Enterprise and Adventure/Adventures of a Coffee Plant
THE ADVENTURES OF A COFFEE PLANT.
The inhabitants of the Caribbee Islands, as the French possessions in the West Indies are called by the English, still remember with gratitude the name of Gabriel Clieu, a French officer, to whose enterprise and zeal they acknowledge that they owe the chief source of their wealth. Clieu was the first person who succeeded in introducing the coffee plant into those islands, and he had the satisfaction of living to see his experiments so successful, that the Antilles from this trifling cause alone rose to be among the most prosperous of colonial possessions. A letter of this excellent man exists, in which he gives a simple and interesting narrative of the efforts which secured this happy result.
Clieu was a captain of infantry, stationed with his company at Martinico, one of the islands refered to. Though possessing high mountains covered with trees, several rivers, and fertile valleys, the island would produce neither wheat nor vines, and was in some respects unfavourable to agriculture. Clieu, who was aware of these defects, determined to make an effort to discover some useful crop suited to its soil and climate. It happened that private affairs called him to France, but the captain of infantry had no business more important in his eyes than that of procuring a coffee plant of a species adapted for cultivation in Martinico. "More occupied" (he says) "with the public good than with my own interests, I was not discouraged at the failure of the attempts that had been made during forty years to introduce and naturalize the coffee-tree in our islands. I made fresh efforts to obtain a plant from the Royal Botanic Garden, but was for a long time unsuccessful. I returned many times to the charge without being disheartened, till at length success crowned my perseverance. It would be useless to enter into details of the infinite care I gave to this delicate plant during a long voyage, and the difficulty I had to save it from' the hands of a man envious of the happiness I enjoyed in being useful to my country; and who, not being able to rob me of this coffee-tree, broke off a branch from it." Water becoming very scarce on board the ship in which he sailed, the passengers had to be put on short allowance, but the enthusiastic Clieu nevertheless shared a small portion with his cherished plant.
He had no sooner arrived at Martinico than he planted, in a soil suitably prepared for it, his precious shrub, which had become more precious from the risk it had run, and the care and anxiety it had cost him. At the end of eighteen or twenty months he collected an abundant crop, and distributed the beans among the religious houses and various inhabitants, who knew the value of this production, and felt how much it was capable of enriching them. They spread from neighbour to neighbour, and Clieu continued to distribute the fruit of the young plants which grew under the shadow of their common parent. Guadaloupe and St. Domingo were soon abundantly supplied. The new product increased and multiplied everywhere. But what rendered its progress more rapid at Martinico was the blight that had struck all the cocoa plants, without exception. The smaller inhabitants, to the number of five or six thousand, were absolutely deprived of a natural product, almost the only one they had to give in exchange for the commodities sent from France. They had no other resource except the cultivation of coffee, to which they exclusively devoted themselves, with a success that far surpassed their losses. In the course of three years, the island was covered with as many thousand coffee-trees as there had formerly been cocoa plants. Such is Clieu's account of the introduction of coffee into the Windward Islands, which soon became an inexhaustible source of wealth to four-fifths of their inhabitants.