Cocoa And Chocolate
The Tree, The Bean The Beverage

30 THE COCOA AND CHOCOLATE INDUSTRY tropical America to Europe. It was thus the Dutch who stimulated the Spaniards in Venezuela to grow cacao, and it was mainly due to the energy of the Jesuit missionaries—who engaged natives to form plantations on the borders of the Orinoco—that the industry thrived, and Venezuela began to ship cacao to Europe. About this time the Spaniards planted cacao in Jamaica, and somewhat later, in 1665, in Dominica, and in 1671 in the Philippines. In spite of this activity in planting, practically the whole of the cacao consumed by Europe came from tropical America, until the stimulating event in 1679. This was the arrival in France of the first crop from Martinique, the French having begun cultivation. there in 1660. By the end of the eighteenth Century this island had become very valuable to France, and, together with Santo Domingo, where the French planted cacao in 1665, produced practically the whole of the cacao consumed in France. The French were also responsible for planting cacao in Surinam in 1684, in French Guiana in 1734, in Madagascar in 1800, and in Cochin China in 1870. At some time in the sixteenth or seventeenth cen-turies, the Spaniards introduced the cacao tree into Fernando Po, and although the output of cacao has only in recent years reached more than moderate dimensions there, its presence in that island led, in the nineteenth Century, to the starting of cacao cultivation in other parts of West Africa, and this has had enormous con-sequences in the twentieth Century. It appears to have been taken from Fernando Po to the small island of Principe and thence in 1822 to San Thome, where, under the Portuguese, it has flourished, until at the present day, of all the countries in the world, San Thomé pro-duces in relation to its total area the greatest number of