You’ve heard of Napoleon brandy. But did you know that when Napoleon, in exile on the island of St. Helena, lay dying, he instead requested a spoonful of coffee from the island’s coffee trees? That is high praise indeed. The coffee which had so won Napoleon’s admiration arrived, as a seed, at St. Helena in 1732 from Yemen’s port city of Mocha, on the East India Trading company ship Houghton. Given St. Helena’s location as one of the remotest spots on earth, the odds of the island ever seeing success as a coffee producer were long indeed.
Situated twelve hundred miles from the west coast of Africa, and eighteen hundred miles from Brazil, its only link to the outside world is through the British mail ship HMS St. Helena, and the occasional cruise ship. For that reason, any commodity produced there remains there, unless there is a huge outside demand.
St. Helena’s coffee, produced today on four separate plantations, is grown from the same trees, and their descendants, which produced coffee sent to London coffee brokers Wm Burnie & Co in 1839. Their praise for its merits sent its price to the top of the London coffee market and, in 1845, it was the most expensive coffee in the world.
It experienced another run in 1851, when it received an award a London’s Great Exhibition. After that, as the world moved beyond the sailing ship era, demand for it collapsed, and it more or less disappeared from memory.
David Henry began restoring the coffee plantings on St Helena’s in the 1980’s, and brought 1.5 tons of coffee to market in 1994. His ambition is to someday achieve a yield of between 25 and 30 tons annually.
At those small yields, Saint Helena’s Green-tipped Bourbon Coffee, of the same strain as the coffee seeds brought to the Island from the Port of Mocha in 1733, is one of the rarest–second only to Kopi Luwak–coffees on the world market.
The coffee trees were old when Napoleon was banished to Saint Helena in 1815. And they are still offering warmth and comfort to its visitors today.
