COFFEE AND COFFEE COUNTRIES. 



563 



rank, 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 furnishes nearly as much as all the rest of the world besides. Its expor- 

 tation, which in 1820 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 countries, for though slavery 

 does not exist in this splendid colony, yet the Dutch have introduced a system which 

 answers the purpose 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 compulsory labor 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. 



Within the last forty years the progress of coffee cultivation in Ceylon has been no 

 less remarkable thr^n its rapid extension in Java or Brazil. Though the plant was 

 found growing in the island by the Portuguese, and is even supposed by some to be 

 indigenous, yet it was only after the subjugation of the ancient kingdom of Kandy by 

 the English in 1815, and the opening of roads in the hill country, that it began to be 

 cultivated on a more extensive scale ; so that in an incredibly short time the mountain 

 ranges in the centre of the island became covered with plantations, and rows of coffee- 

 trees began to bloom upon the solitary hills around the very base of Adam's Peak. 



Brazil is, however, the great coffee country of the world. According to Agassiz* 

 "more than half the coffee consumed in the world is of Brazilian growth. And yet 

 the coffee of Brazil has little reputation, and is even greatly underrated, simply because 

 a great deal of the best produce of the Brazilian plantations is sold under the name of 

 Java or Mocha, or as the coffee of Martinique or Bourbon. Martinique produces only 

 600 sacks of coffee annually ; Guadaloupe, whose coffee is sold under the name of the 

 neighboring island, yields 6,000 sacks, not enough to provide the market of Rio de 

 Janeiro for twenty-four hours ; and the Isle of Bourbon hardly more. A great part 

 of the coffee which is bought under these names, or under that of Java coffee is Bra- 

 zilian ; while the so-called Mocha cofffee is often nothing but the small round beans of 

 the Brazilian plant, found at the summit of the branches, and very carefully selected." 

 "If," continues Agassiz, " the provinces adjacent to Rio de Janeiro offer naturally V-^ 

 most favorable soil for the production of coffee, it must not be forgotten that coffee is" 

 planted with advantage in the shade of the Amazonian forest, and even yields two 

 annual crops wherever pains are taken to plant it. In the province of Cear^, where 

 the coffee is of superior quality, it is not planted on the plains or in the low grounds, 

 or in the shadow of the forest, as in the valley of the Amazon, but on the slopes of 

 the hills and on the mountain bights, at an elevation of from 1,500 to 2,000 feet and 

 more above the sea, in the Serras of Aratanha and Baturite and in the Serra Grande." 



" A thriving coffee plantation," says Agassiz elsewhere,t "is a very pretty sight ; 

 the rounded regular outline of the shrubs gives a tufted look to the hill-sides on which 

 * Journey in Brazil, 506, 507. t Journey in Brazil, 71, 113, 114. 



