Аннотация:Spanish colony of Puerto Rico where he reported: We loaded what of the wood we could get there and sent express to the out bays near us, who returned for answer, that there was very little and so situated that we could not get at it either with ship or boats . . . we proceeded then to another design for we found neither wood nor mules, but a good deal of coffee.' Jamaicans were unlikely to buy Ash's coffee when he returned to Kingston because they produced enough of their own, yet he purchased between two and three thousand pounds, reasoning it could be resold in North America to offset the expense of his endeavor. A decade later many more merchants and ship captains were discovering, as Ash had learned, the lucrative potential of coffee trading. Demand for coffee in the United States grew rapidly after 1783, both as an article of home consumption and as one of the new nation's most profitable reexported commodities. The postrevolutionary coffee trade illustrates the importance of the West Indies to early American economic development and the increasingly international orientation of
