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Updated: June 12, 2025
In the south part of this island is another city, called Nuestra Sennora de Alta Gracia. This territory produces great quantities of cacao, whereof the inhabitants make great store of the richest chocolate. Here grows also ginger and tobacco, and much tallow is made of the beasts which are hereabouts hunted.
Chiapa, itself, is a city of some size, situated on a terrace a little way from the river, with a ridge of hills rising behind it. The plaza is large, and in it stands a market-building. Near by is a picturesque old gothic fountain, built of brick. Market was almost over, but we were interested in seeing the quantities of pineapples and cacao beans there offered.
Law will do, 'and enjoy the fruits of his labour. Mr. Law is of opinion that, to give such a return, the cacao must be farmed in a very different way from the usual plan; that the trees must not be left shaded, as now, by Bois Immortelles, sixty to eighty feet high, during their whole life. The trees, he says with reason, impoverish the soil by their roots.
Of course, none but the wealthy could drink it; indeed, we find writers of the past century alluding to it as an aristocratic beverage. Linnæus was so fond of chocolate, that he called it food for the gods in the distinguishing name which he gave to the tree that produces it Theobroma cacao. The tree is a native of tropical America, but is now largely cultivated in other parts of the world.
He believes that the cacao needs no shade after the third year; and that, till then, shade would be amply given by plantains and maize set between the trees, which would, in the very first year, repay the planter some 6500 dollars on his first outlay of some 8000.
The cacao of Uraba is of excellent quality; and the Darien Indians sometimes come to sell it, with other productions, to the inhabitants of Rio Sinu, entering the valley of that river by one of its tributary streams, the Jaraguai. It cannot be doubted that the Gulf of Darien was considered, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as a nook in the country of the Caribs.
The vanilla, the anana or pine apple, and many other delicious fruits. The cacao, though generally pronounced cocoa, must not be confounded with the Cocoa Palm which produces that largest of all nuts, the Cocoa-nut. These trees and plants which I have mentioned, and many more equally beautiful, are all natives of the American woods.
Bernardo de Castile, who accompanied Cortez, describing one of Montezuma's banquets, says: 'They brought in among the dishes above fifty great jars made of good cacao, with its froth, and drank it, the women serving them with a great deal of respect; and similar jars were served to the guards and attendants 'to the number of two thousand at least. The Spaniards enjoyed the rare beverage, and with a slight transformation of the native Mexican term Chacoc-atl, they introduced chocolate, as they named it, into Spain, monopolising the article for a time, and it was only by slow degrees that the knowledge of it spread into other parts of Europe.
To solemnize it, they all went to the plantation of one of their number, where they sacrificed a dog having a spot on its skin the colour of cacao. They burned incense to their idols, after which they gave to each of the officials a branch of the cacao plant."
In the New World it was compounded of cacao, maize, and flavourings to which the Spaniards, on discovering it, added sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and other ingredients, such as musk and ambergris, cloves and nutmegs, almonds and pistachios, anise, and even red peppers or chillies.
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