THE SPANISH ADVENTURERS
Although the Spanis explorer Hernan Cortes is a generally considered to be the first European to recognize the potential of Aztec chocolate, the initial discovery must be attributed to Christopher Columbus. In 1502, on his fourth and final voyage to the Carribean, Columbus reached the island of Guanaja off the Honduran coast. The story goes that he was greeted by Aztecs who offered him a sackful of what looked like large almonds in exchange for some of his own merchandise. Noticing his puzzlement, the Aztecs explained that a very special drink, tchocolatl (or xocolatl), could be made with these beans. Their chief demonstrated by having his servants prepare some on the spot. Columbus and his crew found the resulting dark and bitter concoction repellent but nevertheless took some cacao beans back to Spain for curiosity value, little realizing their future economic worth.
CACAO AS CURRENCY
When Hernan Cortes arrived in the New World seventeen years later, Montezuma II, the then Aztec Emperotm believed Cortes to be a reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the exiled Toltec god-king whose return had been predicted to take place in the same year. The confusion made it easy for Cortes to gain access to Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, where Montezuma received him and his men with a royal welcome. The emperor offered them numerous gifts, including a cacao plantation, and an extravagant banquet was prepared in their honour.
Despite the overwhelming welcome, Montezuma eventually realized that he had made a mistake and had wrongly identified the Spaniard. Immediately recognizing the insecurity of his position, Cortes enlisted the help of sympathetic natives and managed to take Montezuma prisoner. Withing the space of two or thress years he brought about the downfall of the Aztec kingdom. Unlike Columbus, Cortes quickly realized the enormous economic value of the cacao bean, both as food and a form of currency. A contemporary of Cortes reported that a slave could be bought for one hundred cacao beans, the services of a prostitute for ten, and a rabbit for four. The Jesuit, Pedro Martyre de Angleria, called the beans "pecuniary almonds" and described them as "blessed money, which exempts its possessors from avarice, since it cannot be hoarded or hidden underground". It is presumed that he was reffing to the fact that the beans could not be stored for long without rotting.
The writings of Thomas Gage, a seventeenth-century English Dominican friar, are a rich source of information on chocolate. Visiting the City of Mexico, Gage describes how the cacao bean is used as "both meat and current money". Basing the exchange rate on the Spanish real, which at that time (1625) was worth sixpence (2 1/2p), he explained that two hundred small cacao beans were worth one Spanish real, and "with these the Indians buy what they list, for fice, nay for two cacaos, which is a very small part of a real, they do buy fruits and the like".
THE CACAO PLANTATIONS
When Cortes set out on his voyage to the New World, his primary goal was to find El Dorado - Aztec gold. When he failed to unearth the dreamed-of riches, his attention turned to cacao beans. Having seen them used as currency, and noticing the importance attached to them, Cortes soon realized that money could literally be made to grow on trees. He devoted the next few years to exploiting the commercial potential of this "liquid gold" by setting up cacao plantations around the Carribean.
Cacao was cheap to cultivate and reasonably profitable, and the prospect of easy riches attracted plenty of Spanish colonists. Before long, the Spanish had established plantations in Mexico, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, and the islands of Jamaica and Hispaniola (now called Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Caci production has since spread all over the world, but the plantations in these original regions still produce the most highly prized varieties of bean.
THE SPANISH SECRET
The Spanish colonists had tried to keep the secret of cultivating and preparing cacao to themselves, and with good reason - they were making fat profits out of processing the beans in Latin America before shipping them to Europe. However the colonists did not remain in sole possession of their secret forever. In 1580, the first ever chocolate-processing plant was set up in Spain. From then on the popularity of chocolate gradually spread to other European countries. These, in turn, established their own plantations, trade routes and processing facilities.
The Dutch transplanted the tree to their East Indian states of Java and Sumatra in the early seventeenth century, and from there it spread to the Philippines, New Guinea, Samoa and Indonesia with a degree of financial success made possible by the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of African slaves. The French settled in Martinique in 1660, and in Brazil 1677, along with Portuguese. Trinidad was fought over by the Dutch, the French and the British for years; it eventually went to the British in 1802. In the early nineteenth century, the Portuguese successfully transplanted Brazilian cacao saplings to the island of Fernando Poo (now called Bioko) and West Africa. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Germans had settled in the Cameroons and the British in Sri Lanka. Plantations have since spread to South-East Asia, and Malaysia is now one of the world's leading producers.
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