Page 118 - Arabian Studies (I)

THE DIARY OF A MOCHA COFFEE
AGENT
by PETER BOXHALL

1. The Background

By 1600, the year in which the English East India Company received
its Charter, the Red Sea port of Mocha had already become the
principal centre for the export of coffee to Egypt and India.
Mocha began to come into prominence in the fourteenth century,
at about the same time as coffee was introduced into Arabia from
Abyssinia. According to one legend, the first coffee beans to arrive in
Arabia were received by Shaikh ‘AIT b. ‘Umar al-Shadill from the
Prophet in a vision. Their place of origin was Abyssinia and he took
them to Mocha. However, this may be, the new beverage soon proved
popular and the lower reaches of the Yemeni Highlands, in the area
bounded by Luhaiyah, San‘a’ and Mocha, provided excellent terrain
for the coffee’s propagation. By 1600 Mocha was prosperous and
well populated, although as yet infrequently visited by Europeans
and then only for short durations for it was, as it came to be
described later ... ‘a hell of heat and humid air, of infected drinking
water and without a breath of wind’.1
By about 1660 competition had arisen between the East India
Companies and Arabian, Egyptian and Indian traders for the
procurement of Mocha coffee. Mocha remained the main port for the
dispatch of the sought-after commodity, together with the northern
ports of Hudaidah and Luhaiyah, but by now Bait al-Faqlh, on the
Tihamah Plain between the Highlands and the coast, four days
distant by camel from Mocha, had become the coffee market at
which the main business and transactions were conducted.
In 1660 Mocha coffee was included for the first time in the sales
lists of the English East India Company. Rivalry between the French,
the Dutch and English, reflecting the larger battle for commercial
supremacy in the Indian Ocean, was now intense. In 1708, at the
invitation of the Imam, the Dutch opened a factory at Mocha and

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