Coffee mania continued to spread throughout the eighteenth century,
occasionally making governments nervous at the lessening of state
alcohol revenues. It was fuelled by thousands of sacks of beans from
the auction houses of Cairo. Meanwhile, in spite of Islamic export
bans, coffee seeds had been introduced to India by a pilgrim to
Mecca in 1600, and the intrepid Dutch had managed to steal a plant
to take back to Holland for propagation experiments by 1616. When
the Dutch consolidated their colonial holdings in the East Indies in
1658 they were able to start a vast network of coffee plantations.
The saga of French attempts to propagate coffee plants hardly enough
to withstand a long sea voyage, even with gifts of trees from the
Dutch, is too long to relate here, although it includes one of the
better romantic tales from the history of coffee. Suffice it to say
that the French introduced coffee cultivation in the ancestors of
many of those grown on the early plantations of the Western
Hemisphere.
The British East India Company tended to concentrate
more on growing the plants of the newer epicurean wonder, Camellia
sinensis, better known as tea, in British tropical or temperate
colonies, although the British did introduces coffee-growing to
Jamaica in 1730. The tea market grew, no doubt helped by higher
import duties on coffee. Business slackened off in the coffee house
and many of them closed, while other became gentlemen's clubs.
