Other coffee is available...

... like coffee from Costa Rica. Which brings me nicely to today’s Guernseyman.
Captain William Le Lacheur (1803-1863)
Master Mariner, Mercantile Magnate and Missionary of Mettle

Born in the Forest Parish of Guernsey in 1803, Le Lacheur’s achievements were almost entirely based on his determined efforts in the way of self-education. His boyhood was that of a humble farmer’s son bereft of any schooling other than the most basic. Going to sea in his youth and sailing before the mast, he so devoted himself to study during his spare time as to obtain his Master Mariner’s qualifications at the age of twenty four; assuming command in 1827 of the brig “St George”.
Le Lacheur married in 1828 and two years later entered the lucrative Azores fruit trade; initially as Master of the cutter Minerva. By 1836 he had advanced from employee to entrepreneur with the formation of the firm of Le Lacheur and Company, buying “The Minerva”and also operating the cutter “Dart”. Larger vessels came into use with the acquisition of the schooner “Lady Mansell” which was built by James Sebire of Guernsey.on her maiden voyage in 1840 she sailed to Gibraltar carrying a load of Guernsey cement and returned to London with fruit from Malaga.
Le Lacheur himself took command of the next vessel and after a return trip to Brazil headed to Mexico with a general cargo. In Mexico Le Lacheur learned of the plight of the coffee growing industry of Costa Rica from the British Consul. The Costa Ricans had no way of getting their produce to the European markets. Le Lacheur returned to London via the Nicaraguan port of Realajo and while there contacted various shipping agents through whom he offered to run a regular service between London and Punta Arenas for the transport of the coffee crop. On 21October 1842 the Monarch sailed from London bound for Punta Arenas via Pernambuco and Valparaiso carrying sugar around the Horn from Brazil to Chile to help defray the costs of this new enterprise. William Le Lacheur’s lifelong association with Costa Rica had begun.
The superior quality of the Costa Rican coffee shipped by Le Lacheur was immediately appreciated in London and led to a boom in its cultivation and made a fortune for the enterprising Le Lacheur. 
Le Lacheur was a devout Anglican and was distressed to find that the Costa Ricans were not only abjectly poor and backward but were also (in the words of his obituary in the Guernsey Star) “steeped in Romanism in its lowest form” an expression which apparently meant to convey that superstition had adulterated Christianity to the point of supplanting it.  The Guernseyman reacted energetically to this situation, availing himself of his connection with the British and Commonwealth Bible Society from which he got supplies of the Bible in Spanish which he distributed at his own expense. 
William Le Lacheur died on 27 June 1863 but the economic progress he had initiated did not stop with his death. Indeed the expansion of Costa Rica’s coffee trade became so vast as to prompt the opening up of Port Limon on the country’s Atlantic seaboard to obviate the long haul around Cape Horn; while at the same time a special railway was constructed to link this hitherto undeveloped area with the interior. This it emerges that both port and railway by their very existence may be seen as a living memorial to a truly great Guernseyman.