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I subsequently discovered that my new and non-sporting acquaintances were coffee-planters of a class then known as the Galle Face planters, who passed their time in cantering about the Colombo race-course and idling in the town, while their estates lay a hundred miles distant, uncared for, and naturally ruining their proprietors.
Coffee appears to be so nearly "played out" in Ceylon, that many coffee-planters have been "prospecting" in Perak; and now that the Government of India has consented to the importation of Indian coolie labor into the State, under certain restrictions, as an experimental measure, a future of coffee may be predicted with tolerable certainty.
To estimate the effect on the Indian coffee-planters with reference to the effect of the monetary policy of the Government in placing the Indian at a disadvantage as regards his competition with the Brazilian planter would be difficult, and I am not in a position to form a decisive opinion on the subject; but I may mention that the manager of the London and Brazilian Bank informed the Currency Committee that the production of coffee in Brazil has largely increased, and will still further largely increase, owing to the greater facilities of communication, and also the direct influence of a low rate of exchange.
I have alluded to the losses that the measure must inflict on the planters of Southern India, and my remarks on that head apply equally to the tea-planters of India; but the latter have, besides, a special grievance which they share in common with the tea-planters of Ceylon, and this grievance is also shared in by the coffee-planters, though, as far as I can see, hardly to the same extent.
One might meet there, almost any night, English war correspondents who had campaigned in India, Egypt, and the Sudan; Cuban sympathizers from the United States who had served in the armies of Gomez and Garcia; old Indian fighters and ranch-men from our Western plains and mountains; wealthy New York club-men in the brown-linen uniform of Roosevelt's Rough Riders; naval officers from the fleet of Admiral Sampson; and speculators, coffee-planters, and merchant adventurers from all parts of the western hemisphere.
Messieurs Spiers and Pond would buy any quantity of it, and of late years Brazilian coffee-planters have taken shoots to be grown at home. Here it fetches 1s. per lb.; in England the price doubles. This coffee requires keeping for many months, or the infusion is potent enough to cause the 'shakes; it is the same with Brazilian green tea. The bouquet is excellent, and the flavour pretty good.
Week after week, month after month, sometimes by hard, long stretches where water was scarce, sometimes lingering where pasturage was good, sometimes halting to let a fever run its course, they pushed northward. The farther they went, the more barren became the wilderness. The feudal mansions of the wealthy coffee-planters gave way to the miserable abodes of a land of drought.
Such minor troubles, however, were overcome in time. A razor and a hot bath were by no means the least important items of the rejuvenating process, and when the two men entered the salon where Dom Corria was holding an impromptu reception they looked like a couple of coffee-planters from the Argentine. Schmidt was there already.
When travelling between Kandy and Newera Ellia, I was the guest of coffee-planters, all of them, so far as I remember, my own countrymen; and saw coffee in all its stages, from the berry on the coffee-bush on to the manufactured article ready for the market. The plant is indigenous in the island, but it was turned to little account till taken up by Europeans.
It has a beautiful little artificial lake, and is famous for its temple, with a tooth of Buddha as its great treasure. During the few weeks I was in Ceylon I was most hospitably entertained wherever I went by missionaries, chaplains, coffee-planters, and others. I shall always retain a grateful recollection of the kindness I experienced.
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