The history of coffee continued…

Coffee and coffee houses continued to spread across Europe and by the 17^th Century coffee could be found in England, Austria, France, Germany and Holland.

By the middle of the century, the British had brought the drink to New Amsterdam, the “colony” in the USA that eventually became New York.

As demand spread, there developed fierce competition between the Dutch and the French particularly to cultivate coffee.

Attempts by the Dutch to cultivate a crop in India failed but they were successful in Indonesia, on the island of Java.

It was the Dutch mayor of Amsterdam who presented a young coffee plant to King Louis XIV of France, where it was given a place in his Royal Botanical gardens.

A seedling from the new plant was then given to a young naval officer, Gabriel de Clieu, who journeyed to Martinique, where it thrived and gave rise to a forest of an estimated 18 million trees, gradually spreading across the various islands of the Caribbean.

Its arrival in South America, and particularly to Brazil, now the biggest producer of coffee in the world, is attributed to the wife of the governor of French Guiana.

Allegedly the governor had denied a request for seedlings but his wife was said to have been so charmed by the good looks of the emissary that she gave him a bouquet of flowers on his departure, in which she had hidden enough seeds to begin the coffee plantation industry in Brazil.

And the rest, as they say, is history.