Cacao: the bean behind Europe’s chocolate

Where did cacao and chocolate come from?

Cacao is a tropical tree whose pods hold bitter seeds, which we call cocoa beans. The oldest known traces of people using it come from south-east Ecuador, in the upper Amazon, about 5,300 years ago.

It was the peoples of Mexico and Central America who turned it into chocolate. Traces of cacao drinks found in Honduras may be more than 3,000 years old. The Maya and later the Aztecs fermented, roasted and ground the beans, mixed them with water and flavourings such as chilli, and poured the drink from a height to raise a foam. Chocolate was drunk at feasts, weddings and religious ceremonies, mostly by nobles, warriors and merchants. The beans were valuable enough to use as money: a 16th-century Aztec record prices a tamale at one bean and a turkey hen at a hundred.

How did chocolate reach Spain?

Spanish conquerors met cacao in Mexico from 1519. The first clear record of chocolate in Spain comes from 1544, when Dominican friars brought a group of Q’eqchi’ Maya nobles to the royal court with gifts that included it. The first recorded shipment of cacao for sale reached Spain in 1585.

Spaniards changed the drink to suit their own tastes. They served it hot and sweetened it with sugar, often adding spices. By the 1600s it was fashionable across Spain and spreading to France and England.

How did people drink chocolate in 1715?

In the early 1700s chocolate was almost always a drink, not a sweet to eat. In Spain, people who could afford it mixed ground cacao and sugar into hot water and whipped it to a froth with a wooden whisk called a molinillo. Many drank a cup at breakfast or after meals. When a pope was asked whether drinking chocolate broke a church fast, he answered that it did not, because it was a drink, so Catholics could have it even on fast days.

In England, chocolate had been sold since about 1657 in London’s coffee and chocolate houses, where people met to drink, talk and do business. Everywhere in Europe it was still a luxury. Cheap chocolate, and chocolate bars for eating, came much later, after new machines of the 1800s.

Who grew cacao in Venezuela, and who did the work?

From the mid-1600s to the early 1800s Venezuela was the world’s biggest cacao producer. Cacao groves spread through the valleys and along the coast around Caracas, and cacao became the colony’s main export.

Much of the hard work was done by enslaved Africans. Historian Robert Ferry shows that Caracas relied on enslaved workers sooner than other Spanish colonies of the 1600s. Enslaved people planted and tended the cacao groves, and money from cacao bought more captives. Indigenous workers and small farmers grew cacao too.

Running away was one way enslaved people resisted. In 1721 a royal inspector, Pedro José de Olavarriaga, claimed that 20,000 runaways lived in hidden settlements called cumbes; a modern historian points out that this was about as many people as lived in the whole city of Caracas, so it was probably exaggerated. Some people found freedom in other ways. Juana Isabel escaped slavery on Dutch Curaçao in 1729 and crossed to the Spanish mainland, where she won her freedom by becoming a Catholic. She got land at Curiepe, a town of free Black settlers, and planted cacao. Like thousands of others, she sold her beans to traders from Curaçao, and by 1765 her grove had grown to about 1,000 trees.

Who bought Venezuela’s cacao?

The biggest legal market was Mexico, then called New Spain, where people had drunk chocolate long before the Spanish arrived. From the 1620s ships carried Venezuelan cacao across the Caribbean to Veracruz, and Spanish law kept that market largely for Venezuela. Cacao from Guayaquil, on the Pacific coast of today’s Ecuador, flooded Mexico early in the 1600s and pushed prices down, so from around 1630 Spanish officials tried to ban it from Mexico. Much of it was smuggled in anyway, and it only became Mexico’s main supply later in the 1700s.

Spain also wanted Venezuelan cacao, but very few Spanish ships sailed to Venezuela in the early 1700s. That left a gap that smugglers were happy to fill.

How big was the cacao smuggling trade with Curaçao?

Spanish law said colonists could trade only with Spain, but the Dutch island of Curaçao lay only about 37 miles off the coast. Small boats ran across with cloth and other European goods, and came back loaded with cacao. Many of the traders were small-scale Jewish merchants or sailors of African descent. On Curaçao, enslaved dock workers loaded the cacao into ships bound for the Netherlands, and Amsterdam merchants sold it on across Europe. Sometimes even Spain ended up buying Venezuelan cacao through Dutch hands.

Nobody kept honest records of smuggling, so no one knows exactly how much of the crop went this way. Historian Wim Klooster worked out that between 1717 and 1725 the Dutch Republic received sixteen or seventeen times as much Venezuelan cacao, by way of Curaçao, as Spain did. In the first half of the 1700s, cacao made up more than a third of the value of everything Curaçao sent to the Netherlands. As historian Jesse Cromwell shows, smuggling was not just the work of a few rich planters: whole communities took part, because it brought goods that Spain’s rare ships could not.

What was the Caracas Company?

In the 1720s Spain tried hard to stop the smuggling. In 1728 the Spanish crown gave a group of Basque merchants from San Sebastián a monopoly, the sole right, on trade between Spain and Venezuela. Their Royal Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas was meant to carry cacao to Spain, bring European goods to Venezuela, and patrol the coast with armed ships to catch smugglers. Its first ships sailed in 1730, after the game’s years begin.

The company’s ships carried large cargoes of cacao to Spain, but it paid growers less and charged more for goods than the smugglers had. Historians disagree about how far it really cut smuggling. Anger at the company grew until 1749, when a cacao grower named Juan Francisco de León led a rebellion against it.