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Coffee Heroes
The way coffee arrived to the Caribbean and from there to South America is a story of true bravery and heroism. In the year 1715 Luis XIV who was a passionate coffee lover, asked all the Dutch that owed him a favor to bring him a coffee tree from Java to the botanical garden in Paris. A special greenhouse was made for it and the plant, barely blossomed and gave fruit.
A French man, Gabriel Mathiew de Clieu, was determined to take the young plant through the Atlantic until the French colonial of La Martinique, with the intention of setting up some coffee plantations there. However when he solicited this young plant, it was denied, however through subterfuge, he was able to get one and began his journey. According to many points of view, this was a very horrible trip: it is said that one of the passengers started to cruelly bother Clieu while he was holding the small little tree and pulled one of its fragile branches. But Clieu was unshaken despite all the attacks, facing pirates etc, and continued taking care of his precious plant until finally everything calmed down. He even shared his ration of water with it. He arrived to Martinique in 1720, planted his tree there, and fifty years later there were already 18,791,680 trees growing on the island.
Probably the most romantic coffee story is the one that connects coffee to Brazil. When the Brazilian emperor found out about the success of the coffee plantations in the French Colonies, he immediately wanted to plant them in his country, but the French, in a very similar way as they had done to the Arabs, wanted to protect their interests and did not allow exporting of their plants or seeds. The emperor however, who was an astute man, sent a very handsome emissary, Francisco De Melho Palheta, to French Guinea to see if he could persuade them to let him take some plants with him. Palheta’s request would have failed if his personal charm wouldn’t have been on the same level of his handsome looks. The governor’s wife really liked him, and right before he embarked back to Brazil, she sent him a bouquet of flowers in which she had hidden a small coffee plant, and this was the origin of the biggest coffee empire.
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