TRINIDAD OF YESTERDAY

Cocoa: Worth its weight in silver

​Angelo Bissessarsingh (Researcher and writer)
January 5, 2014
One of the great agricultural potentials of Trinidad is its ability to produce cocoa of the highest quality. But in a land which formerly led the world in production of the golden bean, the industry has dwindled to near oblivion. This column is the first of a three-part series which will take a historical look at cocoa and how it once drove the local economy.
Cacao (Theobroma cacao) is the name given to a tree which was known to Meso-American peoples such as the Aztecs, Olmecs and Mayans for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. The Mayans believed that chocolate was a food from the gods, given to them by the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl.
Christopher Columbus encountered the beans in 1502, as did Hernan Cortes, who dominated the Aztecs in the Yucatan. Cortes and his conquistadores were served a bitter, hot beverage spiced with pepper and little resembling the stuff we call chocolate today. Cocoa seems to have been introduced in Trinidad in the 17th century, since it was one of the few cash crops cultivated for export by the Spanish settlers. It was also grown by subjugated Amerindians on the missions established by Capuchin monks from 1687-90.
Cocoa constituted almost the only export of the colony and was much in demand in Europe—especially in France, where chocolate drinking was becoming vogue. Cocoa was worth its weight in silver, so that one morning in 1716, the frightened residents of Puerta de los Hispanoles (Port-of-Spain) saw an armed sloop sweep in and seize upon a brig loaded with cocoa bound for Spain. The pirate ship belonged to the notorious Benjamin Hornigold, an American buccaneer, and it was under the command of a young protégé of his named Edward Teach, who would later terrorise the high seas as Blackbeard.
In 1725 witchbroom disease struck the cocoa plantations and this was seen by some as a divine punishment because the planters had not been paying their tithes. The island’s economy grew exponentially at the end of the 1700s as the introduction of the Cedula of Population encouraged (mostly French) Catholic planters and their slaves to emigrate and thus much arable land was brought under cultivation. Most of this was sugar, but in the hills of the Northern Range—particularly in Santa Cruz, Maracas Valley and Diego Martin—the cool climate and well-drained soils were perfect for cocoa cultivation.
After the capture of Trinidad by the British in 1797, sugar somewhat outstripped cocoa as English capitalists began to acquire lands, but there remained enough of the cacao trees in the Santa Cruz valley to enchant Henry Nelson Coleridge, who exulted in 1825:
“If ever I turn planter, as I have often had thoughts of doing, I shall buy a cacao plantation in Trinidad. The cane is, no doubt, a noble plant, and perhaps crop time presents a more lively and interesting scene than harvest in England!
The trouble of preparing this article for exportation is actually nothing when compared with the process of making sugar. But the main and essential difference is, that the whole cultivation and manufacture of cacao is carried on in the shade. People must come between Cancer and Capricorn to understand this. I was well tired when we got back to Antonio’s house. What a pleasant breakfast we had, and what a cup of chocolate they gave me by way of a beginning! So pure, so genuine, with such a divine aroma exhaling from it! Mercy on me! What a soul-stifling compost of brown sugar, powdered brick, and rhubarb have I not swallowed in England instead of the light and exquisite cacao!”
And, of course, no cocoa plantation would be complete without a dash of vermilion, as Captain Alexander recounted in 1833:
“One of the most beautiful of the trees in Trinidad, is the Bois immortel, which at certain seasons of the year is covered with clusters of scarlet blossoms of exceeding brightness, and which when shining in the sunbeams, look like a mantle of brilliant velvet. “The tree is very lofty and umbrageous, and serves as a screen to the cocoa plant, which being of too delicate a nature to bear exposure to the sun, is always planted under the shelter of the Bois immortel. This double wood has a very pleasing effect, especially when the cocoa is bearing fruit, when its various colours are beautiful.”
Cocoa estate buildings .Photo Credit : Scott He
(Source: Angelo Bissessarsingh's Virtual Museum of Trinidad & Tobago, January 5, 2024)