Bitter Chocolate (6 page)

By the end of the century, cocoa was a crucial component of the trans-Atlantic trade. And soon the monks of Spain were busy turning out the new commodity. Monasteries had been involved
in food production (and consumption) since the Middle Ages. Popular images of fat, waddling friars were inspired by their long association with wine and beer, cheese and butter, and now chocolate. As with many of their other products, they kept their new recipes a secret. They were so successful that Spain had a virtual monopoly over cocoa until well into the seventeenth century.

Spain also controlled what, for decades, was the only known source of cocoa beans. In fact, other Europeans didn't even know of cocoa's existence until long after it had become a luxury item at the Spanish court. In 1579, when English pirates boarded a Spanish vessel laden with cocoa, they mistook the dried brown beans for sheep manure. The disgusted buccaneers set the ship alight and sent the precious cargo to the bottom of the sea.

The conquistadors quickly expanded from Mexico City and soon controlled almost the entirety of what was once the Aztec Empire, including the fertile valleys of Central America, all the way to Guatemala. With an expanding market in Spain, the cocoa farms became more lucrative, and the pressure to produce more beans intensified. As the flow of New World silver and gold bullion forced down the value of precious metals in European markets, cocoa became a kind of liquid asset and a new source of economic stability.

The pressure intensified on Maya and other natives labouring in the expanding cocoa groves of what are now Belize and Guatemala. There was an insatiable demand for beans for the confectioners in Spanish monasteries and for the custodians of the Mexican and Spanish treasuries. Spanish colonists grabbed up the land, flattening large sections of the rainforest for new and expanded cocoa plantations. Cocoa's inherent elitism played out again with the Spanish, as the “food of the gods” became a luxury for the upper classes, produced by the down-trodden.

In spite of the good intentions of the monks and young Philip back in Spain, working conditions on the cocoa plantations
became even more horrendous. A medieval system called
encomienda
gave Spanish colonists the right to demand the services of local workers on their lands. The doctrine, as it was practised in Europe, required that landowners release their serfs for a few days a week to look after their own crops. But in the distant colonies it was easy to ignore this crucial aspect of the contract, and
encomienda
gradually became a sanctioned form of slavery.

Officially, Spain condemned the practice, especially for those natives who had converted to Christianity and, somehow, became more entitled to the rights of “humans.” Bartolomé de Las Casas had persuaded the Spanish monarch to pass new laws that were designed to protect the Indians from abuse, but Cortés successfully made the case that the colonists could not survive without this involuntary native labour pool. And the Spanish colonists believed that, when it came to work, the only incentive the natives understood was brute force.

The growing popularity of chocolate in Spain and later throughout Europe was associated, at least in part, with a widespread belief in its pharmaceutical benefits. Certainly the Indians of the Americas had long recognized the medicinal properties of cocoa and had prescribed it for many minor ailments. Cocoa butter helped heal burns. Spaniards in the New World believed that cocoa was a drug, while some accounts from the monks and conquistadors even suggest that it was a hallucinogen or even an aphrodisiac. King Philip's personal physician thought cocoa had a calming effect and helped relieve a fever, while other doctors claimed it was a pick-me-up.

To this day, chemists debate chocolate's pharmaceutical properties. Cocoa contains theobromine and caffeine, alkaloids that excite the central nervous system and dilate blood vessels. A
morsel of good-quality chocolate can also contain serotonin—a mind-altering chemical believed to alleviate depression. And there's also phenylethylamine in cocoa, often called the love drug because it's believed to be a sexual stimulant. Other scientists (often funded by chocolate companies) claim that a piece of dark chocolate delivers as much antioxidant as a glass of red wine and might even contain epicatechin, thought to inhibit chemically induced cancers such as those caused by tobacco.

Sixteenth-century pharmacists prescribed chocolate to help emaciated patients gain weight, to stimulate digestion and elimination, to revive lethargic people from their sluggishness and to remedy bowel dysfunction. A cup of cocoa before bed was sure to rouse even the most flaccid libido.

Whether cocoa was a panacea or a placebo, whether food or drink or medicine, the market for cocoa beans was growing in Spain, and consequently so was the demand for cheap labour in the New World. The Spanish monarchy mildly protested the abusive labour practices to their governors and agents in the New World, but their sentiments were easily ignored in the distant colonies. Over time, all the good intentions in the world would melt like chocolate before the overarching economic imperatives of the day: Spain needed all the wealth it could generate in the New World to maintain its imperial position in the old one.

Prince Philip became King Philip II after his father stepped aside in 1556, and the high ideals of his teenage years began to fade in the harsh light of necessity. The wars continued, as did the taxes. The wealth generated in the New World served to fuel inflation, and the king didn't have a clue what to do about it—except to crank out more wealth from the colonies in America and now, just across the Straits of Gibraltar, in Africa. Sugar, spice and
cocoa were too important to the imperial economy to be compromised by naive principles.

It is difficult to estimate the death rate of the aboriginal population in the Americas at the time. There was no census taken before contact with the Europeans, but some statistics estimate that, by the seventeenth century, as much as ninety per cent of the population in parts of Mexico and the Americas may have been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, succumbed to smallpox, measles and venereal diseases, while countless others perished from overwork, abuse and war.

Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote a book about the excesses of the colonial class,
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
(which included the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico), based on his own observations in the New World. In it, he described acts of cruelty amounting to mass murder, and he warned that such atrocities as he had witnessed would not go unpunished by the God he believed to be defined by justice and compassion. Las Casas dedicated the manuscript to King Philip and petitioned the monarch to stop the barbarism.

Las Casas started a debate, if little else. Neither his monarch nor the princes in the Church he served were willing to take the kind of punitive action necessary to stop the colonial abuse. Neither Spain nor any other European country knew how to take advantage of the wealth of the New World without exploiting and trampling on the human rights of the native peoples. There was alarm at the evidence that those people were dying off in genocidal numbers—but mostly because of the obvious manpower shortage that would result. Luckily, there was a solution.

The traffic in African slaves to work in the Caribbean sugar plantations was already well established by the mid-sixteenth century. Now their labour was required to meet the growing shortages in Central America and Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were now diverted to the Spanish American cocoa plantations.

With a potentially unlimited labour pool assured and a seemingly infinite supply of sugar and cocoa, chocolate consumption expanded even further, crossing European borders and capturing the attention of markets throughout the continent. The privileged took their cocoa with them everywhere. It became a refreshment to enjoy during public spectacles, and it wasn't just for pleasure. The grim business of the Inquisition was lightened by the availability of cocoa for the clerics and aristocrats as they witnessed the agonies of suspected heretics.

Europe remained unstable throughout the century and into the next. Intermarriage between the various dynastic households became a contrivance to effect some kind of unity. There was no guarantee of success and, indeed, a high likelihood of even worse national hostility resulting from domestic discord in unsuccessful unions of convenience. But intermarriage was, if not a sure vehicle for peace, a medium for new ideas and shared discoveries. And when the granddaughter of King Philip II of Spain—Anne of Austria—married Louis XIII of France in 1615, chocolate was part of the marital package.

The French court was as skeptical of the strange brew as they were of Anne—France had been at war with Spain for decades. And whatever the supposed virtues of chocolate as an aphrodisiac, it's worth noting that Anne's new husband didn't consummate their marriage for years, preferring to spend his time in the company of young men (he was fourteen when they wed). But it was a new beachhead for chocolate, and Anne was not entirely alone in her affection for it. The king's powerful advisor, Cardinal Richelieu—who effectively ran France at the time—was a habitual cocoa drinker.

While chocolate caught on slowly in France, it gained quick acceptance on the Italian peninsula. The powerful Medicis were early aficionados, having been introduced to it by Spanish aristocrats in Tuscany. While Italy was an entanglement of feuding statelets in the seventeenth century, there did seem to be a nascent
national consensus on the merits of chocolate. Cosimo de' Medici, fat and unhealthy from overconsumption of food, ran a corrupt and venal system that eventually fell into stagnation and ruin, but he was also a celebrated patron of the arts and science. Among his beneficiaries was a celebrated doctor and philologist, Francesco Redi.

We owe to Redi our modern understanding of how maggots materialize on rotting flesh—and, paradoxically, Redi was also responsible for many exotic innovations involving chocolate. With the maggot mystery solved (they are the larva of flies that are drawn to the decomposition), the food-infatuated Cosimo wanted some Italian refinements to the Spanish cocoa drinks. Cocoa was still classified as medicine, as was tobacco, and Cosimo saw chocolate's unlimited potential as a sensual experience. Redi cooked up batches of chocolate mixed not only with spices but also with perfumes, including ambergris, a rare and valuable musk oil derived from the excretions of sperm whales. He served up his concoctions to enthusiastic approval in the Medici court. In a flourish of artful chauvinism, Redi revised the history of chocolate to modestly include his own inventive role: “Chocolate was first introduced from America by the court of Spain, where it is made in all perfection. And yet to the Spanish perfection has been added, in our times, in the court of Tuscany, a certain I know not what of more exquisite gentility, owing to the novelty of divers European ingredients; a way having been found of introducing into the composition fresh peel of citron and lemons, and the very genteel odour of jasmine, which together with cinnamon, amber, musk and vanilla has a prodigious effect upon such as delight themselves in taking chocolate.”