A SLAVE TO CHOCOLATE

I am told that 8,000 years ago stone age residents of the Caucasus mountains (above), stretching between the Black and Caspian seas,  "invented" wine.  These guys didn't have to be geniuses. There was a yeast fungus which naturally grows on grape skins. When you crush the grapes, that allows the yeast to start eating the sugars inside the pulp and they start pooping alcohol. And as we all learned in paleolithic chemistry 101, you can only spell fun with fermentation - in the case of wine, 16%  alcohol by content.

But the western hemisphere lacked two things which taken together meant getting high in the new world would be harder.  First, new world grapes had different fungi and as a result new world humans never developed the two enzymes which internally detoxify alcohol. So the best American natives could do was brew beer with about a 4% alcohol content. 

Now, according to their genomes,  at this same time two trees were thriving in the shade of the rain forest canopy where the Andes Mountains gave birth to the headwaters of the mighty Amazon River (above), And humans started cultivating them both, also about 8,000 years ago.

The first tree was the Coca plant (above). It's leaves, when chewed, suppressed hunger, thirst, pain or fatigue. In this form it was not addictive. Because the leaves were easily transported, and worked wet or dry there was no need to transplant the Coca trees themselves. 

Not so the second tree in our pair,  which was the Cacao tree, which produces an array of 14 ounce seed pods.

When the pods ripened, Meso-Americans cracked them open and then left them piled on the ground for a week or so.   As the pods decomposed in the tropical heat, they began to liquify. This was called "sweating" the pods.

Collect and then cook the sweat and the pods and you get a beer. Left behind to rot in the damp were the 8 to 10 seeds or nubs in each pod.

Then, probably during a drought, some connoisseur noticed the piles of the now dry Cacahualtl nubs (above) gave off a faint yet delightful aroma. All they had to figure out was a way to get that wonderful odor out of their noses and on to their tongues.

Removed from the pods before sweating, the seeds were spread out on leaves for 3 - 5 days,  to dry. 

Then they called in the old ladies and kids, who walked all over the beans, gradually crushing and mixing them into a soft brown powder, called cocoa. It takes some 600 beans to produced 2 pounds of cocoa. For the higher end market a variety of flavorings were then mixed into the Cocoa powder, such as cinnamon, chili peppers or almonds. 

Dissolve that powder in water, and you get a bitter liquid.  Simmer that over a low flame and then let it cool and solidify and, viola, you have cocoa pas, or chocolate liquor, with an alcohol content of up to 20 to 25%.  Given the labor required to produce a mere two pounds of solid cocoa, the drink was clearly intended for the elite.  

Now, besides yeast, the second thing the new world lacked was the wheel. This meant the Amazonian farmers had to walk the seed pods on the backs of lamas, at about 1 and a half miles per hour over the 22,000 foot high Andes, 600 miles to their elite Inca customers. But the  Cacahualtl pods and seeds would rot long before they got there. 

As would the chocolate liquor on the 3,000 miles journey (at 4 miles an hour in a canoe) to their upper crust Mayan and Aztec customers to the north.  Cocoa powder would survive that journey, but the lack of wheels limited the volume which could be transported. It proved far simpler to transport saplings or Cacaualtl seeds for replanting in the welcoming jungles of the Gulf Coast of Mexico, or the plains of the Yucatan Peninsula.

But even  given these limitations, the construction of such wide ranging trading system indicates an advanced culture in the Amazon basin, and recent survey work on the ground shows the 230 million square miles of what later appeared to be virgin rain forests were in fact, as one archeologist put it, "...abandoned gardens” which once supported almost 10 million people.  And yet, a century later, when Spain and Portugal finally penetrated to the core of the Amazon basin, there were barely 2 million people left in isolated villages, living hand to mouth along the muddy Amazon. 

What caused the collapse of this new world fertile crescent were plagues of measles, chicken pox, mumps, and whooping cough which following the trade routes back to their source. Most natives in the Amazon died without ever seeing a white face. They left behind unobtrusive earthworks and over grown canal systems of the abandoned gardens, all of which went unnoticed by the Europeans for another 600 years,  

So the Spanish conquistadors might be forgiven for thinking it was the Aztecs who invented the cocoa which Moctezuma II drank from his golden goblet 60 times a day - at least until  Hernan Cortes set fire to the place in 1520.  It was about the only thing for which Cortes can be forgiven, because the Europeans not only imported diseases, but they also enslaved the entire native population. And they exported bananas, potatoes, cocaine leaves and cocoa.

So, like Moctezuma before him,  Pope Pius V became addicted to the taste of cocoa and the taxes it paid. In 1569 the Catholic ruler decided that drinking the bitter dark liquid did not break Lent. 

That other Catholic Giovanni Casanova recommend the drink as an aphrodisiac. But then, if you believe his book, he didn't really need one of those. 

 The Protestant Reformation tried to redefine cocoa as a sin, when, in 1624 a Viennese professor, Johan Rauch, called for cocoa to be banned. 

But by that time the Protestant Dutch had begun working their own chemistry.  By adding the alkaline agent of cow's milk, (meaning fat) as well as sugar, they produced a more delicious darker cocoa powder and called it "Dutch Chocolate".  There was no stopping the revolution now. All European royalty now had wine and chocolate, and wanted more of both.  

Even chocolate’s role in masking the poison which killed Pope Clement XIV (above) in 1774 could not shake the church’s addiction to the taxes paid to license the delicious cocoa bean.

The 19th Century was a major turning point in the history of chocolate. In 1821 Mexico and Venezuela became an independent nations. In 1823 the Republic of Central America was formed, In  1824 Peru overthrew it's Spanish occupiers (above).  In 1825 Brazil. became independent of Portugal. 

And the first thing all of these new nations did was outlaw slavery.  And more than the revolutions themselves, it was this loss of free labor which cut profits in the chocolate trade. 

Thrown out of their Central and South America colonies, the Europeans saved what they could, in this case Cacahualtl seeds and saplings. These were transplanted across the Atlantic to a chain of 6 volcanic islands which extended into the Gulf of Guinea. The northern most island, just 20 miles off the coast of Africa, was eventually claimed by Spain, even though it was named after it's Portuguese discoverer, Fernando Po. (Now called Bioko Island).

Three hundred seventy-five miles southwest of Fernando Po were a pair of islands occupied by Portugal,  São Tomé and Principe (above).  Originally the Europeans profited by making palm oil on all three, but by 1868 transplanted Cacahualti trees were producing more wealth than palm trees were. They were more labor intensive, but that problem was solved by the simple expedient of using black slave labor, easily kidnapped from Niger and lands to the south. 

Isolated on Po and Principe, beatings, rapes and brutally suppressed uprising of the 68,000 slaves on cocoa plantations could be hidden from annoying "humanitarians", such as the British Navy. By 1895 chocolate seed production from the island of San Thome alone had reached a million kilograms. 

By the Twentieth Century slave production of chocolate had made the jump to the mainland, to Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon and Togo, and morphed while doing so.  Workers signed contracts, guaranteeing salary, food and housing.  But once workers were toiling the planters often ignored those agreements, resulting in slavery covered by a thin veneer of legality.  Officials in Liberia became so outraged they prohibited any labor traders from contacting their citizens to work on the chocolate plantations.

As late as 1955 an observer would report "...some unlucky Africans…are deported to São Tomé and Principe...Here they do forced or directed labor on the cocoa fields in circumstances barely distinguishable from slavery”.

It was the nation of Ghana, with hundreds of small cocoa farms, which became the world's single largest producer of chocolate, exporting half a million metric tons of cocoa beans to Europe and the United States by the Second World War.

Then in 1960, newly independent Côte d'Ivoire ((Ivory Coast) decided to make cocoa their primary export. Today they produced some 2 million tons a year - about 40% of the world market. 

And the place where the Cacaualtl evolved are now the backwater in the world wide chocolate market. 

And still the places were chocolate consumption remains at it's lowest, are the places it is grown, south and central America, and the Atlantic coast of Equitorial Africa. Chocolate remains the food of the Gods upon the earth,

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IN FLANDERS FIELD

 

I remind you that landscape is history, and as proof I offer the green “ponder lands” 30 miles south of the North Sea coast, and 10 miles north of Lilli, France. Politically this is Belgium, but morally it is a haunted landscape, described by a 21^st century writer as “...bleakness...dismal (where) winds howl across flat fields and whip through villages, wrapping around church steeples and belfries” 

To the English of a certain generation this will always be “Wipers”, a poor pronunciation of the French “Ypres” (Ipres).  

Here over four horrible years in the second decade of the 20^th century, hundreds of thousands of mostly young men from Germany and the British Empire endured the unendurable, day after miserable day engaged in static trench warfare and the clumsy, expensive attempts to break it.

So many are buried here in marked and unmarked graves that their bones make up no small portion of the soil. And many were buried alive.

A trench in the Great War meant survival, protection from artillery shells and machine gun fire. But here in the “le plat plays”, the 'flat country' in the local Flemish dialect, any digging or shelling uncovered a clinging, grasping yellowish brown clay, perpetually dripping with water. It coated everything it touched. It added pounds to boots, and subtracted warmth from soaked wool uniforms.

At the slightest shower, trenches and “dugouts” flooded. Those who existed here fought rats grown fat on the corpses that littered no-man's-land between the trenches, suffered from fungus inspired trench foot, trench mouth, and dysentery, cholera and typhus. The Germans had it marginally better, because they were ensconced on the 'high ground' of the Messines-Ypress Ridge, all of thirty feet above the worst of it. Unable to dig too deep, the Germans built concrete pill boxes above the ground. The British soldiers, without benefit of such amenities, endured not only the constant damp and the clay, but having German snipers and artillery observers overlooking their every move.

So it was the British who were were forced to explore the terrain below ground. Test drills discovered the yellow clay was waterlogged because about 70 feet further down was an impervious layer of hard brown clay, which trapped the ground water above it. But 30 dry feet below that was a soft blue clay, perfect for tunneling. Early in 1915 recruiters went out to the mining districts of Britain, Canada and Australia, looking for volunteers.

One company of 600 miners signed up on a Thursday morning in Yorkshire, and were doing preliminary digging the following Wednesday afternoon in Flanders. In all, 33 companies were formed from three continents, but the procedures were the same at all 21 tunnels begun west and south of the Messines ridge. First, about a quarter- mile behind the front, a large steel conduit (above) was driven straight down for fifty feet. Using this as a shield against the oozing yellow muck, the miners then dug straight down to the blue clay. A gallery was then cleared at the bottom of the shaft and a winch lift installed to the surface. Then, divided into four to eight man teams, each company of royal engineers would begin to tunnel toward the German trenches.

The “Kicker” would lay on his back, supported at an angle by a heavy board or sand bags. Using his feet and legs, he would thrust a spade into the clay, slicing away about 9 inches with each push. A “Bagger” would shove the clumps into burlap sacks and pile them atop a rubber wheeled trolley, which a pair of “Tammers” would then push down rails toward the entrance.  Seventy bags were required for every foot of tunnel dug. At the gallery the bags would be winched to the surface, where every night regular army work teams removed the clay for careful disposal. German aircraft kept watch for dry clay on the surface, as this was proof of tunneling.

The trolley returned with pre-cut wooden bracing in 9 inch sections. To avoid the sounds hammering, the bracing was designed to be held in place by the tendency of the blue clay to swell on exposure to the air. Each crew worked a 6 to 12 hour shift at the face, with 8 hours off. The crews then rotated to operating and repairing the air and water pumps and the winches. Bunk rooms were carved off the tunnel shafts. Underground the miners were reasonably safe from all but the heaviest German shells, but the tension and claustrophobia insured that every four days the entire company had to be rotated behind the lines, one hour of Rest and Recovery for every sixteen hours spent in the tunnels.

The tunnels were dark, cold and often flooded with ice cold water. Over one six week period one mining company had 12 men killed by methane and carbon dioxide gas, with 28 sent to hospital and another 60 treated in the unit. Besides the constant threat of cave-ins, the exhausted men suffered all of the usual infections of trench warfare plus those caused by breathing stale air. A surface soldier, artilleryman Charles Brett, with the 47^th London Division, observed that “When the tunnellers emerged above ground they could easily be distinguished by their poor pallid faces. We who lived, or died,...daily subject to bombing, shelling or sniping, pitied them from the bottom of our hearts”

One tunnel was abandoned after it collapsed under a German counter-mine, and it was decided three others would not be used because of various problems. But after two years of digging, by May of 1917, over a million pounds of high explosives were packed into 17 tunnels – – about 40,000 pounds in each – directly under the German trenches atop the Messenes Ridge.

The pre-assault bombardment began on Tuesday, 8 May, 1917  and continued for two weeks. On Wednesday, 23 May, it became heavier, as the artillery was increased to 2,300 guns So heavy was the bombardment - 3.5 million shells a week - that German front line troops were rotated back for relief every other day. Almost 90% of the German artillery behind the Messnes Ridge was destroyed under this bombardment. 

The night before the grand assault, Eton educated General Herbert Plumer (above), told his staff, “Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly change the geography.”

At 2:50 in the morning, Thursday, 7  June, 1917  the British artillery barrage suddenly ceased. The silence that crashed over the trenches was deafening. German infantry clambered out of their dugouts and raced to their weapons. They were in luck, as at this precise moment, the positions were being relieved, and the trenches were filled with twice as many defenders as usual. 

At 3:00 A.M. a white star shell exploded above the German positions, illuminating the stark landscape. And then at 3:10 A.M., in the words of one miner, “All hell broke loose”.

The 17 blasts were clearly heard a hundred miles away in London. The tunneller continued, “In the pale light it appeared as if the whole enemy line had begun to dance....

...then, one after another, huge tongues of flame shot hundreds of feet into the air, followed by dense columns of smoke, which flattened out at the top like gigantic mushrooms...The whole scene was majestic in its awfulness.” And it all happened over a period of just 30 seconds.

The largest mine, labeled as “Spanbroekmolen” and planted 88 feet below ground level, left a crater 40 feet deep and 280 feet in diameter. Before the eyes of Second Lieutenant J.W. Naylor, “The earth seemed to tear apart...The whole ground went up and came down again. It was like a huge mushroom.” 

And Private John Rea Laister wrote after the war, “Arms, legs, trees, bricks coming down all over the place....I thought, 'I wonder how many poor buggers, have gone up with that lot'.”

The artillery began an immediate walking barrage, with the advancing infantry right behind.

 By 10:00 that morning all the first day's objectives had been achieved. And for the first (and only) time in World War One, the defense suffered more causalities than the attackers. British casualties were 24,564, killed, wounded and missing.

They captured 7,354 German soldiers, with perhaps another 4-5,000 Germans missing and presumed dead in the blasts, and 23,000 wounded. The British front line advanced three miles and dug into their new positions, in front of yet another line of German trenches, a line which would not be breached until late in 1918. On the Western front in World War One, this “Bite and Hold” at Messenes Ridge was considered a major success.

For all the effort and sacrifice, there were no more large scale “Mining Campaigns” in World War One. No where else did the combination of soil and static positions combine to make it a viable option. And with time, the effort and sacrifice was largely forgotten...

...at least until Friday, 17 June,  1955.  That afternoon a thunderstorm passed over the old battlefield. And when a bolt of lightening struck a telephone pole placed directly above one of the three unused and abandoned mines, it set off the 38 year old explosives.  The resulting blast created a hole 60 feet deep and 120 feet wide. Windows in houses for miles around were shattered. Luckily, the only causality was a single cow.

That blast revived interest in the mining operations, and the last unexploded mine was finally located midway though the first decade of the 21^st century, beneath a placid farm with the name of La Basee Cour - The Base Court.  Sixty year old farmer Roger Mahieu, insisted he was not worried about the 22 tons of explosives buried 80 feet under his house. “It's been there all that time, why should it decide to blow up now?”

Except,  the same question is asked before most catastrophes, like World War One.

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