AFTER five years’ study, I bring this saga to a close. Besides the aid of books, I am indebted to the stimulating assistance of friends: first of all to that of Dr. Kurt Schechner of Vienna; next to that of Dr. Eckener, of the Zeppelin aerodrome at Friedrichshafen. These two gentlemen have enabled me to undertake a personal study of coffee culture in South America.
From the literary point of view, I have suffered the fate common to so many authors. As soon as my book was on the way, I was overwhelmed with letters, data, all kinds of information. New springs were continually welling up.
No doubt many historical facts must have been overlooked. Much that I had intended to include has slipped through the meshes of my net, because its inclusion would have confused the general impression, and because it was a refractory element. Not every interesting fact can be woven into a comprehensive survey like the present. Here is one example among many. If Francis Bacon, lord chancellor, and pioneer in the field of scientific method, compares the influence of coffee on the brain to the influence of opium, this is not a medical error (had it been such, I should have indicated the fact in the text); but evidence that in 1620 coffee as a beverage was unknown in London, and that one of the leading intelligences in the England of that day knew of it only from hearsay. Here is a historical fact from which inferences can be drawn, but one which has nothing to do with Bacon himself.
There are other obvious lacunæ. It might have been well to investigate Balzac’s attitude towards coffee, which was sometimes puritanical, sometimes one of intemperate use; or to ask why Fontenelle, in his hundredth year, had come to believe that coffee promotes longevity. A chapter might have been devoted to the great importance assumed by “eleven o’clock coffee” among the huge army of commercial employees in every modern great town. From this might be deduced the need for reducing the import duties on coffee in almost all European States.
Much, however, has been intentionally omitted. Friends in Warsaw have written to ask whether I am unaware that the proper spelling of Kolshitsky is Kulczycki. I don’t wish to take sides too obviously in so delicate a matter, but it is questionable whether the valiant Kolshitsky was, after all, a Pole! The best and oldest authorities describe him as a Rascian. Rascia is in Serbia, and in Banat Serbs are often called Rascians. If Kolshitsky was a Serb and not a Pole, that explains a good deal. Then, the “Sambor” which is said to have been his birthplace was not the Sambor near Lemberg in Galicia, but “Sombor” in Jugoslavia, a town whose population is today still a mixed one, consisting of Serbs, Hungarians, and Germans. Like all Banat, Sombor was in those days under Turkish rule. This would explain how it was that Kolshitsky could speak Turkish as a second mother-tongue. His servant, Georg Mihailovich, was unquestionably a Serb. Ruthenians contend that Kolshitsky was a Ukrainian, and that his name was really Kolshetshko. The Viennese always spell it Kolschitzky; but Kolshitsky will do for the English-speaking world, the question being one of phonetics rather than of an indeterminable orthography and racial origin.
The sources of the history of coffee are in a queer condition. Where we should like them to be abundant, they are inclined to dry up. On the other hand, matters of trifling importance are confirmed by a wealth of identical testimony. Hitherto, moreover, there have only been monographs, and works in which coffee is incidentally mentioned; no attempt at an inclusive treatment of the subject. For data concerning the early use of coffee in France, and down to the days of the revolution of 1789, an excellent authority is Alfred Franklin’s Vie privée d’autrefois, in “Arts et métiers des Parisiens du XIIe au XVIIIe siècle” As to the English “coffeo-mania,” consult Westerfrölke’s monograph; as to the Viennese coffee-houses, the Festschrift des Gremiums der Kaffeehausbesitzer in Wien. Uker’s All about Coffee contains trustworthy information upon the history of coffee in America. There are monographs by Dr. Hans Roth, Dr. Hermann Kurth, and Dr. Klara Ratzka-Ernst on the economic history of coffee in Brazil during the nineteenth century, and the latest problems of the coffee industry: over-production and the world market, sequestration, and valorization.