And Pepys' First Cup of Tea The fourth centenary of the intro-Jduction of cocoa into Europe is to be celebrated this month by a conference of Empire producers either in central London or at the British Empire Exhibition. Following the conference, the British Empire Producers' Organization (3, Old Queen Street, S. W.) hopes to arrange meetings with foreign producers, manufacturers, and dealers, and Janyone interested in cacao production who will be in London in July la invited to communicate with them.
Of the three popular beverages, jcocon was introduced into Europe first. There is no reference to tea in European literature before 1588, and the appreciation of coffee as a beverage dates only from the seventeenth century. How long befor the discovery of America by Europeans cocoa was used in its native country it is hard to say. Tha soldiers of Cortez who landed in Mexico in 1519 first encountered it, there, and it was introduced into Spain about 1524.
Coffee, we know, was used in Abyssinia in the fifteenth century, and it was then stated that it boon used from time immemorial. Tea, according to Chinese legend, goes back to almost 3,000 years before Christ, and, if legend is a doubtful basis' of Nistory, it is at east certain that it was already a beverage as long ago as the Tang dynasty, which began in the seventh, To England the three beverages were introduced about the same time, the middle of the seventeenth century. London coffee-houses date from 1652. Five years later the Public Advertiser" announced that "In Bishopsgatestreet, in Queen's Head-alley, at a Frenchman's house, a.an excellent West India drink, cat: Jed chocolate, to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time, also unmade at reasonable rat Cocoa was brought from the West: Indies to' Bristol, and it is suggested that the large commercial interest dich Quakers have in the product nay perhaps be traced to this association, Bristol having for long eon one of the chief centres of Pepys drank his first cup of tea on September 25, 1660, but at least two years before this date it had come to London, for the "Mereurius Politicus" of September, 1658, contains the advertisement: "That. excellent, and by all physicians approved China drink called by Chineans Toba, by other nations Tay, alins tee, is sold at the Suitanese Head, a copheo house in Sweeting Rents by, the Royal Bxchange, London."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.