Black Gold. Antony Wild

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       4

       THE MOCHA TRADE

      Traces of the history of the expansion of European maritime nations into the East, their adoption of coffee drinking at home, and their involvement in the trade itself can all be found on the tiny South Atlantic island of St Helena. To the visitor, who must approach by sea, the island looms out of the dawn, its high peaks swathed in funereal clouds, and the enormous, bare, red-black basalt cliffs glisten with the remorseless damp of aeons of isolation, creating a seemingly impregnable fortress. As the boat draws closer and skirts the cliffs around the island towards the miniature capital of Jamestown on the north coast, the impression is of an unfathomable gloom.

      This is partly because St Helena is further from anywhere else than anywhere on the planet. If the island were the size of the earth, the nearest land would be four times the distance of the moon away. Ascension Island, some seven hundred miles away, is closest – ‘another meer wart in the sea’, as a Dr Fryer noted in 1679. Madame Bernard was to remark during Napoleon’s exile: ‘the devil sh-t this island as he flew from one world to the other’. St Helena wears its remoteness like a damp, suffocating cloak.

      The fierce, naked cliffs of basalt defy the heavy, sluggish swell of the South Atlantic and the unending battering of the south-east trade winds. It is hard to believe from the sea that, in 1502, the 47-square-mile island was regarded by its discoverer, the Portuguese Admiral Juan da Nova, as a veritable Eden. It was densely forested all over with gumwood, oak, and ebony, with no large animal inhabitants except sea-lions, sea-birds, seals, and turtles; it had no predators, no snakes, no poisonous insects, but 120 endemic kinds of beetle. The only usable access to the interior lay through the narrow valley that now contains Jamestown, where the early visitors built a small chapel, collected fresh water, and gathered fruits. Da Nova left a number of goats, and thus the untouched Eden that had first exploded out of the ink-blue waters of the South Atlantic some sixty million years previously commenced the inexorable fall from grace that only contact with man’s intrusive ways can bring.

      The goats bred rapidly, and herds of hundreds, huge and fat, roamed the island eating young trees. Rats had escaped from the Portuguese ships and proliferated, along with great poisonous spiders from Africa, and there were packs of feral cats and dogs. The island continued to be the secret solace of Portuguese sailors, but as other European nations began to flex their maritime muscles it was inevitable that the secret of St Helena would out. An English adventurer, James Fenton, came across it by accident in 1582, and hatched a suitably piratical plot to oust the Portuguese and have himself proclaimed King, from which he had to be dissuaded by William Hawkins, his second-in-command. In 1583 three Japanese princes stopped there en route for Rome, on an embassy inspired by the indefatigable Jesuits. By chance, two other Japanese, captured off California from a Spanish ship, the Santa Ana, by Thomas Cavendish on his round-the-world voyage, would also have visited St Helena when the captain stopped there in 1588. He had been able to locate the island by taking prisoner the navigator from the Santa Ana. He stayed twelve days on the island, surveying it meticulously, observing the herds of goats nearly a mile long, the Persian partridges and Chinese pheasants, and stands of imported fig, lemon, and orange trees, as well as herbs and vegetables.

      St Helena, despite its isolation, already bore the heavy stamp of man. Having finally been put on the map by Cavendish, it was inevitable that St Helena should become the unfortunate battleground of later European rivalries. A Dutch pilot in the service of the Portuguese, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, put in on the way back from India a year after Cavendish had left and heard stories of the Englishman’s sojourn. He described the island as ‘an earthly Paradise for the Portuguese ships’, so well placed in the vast wastes of the South Atlantic as to appear to be evidence of God’s beneficence. In those early days, there was virtually no piracy and no rival European navies to worry about, so the Portuguese ships sailed their own course from India to convene in St Helena before making the voyage home together. St Helena’s very isolation made it a uniquely valuable piece of real estate, in a bizarre sense obeying the estate agent’s mantra of ‘Location, Location, Location’. There was literally nowhere else to go.

      Cavendish’s discovery that the island was the gathering place for the returning Portuguese East India fleet meant that it quickly became the haunt of English warships in search of easy – and lucrative – prey, to such an extent that, by 1592, the fleet returning from Goa had specific orders to avoid St Helena at all costs. Captain James Lancaster stopped on the island in 1591 on the first English commercial voyage to the Indies. He was to be the commander of the first East India Company fleet ten years later, using Portuguese maps of the Spice Islands which, ironically, had been stolen by van Linschoten from the Archbishop of Goa. These maps had excited so much interest in Holland and England that they gave the initial impetus necessary for the formation of merchant companies to exploit the knowledge they revealed. St Helena had already started to be the stage upon which many of the main characters of the coming European dominance of the East were to be first seen.

      European sailors returning from the Cape of Good Hope, the Arabian Sea, and the East Indies beyond could run before the south-easterly trade winds that blow almost unceasingly from the Cape across the expanses of the South Atlantic. To avoid running into the same winds, outgoing ships mostly swung out towards the Brazilian coast, eventually making a much more southerly passage to the Cape. Frequently, the boats that had made the long journey to the trading ports of the East were in poor shape by the time they returned, and St Helena became a sanctuary for battered, weary sailors and their broken ships. The island’s history at the beginning of the seventeenth century reflected the waxing and waning of European fortunes in the East. Portugal, after it had become united with Spain in 1580, СКАЧАТЬ