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to travel beyond Europe. He had been brought up on vivid tales of the exotic lands where cocoa originated, and the history of its cultivation. ‘It was one of the dreams of our childhood,’ he wrote, ‘to sail on the bosom of that mighty river whose watershed drains the greater part of the northern portion of the continent of South America, and to explore the secrets of its thousand tributaries that penetrate forests untrodden by the foot of man.’ He was particularly interested in the long and colourful history of cocoa in South America and Mexico, a history that gave intriguing glimpses as to how the bean might best be cultivated and consumed.

      Richard had never actually seen a cocoa plantation, and attempted to satisfy his curiosity by collecting stories of explorers. While the traders he had met in Mincing Lane had never been short of anecdotal accounts, he could find out more by corresponding with experts at the tropical botanical gardens in Jamaica, and the Pamplemousse Botanic Gardens in Mauritius. Closer to home, knowledge of tropical species was increasing through the famous glasshouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The magnificent Palm House had recently been completed, and in the early 1860s work was just beginning on the Temperate House. Botanists knew cocoa by its scientific name – Theobroma cacao, or ‘Food of the Gods’ – given to the plant in 1753 by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linnaeus.

      ‘This inestimable plant,’ Richard wrote, ‘is evergreen, has drooping bright green leaves . . . and bears flowers and fruit at all seasons of the year.’ It flourished only in humid tropical regions close to the equator, and was acutely sensitive even to slight changes in climate. The cocoa pod itself he described as ‘something like a vegetable marrow . . . only more elongated and pointed at the end’. In contrast to European fruit trees, the pods grow directly off the trunk and the thickest boughs, from very short stalks, rather than from finer branches. The outer rind of the pod is thick, and when ripened becomes a firm shell. Inside, embedded in a soft, pinkish-white acid pulp, are the seeds or beans – as many as thirty or forty within each pod.

      Richard’s romantic idea of cocoa plantations was fed by the travel narratives that were occasionally featured in fashionable magazines like the Belgravia. One such article described a magical tropical paradise that must have seemed a million miles from Victorian Birmingham. In looking down over the plantation, ‘the vista is like a miniature forest hung with thousands of golden lamps . . . anything more lovely cannot be imagined’. Taller trees such as the coral tree, were planted around the cocoa trees to provide shade. In March, the coral trees became covered in crimson flowers, and ‘At this season, an extensive plain covered with cocoa plantations is a magnificent object. The tops of the coral tree present the appearance of being clothed in flames.’ Passing through the shady walkways of the plantation was like being ‘within the spacious aisles of some grand natural temple’.

      To harvest the marrow-like cocoa pods, the plantation workers would break them open with a long knife or cutlass. The pale crimson seeds or beans were scooped out with a wooden spoon, the fleshy pulp scraped off, and the beans dried in the sun until they turned a rich almond brown. This method of preparation had remained essentially unchanged for centuries, and is richly interwoven with the history of the Americas.

      Richard could not suspect how far into the past this history of cultivation extended. Recent research has revealed that three millennia have elapsed since the Olmec, the oldest civilisation in the Americas, first domesticated the wild cocoa tree. Little survives of the Olmec, who eked out an existence in the humid lowland forests and savannahs of the Mexican Gulf coast around 1500 to 400 BC, save the striking colossal heads they sculpted of their kings. Evidence that these early Mexicans consumed cocoa comes principally from studies in historical linguistics – their word ‘ka ka wa’ is thought to be the origin of ‘cacao’.

      When the Maya became the dominant culture of Mexico from around AD 250 they extended the cultivation of cocoa across the plains of Guatemala and beyond. In Mayan culture, the rich enjoyed a foaming, hot, spicy cocoa drink. The poor took their cocoa with maize as a starchy, porridge-like cold soup that provided easily prepared high-energy food. It could be laced with chilli pepper, giving a distinct afterburn, or enhanced with milder flavourings such as vanilla.

      Mayan art reveals that cocoa was highly prized. Archaeologists have found images decorating Mayan pottery of a ‘Cacao God’ seated on his throne adorned with cocoa pods. There is evidence suggesting that Mayan aristocrats were buried with lavish supplies for the afterlife, including ornate painted jars containing cocoa and cocoa flavourings. The earliest image of the preparation of a chocolate drink appears on a Mayan vase from around the eighth century AD, which also depicts a human sacrifice. Two masked figures are beheading their victim, while a woman calmly pours a cocoa drink from one jar to another in order to enhance the much-favoured frothy foam.

      ‘European knowledge of cocoa as an article of diet,’ Richard wrote in his survey, ‘dates from the discovery of the Western World by Christopher Columbus.’ On 15 August 1502, during Columbus’s fourth trip to the New World, he reached the island of Guanaja, near the Honduran mainland. His men captured two large canoes and found they were Mayan trading ships, laden with cotton, clothing and maize. According to Columbus’s son Ferdinand, there were a great many strange-looking ‘almonds’ on board. ‘They held these almonds at great price,’ he observed. ‘When any of these almonds fell, they all rushed to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.’ The Europeans could not understand why these little brown pellets should be so valued.

      The mystery was solved by the Spanish conquistadors, who arrived in Mexico in 1519. Travelling into the Valley of Mexico, they reached the heart of what was then the Aztec civilisation. It was soon apparent to them that the cocoa bean had special value in Aztec society, since it was used as coinage, and people in the provinces paid tributes to their Emperor, Montezuma, with large baskets of cocoa beans. The Emperor kept a vast store in the royal coffers in the capital city of Tenochtitlan of no fewer than 40,000 such loads: almost a billion cocoa beans. According to one Spanish chronicler, ‘a tolerably good slave’ was worth around one hundred beans, a rabbit cost ten beans, and a prostitute could be procured for as few as eight.

      It is now known that the Aztecs, like the Mayans, used their favourite drink in a number of religious rituals, including human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that their most powerful gods required appeasement, and prisoners of war had to be sacrificed each day to sustain the universe. In one macabre ritual, the heart of a slave was required to be cut out while he was still alive. The slave was selected for his physical perfection, since until the time of his sacrifice, he represented the Aztec gods on earth and was treated with reverence. According to the Spanish Dominican friar Diego de Duran, who wrote The History of the Indies of New Spain in 1581, as the ritual approached its climax, and the fate of the victim was made known, the slave was required to offer himself for death with heroic courage and joy. Should his bravery falter, he could be ‘bewitched’ by a special little cocktail to see him through, prepared from chocolate and mixed with the blood of earlier victims and other ingredients that rendered him nearly unconscious.

      Some time in the sixteenth century the cocoa bean found its way to Europe, where it was introduced into the Spanish royal household. The Spanish court initially consumed cocoa the South American way, as a drink in a small bowl, and then gradually replaced the maize, or corn, and chillies with sugar, or sometimes vanilla or cinnamon. In time elaborate chocolate pots were developed in which the heavy liquid was skimmed and allowed to settle before pouring, but essentially the Spanish ground the beans in the same way as the inhabitants of the Americas, crushing them between stones, or grinding them with stone and mortar. The result was a coarse powder.

      Richard Cadbury found one written account of cocoa preparation in Madrid in 1664 in which one hundred cocoa beans, toasted and ground to a powder, were mixed with a similar weight of sugar, twelve ground vanilla pods, two grains of chilli pepper, aniseed, six white roses, cinnamon, two dozen almonds and hazelnuts and a little achiote powder to lend a red hue. The resulting paste was used to make a cake or block of cocoa which could be ground to form a drink. But whether mixed with maize or corn to absorb the fatty cocoa oils the Mexican way, or blended with sugar, the cocoa oils made the drink heavy and coarse, and cocoa continued to receive a mixed reception in Spain. Josephus Acosta, a Spanish writer at the turn of the seventeenth century, considered the chocolate drink much overrated,

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