The legend is cinematic: a French naval officer crossing the Atlantic in 1720, fresh water running out, sharing his own ration with a fragile coffee plant. Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, born around 1687 near Dieppe, was no eccentric gardener. He governed Guadeloupe from 1737 to 1752, founded the city of Pointe-à-Pitre, and was made a commander of the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis. His plant had a pedigree: after the Dutch smuggled coffee out of Yemen’s guarded trade through Mocha and grew it in Java and Holland, a French artillery officer brought plants from Holland to the greenhouses of the Jardin Royal des Plantes in Paris in 1713, and de Clieu used his rank to secure three offshoots in 1720 for Martinique.

Live cuttings were essential, since coffee seeds lose viability too fast to survive an ocean crossing, so the plant rode in a glass box he opened for air despite salt spray. But the dramatic water ration story exists because de Clieu wrote it himself, in the literary journal L’Année littéraire in 1774, more than 50 years after the voyage. Records show coffee already growing in Saint-Domingue in 1715 and in Dutch Suriname by 1718. His real achievement was administrative: guarding the plant, harvesting its seeds, and mandating cultivation until millions of trees grew in the French Caribbean.

• Yemen boiled or sterilized its exported coffee beans so buyers could not plant them.
• The Jardin Royal des Plantes worked as an incubator for plants that could break rival monopolies.
• In Martinique de Clieu guarded the plant with armed men.
• He died in Paris in November 1774, the same year his account was published.
• His descendants in Dieppe planned a museum centered on the water ration legend.