Black Gold. Antony Wild

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СКАЧАТЬ histories in the country. It was in its time as significant as the California gold rush. By the end of the sixteenth century, Arabia Felix was universally seen to be the origin of coffee production, totally eclipsing Ethiopia in a matter of half a century. When Europeans first heard of coffee, and when their merchants gathered intelligence regarding the trading potential of the mysterious new drink, it was to Yemen they looked. Yemen had usurped the Ethiopian claim to be the unique source, and farmers brought coffee to the busy entrepôt of Bait-al-Faqih at the foot of the mountains, from whence it was transported in camel trains down the Tihama to the port whose name soon became synonymous with the coffee trade: Mocha.

      The name Mocha is so enmeshed with that of coffee itself that it appears on everything from Ethiopian coffee to a variety of brewing machines, to coffee blends, or coffee made in myriad ways, including, in the case of one coffee bar, ‘espresso, steamed milk, chocolate, richly blended, topped with fresh cream’, which would seem about as far removed from the austere majesty of the Yemeni original as it is possible to be. The reason for this ubiquity is simple: for a hundred and fifty years Mocha was celebrated as the sole port supplying the world’s coffee, at a time when coffee drinking was booming in the Islamic world and Europe. Today, it is hard to believe that the town was very prosperous, with six thousand houses and a stone-built Governor’s mansion ‘with very fayre and large stayres’. It is now a godforsaken, fly-blown spot, strewn with the inevitable mounds of plastic bags and mineral-water bottles that are the unfortunate detritus of Yemen’s qat chewing habit. The sand dunes have reclaimed much of the town, and the most permanent buildings are made from redundant shipping containers. Even in the mid nineteenth century it was described as ‘a dead-alive mouldering town’. However, one can still find some signs of its former glories: the ruinous brick walls that have not been buried by the sand show signs of having been richly decorated with ornate plasterwork – these would have been the villas in which the wealthy coffee merchants lived. Likewise the mosque dedicated to Shadomer Shadhili, patron saint of the town, rises like a pearly mirage in the distance through the hot, dusty air, and the curving stairs of the ruins of what is said to have been the lighthouse, marooned half a mile from the sea, can still be visited, as long as the smell of human dung can be endured. This is one feature of Mocha that has not changed since the first descriptions by Europeans, who found it handsome and whitewashed along the waterfront, but ‘unbearably filthy within’. The other is the unrelenting heat and humidity. The Tihama is as airless and humid a place as can be imagined, and early European merchants who ventured there in their doublets and fustian must have been horribly uncomfortable. The squalor and the heat contributed to the town’s reputation for being an unhealthy place, ‘a hell of heat and humid air, of infected drinking water and without a breath of wind’. The villa owners built verandas on the top of their houses, shaded by reed screens and designed to admit the slightest of breezes.

      Mocha, according to one early account, ‘standeth hard by the waterside in a plaine sandye field’. The local soil was barren because of salt contamination, and the only thing that grew there was date palms, from which toddy was made. It was hardly an ideal place for a port, but it was the best that was on offer on the Tihama coast. Aden, one of the world’s great natural harbours around the corner on the Arabian Sea, was too far away from the coffee-producing mountains to be of use. Although fourteen fathoms deep, Mocha’s anchorage was ‘open and dangerous with very shoali water a mile off the town’. These shallows were eventually to be the death of the port as they accreted silt and became increasingly treacherous: today the water is only four fathoms deep as far as four miles off the town. This natural tendency to silt up was not helped by American trading ships in the early nineteenth century dumping their ballast in the anchorage before taking coffee on board.

      By the time the first European traders arrived in the first decade of the seventeenth century the prosperity of Mocha was assured, with the coffee supplied by new plantations developed on the towering Yemeni mountains hard by. However, the increasing dominance of the Ottomans on both sides of the Red Sea meant that the strain of coffee that had been successfully introduced to Yemen continued to have a rival in the form of the Ethiopian Harar coffee. That coffee was under Arab control, and it was shipped to Mocha before being sold to other merchants. Hence the so-called monopoly held by the port of Mocha was a monopoly on the trade, not on the origin of the coffee. At times, the quality of coffee being shipped to Mocha from Ethiopia exceeded that of the local Yemeni coffee, and it achieved a better price. The East India Company’s chief factor at Mocha, Francis Dickinson, wrote as late as 1733: ‘There has been about Three hundred Bales of Abbysine coffee imported this Season, but as that is now cleaner than the Coffee generally brought to this Market, it sells for a higher price, and was all brought up for the Busseroh Market.’ It has long been a puzzle to those interested in the coffee trade as to how the name ‘Mocha’ has been misappropriated by Ethiopia – in line with the assumption that the world’s first cultivated coffee came from Yemen, it was believed that the Mocha sobriquet should properly be applied only to coffee from that country and that Ethiopia was guilty of barefaced theft. Since we have now demonstrated that, historically, Ethiopian coffee was sold alongside Yemeni coffee through the entrepôt of Mocha, that mystery has been solved.

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