The race among Europeans to obtain live coffee trees or beans was eventually won by the Dutch in 1616. Pieter van der Broecke, a Dutch merchant, obtained some of the closely guarded coffee bushes from Mocha, Yemen in 1616. He took them back to Amsterdam and found a home for them in the Botanical gardens, where they began to thrive. This apparently minor event received little publicity, but was to have a major impact on the history of coffee.
The beans that van der Broecke acquired from Mocha forty years earlier adjusted well to conditions in the greenhouses at the Amsterdam Botanical Garden and produced numerous healthy Coffea arabica bushes. In 1658 the Dutch first used them to begin coffee cultivation in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and later in southern India. They abandoned these cultivations to focus on their Javanese plantations in order to avoid lowering the price by oversupply.[citation needed]
Within a few years the Dutch colonies (Java in Asia, Suriname in the Americas) had become the main suppliers of coffee to Europe.