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 region (the Harar Arabs were incorrigible slavers) were lined with coffee plants discarded by the coffee-chewing Oromo captives. This would not account for the domestication of the plant, however, which required the application of specific skills. As there was a sudden surge in demand for coffee in the first half of the sixteenth century, it would have made the cultivation of coffee commercially worthwhile, and Harar was in any case a great deal more convenient for Arab traders than distant Kaffa. The presence of a domesticated coffee plant in the Arab-controlled Harar region would have made the transplanting of that variety to Yemen virtually inevitable as Mocha consolidated its position as the chief coffee port.
Although the coffee trade remained relatively insignificant, and the records concerning its usage remarkably thin in the era up to 1550, it would appear that the groundwork, in the form of tacit social acceptance, along with religious and imperial approval, had been done on the basis of Ethiopian coffee alone, and that the cultivation of the plant had first commenced in the Harar region. The pretensions of Yemeni coffee to hold the monopoly on the early coffee trade are hollow indeed.
However, the switch of the principal source of coffee production from Ethiopia to Yemen can be dated with some confidence. In 1544 the Imam banned the cultivation of qat in the Jabal Sabir region of Yemen and introduced coffee plants ‘from which the population will derive great benefit’. The same date is ascribed to the introduction of coffee in a later Arabian chronicle. The Ottomans took the neighbouring city of Ta’izz in the following year, and it is under their auspices that the cultivation of coffee became a significant feature of the economy. Indeed it was in many ways a classic colonialist venture: cultivated in a conquered country, coffee was principally consumed in the main cities of the conqueror. The only element missing from the later European model was the use of slaves, for it appears that the rapid expansion of coffee drinking throughout the Ottoman Empire had created a golden opportunity for Yemeni farmers. The mountains overlooking the Tihama – the coastal plain which had previously been relatively uncultivated – proved to be perfectly suited to coffee growing. Farmers from the Tihama and inland plateau moved there: an immense project of terrace building and irrigation works was implemented, financed by the burgeoning coffee trade throughout the Ottoman Empire.
Situated at the south-west corner of the Arabian peninsula, Yemen defies any mistaken preconceptions of unrelenting heat and equally unrelenting sand dunes. It is as if the peninsula had been stood upon, like a sheet of ice, in the north-east, raising the south-west Yemeni portion into ranges of mountains sliced through with precipitate gorges strewn with rocks and vegetation and watered by seasonal streams. The Tihama, bordering the Red Sea, is intensely hot and humid, but only thirty kilometres inland the mountains soar straight out of the plain to heights of well over three thousand metres. Whereas the Tihama remains relatively dry almost throughout the year, the mountains catch the monsoon clouds, and short, intense bursts of rain are frequent, resulting in sayl – flash floods in the dry river beds. From this dramatic landscape the coffee farmers fashioned a yet more dramatic way of life; to catch the sporadic rainfall, the precipitate hillsides are covered from peak to trough with terraces held in place by stone walls. It may take a wall five metres high, snaking around the craggy contours, to create a cultivatable terrace two metres wide. Looking up from below, it sometimes seems as if the whole mountain is one gigantic man-made dry stone wall stretching into the clouds. In order to harness the rainfall in an elaborate system of irrigation channels and tanks, Yemeni villages are deliberately built away from the terraces – the only such place available being on top of the mountains. Since the vernacular architecture favours houses in the form of five- or six-storey square-built stone mini-skyscrapers, the total effect is unique and astounding. Villages of perhaps ten of such houses are perched in the most improbable clusters on the top of jagged mountainsides, whilst below them row after row of terracing planted with windbreaks of wolf’s wood and screw pine
