264 TRINIDAD. 



they are sufficiently dried to be packed into bags. This is cacao 

 prepared for the British markets; it is of a red colour, clean, 

 flinty, heavy, and bitter, in fact, the worst sample from which to 

 prepare chocolate. Unfortunately this sort of cacao has been, and 

 still is, too much encouraged in the same markets. A different 

 method is followed when the cacao is to be prepared for the French 

 or Spanish markets ; it is then put in heaps, well covered with 

 leaves, and allowed to sweat or ferment for five, six, or eight days, 

 according as damp or dry weather may prevail : some persons con- 

 tend that it is better to allow it to ferment on the spot where 

 plucked and opened. 



Sometimes it is spread in the sun for a few hours before being 

 placed in heaps ; and this seems to accelerate fermentation ; it is 

 afterwards spread in shallow boxes, or on a drying-floor prepared 

 for the purpose. This latter plan is preferred on the main, and 

 probably with reason ; but in no place is the cacao buried as a 

 preparative to drying, as reported in some works on the subject. 

 Cacao which has fermented is of a dark colour, light in weight, con- 

 tains less of the oily substance, and has no astringency. The bean 

 is rounded in form, and of a cinnamon colour within : this is not 

 only the best, but the only cacao suited to the preparation of 

 chocolate. Trinidad cacao is now worth about five dollars in the 

 colony, but it fetches about fourteen dollars in the French market. 

 During the revolutionary war of the Spanish colonies, the best 

 Trinidad cacao sold for twenty-eight dollars per fanega of 110 

 pounds, and continued to sell at a high price from fourteen 

 to sixteen dollars for several years ; it then declined, by degrees, 

 till, in 1827, it sold as low as three dollars planters not taking 

 the trouble of gathering their crops, the expenses attendant thereon 

 being greater than the price offered. This falling off in the price of 

 Trinidad cacao may be attributed to various causes, general or 

 local. The European, and the British markets especially, became 

 glutted with importations from Brazil and Guayaquil; Spain, 

 then at peace with her old colonies, began to import cacao from 

 Venezuela and Nueva Granada, so that the article became a mere 

 drug, except the best, or Caracas cacao, which, even now, sells as 

 high as eighteen and twenty-one dollars. Unscrupulous specu- 

 lators in the island also resorted to most nefarious practices to de- 

 fraud purchasers, not only by the admixture of damaged and in- 

 ferior with good cacao, but by the addition of weighty substances. 



