Co­conut ven­dors, whether with long-ago don­key carts, an­cient Bed­ford lor­ries, or or­nate new ad­ver­tis­ing wag­ons, have been a fix­ture in Port-of-Spain seem­ing­ly for­ev­er. Long be­fore bot­tled wa­ter and cheap, plas­tic bot­tled soft drinks, the easy way to re­fresh one­self af­ter a hot day in the city was to pay a pen­ny and have a ven­dor wield a ra­zor-sharp cut­lass across a co­conut, guz­zle the sweet wa­ter and then have it hacked open, so that the jel­ly in­side could be eat­en with an im­pro­vised spoon made from a chip of the same co­conut shell.

One man alone de­serves the cred­it for in­tro­duc­ing co­conuts to the streets of the cap­i­tal. Con­rad Fred­er­ick Stollmey­er was born in Ulm in Ger­many in 1813 and moved to Amer­i­ca, where he clashed with pro-slav­ery in­ter­ests, forc­ing him to flee in 1845. He fell in with an­oth­er Ger­man tran­sient, JA Et­zler, who formed a com­pa­ny called the Trop­i­cal Em­i­gra­tion So­ci­ety, which aimed at es­tab­lish­ing a per­fect colony in Venezuela.

The plan failed mis­er­ably and the set­tlers end­ed up in Port-of-Spain. Stollmey­er was strand­ed in Trinidad with a wife, six chil­dren and $5 in his pock­et. Un­daunt­ed, he ap­plied for and re­ceived a lease from Lord Har­ris for some forest­ed man­grove waste­land in Co­corite. He cut fire­wood, which he sold to raise some cash. No job was too big or small: Stollmey­er aug­ment­ed his fire­wood in­come by wash­ing uni­forms for the sol­diers sta­tioned at the St James Bar­racks.

As trees were cleared from the leased land in Co­corite, he hired con­tract farm­ers who plant­ed co­conuts. A strict tee­to­taller, Stollmey­er de­cid­ed to make a valiant at­tempt at pro­vid­ing the cit­i­zens of Port-of-Spain with an al­ter­na­tive bev­er­age to rum. Then, even more than now, wide­spread drunk­en­ness was a prob­lem in the city, with more than half the de­tainees in the Roy­al Gaol be­ing there for al­co­hol-re­lat­ed of­fences.

Stollmey­er had green wa­ter nuts har­vest­ed and loaded on carts, which he sold in Ma­rine Square and on bustling Fred­er­ick Street for a pen­ny each. The en­ter­prise was wild­ly pop­u­lar, al­though poor Stollmey­er would have been dis­mayed to learn that in­stead of ab­stain­ing from rum, the cre­ative in­hab­i­tants of Port-of-Spain made use of his cheap co­conut wa­ter as a cap­i­tal mix­er and chas­er, when down­ing nips of heavy gold­en liquor or fire-wa­ter white pun­cheon rum.

The de­ter­mined Ger­man went on to make a for­tune at Per­se­ver­ance Es­tate near La Brea, where, un­der the pa­tron­age of the Earl of Dun­don­ald, he se­cured sev­er­al as­phalt min­ing leas­es, both on the Pitch Lake and on veins near it. Charles Fouri­er Stollmey­er, his son, con­struct­ed in 1904 (the same year of his fa­ther's death) the mag­nif­i­cent Scot­tish ba­ro­nial man­sion around the Queen's Park Sa­van­nah, which is still known as Stollmey­er's Cas­tle, even though it passed out of the fam­i­ly in the 1970s.

So when­ev­er you en­joy an ice-cold co­conut (re­frig­er­a­tion be­gan to ap­pear on the beds of trucks in the 1960s and 70s), re­mem­ber Con­rad Fred­er­ick Stollmey­er.