NR-009Ingredient Atlas entry · Food

Cacao

The seeds of the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao

Captives stooping for a dropped bean, an emperor's frothing jugs, a bishop who banned chocolate from church and a farthing in a Birmingham court. People have used cacao for five thousand years, and it was money too. Nobody counted the emperor's fifty cups a day.

  • Taken as: cocoa, dark chocolate or extract
  • Dosed as grams of chocolate or mg of flavanols
  • A single dose or a few weeks
Version 1.6
Pile of whole cacao beans

As if an eye had fallen

Guanaja, off Honduras, 1502. A great trading canoe meets Columbus's last fleet.1, 2

The Admiral's brother Bartholomew had gone ashore with two boats when, by luck, the canoe arrived. It was as long as a galley and eight feet wide, cut from a single tree, with a palm-leaf awning amidships like the cabins on Venetian gondolas. Under it, out of the rain, sat the women and children with the cargo. Twenty-five men worked the canoe, and not one of them dared to fight the boats that came after it.1

Columbus thanked God for this sample of everything in that land, won at a stroke and at no risk, and took his pick. Painted cotton blankets and sleeveless shirts. Wooden swords edged with flint that cut "as if they were steel". Copper hatchets. The canoe carried more. Copper bells and crucibles to melt the copper, a maize drink like English ale, and many of the almonds that the people of New Spain use for money.1

Ferdinand, the Admiral's son, was thirteen, and he watched the captives come aboard. Whenever one of the almonds fell, he wrote, "they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen." They had just been hauled out of their canoe as prisoners, among strangers "so strange and fierce" to them, Ferdinand admitted, and still they stooped.1, 2

Columbus gave them back their canoe, with some goods in exchange for what he had taken. He kept one old man, Giumbe, as his guide. From that canoe he heard of rich, polished and hard-working peoples to the west. He chose not to go there. He turned east, to look for a strait to the lands of spices.1

The almonds were cacao beans. To the west they were small change, and ground and frothed they made a drink for lords.1, 2, 3, 9

The pot that said cacao

Cacao was a drink for the dead long before any Spaniard tasted it. Around AD 480 the Maya of Río Azul, in Guatemala, buried an aristocratic man in a tomb cut into the bedrock beneath a funeral temple. Pots of cacao went into tombs to feed the dead in the afterlife, and in his stood a round jar with glyphs on its lid. It still held the powdery remains of a drink.4

Archaeologists sent residues from his pots to two chemists at the chocolate maker Hershey. Some held theobromine and caffeine, the chemical signature of cacao.5

On the team was David Stuart, an epigrapher who at eighteen became the youngest person ever given a MacArthur fellowship. They read two of the glyphs on the jar as the Maya word for cacao. The pot said what it held, and the chemistry agreed.5, 6

The oldest trace of all lies far to the south. At Santa Ana-La Florida, in the upper Amazon of south-east Ecuador, people were using cacao some 5,300 years ago. Its starch, theobromine and DNA survive at the site.7

Money you could drink

Peter Martyr, an Italian scholar at the Spanish court, never crossed the ocean. In 1523 he explained the cacao money to the Pope. The beans served twice, as coins and as "a truly royal drink".3, 8

"O blessed money," he went on, which gives the human race a delightful drink and saves its owners from avarice, "for it cannot be piled up, or hoarded for a long time."3

The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo kept a house in León in Nicaragua and wrote down the prices. A rabbit cost ten beans. A slave cost about a hundred. The women who sold themselves charged eight or ten.9

Where there is money there are forgers. Some peeled the thin skin off a bean, stuffed it with earth and closed it so finely that only a finger run over each bean could tell.9 In Mexico the friar Bernardino de Sahagún described the bad cacao seller. He toasted his beans and soaked them to make them look plump, rolled them in clay, and filled empty husks with black dough, black wax, or rounded chips of avocado stone.10

Only lords drank it, Oviedo wrote, because for anyone else it meant swallowing money.9 They reddened it with achiote so that it looked like blood, and the froth left on a drinker's lips looked like his own. Drink it on an empty stomach, the Nicaraguans told him, and no snake could kill you that day.9

The cacao trees grew in the shade of taller trees that the Spaniards called black wood, planted to keep the sun from scorching the crop. Oviedo once pulled down a temple outside León, to end its rites, and built a stable for his horses from its black-wood posts.9

Fifty jugs at Moctezuma's table

In November 1519 Hernán Cortés and his soldiers entered Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, and stayed for months, first as Moctezuma's guests and then as his jailers.11 Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of those soldiers, set it all down nearly fifty years later.12

The emperor ate behind a gilded wooden screen, so that nobody would see him eat. Four beautiful women brought water for his hands. Four old lords stood beside him, and he gave each a dish, which they ate standing, without once looking at his face. Hunchbacked jesters played the fool.12

"From time to time they brought him, in cups of fine gold, a drink made from cacao," Díaz remembered. "They said it was for going with women, and at the time we paid it no heed. What I did see was that they brought over fifty great jugs of good cacao with its froth, and he drank of it."12 When he had finished, his guard and household ate, and more than two thousand jugs of frothing cacao went out with the food.12

Not every cup was a pleasure. In the 1570s the friar Diego Durán wrote down how the merchants of Cholula used to buy a flawless slave forty days before Quetzalcoatl's feast and dress him as the god. By day he danced and sang through the streets, and women and children came out to greet him. At night he was shut in a cage.13

Nine days before the feast, two old priests told him he would die. If he grew sad and stopped dancing, they washed the human blood off the sacrificial knives, mixed a gourd of cacao with that water and gave it to him. It left him with no memory of the warning, people said, and he went back to dancing. They called it itzpacalatl, knife-washing water. At midnight his heart was offered to the moon, and at dawn the merchants feasted on his body.13

Beware the chocolate of Chiapa

By the 1620s, when the English friar Thomas Gage was in Chiapa, the ladies of the city said their stomachs were too weak to last through Mass without a cup of hot chocolate and a bite of sweetmeats. Their maids brought the cups to church in the middle of the sermon.14

Bishop Bernardino de Salazar warned them, then posted an excommunication on the church doors against eating or drinking in church. One day it ended in uproar, with swords drawn against the priests who tried to take the cups from the maids. The ladies moved to the convent churches. When he ordered them back to the cathedral on pain of excommunication, they stayed at home for a whole month.14, 15

Then the bishop fell ill. He asked to be moved to the Dominican cloister, and the doctors agreed he had been poisoned. He lay there a week at most. When he died, his body swelled until the skin broke at a touch.14

People said that a lady "somewhat too familiar with one of the Bishop's Pages" had the page give him a poisoned cup of chocolate. Gage knew her. He taught her son Latin, and she sent him boxes of chocolate. He heard her say that few grieved for him, and that the chocolate the bishop drank at home "had not agreed with his body".14

"Beware of the Chocolatte of Chiapa" became a saying in that country. After that Gage would drink it only in houses where he trusted the whole family.14

A farthing in Birmingham

In 1905 the journalist Henry Nevinson reached the western edge of Angola's Hungry Country, where slave drivers untied their captives because no one could walk back across it alive. The trees were hung with shackles, and the path was strewn with dead men's bones.16

On the road to the coast he met a woman of about twenty, taken from her husband and three children and sold for twenty cartridges. She marched on with a gang of "voluntary laborers" bound for the ship to São Tomé.16 Nevinson wrote that the Portuguese islands of São Tomé and Príncipe had become some of the most profitable land on earth, so that "England and America can get their chocolate and cocoa cheap."16

At a model plantation on São Tomé, the visiting doctor told him twelve or fourteen in every hundred workers there died each year. The chief cause, he said, was anaemia. And the cause of the anaemia? "Unhappiness." On Príncipe, one in five died in 1901.16

Cadbury, the Quaker chocolate firm in Birmingham, bought much of its cocoa from São Tomé.17 William Cadbury went to Africa to see for himself in 1908, and by 1909 the leading English cocoa makers had stopped buying it.18 The London Standard had accused the Cadburys of knowing the cocoa was slave-grown, and they sued for libel.17, 19

On 6 December 1909, in Birmingham, they won. The court put the harm at one farthing, a quarter of a penny.19 The São Tomé cocoa had already found other buyers. It went to America, cheaper.18

Food of the gods

In 1753 Carl Linnaeus gave the tree its grand name, Theobroma cacao, from the Greek for "food of the gods".20

In 1842 Alexander Voskresensky, a Russian chemist and a poor priest's son from Torzhok, went looking for caffeine in cocoa beans, because they had its faint bitterness and the stirring power of coffee. He found "no caffeine, but a peculiar substance, which I will call theobromine." His pupil Dmitri Mendeleev called him a grandfather of Russian chemistry.21, 22

Stuck in a hotel room in Kathmandu with nothing else to do, the New York doctor Franz Messerli plotted chocolate eaten per head in 23 countries against Nobel prizes per head. "I could not believe my eyes," he said. The more chocolate, the more prizes. Sweden won 32 where its chocolate predicted 14, so either the Nobel committee favoured its own or the Swedes were "particularly sensitive to chocolate".23, 24

He published it in 2012, declared his daily chocolate as a conflict of interest, and called the whole thing "a complete nonsense correlation."23

Fifty cups a day

In 2016 a food website told readers that Moctezuma "is said to have downed up to 50 goblets of chocolate a day, to keep up with the demands of his ever-growing harem."25

Go back to Díaz and the story comes apart. He saw over fifty great jugs brought to the emperor's meals, and Moctezuma drank "of it". The talk of women belongs to the gold cups, and the soldiers paid it no heed.12

In 1843 the fifty jugs became the emperor's own. The American historian William Prescott, working from Díaz, wrote of "no less than fifty jars or pitchers being prepared for his own daily consumption!" From there to fifty cups a day was a short step, and the harem came along for the ride.26

Today cacao is studied as cocoa, dark chocolate and flavanol extracts, mostly for the heart and blood vessels, blood pressure and blood sugar. What the trials found is in the Research tab.27

At Guanaja, prisoners in a strange ship stooped for one dropped bean as if it were an eye. Columbus let their canoe go and sailed east, away from the beans. Everyone else, in the end, went after them.

See what modern trials found

Myths and facts

In the record, or legend?

Every story you will read about this plant, checked against the oldest source we could find.

  • Moctezuma drank fifty cups of chocolate a day for his harem

    Partly

    Bernal Díaz saw over fifty jugs brought to his meals. The emperor drank "of it", women served him, and the jugs went on to his jesters. The talk of women was hearsay, attached to the gold cups, though Díaz and Prescott both say he kept many women. Gómara, in 1552, has three thousand jugs of drink for the guard and no fifty. Prescott, in 1843, is the first we found to make the fifty "his own daily consumption"12, 25, 26, 28

  • Cacao beans were money

    In the record

    Ferdinand Columbus in 1502, Peter Martyr in 1523, Oviedo's Nicaraguan prices and Sahagún's forged beans1, 3, 9, 10

  • The 1502 canoe carried cacao

    In the record

    Ferdinand Columbus, aged thirteen, saw the traders' "almonds", which he says the people of New Spain use for money, and saw how the captives prized them. He wrote in Spanish before he died in 1539, and the book was printed in an Italian translation in 1571. Historians read the almonds as cacao beans1, 2

  • Columbus took cacao beans home to the king, who ignored them

    Told, not shown

    Repeated by popular histories. Ferdinand's account says the canoe was given back and mentions the beans only as the traders' money. We found no record of beans reaching Spain from this voyage1, 29

  • Cacao was first domesticated in Mexico and Central America

    Legend

    It was long the traditional view. The oldest cacao use found so far is in Ecuador, about 5,300 years ago, and the tree's genes are most varied in the upper Amazon, which the finders call the oldest centre of cacao domestication yet identified. The chocolate drink and the bean money are Mesoamerican7

  • The Río Azul jar held cacao

    In the record

    Its residue held theobromine and caffeine, and its glyphs are read as "cacao"4, 5

  • The Aztecs drank chocolate as a love potion

    Told, not shown

    Díaz reports it as something people said, and says the soldiers paid it no heed. In 1765 a Linnaeus dissertation gave the credit to vanilla12, 30

  • A victim was given cacao before sacrifice to make him forget

    Told, not shown

    Durán, writing in the 1570s from what people told him, describes the knife-washing drink for one feast. Its effect is what "they say"13

  • A Chiapa bishop was poisoned with chocolate

    Told, not shown

    Gage reports the doctors' verdict of poison and the town's talk of a chocolate cup. Nobody was shown to have done it14

  • Cadbury won its 1909 libel case

    In the record

    It won, and the damages were one farthing, "contemptuous damages"17, 19

  • Eating chocolate wins Nobel prizes

    Legend

    The 2012 graph was real, and its author called it "a complete nonsense correlation"23

In the record means a source from the time, or a scholar quoting one, says it. Likely means a named expert's reasoned identification. Told, not shown means one interested party says it and nothing checks it. Partly means a real event sits under a bigger story. Legend means the earliest source is far too late or missing. Wrong date means the event is real but the popular date doesn't match the record.

Notes

Every fact in the story points to one of these. Where a translation is ours, the note says so.

Show all 30 notes Hide the notes
  1. Ferdinand Columbus (Fernando Colón), Historie del S. D. Fernando Colombo; nelle quali s'ha particolare, & vera relatione della vita, & de' fatti dell'Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre, translated into Italian by Alfonso Ulloa (Venice: Francesco de' Franceschi, 1571), ch. 89, ff. 199v-201r, and ch. 90, f. 201r, https://archive.org/details/historiedelsdfer00coln . Folio numbers read off the page images (the scan's text layer reads folio 200 as "100"). Translation ours. Ch. 89 ("Come l'Ammiraglio partì dalla Spagnuola seguendo il suo viaggio, & scoprì le Isole de' Guanazi"): at "l'Isola di Guanaia" the Admiral ordered "al Prefetto D. Bartolomeo Colombo, suo fratello, che andasse in terra con due barche"; "volle la sua buona sorte, che vi capitasse allhora vna Canoa tanto lunga, come vna galea, & larga VIII piedi, tutta di vn legno solo" (as his good luck would have it, a canoe arrived just then, as long as a galley and eight feet wide, all of a single piece of wood), "venia carica di mercantie dalle parti Occidentali verso la nuova Spagna" (coming loaded with merchandise from the western parts, towards New Spain); amidships "vn volto fatto di foglie di palma, non diverso da quelli, che portano in Vinegia le gondole, & da' Vinitiani son detti felzi" (an awning of palm leaves, not unlike those the gondolas carry in Venice, which the Venetians call felzi), which kept rain and storm off whatever was under it; "Sotto questo volto stauano i figliuoli, & le donne, & tutte le bagaglie, & la mercatantia, & gli huomini, che il legno guidauano, ancor che fossero XXV: i quali non hebbero animo di difendersi contra le barche, che li seguirono" (under this awning were the children and the women and all the baggage and the merchandise, and the men who steered the boat, though there were twenty-five of them, who had not the courage to defend themselves against the boats that followed them). The Admiral "rese molte gratie a Dio, vedendo egli, che in vn'istante, & senza fatica, ne pericolo de' suoi gli piacea dargli mostra di tutte le cose di quella terra" (gave many thanks to God, seeing that in an instant, without toil or danger to his men, He was pleased to give him a sample of all the things of that land). The Admiral ordered taken "quel, che a lui parue esser di maggior vista, & prezzo" (what seemed to him the finest and most valuable): "coperte, & camiciuole di bambagia senza maniche, lauorate, & dipinte di diuersi colori" (blankets and sleeveless cotton shirts, worked and painted in different colours); loincloths; sheets the women wrapped themselves in "come sogliono coprirsi le More di Granata" (as the Moorish women of Granada do); "spade di legno lunghe con vn canale da ogni banda de' fili, ne' quali erano attaccati con filo, & pece rasoi, fatti di pietra focaia, che fra huomini nudi tagliano, come se fossero d'acciaio" (long wooden swords with a groove along each edge, in which razors of flint were fixed with thread and pitch, which among naked men cut as if they were of steel); and hatchets for cutting wood "di buon rame" (of good copper). What the traders carried follows (f. 200r, page image): "& pur di quel metallo portauano sonagli ... con crisoli, per fonderlo" (and of the same metal they carried bells, with crucibles to melt it); "& per loro vettouaglie portauano delle radici, & grano" (and for their provisions they carried roots and grain), "vn certo vino fatto di Maiz, che è simile alla Ceruosa d'Inghilterra" (a kind of wine made of maize, like the ale of England), "& molte di quelle mandorle, che hanno quelli della nuoua Spagna per moneta" (and many of those almonds which the people of New Spain have for money). Ferdinand does not say the almonds were taken. F. 200v: "io notai, che cadendo alcuna di queste mandorle, subito si piegauano tutti a pigliarla, come se lor fosse caduto vn occhio" (I noticed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped at once to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen), at a time when "ancor di se stessi non potessero ricordarsi, vedendosi trar prigioni dalla lor Canoa nella naue fra gente così strana, & feroce, come siamo noi, rispetto a loro" (they seemed unable even to remember themselves, seeing themselves taken as prisoners out of their canoe into the ship, among people as strange and fierce as we are compared with them); he puts it down to human avarice. The Admiral treated them well, "a restituir loro la Canoa, & dare alcune cose loro in cambio di quelle, che per mostre eran loro state tolte" (gave them back the canoe and gave them some things in exchange for those taken from them as samples), and kept only "vn vecchio, chiamato Giumbe" as guide and interpreter, whom he later sent home "molto contento" (well content) with gifts (f. 201r). Ch. 90, f. 201r: though "da quella Canoa l'Ammiraglio intendesse delle gran ricchezze, & della ciuiltà, & industria, ch'era ne' popoli delle parti Occidentali della nuoua Spagna" (from that canoe the Admiral heard of the great riches, civility and industry of the peoples of the western parts of New Spain), "non vi volle andare", and followed his plan to find the strait through the mainland "per scoprir le terre delle specierie" (to discover the lands of spices), turning east. Ferdinand wrote in Spanish; the book was first printed in Ulloa's Italian translation (note 2). ↩
  2. Wikipedia, "Bartholomew Columbus", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartholomew_Columbus : "On 30 July 1502, Bartholomew and Christopher arrived at Guanaja, one of the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras"; the canoe "was a Maya trading vessel from Yucatán"; "This was the first recorded contact between Europeans and the Maya" (citing Sharer and Traxler, The Ancient Maya, 2006, p. 758). Wikipedia, "Ferdinand Columbus": born 15 August 1488, so he was thirteen in summer 1502; died 1539; he "wrote a biography of his father in Spanish that was translated into Italian" by Alfonso de Ulloa and published in Venice, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Columbus . I. Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (2nd ed., Cambridge, 2003), ch. 1, p. 3, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ambivalent-conquests/explorers/FBE8FAE204B17232992194C77DCCB64E : "In 1502, on his fourth and final voyage, Christopher Columbus happened upon a great trading canoe just off the coast of Honduras. It was 'long as a galley', as Ferdinand, the Admiral's thirteen-year-old son recalled"; "It was only when some cacao beans were allowed to spill from their containers in the course of the looting that they momentarily forgot their fear, scrambling to retrieve them 'as if they were their eyes'". The fleet's date at Guanaja comes from later reconstructions, not from Ferdinand's chapter. ↩
  3. Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, Fifth Decade, Book 4, in F. A. MacNutt (trans.), De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr d'Anghera, vol. 2 (New York and London, 1912), pp. 111-112 (read off the page images), https://archive.org/details/deorbenovoeightd02angh : "it is the fruit of certain trees resembling almonds, that is used by the natives as currency. These fruits are doubly useful, as they serve as money, and from the beans a beverage is made"; stirred in water "until it produces a truly royal drink. O blessed money, which not only gives to the human race a useful and delightful drink, but also prevents its possessors from yielding to infernal avarice, for it cannot be piled up, or hoarded for a long time." The Decade is addressed to the Pope ("Your Beatitude"), who, Martyr says, "already knows" of the money "because I have elsewhere written about it" (end of Book 3, p. 111), and "Before leaving Spain" was "already acquainted with these hitherto unknown particulars concerning the money" (p. 112). Book 1 is headed to Adrian VI, who "died before receiving it", and Martyr passed the Decade to Clement VII (pp. 57-58). ↩
  4. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship (exhibition, 2005), "Feasting" gallery, https://www.mesoweb.com/lords/feasting.html and https://www.mesoweb.com/lords/feasting06.html : "Vessels filled with cacao also were placed in tombs to provide sustenance for the deceased in the afterlife. The vessel depicted here was found in the burial of an aristocratic man at Río Azul. This tomb was dug into bedrock underlying the platform that supported an early funerary temple perhaps associated with Río Azul's tenth ruler"; "Lidded Vessel and Stand ... Tomb 19, Structure C-1, Rio Azul, Guatemala, AD 480, Ceramic with stucco and slip, 35 x 17 cm, Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala City"; "This globular lidded vessel has a hieroglyphic text stating that it was for cacao (see first glyph on lid), and the vessel itself contained powdery residue of a cacao beverage." ↩
  5. G. D. Hall, S. M. Tarka Jr., W. J. Hurst, D. Stuart and R. E. W. Adams, "Cacao Residues in Ancient Maya Vessels from Rio Azul, Guatemala", American Antiquity 55 (1990): 138-143, abstract, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/abs/cacao-residues-in-ancient-maya-vessels-from-rio-azul-guatemala/941ABB5996FA30C84EAED017E010B738 : residues from vessels "found in an Early Classic period Maya tomb ... contained theobromine and caffeine, a clear indication that the corresponding vessels once contained cacao in some form. One of the vessels yielding cacao residues is decorated with hieroglyphs, two of which we believe have the phonetic values for the word 'cacao' in the Mayan language." Tarka and Hurst are listed at the "Hershey Food Corporation Technical Center, P.O. Box 805, Hershey, PA", Stuart at Vanderbilt University. The abstract reports "chemical analyses" and lists Tarka and Hurst at Hershey's technical centre; it does not say who ran the analyses, so "two chemists at Hershey" is our reading of the author list. The abstract says only that the residues were "collected from ceramic vessels found in an Early Classic period Maya tomb"; Hall is listed at the "Department of Anthropology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University" and Adams at the University of Texas at San Antonio, so "archaeologists sent" is our reading of the author list too. The full paper is paywalled and we read the abstract and author list only. The tomb investigations are reported in G. D. Hall, "Results of Tomb Investigations at Rio Azul, Season of 1984", in Rio Azul Reports Number 2, The 1984 Season, ed. R. E. W. Adams (San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, University of Texas, 1986), pp. 69-110 (from the paper's reference list), which we did not see. ↩
  6. Wikipedia, "David Stuart (Mayanist)": born 1965; "He is the youngest person ever to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, at age 18"; the fellowship came in 1984, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Stuart_(Mayanist) . ↩
  7. S. Zarrillo, N. Gaikwad, C. Lanaud et al., "The use and domestication of Theobroma cacao during the mid-Holocene in the upper Amazon", Nature Ecology & Evolution 2 (2018): 1879-1888, abstract, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0697-x (free abstract on PubMed, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30374172/ ): "Traditionally, cacao is thought to have been first domesticated in Mesoamerica. However, genomic research shows that T. cacao's greatest diversity is in the upper Amazon region of northwest South America, pointing to this region as its centre of origin"; "cacao starch grains, absorbed theobromine residues and ancient DNA, dating from approximately 5,300 years ago recovered from the Santa Ana-La Florida (SALF) site in southeast Ecuador ... the earliest evidence of T. cacao use in the Americas"; "the upper Amazon region as the oldest centre of cacao domestication yet identified." ↩
  8. Wikipedia, "Peter Martyr d'Anghiera", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Martyr_d%27Anghiera : Pietro Martire d'Anghiera (1457-1526), at the Spanish court, where after 1492 "Martyr's chief task was the education of young nobles at the Spanish court"; the Decades "consisted of ten reports, two of which Martyr had previously sent as letters describing the voyages of Columbus" to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza; he wrote some eight hundred letters "addressed to various illustrious persons"; "The fifth Decade (1523) dealt with the conquest of Mexico"; made abbot of Jamaica, "Although Martyr never visited the island". The Fifth Decade's "Your Beatitude" is the Pope. University of Miami Libraries, Helen Carmichael Purdy Foundation collection, "Martyr, Peter", https://scholar.library.miami.edu/purdy/martyr.html : "Though Martyr never traveled to the Indies, all of the information that he imparts on the subject was derived from documents he examined, including interviews of explorers and sea captains who had returned from the area." ↩
  9. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias, Book 8, ch. 30, ed. J. Amador de los Ríos, vol. 1 (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851), pp. 316-318 (page numbers read off the page images), https://archive.org/details/historiageneraly01fern . Translation ours. The 1535 printing promised this matter for a later part ("se dirá en la ii parte"); the chapter comes from Oviedo's expanded manuscript, first printed in 1851. P. 316: the beans are held "en el mismo prescio é estimación que los chripstianos ... tienen el oro é la moneda"; "en aquella provincia de Nicaragua, un conejo vale diez almendras destas, é por quatro almendras dan ocho pomas ó nísperos ... y un esclavo vale ciento, é mas ó menos almendras destas, segund es la pieça ó la voluntad de los contrayentes se conciertan" (in that province of Nicaragua a rabbit is worth ten of these almonds, and for four almonds they give eight medlars ... and a slave is worth a hundred, more or less, as the piece is or as the parties agree); women "que dan por prescio sus cuerpos" charge "por una carrera ocho ó diez almendras" (eight or ten almonds a time); the fraud, "quitándoles aquella coriccica ó cascara ... é hinchándolas de tierra ó de otra cosa, é cierran aquel hollejo tan sotilmente que no se conosce" (taking off the little skin, filling them with earth or something else, and closing the skin so finely it can't be seen), found out by passing them one by one under "el dedo (index)". P. 317: "no lo usan sino los poderosos ... porque la gente común no osa ni puede usar con su gula ó paladar tal bevraje; porque no es mas que empobreçer adrede é tragarse la moneda ó echalla en donde se pierda" (only the powerful use it ... because the common people neither dare nor can indulge their greed or palate with such a drink, for it is nothing but making oneself poor on purpose and swallowing money or throwing it away); the shade trees, which the Indians call yaguaguyt "é los chripstianos de la madera negra", planted because "algunos años el sol los suele abuchornar é escaldar" (some years the sun scorches them); "Yo deshiçe una casa de sacrifiçios en Nicaragua, un quarto de legua ó menos fuera de la cibdad de Leon ... é por quitarlos de aquellos ritos é sacrifiçios ... é hiçe llevar á Leon los postes de la madera, que todos eran desta que he dicho de la negra, é hiçe en mi casa una caballeriza para mis caballos" (I pulled down a house of sacrifices in Nicaragua, a quarter league or less outside the city of León ... to take them away from those rites ... and had the wooden posts, all of this black wood, carried to León, and made a stable for my horses in my house). P. 318: they add bixa (achiote) "para que este bevraje parezca sangre" (so that this drink looks like blood); the paste smeared "por los carrillos é barba é sobre las nariçes", sucked off "poco á poco con el dedo"; "diçen los indios quel que ha bebido el cacao en ayunas, que aunque aquel dia le pique alguna víbora ó culebra venenosa ... que ningun peligro de muerte corre" (the Indians say that whoever has drunk cacao fasting runs no danger of death that day, even if a viper or poisonous snake bites him); red froth on the lips "paresçia sangre propria" (looked like their own blood). Oviedo also gives his own explanation for the red colouring, that "aquella gente es amiga de beber sangre humana" (that people is fond of drinking human blood); the story leaves out his slur. His house at León is the one in the stable passage (p. 317). ↩
  10. Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, Book 10, ch. 18, "De los que venden cacao, maíz y frisoles", ed. C. M. de Bustamante, vol. 3 (Mexico, 1829), pp. 43-44 (p. 44 read off the page image), https://archive.org/details/historiagenerald03saha . Translation ours. "El mal tratante, vende las falsas porque las cuece, y aun las tuesta para que parezcan buenas, y á las veces échalas en la agua para que parezcan gordas ... después las envuelve con greda, ó con tierra húmeda"; "en las cáscaras de las almendras, mete una masa negra, ó cera negra, que parece ser semejante al meollo de ellas, y algunas veces los huesos de ahuacetes los hacen pedazos, y redondéanlos, y así redondeados los meten en las cáscaras vacías" (the bad dealer sells false ones, because he cooks them and even toasts them so they look good, and sometimes puts them in water so they look fat ... then coats them with clay or wet earth; into the husks he puts a black dough or black wax that looks like the kernel, and sometimes they break avocado stones into pieces, round them, and put them into the empty husks). Sahagún compiled the work with Nahua informants from the 1540s to the 1570s; we read the Spanish text, not the Nahuatl. ↩
  11. W. H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843; Montezuma edition, ed. J. F. Kirk, 1904), vol. 2, Project Gutenberg #59820, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59820 . Book 3, ch. 9: the Spaniards entered the capital on "the eighth of November, 1519". Book 4, ch. 3, "Anxiety of Cortés, seizure of Montezuma": Cortés took the emperor to "the Spanish quarters" and kept him there. ↩
  12. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, ch. 91 (finished in 1568, first printed Madrid, 1632), f. 67r of the 1632 edition, https://archive.org/details/historiaverdader00dazd ; and in G. García's edition of the Guatemala manuscript, vol. 1 (Mexico, 1904), pp. 280-281 (page numbers read off the page images), https://archive.org/details/historiaverdade04castgoog . Translation ours. "Finished in 1568, almost fifty years after the events it described": Wikipedia, "Bernal Díaz del Castillo", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_D%C3%ADaz_del_Castillo . García, p. 280: they set before him "vna como puerta de madera muy pintada de oro porque no le viesen Comer" (a sort of wooden door painted all over with gold, so that they should not see him eat); "quatro mugeres muy hermosas, E linpias, le davan agua a manos"; four "grandes señores biejos" stood by him and he gave each a dish, which they ate "en pie E con mucho acato, y todo sin miralle a la cara"; "trayan En vnas como a manera de copas de oro fino con çierta bevida hecha del mismo cacao dezian q era para tener açeso con mugeres y entonçes no miravamos En ello, mas lo que yo vi, que trayan sobre çinquenta jarros grandes hechos de buen cacao, Con su espuma, y de aquello bevia y las mugeres le servian al bever" (they brought, in cups like goblets of fine gold, a certain drink made of cacao itself; they said it was for having access to women, and at the time we paid no attention to that; but what I saw was that they brought over fifty large jugs made of good cacao with its froth, and of that he drank, and the women served him the drink); then "yndios corcobados, muy feos", jesters and buffoons. P. 281: after he had eaten, his guard and household servants ate, "sobre mill platos" and "jarros de cacao, con su espuma, como entre mexicanos se haze mas de dos mill" (jugs of cacao with its froth, as the Mexicans make it, more than two thousand). The 1632 text, f. 67r, has the same words ("dezian era para tener accesso con mugeres: y entonces no mirauamos en ello"). Our "From time to time" follows the 1632 punctuation ("y de quando en quando traian vnas como copas de oro fino"); García's text ends the sentence before with "de quando En quando" (he ate little fruit, "from time to time"). The same sentence goes on "y las mugeres le servian al bever" (and the women served him the drink); after the meal Moctezuma had "los rrelieves y jarros del cacao" (the leftovers and the jugs of cacao) given to the jesters and dancers (p. 281), and Díaz introduces the household's thousand dishes and two thousand jugs with "me paresçe" (it seems to me). Earlier in the chapter (p. 278) Moctezuma "tenia muchas mugeres por amigas" (had many women as mistresses) besides two lawful wives. A. P. Maudslay's English translation (The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, vol. 2, Hakluyt Society, 1910, p. 63, https://archive.org/details/truehistoryofcon0002bern ) gives "which they said he took when he was going to visit his wives, and at the time he took no heed of it", which turns "we paid no heed" into "he took no heed". ↩
  13. Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas de Tierra Firme, vol. 2 (Mexico: Escalante, 1880), ch. 84 (the chapter on Quetzalcoatl, god of the Cholultecas, in the Book of the Gods and Rites), pp. 120-121 (p. 121 read off the page image), https://archive.org/details/historiadelasind02dur . Translation ours. P. 120: the feast fell "a tres de Febrero"; "quarenta días antes deste dia los mercaderes conprauan un yndio sano de pies y manos sin macula ni señal ninguna" (forty days before, the merchants bought a man sound of hand and foot, without blemish or mark), purified him and dressed him as the idol; "Tanbien lo enjaulauan de noche porque no se les uyese" (they also caged him at night so he would not escape); by day he went "cantando y baylando por toda" the city, and "salían de las cassas las mugeres y niños a le saludar"; "Nueve días antes ... venían ante el dos biejos muy benerables" who told him that in nine days his dancing and singing would end "y sepa que ha de morir". P. 121: if he grew sad and "ya no baylaba con aquel contento que solia" (no longer danced with the joy he used to), "luego yban y tomauan las nauajas de sacrificar y lauabanles aquella sangre humana questaba en ellas pegada de los sacrificios pasados y con aquellas lauaças haciánle una xicara de cacao y davansela a beber la qual bebida dicen que haçia tal operacion en el que quedaua sin ninguna memoria de lo que le habían dicho ... y que luego bolvia al ordinario contento y bayle" (they took the sacrificial knives and washed off the human blood still stuck to them from past sacrifices, and with those washings made him a gourd of cacao and gave it him to drink; this drink, they say, worked on him so that he kept no memory of what he had been told ... and went back to his usual contentment and dancing); "llamauan (ytzpacalatl) que quiere deçir lauaças de cuchillo" (they called it itzpacalatl, which means knife-washings); "a media noche" he was sacrificed, "haçiendo ofrenda de su coraçon a la luna", the body thrown down the steps, then cooked "en diferentes manjares para en amaneciendo" for the merchants' banquet. Durán wrote the Book of the Gods and Rites in 1574-1576 (Wikipedia, "Diego Durán", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Dur%C3%A1n ), half a century after the conquest, from what Nahua informants and old conquerors told him. ↩
  14. Thomas Gage, The English-American his Travail by Sea and Land: or, A New Survey of the West-India's (London, 1648), ch. 15, pp. 102-104 (p. 103 read off the page image), https://archive.org/details/graff_1470 . P. 102: "Don Bernardino de Salazar was the Bishop of this City in my time"; the women "pretend much weaknesse and squeamishnesse of stomack", so that they cannot stay in church while Mass "is briefly hudled over, much lesse while a solemn high Masse ... is sung, and a Sermon preached, unlesse they drinke a cup of hot Chocolatte, and eat a bit of sweet-meats"; "it was much used by them to make their maids bring to them to Church in the middle of Masse or Sermon a cup of Chocolatte". P. 103: having "given faire warning", the bishop "thought fit to fixe in writing upon the Churches dores an excommunication against all such as should presume at the time of service to eat or drinke within the Church"; "such an uproare in the Cathedrall, that many swords were drawne against the Preists and Prebends, who attempted to take away from the maids the cups of Chocolatte"; most of the city went to "the Cloister Churches"; the bishop set up "another excommunication", "which the women would not obey, but kept their houses for a whole month"; he "fell dangerously sick", retired "to the Cloister of the Dominicans", "Physitians were sent for far and neere, who all with a joynt opinion agreed that the Bishop was poisoned; and he himself doubted not of it at his death"; "He lay not above a week in the Cloister, and as soone as he was dead, all his body, his head and face did so swell, that the least touch upon any part of him caused the skin to break"; "A Gentlewoman with whom I was well acquainted ... who was noted to be somewhat too familiar with one of the Bishops Pages, was commonly censured to have prescribed such a cup of Chocolatte to be ministred by the Page which poysoned him"; "My selfe heard this Gentlewoman say of the deceased Bishop, that she thought few grieved for his death ... and that she judged, he being such an enemy to Chocolatte in the Church, that which he had drunk at home in his house had not agreed with his body"; "it became afterwards a Proverbe in that Country, Beware of the Chocolatte of Chiapa; which made me so cautious, that I would not drinke afterwards of it in any house, where I had not very great satisfaction of the whole Family"; she "had often used to send me boxes of Chocolatte or conserves". P. 104: Gage took them as thanks "for the paines I tooke in teaching her son Latin". Gage, an English Dominican, sailed for New Spain in 1625 (his own text, ch. 1-2). ↩
  15. Catholic-Hierarchy, "Bishop Bernardino de Salazar y Frías", https://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bsalf.html : appointed bishop of Chiapas 25 October 1621, ordained bishop 15 October 1623, died 1626 ("Year Uncertain"). ↩
  16. H. W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (London and New York: Harper, 1906), Project Gutenberg #67530, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67530 . Preface: "my journey in the Portuguese province of Angola (West Central Africa), and in the Portuguese islands of San Thomé and Principe, during the years 1904, and 1905." Ch. 6, "The worst part of the slave route": at the Cuanza "most of the slaves, being driven down from the interior, are untied. It is safe to let them loose here ... behind them lies the long stretch of Hungry Country, which they could never get through alive if they tried to run back to their homes. So it is that the trees on the western edge of the Hungry Country bear shackles in profusion"; "That path is strewn with dead men's bones"; a messenger's news is dated "February (1905)". Ch. 8, "The slave route to the coast": "a beautiful woman of about twenty", who "had a husband and three children at home, but was seized by the men of another tribe and sold to a white man for twenty cartridges"; later she marched among "forty-three men and women ... a certain company's detachment of 'voluntary laborers' on their way to the head 'Emigration Agent' at Benguela and to the ship for San Thomé"; "Thus it is that the islands of San Thomé and Principe have been rendered about the most profitable bits of the earth's surface, and England and America can get their chocolate and cocoa cheap." Ch. 10, "Life of slaves on the islands": the plantation doctor, "The death-rate on this roça ... is twelve or fourteen per cent. a year among the serviçaes" (he was paying "his official visit" to a plantation "rightly regarded as a kind of model", with "four hundred slaves on the estate, not counting children"; the rate is for that roça, not the island); "'And what is the chief cause?' I asked. 'Anæmia,' he said ... 'what brings on anæmia?' 'Unhappiness [tristeza],' he said, frankly"; "on Principe 867 slaves died during 1901 ... a total death-rate of 20.67 per cent. per annum. In other words ... one in every five will be dead by the end of the year." Gutenberg's text has no page numbers. ↩
  17. Wikipedia, "Cadbury": "On 4 March 1824, John Cadbury, a Quaker, began selling tea, coffee and drinking chocolate in Bull Street in Birmingham", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadbury . Wikipedia, "Edward Carson", section "Cadbury Bros.", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Carson : São Tomé was "the Portuguese island colony from which Cadbury purchased most of the cocoa used in the production of their chocolate"; the Standard's articles alleged that the firm knew of "the slave labour conditions on São Tomé". The same section dates the action to 1908 and calls the paper the Evening Standard; the 1909 reports in notes 18 and 19 give the verdict as December 1909 and the paper as the London Standard. Kevin Grant and Lowell Satre have written full studies of the case, which we did not read. ↩
  18. "Englishmen say we are aiding slavery", Roswell Daily Record (Roswell, New Mexico), 7 October 1909, p. 1, Library of Congress, Chronicling America, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn86063823/1909-10-07/ed-1/?sp=1 (the Library of Congress site blocks automated link checks; we checked the page through its JSON service) : "Some months ago the leading English cocoa manufacturers declared that they would no longer purchase the cocoa produced by slave labor in the islands of San Thome and Principe. This decision was reached as a result of the investigations which the cocoa firms had been making for some years past, and especially of the personal visit of Mr. William A. Cadbury last year to Portuguese West Africa ... The effect of their action has been to drive the San Thome cocoa on to the American market at a cheaper rate". ↩
  19. "Awarded a farthing damages", The Daily Inter-Mountain (Elkins, West Virginia), 8 December 1909, p. 1, Chronicling America, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn86092279/1909-12-08/ed-1/?sp=1 (the Library of Congress site blocks automated link checks; we checked the page through its JSON service) : "Birmingham, England, Dec. — Damages of one farthing were granted here to the heirs of the late Richard Cadbury, the millionaire chocolate manufacturer in their suit for libel against the London Standard. The litigation grew out of charges relative to the use of alleged slave grown cocoa from the island of St. Thomas, a possession of Portugal on the west coast of Africa." The Sun (New York), 7 December 1909, p. 1, "One farthing for a libel", datelined "Birmingham, Dec. 6", https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1909-12-07/ed-1/?sp=1 (same site, same block). A farthing was a quarter of a penny. Wikipedia (note 17) calls the farthing "contemptuous damages". ↩
  20. C. Linnaeus, Species Plantarum 2 (Stockholm, 1753), p. 782, "THEOBROMA ... Cacao. 1. THEOBROMA foliis integerrimis", https://archive.org/details/mobot31753000802832 . The genus name already appears in his Hortus Cliffortianus (Amsterdam, 1737), index ("Theobroma. 379"), https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002856265 . Wikipedia, "Theobroma": "The generic name is derived from the Greek words θεός theos meaning 'god' and βρῶμα broma meaning 'food' translating to 'food of the gods'", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobroma . ↩
  21. A. Woskresensky, "Ueber das Theobromin", Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie 41 (1842): 125-127, https://doi.org/10.1002/jlac.18420410117 (the publisher's site blocks automated checks; free scan on Zenodo, https://zenodo.org/record/1426965 ). Translation ours. He looked for caffeine "in der Cacaobohne ..., deren schwach bitterer Geschmack vollkommen an das Bitter des Caffeins erinnert, und die auch die Haupteigenschaft des Caffees, die aufregende Kraft, besitzt" (in the cacao bean, whose faintly bitter taste is just like the bitterness of caffeine, and which also has the chief property of coffee, its stimulating power); he found "kein Caffein, sondern ein eigenthümlicher Körper, den ich Theobromin nennen will" (no caffeine, but a peculiar substance, which I will call theobromine). ↩
  22. Wikipedia, "Aleksandr Voskresensky", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Voskresensky : born 1808 in Torzhok, "to a family of a poor priest"; "Dmitri Mendeleev regarded him as a 'grandfather of Russian chemistry'"; his students included Mendeleev. ↩
  23. Reuters Health, "Eat chocolate, win the Nobel Prize?", Fox News, 11 October 2012, https://www.foxnews.com/health/eat-chocolate-win-the-nobel-prize : Franz Messerli "runs the hypertension program at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital in New York"; "He began with industry data on chocolate intake in 23 countries and a list from Wikipedia ranking countries according to the number of Nobel laureates per capita. 'I started plotting this in a hotel room in Kathmandu, because I had nothing else to do, and I could not believe my eyes'"; the Swiss lead, "closely followed by the Swedes and the Danes"; "unless you teach me otherwise it's a complete nonsense correlation"; "In the conflict of interest section of his article, Messerli, who is of Swiss origin, 'admits to daily chocolate consumption.'" The paper is F. H. Messerli, "Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates", New England Journal of Medicine 367 (2012): 1562-1564, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMon1211064 . The NEJM site blocks automated checks, so we read the paper through these news reports. ↩
  24. O. Nieburg, "Eating chocolate produces Nobel prize winners, says study", ConfectioneryNews, 11 October 2012, https://www.confectionerynews.com/Article/2012/10/11/Chocolate-creates-Nobel-prize-winners-says-study : "'Sweden should have produced 14 Nobel Laureates, yet we observe 32,' said Messerli"; "One cannot quite escape the notion that either the Nobel Committee in Stockholm has some inherent patriotic bias when assessing the candidates for these awards or, perhaps, that the Swedes are particularly sensitive to chocolate, and even minuscule amounts greatly enhance their cognition". ↩
  25. K. Jay, "The untold truth of chocolate", Mashed, 23 August 2016, https://mashed.com/22558/untold-truth-chocolate : "The Aztec ruler Montezuma is said to have downed up to 50 goblets of chocolate a day, to keep up with the demands of his ever-growing harem." Also T. Flight, "20 Downright Bizarre Details About the History of Chocolate", History Collection, 27 December 2018, item 11, "The Aztec emperor Montezuma II drank 50 cups of hot chocolate a day", https://historycollection.com/20-downright-bizarre-details-about-the-history-of-chocolate-that-we-love-to-sink-our-teeth-into/11/ . TheCollector (K. Jancuk) calls the fifty cups "likely an exaggeration based on" Díaz, https://www.thecollector.com/aztec-emperor-montezuma-life-death-facts/ . ↩
  26. W. H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, first edition, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1843), Book 4, ch. 1, p. 125 (title page and page read off the images), https://archive.org/details/prescottmexico02 : "The emperor took no other beverage than the chocolatl, a potation of chocolate, flavored with vanilla and other spices ... served in golden goblets ... The emperor was exceedingly fond of it, to judge from the quantity,—no less than fifty jars or pitchers being prepared for his own daily consumption! Two thousand more were allowed for that of his household." His footnote 39 quotes Díaz on the fifty jugs ("Lo que yo vi ... que traian sobre cincuenta jarros grandes hechos de buen cacao con su espuma, y de lo que bebia") and leaves out the line about women. The 1904 edition (note 11) reads "no less than fifty jars or pitchers--prepared for his own daily consumption." Díaz says nothing of vanilla. The same chapter of Prescott gives Moctezuma "as many wives as are found in the harem of an Eastern sultan". Of the sources we read, Prescott is the first to make the fifty the emperor's own, every day; Díaz describes them at his meals, with women serving and the jugs passed on to his jesters (note 12). We did not read Solís or Robertson; the reviewer checked vol. 1 of Clavijero's 1787 English edition and found no fifty jars. ↩
  27. Nooroots Ingredient Atlas, cacao, Research tab, /pages/cacao-research : the roasted seeds "eaten as cocoa and dark chocolate or taken as a flavanol extract, and studied mostly for the heart and blood vessels, blood pressure and blood sugar." ↩
  28. Francisco López de Gómara, Conquista de México (Zaragoza, 1552), the chapter on Moctezuma's person and service; Biblioteca histórica de la Iberia vol. 2 (Mexico: I. Escalante, 1870), vol. 1 of the work, pp. 220-222 (pp. 221-222 read off the page image), https://archive.org/details/conquistademxic00gmgoog . Translation ours. "Lo demás que sobraba comían tres mil de guarda ordinaria, que estaban en los patios y plaza; y por esto dicen que se traían siempre tres mil platos de manjar y tres mil jarros de bebida" (what was left was eaten by three thousand of the ordinary guard in the courtyards and square, and for this reason, they say, three thousand dishes of food and three thousand jugs of drink were always brought); "El beber no era con tanta ceremonia ni pompa"; some twenty of his women brought him water for his hands. The chapter does not name cacao or the women's drink. Gómara entered Cortés's service "as secretary and chaplain" after 1540 and "had in fact never been to the Americas": Wikipedia, "Francisco López de Gómara", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_L%C3%B3pez_de_G%C3%B3mara . ↩
  29. Exploratorium, "The History of Chocolate: Chocolate and the Spanish", https://annex.exploratorium.edu/exploring/exploring_chocolate/choc_2.html : "Columbus had his crew seize the vessel and its goods, and retained its skipper as his guide"; "While it is likely that Columbus brought the cacao beans he seized back to Europe, their potential value was initially overlooked by the Spanish King and his court." It dates the encounter to 15 August 1502. We did not read Columbus's own letter on the fourth voyage (1503) or Las Casas's account, so this verdict rests on Ferdinand's chapter. ↩
  30. C. Linnaeus (praeses) and A. Hoffman (respondent), Dissertatio medica inauguralis de potu chocolatae (Uppsala, defended 18 June 1765), section 6, https://archive.org/details/b31883771 . Translation ours. "Vanilla vero, quae Ambrosiaco odore longe praestat, cum nutriente Cacao combinata, illam effectu superat atque Chocolatae eximiam venerem stimulandi vim impertit, quam quidem in illa, quae absque Vanillis paratur, frustra quaerimus, quippe quae grata corpus exhilarandi careat virtute et non nisi merum praebeat alimentum" (but vanilla, far finer in its ambrosial scent, combined with nourishing cacao, outdoes it [salep root, praised in the sentence before] in effect, and gives chocolate an excellent power to stir desire, which we look for in vain in chocolate made without vanilla, since that lacks the pleasant power of cheering the body and gives nothing but mere nourishment). The title page names Hoffman as "Reg. Colleg. Med. Syndicus" and the thesis as submitted "pro summis in medicina honoribus obtinendis" (for the highest honours in medicine), with Linnaeus presiding. Who wrote Uppsala theses of this period, the presiding professor or the candidate, varies and is often unclear; the story says the thesis gave the credit, not Linnaeus. ↩