Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

¥ ^3: gi >ä fa i ••'i; if w •<i <1 i - -; >5 :■:? :'i I i 12 THE COCOA AND CHOCOLATE INDUSTRY Aztecs, that one can only conclude it had already been grown by them for many generations. De Candolle, in his Origin of Cultivated Plants, asserts that the cacao tree has been cultivated in America for 3,000 or 4,000 years—a prodigious period, hard to con-ceive. Certain it is that many chieftains of Mexico, either Toltecs or Aztecs, must have consumed chocolate before Montezuma indulged his fancy for this delicacy, but, until Columbus discovered the great continent of America, Europe knew nothing of the Western hemis-phere and no European had ever seen a cacao bean. The Aztecs, besides their vast palaces and ingenious forts, possessed other evidences of a civilisation equal, if not superior, to that of Europe. In spite of these, and of the faet that they had elaborated independently the. art of picture-writing, their early history is a mere distillation of rumour.” There is evidence that they conquered the more peaceful Toltecs, and first reached the City of Mexico in 1324. How and when they acquired their knowledge of cacao are open questions. Where history is vague and indefinite, the imagination elaborates its own forms when the mind peers with eager eyes into the dark caverns of the past. It is probable that in ancient times, long before the Britons had learned to daub their bodies with woad, an early Aztec or possibly a Toltec, who was in the habit of quenching his thirst by sucking the juicy pulp of the seeds in the cacao pod,1 accidentally threw some into a re. Soon he became conscious of scented odours and a spicy air, and, having found their origin, tasted for the first time the roasted bean. One can but admire We met with no tribe on the Orinoco that prepared a everage irom the seeds of the cacao tree. The savages suck e pu p oi the pod and throw away the seeds.” Von Humboldt’s Travels w? America (1799-1804).