Nicolaes Witsen
As the fame of coffee grew across Europe, attempts to procure the elusive seeds from Yemen also increased. Around 1693, the mayor of Amsterdam and administrator of the Dutch East India Company — Nicolaes Witsen — used his connections in the Dutch East India Company trading outpost in Yemen to get hold of some fertile coffee beans. He had them sent to the island of Java (Indonesia), where the plants flourished. A single coffee plant was subsequently sent by ship from Java to Amsterdam. It was planted in the Botanical Garden of Amsterdam, where it also produced crops of beans, although the colder European climate did not lend itself to widespread production of coffee. Nevertheless, this gave European botanists a unique opportunity to study live coffee plants. A few decades later, in 1719, the first commercial coffee crop grown in a European colony was harvested in Java. It was the beginning of the end of the Mocha monopoly over this increasingly popular beverage.
Read more here: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/anh.2015.0283
