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Page 23
[19] See Appendix III.
[Illustration--Colour Plate: CHART SHOWING THE POSITIONS OF THE
PRINCIPAL COCOA PLANTATIONS OF THE WORLD.]
V. ITS SOURCES AND VARIETIES.
[Illustration--Drawing: SACKS OF CACAO BEANS.]
Guayaquil, in the republic of Ecuador, on the west coast of South
America, produces the largest output in the world. This cacao has a
bold bean and a fine flavour, and is rich in theobromine; it is much
valued on the market, and its strength and character render it
indispensable to the manufacturer.
The neighbouring countries of Columbia and Venezuela, facing the
Caribbean Sea, have for centuries grown cacao of excellent quality.
The _criollo_ (creole) bean is generally used as seed, and for it high
prices are obtained. Owing, however, to the unsettled state of the
republics and their unstable governments, its cultivation has gone
back rather than forward during the past decade. With better
administration and settled peace, great developments might easily be
achieved. The British Royal Mail Steam Packet Company provides a good
fortnightly service to England.
In early times the Jesuit missionaries encouraged the natives to form
small plantations on the borders of the river Orinoco, and Father
Gumilla, in his "History of the Orinoco," says: "I have seen in these
plains forests of wild cacao-trees, laden with bunches of pods,
supplying food to an infinite multitude of monkeys, squirrels,
parrots, and other animals."
The name of "Soconosco" cocoa is still a guarantee of excellent
quality. This district in Guatemala was in bygone days so noted for
its cacao that the whole crop was monopolized for the use of the
Spanish Court. In Central America, as in other countries, the
Spaniards gathered more solid riches from the cacao than from the gold
mines they hoped to discover.
[Illustration--Black and White Plate: A Scene in the Maracas Valley,
Trinidad.]
British and Dutch Guiana produced but little cacao as long as sugar
realized high prices, but in comparatively recent years it has been
more extensively planted, and the crops from the lowlands at the
mouths of the great South American rivers have been very heavy.
In French Guiana cacao was scarcely cultivated until about 1734, when
a forest of it was discovered on a branch of the Yari, which flows
into the Amazon. From this forest seeds were gathered, and plantations
were laid out in Cayenne.
The cacao of Par� in Brazil differs from all other growths; the bean
is much smaller and rounder, and is elongated, but when well cured it
is mild, and has a very pleasant flavour, highly valued by
manufacturers. Bahia produces large quantities of cacao, formerly of
an inferior quality, owing to careless cultivation and indiscriminate
mixing of all that was brought from the interior, some of it wild and
uncured. But now this state of things is being improved, and the good
quality of "fermented" Bahian cacao is fully recognised.
A little cacao is grown in the low-lying parts of Rio Janeiro, but it
is not to be met with further south than this. The part of Florida
which borders the Gulf of Mexico and the southern part of Louisiana
mark the northerly limit of its natural growth.[20] A traveller in
Louisiana in 1796 speaks of the cacao-tree among others as "covering
with delightful shade the shores of the Mississippi," and on the banks
of the Alatamaha in Georgia, but it is not cultivated so far north.
At the present day the West India Islands rival the South American
Continent in providing cocoa from the New World. Trinidad has for more
than a century deservedly claimed to be the first of these
cocoa-producing islands. As far back as the sixteenth century the
Spaniards who first colonized the island were interested in the
cultivation of cacao. In the year 1780 a French gentleman residing in
the neighbouring island of Grenada visited Trinidad, and gave such a
glowing account of its fertility that agriculturists from France
and elsewhere flocked to the colony, and ever since this date it has
maintained a high standard of agricultural advance. The names of the
cacao estates at the present day are nearly all Spanish or French, and
throughout the British occupation of more than a hundred years the old
families have in many cases held the same lands.[21]
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