History's Lost Moments Volume III

Early Carolina Was Managed From a London Coffee House Imagine setting up a real estate venture -- more than 500 square miles of uncharted woodland -- with a handful of cronies. The land is a King’s royal political payback for a favor; never mind that the land’s disputed by two nations and by hostile natives. You have minions to do the footwork so you don’t actually have to get physically involved in going there a half a world away. If the partners are clever, the development named Carolina will be carved into fiefdoms and towns, and agents will induce thousands of speculators to buy in. And the partners manage the whole affair nonchalantly from a back table in a London coffee house! Improbable as it sounds, the Lords Proprietors did take in a bonanza with King Charles II’s unusual bequest, and they did meet regularly to discuss their plans at, coincidentally, the Carolina Coffee House on Threadneedle Street. Within one generation Londoners experienced two novel beverages, coffee and tea, each of them served piping hot in a mug, but usually sipped delicately from a saucer. In a successive generation the city was submerged in a sea of rum followed by a tidal wave of gin. What fortune for us that the ideas relating Carolina were conceived in coffee houses and not the rumshops! In John Evelyn’s writings the first mention of coffee in England is 1637. Evelyn was a student at Balliol College, Oxford, and he noted an odd habit of a fellow student from the Isle of Crete. The Greek roasted coffee beans and poured boiling water over them. By 1651 in Oxford a Lebanese Jew named Jacob opened that city’s first coffee house, probably the first one in England. Located near All Souls College, Jacob’s shop drew the patronage of Edward Pococke, the Laudian Professor of Arabic. Pococke introduced coffee to the senior commons room at All Souls in 1660, the year of the restoration of Charles II. Pococke had lived in Aleppo for ten years and was very familiar with the black and bitter hot drink. It was he who popularized the “black wine of Araby” as the preferred drink of university intellectuals. All Souls was the Oxford college that supported the Society for The Propagation of The Gospel (S.P.G.), and Jacob’s Coffee House was a hangout for sober minded S.P.G. fellows -- the ones who came out to Carolina as Anglican priests and school teachers. Samuel Pepys’ private diary of London in the 1660s, the era of the Lords Proprietors, makes 19 references to his frequenting the city’s coffee houses, primarily for the sake of gathering news. For Wednesday, 22 June 1664, Pepys records “Up and I found Mr. Creed below, who staid with me a while, and then I to business all the morning. At noon to the Change and Coffee house, where great talke [sic] [sic] of the Dutch preparing of sixty sayle of ships. The plague grows mightily among them, both at sea and land.” Where else but the coffee houses could Pepys have learned from the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Duke of Albemarle’s wife had numerous adulterous flings behind his back and that Lady Carteret and the other proprietors’ wives despised her -- or that John Locke saved the Duke’s life in 1666 by insisting that he brave a dangerous operation to remove a cyst from his liver. If Ashley Cooper, the Duke of Albemarle, had died in 1666, then the impetus for settlement here might well have disappeared. London experienced a commercial revitalization in the 1660s and for a while, the years of the Anglo-Dutch wars, there wasn’t a rush to venture to the New World. Locke, an attorney as well as a physician, was Lord Ashley’s political counsel. It was he who drummed up support for the Carolina settlement as a place where independent-minded Englishmen could practice commerce, agriculture, and religion in a more relaxed political environment.