Of Coffee and Thieves

I like historical fiction. Occasionally, I take a stab at it myself.

It was the second to the last day of spring that year of 1720, when a dashing young military officer scrabbled silently over a wall near Paris, and disappeared into the Royal Botanical Gardens of Louis the XIV.  

Days later, under the heavy sky of a  Mistral Noir, that same military officer sat silently in his berth as the tall ship Le Dromedaire pulled its lines from the docks and disembarked for the new world . As the port at Le Harve faded in the distance and the ship began to feel the growing seas of the channel, the man drew from his flask a small sip of water, water he would share along the journey with his stolen companion. As the great ship slowly pitched and rolled , he stared at his peculiar prize.  

The large oil lamp, its internal parts and pieces replaced instead with a dark fertile soil, repurposed as a tiny green-house. This was the reason for his late-night adventure. The seedling within was his legacy.  

The trip was plagued with many hardships. Inclement weather and tumultuous  seas slowed their progress across the great ocean. A saboteur tried to steal the seedling during the perilous journey, damaging it in the process. The green house was nearly destroyed when the ship encountered an early season hurricane . And then, under a slack wind and big sky, the ship was attacked by pirates as they neared the island of Martinique.

Eventually, the officer, that sewn together greenhouse and the seedling within made it to shore. That seedling was planted with great care and grew with vigor in its new home. Cuttings were nurtured, which lead to more seedlings. Which also grew. A single plant became a field. The field grew into a plantation.

By the time of the American revolution, the island of Martinique was covered by over 18 million coffee plants. They grew in Dominica. And Columbia. And Brazil.  Genetics suggests that well over 90% of all coffee grown in the Western Hemisphere is a descendant of that single seedling, spirited with great care across the Atlantic in 1723.