The _chaa_ is, of course, tea, dialect _t'eh_.
In 1599, "Sir" Antony (or Anthony) Sherley (1565-1630), a picturesque gentleman-adventurer, the first Englishman to mention coffee drinking in the Orient, sailed from Venice on a kind of self-appointed, informal Persian mission, to invite the shah to ally himself with the Christian princes against the Turks, and incidentally, to promote English trade interests in the East. The English government knew nothing of the arrangement, disavowed him, and forbade his return to England. However, the expedition got to Persia; and the account of the voyage thither was written by William Parry, one of the Sherley party, and was published in London in 1601. It is interesting because it contains the first printed reference to coffee in English employing the more modern form of the word. The original reference was photographed for this work in the Worth Library of the British Museum, and is reproduced herewith on page 39.
The passage is part of an account of the manners and customs of the Turks (who, Parry says, are "damned infidells") in Aleppo. It reads:
They sit at their meat (which is served to them upon the ground) as Tailers sit upon their stalls, crosse-legd; for the most part, passing the day in banqueting and carowsing, untill they surfet, drinking a certaine liquor, which they do call _Coffe_, which is made of seede much like mustard seede, which will soone intoxicate the braine like our Metheglin.[50]
Another early English reference to coffee, wherein the word is spelled "coffa", is in Captain John Smith's book of _Travels and Adventure_, published in 1603. He says of the Turks: "Their best drink is _coffa_ of a graine they call _coava_."
This is the same Captain John Smith who in 1607 became the founder of the Colony of Virginia and brought with him to America probably the earliest knowledge of the beverage given to the new Western world.
Samuel Purchas (1527-1626), an early English collector of travels, in _Purchas His Pilgrimes_, under the head of "Observations of William Finch, merchant, at Socotra" (Sokotra--an island in the Indian Ocean) in 1607, says of the Arab inhabitants:
Their best entertainment is a china dish of _Coho_, a blacke bitterish drinke, made of a berry like a bayberry, brought from Mecca, supped off hot, good for the head and stomache.[51]