If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment I will shrivel up like a piece of roasted goat!
— Johann Sebastian Bach and Christian Friedrich Henrici,
Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, aka the Coffee Cantata (c. 1734)

In the year 1723, a French merchant ship sat becalmed halfway across the atlantic ocean. For over a month, she drifted with the currents, sails loose and flapping, waiting for a steady breeze. More than two hundred years had passed since Columbus made the same journey, and transatlantic travel was now a matter of course. But sometimes the fate and consequence of a voyage still hinged on seeds. By some accounts, the drifting ship had already faced a troubled passage—outrunning a deadly storm off Gibraltar, and narrowly avoiding capture by tunisian pirates. Now, stuck in that windless equatorial zone known as the doldrums, the ship had run so low on fresh water that the captain ordered strict rationing for crew and passengers alike. Among those travelers, one gentleman felt particularly parched, because he was sharing his small allotment with a thirsty tropical shrub.

“It serves no purpose to go into the details of the infinite care I had to provide that delicate plant,” he wrote, long after the wind picked up and the ship docked safely at the Caribbean island of Martinique. And long after the descendants of his spindly sapling were well on their way to changing economies throughout Central and South America. The plant, of course, was coffee, but just how a young naval officer named Gabriel-Mathieu De Clieu got his hands on it remains a matter of debate.

In one version of the story, De Clieu and a band of masked colleagues scaled the walls of the paris botanical gardens, broke into a greenhouse, uprooted a young coffee tree, and fled into the night. Most historians regard this reported chain of events with suspicion, but no one disputes its location. In the early eighteenth century, the only coffee plant in all of france resided at the Jardin Royal Des Plantes. It was a large, healthy specimen that had been given as a token of esteem to King Louis XIV from the city of amsterdam. De Clieu described his coffee plant as small, “no larger than the slip of a pink,” so it must have been either a cutting or a seedling grown from the sun king’s tree. The royal gardeners had been trying to propagate coffee as a horticultural rarity, but they may not have recognized its huge economic potential. Having traveled widely, De Clieu knew that people in the west no longer regarded coffee as an exotic novelty, a beverage of Turks and Arabs. It was becoming a daily staple from London to Vienna to the colonies, consumed not only in cafes and coffeehouses, but in people’s homes. Dutch plantations on java dominated the world market so completely that the word java would soon become synonymous with the drink itself. Bringing coffee to Martinique, where De Clieu owned a large estate, promised to break the dutch monopoly, bolster the French empire, and earn De Clieu a tidy profit in the process.