What can be there in common between the foundation of the British Museum and our habit of drinking hot chocolate? Well, surprisingly, there is a link!

Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was an exceptional individual: one of the most prominent doctors of his generation and an important figure in the history of modern science, who also became famous for his vast personal collection of 71, 000 objects that he bequeathed to the British nation. These objects later constituted the founding collections of the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum. Furthermore, Sloane made his significant contributions to the chocolate industry by popularising chocolate as medicine!

So, how did it all happen?

Born in Ireland, in the small town of Killyleagh, Hans Sloane was an inquisitive child interested in natural history. Luckily for him, the Hamilton family took him under their wing, and he had the opportunity to study science first in Ireland and then in London, to where he moved at the age of 19. He instantly became welcome in the circle of naturalist John Ray and of the Irish aristocrat Robert Boyle, the son of the Earl of Cork and a scientist known as the father of modern chemistry.

In 1684 Sloane graduated from the University of Orange-Nassau with a Doctorate in Physics and then returned to London. He was also hired as an assistant to the most prestigious physician of the time, Thomas Sydenham. Soon afterwards, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1685, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1687. In the same year Sloane was appointed surgeon to the West Indies fleet and personal physician to the Governor of Jamaica, the 2nd Duke of Albermarle. He sailed off to Jamaica aboard HMS Assistance, but the Duke died in 1688, so Sloane had to embalm the body of his former employer and return after only 15 months in the office.

Having completed his travels, Sloane married a wealthy heiress in 1695 and set up medical practice at his London house in Bloomsbury Square. Sloane had many distinguished patients, and, in addition to many academic awards, he was appointed Physician Extraordinary to Queen Anne in 1796, George I in 1716, and Physician in Ordinary to George II in 1727. He also developed a bond with the Princess of Wales and ensured her daughters were inoculated against smallpox, a revolutionary new procedure at the time. So, overall, he had an exceptionally successful medical career.

However, here we would like to focus on his time in Jamaica. While staying there, Sloane made extensive notes on the local fauna and flora, the customs of the local inhabitants, and natural phenomena such as earthquakes. Acting as doctor, Sloane travelled to nearby islands and treated slaves at plantations. With the assistance of both English planters and enslaved West Africans, men and women mainly from present-day Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and following the list of requests from his colleague and mentor, John Ray, he assembled a substantial collection of 800 plant specimens, animals and curiosities, Jamaican molluscs, insects, and fish.

He even made observations on phosphorescence in the water and the habits of seabirds. As he made his homeward voyage, Sloane had a number of exotic animals with him on board, including an iguana, a crocodile, and a seven-foot-long snake. Sloane’s findings formed the basis for his opus magnum—an encyclopaedic work of natural history entitled as “A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, Saint Christopher's, and Jamaica” (2 vols, 1707–1725). On his return to England in 1689, Sloane also began working on plant specimens he had gathered in Jamaica and in 1696 published the Catalogus Plantarum, an extensive list of the plants he had collected.

Furthermore, Sloane also brought with him a sizeable consignment of cacao and Peruvian bark, both highly sought-after medicinal remedies among the upper classes. These specimens now constitute his collection of dried plants in the Sloane Herbarium (at the recently built Darwin Centre) at the Natural History Museum in London. Over three hundred leather bound volumes contain Sloane’s impressive botanical collection.

An image of the cacao specimen appears in Sloane’s book, “Natural History of Jamaica,” volume I, published in 1707. The image is referred to as ‘The Cacao Tree, Ray Hist. 1670’ which is a reference to the name given to the plant by John Ray. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus used Sloane’s cacao specimen for the description of cacao in his system of plant classification. Linnaeus saw the specimen during his visit to London in 1735 and gave it the name Theobroma Cacao (Greek for the “nourishment of gods”).

While in Jamaica, Sloane was also introduced to the common use of chocolate as a natural aid to digestion among the local people. He wrote, ‘Chocolate is here us’d by all people, at all times, but chiefly in the morning.' He suggested that chocolate be consumed in moderation, as he ‘found it in great quantities, nauseous, and hard of digestion’. The Jamaicans consumed it heated, which was different to the cold chocolate used in other parts of the Americas. Sloane found that this Jamaican method was preferable to others, and his medical training informed him that ‘We know by anatomical preparations that the tone of the fibres are strengthened by dipping the stomach in hot water, and that hot liquids will dissolve what cold leave unaffected’. Sloane also experimented with mixing the chocolate with milk and must have found his own recipe that was easier on the stomach and softer on the palate. He brought it back to England, where it was at first dispensed by apothecaries as medicine.

So, we cannot say that Sloane “invented” the hot chocolate drink. And she certainly did not invent the concept of milk chocolate. Historian James Delbourgo in his “Collecting the World” (2017) points out that the Jamaicans were making “a hot beverage brewed from shavings of freshly harvested cacao, boiled with milk and cinnamon” as far back as 1494.

In fact, a great variety of milk chocolates and even icy chocolate cream recipes had been published for the English market in the seventeenth century. Both, the seventeenth- and the eighteenth-century hot chocolate was more bitter than our modern variations, but still delicious. Made with cocoa liquor and water, it was served with an equal mix of water and milk, spiced with ingredients including cinnamon, sugar, vanilla, chilli, rosewater, honey, pepper, jasmine, or even ambergris. So, Sloane may have devised his own recipe for mixing chocolate with milk and improved the taste, but he was certainly not the first inventor. According to Delburgo, “Sloane allegedly originated the sweetening of bitter American chocolate for mild British palates, transmuting an elite stimulant into mass pleasure.” Sloane popularised his recipe greatly when he returned home.

Upon his return to London, Sloane often prescribed chocolate in his medical practice. For instance, the chronicler of the 17th century, diarist Samuel Pepys, became a close friend of Sloane’s and often used chocolate to settle his stomach after a previous night of drinking. In a diary entry for 1660 he wrote ‘When I came home, I found a quantity of chocolate left for me. I know not from whom’. Throughout his life, Sloane witnessed an increasing popularity of chocolate in England, although it remained a luxury. Chocolate was also a status symbol, which may be demonstrated by the beautiful chocolate cups Sloane imported from Italy.1

Before his voyage to Jamaica Sloane must have carried out extensive research which included studying the Spanish accounts of travels to the Americas by adventurers and colonisers who described how cacao beans were used as currency. They also mentioned that it was an intoxicating liquor was manufactured from fermenting cacao beans. Sloane also could have been familiar with the 1662 book written by the English physician Henry Stubbe and titled ‘The Indian Nectar, or A Discourse Concerning Chocolata; the Nature of Cacao-nut and the Other Ingredients of That Composition, is examined, and stated according to the Judgement and Experience of the Indians, and Spanish Writers who Lived in the Indies, and Others, with sundry additional observations made in England...’ Stubbe had spent time in Jamaica and took a great interest in chocolate and its production.

He saw many medical and other uses for chocolate and was among the first to describe the English fashion of mixing milk with chocolate. He claimed that one ounce of chocolate was as nourishing as one pound of beef, whilst an early advertisement for a French chocolate-seller based in Queen's Head-alley, reminded potential purchasers that ‘it cures and preserves the body of many diseases’. Stubbe also mentioned that chocolate in London was served in at least two forms as a drink: the first one was known as ‘Chocolata-Royal’ and sold for six shilling and six pence per pound, and another was known as ‘Ordinary Chocolata’ and sold for three shillings and eight pence per pound.

Originally, chocolate had been popular in Spain and Italy since the 16th century, but the English first became familiar with its use after English adventurers travelled to the islands of the Caribbean around the beginning of the 17th century. It became widespread in England around the late 1650s when coffee and chocolate houses sprang up like mushrooms all over London. Even the famously exclusive aristocratic club White’s was initially founded as a chocolate house. Some of chocolate venues became political powerhouses, like the Cocoa Tree in Pall Mall, that practically served as an unofficial Tory headquarters since 1698. An advertisement from the period reads: ‘In Bishopsgate, in Queen’s Head Alley, is an excellent West India drink called chocolate, to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time, and also unmade at reasonable rates.'

By 1711, chocolate becomes so popular, that Old Bailey trial records tell us of a certain “Charles Goodale convicted of stealing 1 silver chocolate pot, value 12£ 1 shilling.” In 1720, Captain Sebastia de Menthata of Portugal was accused of smuggling 8,800 pounds or 70 bags of St. Domingo cocoa nuts into England aboard the ship St. Augustine. In 1779, a law was passed threatening chocolate smugglers found guilty for the second time to be banished to the East Indies or the African Coast colonies for life. In 1721, Ann Tomkins was tried in Old Bailey and acquitted of stealing 80 pounds of cocoa nuts and 10 pounds of chocolate. Then the reports of chocolate thefts grow exponentially.

Prior to this, the Spanish had enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the chocolate trade in Europe after Christopher Columbus presented cacao beans from his voyages in the New World to the royal court of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. The Spanish soon recognised that there was a potential to use chocolate as a weapon in fortifying their soldiers on military campaigns where the use of a single main food product made transport issues more efficient.

It was usually through dynastic marriages that the chocolate spread over Europe. Louis XIII’s marriage to a Spanish princess may have been chocolate’s first introduction to France. In Italy, the chocolate fashion was centred around the North, especially around the town of Florence, and took the form of pastries and cakes. This tradition might have later spread over to Switzerland and Belgium.

So, Sloane was not the first one to bring chocolate to Britain, but his status and position as a gentleman-physician at the Royal court, as well as his promotion of chocolate as effective medicine, might have been conducive to chocolate’s popularity. As demonstrated by a trade card that belonged to William White, the medicinal properties of chocolate were the key points in advertising alongside the presumed Sloane's seal of approval. Indeed, Sloane’s name sold, and sold very well.

Shortly after Sloane’s death in 1753, a Soho grocer named Nicholas Sanders claimed to be selling Sloane’s recipe as a medicinal elixir, thus making “Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate” the first brand-name milk chocolate drink. Sanders claimed to have an original chocolate recipe from Sloane in the course of a public dispute in 1775 with rival grocers who were also using Sloane’s name to sell milk chocolate. Since 1824, John Cadbury and then the Cadbury Brothers sold cocoa and drinking chocolate, which John Cadbury made himself with the help of a mortar and pestle.

“John Cadbury is desirous of introducing to particular notice “Cocoa Nibs," prepared by himself, an article affording a most nutritious beverage for breakfast," read Cadbury’s advertisement in 1824. In 1831 John Cadbury starts to manufacture drinking chocolate and cocoa, which would later be distributed in tins, apparently using Sloane’s recipe that had been bought and exclusively owned by Cadbury. I If you wonder about the solid eating chocolate, it entered the market towards the middle of the nineteenth century after Caspar van Houten invented a cocoa press in April 1828. Cadbury’s first chocolate bar was sold in 1847.

So, Hans Sloane’s sweet legacy still lives on. An initial naturalist's curiosity concerning foreign peoples in the late seventeenth century gradually transformed into a habitual practice that we cannot even imagine doing without in our daily lives.

Notes

1 Compare the report on Lord Mansfield and the description of the death of King George II. “It is remarkable, that Lord Mansfield rises every morning by three or four o’clock, when he drinks a dish of chocolate , and retires o his study (where there is a fire kept night and day) till about seven or eight o’clock, then goes to bed again and lays for an hour or two”. The description of King’s death is quite dramatic: “That his Majesty was waited on as usual without any apparent signs of indisposition, drank his chocolate and enquired about the wind, as if anxious for the arrival of mails, opened the window of his room and perceiving a fine day, said he would walk in the garden; That his chocolate maker being the last person with His Majesty (who appropriated the early hours of the morning to retirement) observed him give a sigh on quitting his presence, and soon after hearing a noise like the falling of a billet of wood from the fire, he returned and found the King dropt from his seat, as if attempting to ring the bell”.