Plants That Changed Our Lives: The Cacao Tree

A Taste of Money

- Martyn Baguley

On 15th August 1502, during his fourth visit to the ‘New World’, whilst exploring near an island off the coast of what is now called Honduras, Christopher Columbus encountered a native Mayan trader in a large canoe filled with a variety of goods including what the Spaniards thought looked like almonds (it’s said that Columbus thought they were goats’ excrement). In good conquistadorial fashion Columbus seized the canoe and took the contents on board his ship where the crew were puzzled by the importance the natives seemed to attach to the ‘almonds’. Later Columbus’ son Ferdinand wrote: ‘They seemed to hold these almonds at a great price; for when they were brought on board ship together with their goods, I observed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped to pick them up, as if an eye had fallen.’ The ‘almonds’ were cacao beans, the seeds of cacao trees.

Although Columbus is credited with bringing the first cacao beans back to Europe they were considered to be far less interesting than the other treasures on board his galleons. No-one could have guessed then that the humble beans would spawn a worldwide industry estimated to be worth some £40 billion today.

In 1753 the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus gave the cacao tree the botanical name Theobroma cacao; ‘Theobroma’ from the Greek for ‘food of the gods’, ‘cacao’ said to derive from the Aztec word ‘xocolatl’, ‘xococ’ meaning bitter,