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Updated: June 12, 2025
It may be said there is no fear of the trade, which keeps the native, disappearing from the West Coast, but it is well to remember that the stuff that this trade is dependent on, the stuff brought into the traders' factory by the native, is mainly indeed, save for the South-West Coast coffee and cacao, we may say, entirely bush stuff, uncultivated, merely collected and roughly prepared, and it is so wastefully collected by the native that it cannot last indefinitely.
Under a different system from that which we found existing in these countries, the Rio Negro will produce indigo, coffee, cacao, maize, and rice, in abundance.
There are a number of others, like the anon, the zapote, the granadilla, the mamey, etc., with which visitors may experiment or not as they see fit. Some like some of them and others like none of them. An excellent grade of cacao, the basis of chocolate and cocoa, is produced in somewhat limited quantity. The industry could easily be extended.
F. Hernandez found four kinds of cacao in use among the Axtecs, and he describes four varieties of drinks that were prepared from them. Maize, crushed and soaked, was added to it, and a beverage prepared from the mixture; to which the oily parts that had been skimmed off the top were restored, and the whole was drunk hot.
The "coca," upon which Guapo made his supper, and which contented his stomach perfectly for the night, was an article very different from either the cacao which makes chocolate, or the nut of the cocoa-palm. You are now impatient to hear what sort of thing it was, and I shall tell you at once.
But their rat-tails of small green flowers prove them to be peppers nevertheless. On we went, upward ever, past Cacao and Bois Immortelle orchards, and comfortable settlers' hamlets; and now and then through a strip of virgin forest, in which we began to see, for the first time, though not for the last, that 'resplendent Calycophyllum' as Dr.
In preparing the cacao they have not devised any means of separating the seeds well from the pulp, or drying it in a systematic way; the consequence is that, although naturally of good quality, it molds before reaching the merchants' stores, and does not fetch more than half the price of the same article grown in other parts of tropical America.
In many parts coffee and cotton-trees progressively take place of the cacao, of which the lingering harvests weary the patience of the cultivator. It is also asserted, that the new plantations of cacao are less productive than the old; the trees do not acquire the same vigour, and yield later and less abundant fruit.
Have the coffee-berry and beans, ground coffee, cups of coffee prepared as a drink, and pictures of the tree, fruit, and coffee plantations; also secure specimens of the fruit of the cacao tree, a cake of solid chocolate, chocolate candy, and a cake containing chocolate layers. Cups of cacao or chocolate may be prepared as a drink. Have near pictures of the cacao tree and fruit.
It is not for me to give an opinion upon the correctness of his estimates: but the past history of Trinidad shows so many failures of the cacao crop, that even a practically ignorant man may be excused for guessing that there is something wrong in the old Spanish system; and that with cacao, as with wheat and every other known crop, improved culture means improved produce and steadier profits.
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