All about coffee by William H. Ukers
CHAPTER VII
808 words | Chapter 51
THE INTRODUCTION OF COFFEE INTO HOLLAND
_How the enterprising Dutch traders captured the first world's
market for coffee--Activities of the Netherlands East India
Company--The first coffee house at the Hague--The first public
auction at Amsterdam in 1711, when Java coffee brought forty-seven
cents a pound, green_
The Dutch had early knowledge of coffee because of their dealings with
the Orient and with the Venetians, and of their nearness to Germany,
where Rauwolf first wrote about it in 1582. They were familiar with
Alpini's writings on the subject in 1592. Paludanus, in his coffee note
on _Linschoten's Travels_, furnished further enlightenment in 1598.
The Dutch were always great merchants and shrewd traders. Being of a
practical turn of mind, they conceived an ambition to grow coffee in
their colonial possessions, so as to make their home markets
headquarters for a world's trade in the product. In considering modern
coffee-trading, the Netherlands East India Company may be said to be the
pioneer, as it established in Java one of the first experimental gardens
for coffee cultivation.
The Netherlands East India Company was formed in 1602. As early as 1614,
Dutch traders visited Aden to examine into the possibilities of coffee
and coffee-trading. In 1616 Pieter Van dan Broeck brought the first
coffee from Mocha to Holland. In 1640 a Dutch merchant, named Wurffbain,
offered for sale in Amsterdam the first commercial shipment of coffee
from Mocha. As indicating the enterprise of the Dutch, note that this
was four years before the beverage was introduced into France, and only
three years after Conopios had privately instituted the breakfast coffee
cup at Oxford.
About 1650, Varnar, the Dutch minister resident at the Ottoman Porte,
published a treatise on coffee.
When the Dutch at last drove the Portuguese out of Ceylon in 1658, they
began the cultivation of coffee there, although the plant had been
introduced into the island by the Arabs prior to the Portuguese invasion
in 1505. However, it was not until 1690 that the more systematic
cultivation of the coffee plant by the Dutch was undertaken in Ceylon.
Regular imports of coffee from Mocha to Amsterdam began in 1663. Later,
supplies began to arrive from the Malabar coast.
Pasqua Rosée, who introduced the coffee house into London in 1652, is
said to have made coffee popular as a beverage in Holland by selling it
there publicly in 1664. The first coffee house was opened in the Korten
Voorhout, the Hague, under the protection of the writer Van Essen;
others soon followed in Amsterdam and Haarlem.
At the instigation of Nicolaas Witsen, burgomaster of Amsterdam and
governor of the East India Company, Adrian Van Ommen, commander of
Malabar, sent the first Arabian coffee seedlings to Java in 1696,
recorded in the chapter on the history of coffee propagation. These were
destroyed by flood, but were followed in 1699 by a second shipment, from
which developed the coffee trade of the Netherlands East Indies, that
made Java coffee a household word in every civilized country.
A trial shipment of the coffee grown near Batavia was received at
Amsterdam in 1706, also a plant for the botanical gardens. This plant
subsequently became the progenitor of most of the coffees of the West
Indies and America.
The first Java coffee for the trade was received at Amsterdam 1711. The
shipment consisted of 894 pounds from the Jakatra plantations and from
the interior of the island. At the first public auction, this coffee
brought twenty-three and two-thirds _stuivers_ (about forty-seven cents)
per Amsterdam pound.
The Netherlands East India Company contracted with the regents of
Netherlands India for the compulsory delivery of coffee; and the natives
were enjoined to cultivate coffee, the production thus becoming a forced
industry worked by government. A "general system of cultivation" was
introduced into Java in 1832 by the government, which decreed the
employment of forced labor for different products. Coffee-growing was
the only forced industry that existed before this system of cultivation,
and it was the only government cultivation that survived the abolition
of the system in 1905-08. The last direct government interest in coffee
was closed out in 1918. From 1870 to 1874, the government plantations
yielded an average of 844,854 piculs[63] a year; from 1875 to 1878, the
average was 866,674 piculs. Between 1879 and 1883, it rose to 987,682
piculs. From 1884 to 1888, the average annual yield was only 629,942
piculs.
Holland readily adopted the coffee house; and among the earliest coffee
pictures preserved to us is one depicting a scene in a Dutch coffee
house of the seventeenth century, the work of Adriaen Van Ostade
(1610-1675), shown on page 586.
History records no intolerance of coffee in Holland. The Dutch attitude
was ever that of the constructionist. Dutch inventors and artisans gave
us many new designs in coffee mortars, coffee roasters, and coffee
serving-pots.
[Illustration]
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