Coffee TreeCurrent page St. Helena Coffee Official website
St. Helena's coffee is appreciated by tasting experts, but the island's natural environment has deteriorated since it was discovered. The goats left behind by DaNova ravaged the trees there, the local ebony is almost extinct, and other man-made disasters have stripped the island of its thick topsoil and exposed the rugged volcanic rocks to broad daylight, making up most of the island's exterior. After the opening of the Suez Canal, the island lost its strategic importance – there were no airfields and could only sail into a heavily armored ship at a time.
The black-gray basalt of St. Helena bears witness to the mysterious stories of many major events and important people in the history of the world.
Map of Napoleon's residence on St. Helena at Longwood Manor Lisa Strachan
While on St. Helena, Napoleon, though not very interested in food, often drank coffee. Drink coffee every morning at breakfast at 6 a.m. and coffee after lunch at 10 a.m. As dinner began at 8 o'clock came to an end, he always had to drink coffee poured from a silver pot into his valuable cups, which Napoleon had ordered in 1806 to be specially made by the Sèvres porcelain factory. The cups are small, blue, decorated with gilded hieroglyphs and images modeled after vivant Denon's Egyptian Scenes. Bingham noticed the cups and said, "Dessert is served in a Sèvres porcelain plate with a gold knife, fork and spoon. The coffee cups were the most beautiful I've ever seen, each with a picture of Egypt on each cup and a portrait of a celebrity on each plate. In France, it costs 25 cents to buy such a cup with a shallow dish. ”
Porcelain plate from the Sèvres Porcelain Factory 1804-1805, a scene of an Egyptian temple painted by Vivant Denon on the plate, from the collection of the British Museum
Napoleon, who had always been generous, gave a set of cups and saucers to Madame Malcolm, the man who had succeeded Coburn as admiral. Becky Balcomb, accompanied by Napoleon, visited Maréchal Bertrand, an assistant to Admiral Malcolm who lived near the parish of St. Matthew, and together they tasted "fragrant" coffee cooked by La Pages, but he did not mention where that coffee came from. At an impromptu picnic-style lunch party at Sir William Dofton's house, Napoleon brought cold pies, canned cooked meat, cold turkey, meat cooked with curries, dates, almonds, a very delicate salad, and coffee. Mrs. Greentree tasted the coffee and felt "sour and difficult to swallow."
The coffee cup made by the Sèvres Porcelain Factory was a gift from Napoleon Bonaparte's second wife, Empress Marie-Louise, to her maid in the collection of the American National Museum of History
The sandy bay area of St. Helena is nestled on Mount Pleasant, surrounded by a 500-yard bamboo fence where coffee trees from Yemen were first planted in the 1730s. It is easy to speculate that Sir William would have told Napoleon that the place where the coffee trees were planted could be seen in the house where he lived, and that he might even have prepared for Napoleon some coffee picked from a bamboo hedge.
However, because there were no experts and equipment for processing coffee on the island, Sir's coffee was likely to be poorly processed, which led to the "sour, hard to swallow" taste that Mrs. Greentree complained about. Interestingly, Mrs. Greentree actually complained to Napoleon about the bad taste of the coffee. If it had been Napoleon himself, she would not have lost her grace and would not have hurt her father's hospitality, unless there were other reasons involved. What exactly happened during a picnic on the grass on the edge of Mount Pleasant is no longer known.
This happened in October 1820, shortly after Napoleon suddenly became interested in gardening and solemnly planted a few coffee trees. The trees could not stand longwood's endless wind and died quietly.
Napoleon's Exile in St. Helena, by Franz Josef Sandman, 1820, Mameson National Castle Museum Collection
Napoleon must have started drinking coffee soon after he became an adult. When he pursued his first wife, Josephine, in 1795, Josephine offered Napoleon the coffee her family's estate in Martinique. Josephine's Tascher family has owned its own plantation there since the 17th century, first growing sugar cane and then after Gabriel Cleu introduced coffee to the island. There were 150 slaves in the plantation, all of whom were treated well, but the plantation did not bring josephine income, because the island was controlled by the British at the time of her association with Napoleon. Probably under the influence of Josephine, Napoleon restarted the slave trade in France in 1802.
Of course, this was not only influenced by Josephine, but also because Napoleon was under pressure from Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseille and other regions to allow slavery. Moreover, Napoleon saw from the example of the rebellion in St. Dominica what a painful economic loss would bring, which was one of the reasons.
However, in the case of St. Helena, it was precisely the practice of maintaining colonial rule that brought about a heavy loss. Although St. Helena remained owned by the East India Company, during Napoleon's exile, the British King took over St. Helena and paid a much largely increased amount of money to maintain the island's high state of alert. The respected Governor-General wilkes was given a pension and sent away, with Admiral Coburn and Malcolm serving as provisional governors until the arrival of the King's chosen governor, Sir Hedson Lowe, in April 1816. Hedson Lowe was taciturn and boring, and his days in exile were like years for him. But Montholon, one of Napoleon's so-called four evangelists who accompanied Napoleon to the penal colony —the other three being Bertrand, Gourgaud and Las Cass—once wrote: "Angels from heaven will not like us as much as the new governor." In fact, whatever merits Hedson Lowe may have, he is not an angel. As relations with Napoleon deteriorated rapidly, he immersed himself in defending his control of Napoleon's custody, a place ridiculed as "Fort Hedson." He would wake up in the middle of the night and nervously write down new ideas on how to step up your safety precautions. He faces a bitter, boring and ruthless opponent, Napoleon. Napoleon said in December 1818: "Whatever others say, I can make this governor more famous, and I can make him notorious... Whether I say anything about him, whether it's rude behavior or trying to poison me, everyone will believe it. ”
Editor-in-charge: Zhu Zhe
Proofreader: Shi Gong