EXTENSION OF COFFEE CULTURE 191 



found its way to Marly, where it was multiplied by seeds. 

 ( 'iptain Descleux, a French naval officer, took some of these 

 young coffee-plants with him to Martinique, desirous of adding 

 ;i new source of wealth to the resources of the colony. The 

 I iissage was very tedious and stormy ; water began to fail, and all 

 the gods seemed to conspire against the introduction of the 

 coffee-tree into the new world. But Descleux patiently endured 

 tlie extremity of thirst that his tender shoots might not droop for 

 want of water, and succeeded in safely bringing over one single 

 plant, the parent stock whence all the vast coffee-plantations of 

 i\\v West Indies and Brazil are said to have derived their origin. 

 The names of such men should not be forgotten, and deserve, in 

 my opinion, to be recorded before those of the many worthless 

 monarchs which uselessly fill the pages of history. 



On examining the present state of cofFee-production through- 

 out the world, we find that it has undergone great revolutions 

 within the last twenty years, as some of the countries that were 

 formerly prominent in this respect now occupy but an inferior 

 rnuk, while in others the cultivation of coffee has rapidly 

 attained gigantic proportions. 



Thus Brazil, which at the beginning of the century was hardly 

 known in the coffee market, now furnislias nearly as much as 

 all the rest of the world besides. Its exportation, which in 

 1N20 amounted to 97,500 sacks, rose to a million in 1840 and 

 attained in 1855 the enormous quantity of 2,392,100 sacks, or 

 more than 350 millions of pounds ! 



Java ranks next to Brazil among the coffee-producing coun- 

 tries, for though slavery does not exist in this splendid colony, 

 yet the Dutch have introduced a system which answers the pur- 

 pose fully as well. Every Javanese peasant is obliged to work 

 sixty-six days out of the year for government ; and the residents 

 or administrators of the various districts distribute this com- 

 pulsory labour among the several plantations, which are all in 

 the hands of private individuals. Thus the latter are provided 

 with the necessary hands at a very cheap rate ; but on the other 

 hand, they are compelled to sell their whole produce to the 

 Handels Maatschappy, or Dutch East India Company, at a 

 price fixed by the government, which of course takes care to 

 secure the lion's share of the profit. 



When we consider that Java has more than nine millions of 



