So in 1616, a Dutchman named Pieter van den Broecke, who had visited Mokha while working for the Dutch East India Company, successfully stole seedlings from Mokha and secreted them to Holland, where they were installed at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam. The seedlings took root in the garden, but the Dutch climate wasn’t right for large-scale cultivation of the plant. It wasn’t until 1658 that coffee was brought to the Dutch colony of Ceylon and later to Java, also a Dutch territory, where it thrived. Java soon became the primary supplier of coffee to Europe, and Mokha’s primacy waned.
