Mokha (), also spelled Mocha, or Mukha, is a port city on the Red Sea coast of Yemen. Until Aden and al Hudaydah eclipsed it in the 19th century, Mokha was the principal port for Yemen's capital, Sanaa. Long known for its coffee trade, the city gave its name to Mocha coffee.
Overview
Mocha was the major marketplace for many commodities, including, but not limited to coffee (Coffea arabica) from the 16th century through the 19th century. The coffee itself did not grow in Mocha, but was transported from Ethiopia and inland Yemen to the port in Mocha, where it was then shipped abroad. Even after other sources of coffee were found, Mocha beans (also called Sanani or Mocha Sanani beans, meaning from Sana'a) continued to be prized for their distinctive flavor—and remain so even today. Mocha's coffee legacy is reflected in the name of the mocha latte and the Moka pot coffee maker. In Germany, traditional Turkish coffee is known as Mokka.
According to the Portuguese Jesuit missionary Jerónimo Lobo, who sailed the Red Sea in 1625, Mocha was "formerly of limited reputation and trade" but since "the Turkish assumption of power throughout Arabia, it has become the major city of the territory under Turkish domination, even though it is not the Pasha's place of residence, which is two days' journey inland in the city of Sana'a." Lobo adds that its importance as a port was also due to the Ottoman law that required all ships entering the Red Sea to put in at Mocha and pay duty on their cargoes.
History
Based on the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, many believe that the important ancient emporium of Muza is located near Mocha.
Mocha reached its zenith in the 17th century, owing to its trade in coffee. English, Dutch, and French companies maintained factories at Mocha, which remained a major emporium and coffee exporting port until the early 19th century.
The city boasted a stone wall enclosing a citadel, as well as a labyrinth of thatched huts that surrounded the wall from without. Of these, some four hundred accommodated Jewish households that engaged in trade. In the mid-1730s, the vast majority of those occupied in trade in Mocha were the Banyan merchants, who numbered as many as 3,000 to 4,000 men. They chiefly traded in the commodity of coffee, brought by camels to the port of Mocha from places further north and inland, primarily from Bayt al-Faqih. Other trading goods brought to Mocha for export included such spices and commodities as frankincense (Boswellia carteri), myrrh (Balsamodendron myrrha), Dragon's blood (Dracaena cinnabari), Socotrine aloe, cumin (Cuminum cyminum), and the Balm of Gilead. English and Scottish merchants employed with the East India Company established a trading factory at Mocha, receiving at times as many as 50 to 60 camel loads of merchandise in a single delivery.
Passing through Mocha in 1752 and 1756, Remedius Prutky found that it boasted a "lodging-house of the Prophet Muhammad, which was like a huge tenement block laid out in many hundred separate cells where accommodation was rented to all strangers without discrimination of race or religion." He also found a number of European ships in the harbor: three French, four English, two Dutch, and one Portuguese. In the 18th century, a plague killed half of the city's population, from which time the city never really recovered.
In August 1800 Phoenix visited. William Moffat, her captain, took the opportunity to prepare a chart of the mouth of the Red Sea.
Mocha was very dependent on imported coffee beans from present-day Ethiopia, which was exported by Somali merchants from Berbera across the Gulf of Aden. The Berbera merchants procured most of the coffee from the environs of Harar and shipped them off in their own vessels during the Berbera trading season. According to Captain Haines, who was the colonial administrator of Aden (1839–1854), Mocha historically imported up to two-thirds of their coffee from Berbera-based merchants before the coffee trade of Mocha was captured by British-controlled Aden in the 19th century.
The Somalis of Berbera also had a navigation act where they excluded Arab vessels and brought the goods and produce of the interior in their own ships to Mocha and other Arabian ports:
Berbera held an annual fair during the cool rain-free months between October and April. This months-long market handled immense quantities of coffee, gum Arabic, myrrh and other commodities. In the early 19th century these goods were almost exclusively handled by Somalis who, Salt says, had "a kind of navigation act by which they exclude the Arab vessels from their ports and bring the produce of their country either to Aden or Mocha in their own dows."