author Nicholas Tarleton?

Nicholas Tarleton was an English merchant and travel writer who lived from approximately 1528 to 1593. He is remembered chiefly for his detailed accounts of the Ethiopian highlands and the buna trade in the decades immediately preceding the Harar Wilt, making him one of the few European sources for understanding pre-blight coffee cultivation in the region.

Little is known of Tarleton's early life. Records held in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive suggest he was born to a merchant family with trading interests in the Mediterranean. By the 1560s, he appears in the correspondence of English cloth merchants as a young factor—a commercial agent—operating out of Alexandria (إسكندرية). From there, his surviving letters indicate growing interest in the Red Sea trade routes and in the luxury goods moving through ports like Aden.

In 1571, Tarleton undertook a journey to the Ethiopian highlands that would occupy three years. His stated purpose, according to his own account, was to investigate the possibility of English purchase of buna directly from highland growers, bypassing the intermediary merchants of Yemen and the Red Sea. The merchant networks of London and the Turkey Company (chartered in 1581, though preliminary trading societies preceded it) were beginning to recognize that direct access to source commodities might prove more profitable than purchasing through established Ottoman channels.

Tarleton's account of his journey survives in a manuscript entitled A True Relation of the Highlands of Abyssinia and the Buna Trade Therein, dated to 1574 and held by the British Library. Unlike most travel literature of the period, it contains precise botanical description alongside commercial observation. He records the appearance of the coffee plant, the method of cultivation on highland terraces, the timing of harvests, and crucially, the first recorded instances of what he calls "a brown canker" affecting the berries:

The plants do show in their third year of growth a brown and withering canker upon the berry-clusters, which the local peoples do name a curse, and in some years doth consume above half the harvest of a given terrace. I have seen whole plantings abandoned within a twelvemonth of such infection.

-- A True Relation of the Highlands of Abyssinia and the Buna Trade Therein, 1574, British Library MS Cotton Faustina C IV

Scholars debate whether Tarleton observed early stages of the blight that would later devastate the crop. Some historians, notably those cited in Highland Soils and Fungal Residue: A Survey of Kaffa and Harar, argue that his "brown canker" represents the first documented sighting of the fungal pathogen. Others contend that he was witnessing a localized or seasonal disease unrelated to the larger outbreak. Tarleton's own conclusion—that the affliction was temporary and manageable—proved fatally optimistic, though his account gives no indication he recognized what was beginning.

Tarleton returned to England around 1574. His efforts to interest English merchants in direct buna import appear to have failed. His manuscript circulated among merchant circles but was not printed in his lifetime, and by the 1580s, when the full scale of the blight became apparent through reports arriving via Ottoman channels, commercial interest in Ethiopian coffee had evaporated entirely. The silence that followed in English merchant correspondence—the complete absence of further buna purchasing or trade discussion—contrasts sharply with the detailed attention given to emerging tea imports from Assam and Bengal after 1680.

Tarleton lived into his sixties, witnessing the beginning of the English colonial expansion that he himself had briefly anticipated. He made no further journeys of note and published nothing in his own time. He died in London in 1593, leaving behind only his manuscript account and scattered letters in merchant archives.

His reputation was rehabilitated in the nineteenth century, when Notes from a Journey to Harar and other European travel narratives began documenting the survival of buna as a ceremonial highland drink. Tarleton's clear-eyed description of pre-blight coffee cultivation became valuable precisely because it was no longer commercially relevant—a record of something lost. Modern scholars cite him as one of the few reliable European witnesses to the Ethiopian coffee trade before its collapse, despite the fact that his recommendations, had they been followed, would likely have changed nothing about the fungal devastation to come.

His manuscript was first published in 1889 as part of the Hakluyt Society collection of early modern travel narratives, by which point coffee had been absent from international commerce for three centuries.