62 



COFFEE. 



wood, that will produce an abundant crop of sound berries. All 

 portions of the plant itself and its fruit form a manure which cannot 

 be equalled ; but as these are rarely to be had in sufficient abundance, 

 green grass, weeds, and other vegetable matter, dug in around the 

 roots, act very beneficially on the plant. Cattle-pen and stable 

 manure may be used with discretion ; but bone manure (such as burnt 

 and ground bones, either alone or decomposed by the action of sul- 

 phuric acid) constitutes one of the choicest manures that can be applied 

 to the coffee tree. 



12. Irrigate in the dry season wherever it can be done, and the 

 increased value of the crop will prove its great utility. It very 

 frequently happens that a long spell of dry weather follows the general 

 blossoming of the trees ; and they are so parched from lack of moisture 

 in the soil, that the young fruit is destroyed in setting, and the ground 

 is found to be thickly strewed with the young sets when no larger 

 than very small peas. In this manner the hopes of a whole crop may 

 be entirely dissipated. 



Production in the West India Islands. — The rapid decline in coffee 

 production — I may almost say its abandonment — in the British 

 West Indies, since negro emancipation, is remarkable. In 1828 we 

 received from our West India colonies and Demerara 30,000,000 lbs. 

 of coffee ; in 1831, 20,000,000 lbs.; in 1811, less than 10,000,000 lbs.; 

 and now under 7,000,000 lbs. reach us. 



Coffee was first cultivated by the Dutch, in Surinam, early in the 

 eighteenth century. It was next grown by the Freuch in Martinique, 

 and thence spread to the neighbouring islands, and to Jamaica. The 

 Dutch jealously guarded their early efforts in this direction, and were 

 not anxious to aid other nations in competing with them. There is a 

 little fragrance of romance connected with the first French eftbrt of 

 this kind which was made in Martiniqufe. Louis XIV. who, in spite 

 of all his foibles and vices, was fully able to appreciate the importance 

 of such apparently small matters as a potato tuber or a coffee bean, 

 had in his private gardens a coffee shrub five feet high, which, before 

 his death (1715), bore ripe fruit. Having heard of Dutch coffee 

 plantations in Berbice and Surinam, his ambition was aroused, and he 

 desired to have similar ones in his French West Indian colonies. 

 He entrusted, therefore, a slip from his pet tree to a naval officer, 

 Declieux, with orders to carry it safely to Martinique. Unfortunately 

 the ship in which he served had an unusually long voyage — fierce 

 storms alternating with provoking calms, and at last the water casks 

 were empty. The captain, however, sacrificed his own wants for the 

 sake of the young plant, and shared with it his scanty ration of water. 

 But his troubles were not at an end when he at last reached the 

 island ; storms and tempests, men and beasts, seem to have united to 

 threaten the tender shoot, and Declieux had to place a guard over the 

 plant, who, under his supervision, watched it day and night. Fortu- 

 nately it grew and throve till it became a fine large tree, the ancestor 

 of most of the coffee plantations in the West India islands. It may 

 be safely said that never was tree more carefully tended or more 

 usefully employed. 



