CHAPTEE Xni. 

 chltitation nsr india. 



Beitish India is also making great strides in the production of 

 coffee, the first plantations of which were, it is said, opened in 

 Bengal by some French or Spanish refugees from the Philippines 

 in 1820. Legend says that the first plant was brought by Baba 

 Buden, a pilgrim, from Arabia, ten to twenty generations back. 

 It was planted in Mysore, and from this parent stock probably 

 came the coffee trees that were found in Wynaad, Coorg, and 

 other parts of the peninsula by travellers, these trees bearing 

 evidence of being thirty to forty years old. The culture is now 

 principally carried on in the Madras Presidency, and in the native 

 states of Mysore, Travancore, and Coorg. It has been largely 

 taken up by the natives as well as by Europeans. The province 

 of Coorg has about seventy thousand acres under cultivation, 

 from which from seven thousand to ten thousand tons of coffee 

 are produced annually. The mountain-grown coffee of Mysore 

 commands a high price at home, owing to its fine quality. It is, 

 grown some four thousand feet above sea level. In Neilgherry 

 the tree flourishes at an altitude of six thousand feet, and trees 

 thirty years of age are found as productive as the young trees. 



From an official " Statement of the Material Progress of 

 India " we learn that : " The extension of coffee cultivation com- 

 menced experimentally in the Wynaad in 1840, and in 1862 there 

 were 9,932 acres under cultivation in the Wynaad alone. In 1865, 

 Wynaad coffee cultivation had increased to 200 estates, covering 

 14,613 acres. The exports in 1860-61 amounted to 19,119,209 

 pounds, and coffee cultivation became a very important and in- 

 creasing source of wealth. In 18Y3 the total number of acres 

 under coffee were 29,695, in 6,913 holdings, of which 195 belong 



