ne, Wynaad I
will not pronounce upon, as I have not visited the estates in that
district, but that Coorg and Mysore with their shade grown coffee will go
with leaf disease is a mere groundless assertion, as the reader will, I
hope, admit when I come to treat, in its proper place, of leaf disease and
the effect of shade in limiting its amount, and controlling its injurious
effects. And so far had these reports gone, and so thoroughly do the
public at home connect coffee with Ceylon, and Ceylon alone, that a most
thriving Mysore planter told me that, when he visited England, he now took
good care to conceal his occupation, as he found that when he mentioned he
was a coffee planter, people concluded at once that he was ruined. It is,
then, most necessary to lay all the facts connected with coffee in Mysore
before the public, with the view of placing our industry in its legitimate
position, and I therefore make no apology for having gone into this branch
of my subject with considerable minuteness. But it is now time to address
myself particularly to the history and cultivation of coffee in Mysore,
and to other matters in which the planters are directly or indirectly
interested, and first of all it may not be uninteresting if I say a few
words as to the introduction of the plant into India, or at any rate as to
the earliest notices I can find on the subject.

The earliest notice I can find of coffee in India is contained in a Dutch
work entitled "Letters from Malabar," by Jacob Canter Visscher, chaplain
at Cochin. This collection of letters has been translated by Major Drury,
or rather at his instance, and as the date of the Dutch editor's preface
is 1743, it is evident that the coffee plant must have at least been
introduced five or six years earlier, but the date of its introduction is
not mentioned, and we are merely informed, at page 160, that "the coffee
shrub is planted in gardens for pleasure and yields plenty of fruit, which
attains a proper degree of ripeness. But it has not the refined taste of
the Mocha coffee.... An entire new plantation has been laid out in
Ceylon." The plant, however, though introduced at that early period, does
not seem to have met with much attention in India, and I can find no other
allusion to coffee in Indian books till we come to Heyne's Tracts, which
were published in 1800, and we are there merely told that coffee was sold
in the bazaars of Bangalore and Seringapatam.

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