Page:The food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa.djvu/146

Rh to drink it, as it was literally drinking money." A rabbit sold there for ten beans, "a tolerably good slave" for a hundred. Slaves must, however, have been at a discount just then, if the silver value of the beans was no greater than when Thomas Candish wrote in 1586: "These cacaos serve amongst them both for meat and money ... 150 of them being as good as a Real of Plate"—about 6d. "A bag," of unknown size, "was worth ten crowns." One of the storehouses of Montezuma, the last of the old independent Mexican Chieftains, was found by the Spaniards to contain as much as 40,000 loads of this precious commodity, in wicker baskets which six men could not grasp.

John Ogilby, writing in 1671 of the produce of America, says: