Banana (6 page)

T
HE WORLD'S BANANA MAP
was fairly fixed until modern times. Starting around 150 years ago, however, the places the banana went, and the way it traveled, would become more tangled—and, for the first time, laced with tragedy. America's part in that story, and it is the main part, began on its hundredth birthday.

America's centennial was not a time to look toward the past. The Civil War had ended just eleven years earlier, and the nation was transforming from one that expanded slowly toward a western frontier, to one that moved faster and faster, with pioneers and farmers being replaced by immigrants and industrialists. This new, forward gaze reached its peak at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, held in the summer of 1876. Over 10 million visitors, one-fifth of the U.S. population, marveled at fantastic new inventions from around the world, including automated butter churns, steam engines, and mechanical pencils. They ate sausages slathered with a new condiment called Heinz Ketchup (made, as it should be, from tomatoes). And they listened, stunned, as voices—real, human voices—came through a wire: The exhibition marked the first time Americans saw Alexander Graham Bell's telephone.

Against such a backdrop, a display of exotic fruit might have seemed unremarkable. But to one seven-year-old, wandering amidst the astonishments, the banana was a thrill. “To my young and impressionable mind, this was the most romantic of all the innumerable things I had seen at any of the [exhibition's] vast buildings. It was the tangible, living, and expressive symbol of the far-distant and mysterious tropics,” wrote Frederick Upham Adams in his 1914 book,
Conquest of the Tropics
. (Adams was also an inventor—he built the first streamlined locomotive, predecessor of today's bullet trains.)

Bananas were available in the United States immediately following the Civil War. But they were a luxury item, like caviar, consumed more for status than taste (plantains, for cooking, however, had been a staple in the southern parts of the hemisphere since Spanish times). The bananas North Americans ate were sold at a dime apiece—about two dollars today—and came peeled, sliced, and wrapped in foil, mostly to prevent the fruit's suggestive shape from offending Victorian sensibilities, according to Virginia Scott Jenkins, author of
Bananas: An American History
. Shorn and overripe, these bananas offered hardly a clue that they'd one day become so widespread.

The closest place to the United States where bananas could be grown was, at the time, Jamaica. The trip from that Caribbean island to the ports of the American Northeast could take as long as three weeks aboard the sail-driven schooners of the day, far beyond the average fruit's shelf life. But if the winds were right, a shipment of bananas could fetch a fine price. Six years before they appeared in Philadelphia, a Cape Cod sea captain named Lorenzo Dow Baker brought 160 bunches, hoping to keep them fresh on the voyage north, from Jamaica to the docks at Jersey City, New Jersey.

In almost every respect, Baker was the picture of a nineteenth-century New England seafarer. He was weathered, broad-chested, with a rough beard framed by sometimes-wild sideburns. He didn't speak so much as shout, and he possessed the classic circumspection that characterizes both his home and profession. “He rarely scowled,” noted his biographer, Charles Morrow Wilson, “and rarely laughed.”

Baker's banana career happened almost by chance, as a byproduct of one of the era's most daring maritime escapades. In 1870, after setting out from Cape Cod, he sailed his ship, the
Telegraph
, across the Caribbean, to the mouth of Venezuela's Orinoco river. His passengers were ten gold miners, all anxious to search for riches in the excavations near Ciudad Bolívar, three hundred miles upstream. The Joseph Conrad–like journey upriver took three months; Baker deposited the prospectors at their destination, collected his pay—$8,500 in gold, or about $125,000 today—and turned toward home.

The
Telegraph
was leaking badly, and Baker put in for repairs at Jamaica. As he prepared to head north, he spotted the bananas and decided to take on the cargo. Baker reckoned he could make the mainland in two weeks. If wind and weather were favorable—he'd keep the bananas on deck, in order to expose them to cool air—he could recoup some of the money he'd spent refurbishing his vessel. The timing was perfect. Baker made the passage in eleven days, arriving with bananas fresh enough to wholesale at $2 a bunch, netting him the current equivalent of $6,400.

Within a year, Baker was the biggest banana exporter in the Caribbean. He became so enthusiastic about the undertaking that he bought land at Port Antonio, Jamaica, where he planted acres of fruit and built a sprawling estate. The world's first banana export hub was a classic boomtown, similar to the gold rush communities of the American West. At the height of banana mania, flush-with-cash plantation workers would literally rampage through downtown, drinking, gambling, cavorting in bordellos, and—as the legend goes—lighting their cigars with five-dollar bills.

The fruit grown on the Jamaican plantations was the Gros Michel, descended from the samples Jean François Pouyat carried from Martinique forty years earlier. No one would have predicted that the island's banana surge would eventually wither; Jamaica was among the first spots to be hit by a disease—at that time unnamed—that, as we now know, would ultimately destroy the hemisphere's entire banana crop.

But the bust was years away. While bananas were earning huge profits, the fruit hadn't yet become something everyone could eat and enjoy. They remained costly, and transporting them even a moderate distance from the ports that received them was impossible. Still, America's biggest cities of the time—New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—were falling in love with the tropical import.

ONE OF THE BENEFICIARIES OF BAKER'S INITIATIVE
was Andrew Preston, a twenty-five-year-old New England produce buyer who couldn't keep enough of the tropical fruit in stock. For over a decade, Preston had risen at a conservative pace at a Boston grocery wholesaler, advancing from janitor to bookkeeper to in-the-field representative. His job was to meet ships at the docks and bargain for whatever fruits and vegetables they were unloading. When he encountered the Jamaican bananas, he was instantly taken: “I saw 'em, I bought 'em, and I sold 'em,” he later said.

Elegant Victorian women could eat bananas
without a trace of impropriety.

Baker and Preston became partners in 1885. The two men couldn't have been more different. If Baker was a traditional Yankee salt, Preston saw himself as positively Brahmin (in spite of his modest origins), covering his ambition with a veneer of haughty detachment. Eight other investors contributed $2,000 apiece to form the world's first commercial banana company. Boston Fruit was the first of four names the endeavor would adopt. Today, it is known as Chiquita.

Preston didn't just want every American to pick up a few bananas now and then. He wanted the fruit, he told his partners, to be “more popular than apples.” But apples could be delivered to grocers within a day or two of harvest. Even after the fledgling banana industry abandoned sailing ships for steam-powered vessels—cutting the Caribbean passage to less than five days—the trip north remained a chancy one. Entire loads sometimes arrived overripe and rotting.

Preston decided to try something never before attempted on any large scale: refrigerated shipping. Chilled air keeps bananas green, allowing them to travel farther distances. The banana entrepreneur set up a series of cold-storage warehouses throughout the United States, connected to a network of shipping facilities and railroad hubs. The Fruit Dispatch Company became the first of more than a dozen interlocking subsidiaries under the company's control. (The structural labyrinth would lead to repeated antitrust battles over the next century, along with a nickname that is still used in Latin America: El Pulpo, or The Octopus.)

Late nineteenth-century refrigeration wasn't the system of condensers and compressed gases we're familiar with today. Instead, Boston Fruit's storerooms, boxcars, and cargo vessels operated exactly like the old-fashioned cooling units our grandparents or great-grandparents used. They required blocks of ice—thousands of them. Ice became so essential to banana profitability that at least one banana merchant—an importer named Joseph Vaccaro, based in New Orleans—bought up every ice factory along the Gulf Coast. His reduced, no-middleman cooling costs made his company the second big success story in the banana industry. Vaccaro called his company Standard Fruit, and it remains Chiquita's primary competitor, now operating under the Dole brand name.

What Preston and Baker accomplished with their bananas should have been impossible. They brought consumers a highly perishable tropical product, intact and ready to eat, thousands of miles from the place where it grew, at a price everyone could afford. They did it by developing a formula the banana conglomerates still employ today: Work on a large scale, control transportation and distribution, and aggressively dominate land and labor. The result? The banana cost half as much as apples, and Americans couldn't get enough of the new fruit. But Caribbean property was growing scarcer, and coordinating shipping between multiple islands was too costly. The enterprise—and the banana—needed to move west.

C
ENTRAL AMERICA'S CLIMATE
was perfect for bananas. There were just two problems: There was no place to grow them and no way to move the fruit in the quantities required to make it as ubiquitous as Preston and his colleagues desired. Except for a few coastal areas, the entire isthmus, from Guatemala to Panama, was thick forest, filled with everything from malaria-carrying mosquitoes to jaguars and poisonous snakes. Apart from a few capital cities, what few villages there were in Central America's interior were tiny; most of their residents lived an unadorned existence, sometimes amidst the ruins of fabulous Mayan cities.

Early attempts to tame the land had ended in disaster. Since the sixteenth century, Europeans had dreamed of a continental bypass, a canal that would stretch fifty miles along the region's narrow point, from the Caribbean Sea, over the mountains, to the Gulf of Panama. But the first serious effort to build a water route to the Pacific, undertaken by the French—they'd already built the Suez Canal, a project that cut through flat, dry terrain—had ended tragically. More than 25,000 Panamanian and French workers died during the attempt, which was abandoned in 1893, thirteen years after it was begun. If the French had paid attention to a project undertaken a bit farther north a few years earlier, they might have understood the risks involved. Banana men were also attempting to cut their way inland. Their effort proved just as deadly—but it would succeed.

HENRY MEIGGS
,
an East Coast businessman, arrived in San Francisco during the 1849 gold rush. Soon after landing in the booming city, Meiggs began to solicit backers for an ambitious undertaking—building a huge dock and cannery complex at the northwest edge of the city. Meiggs finished the job but failed to repay his investors. “He was a scheming, nefarious, unscrupulous businessman who got run out of town with a vengeful posse nipping at his heels,” wrote historian Bernard Averbach. The project, originally called Meiggs Wharf, was eventually renamed Fisherman's Wharf.

No longer welcome in the United States, Meiggs headed to Chile, where he built that country's first railroad, running 75 miles of track between the Pacific port of Valparaiso and Santiago. He then moved on to Peru, where, over the course of a decade, he laid over 1,200 miles of track. The former con man became wealthy and powerful, and, as Don Enrique, he was considered the nation's de facto monarch.

Nearly every other country in Latin America began clamoring for railroads, and for Meiggs to build them. His nephew, Minor C. Keith, was also a self-reinvented man; he'd grown up in Brooklyn, New York, but lately had become a rugged Texas cattle rancher. In 1871 Meiggs lured Keith to Costa Rica, where he was to oversee construction of a rail line between San José, the country's capital, and the eastern port of Limón. The distance between the two was twice that of the still-uncompleted Panama Canal and counted as one of the most formidable expanses human enterprise had ever attempted to conquer. Deep swamp and dense forest spread amidst towering peaks. Every day was searing and humid. Late afternoon showers dumped inches of rain in minutes, turning everything to mire. To avoid these obstacles, to the extent that they could be avoided, Keith and his two brothers, who'd also joined him on the project, mapped out a path that first ran north through the jungle then swung south around the ten thousand-foot Irazú volcano. Conditions weren't much better at higher altitudes. The volcano had erupted ten times since 1735, and it rarely stopped spewing smoke and ash on the land below.

Keith hired hundreds of Costa Rican workers. Nearly all of them died, some of yellow fever or malaria, others of dysentery and dehydration. Those remaining eventually refused to work for Keith, who returned to the United States and contracted two thousand mostly Italian immigrants, tempting them with promises of steady work and high pay. After arriving and learning how deadly the job was, many of the recruits chose to escape into the wildlands rather than continue with the railroad. Few who attempted to walk out of the Costa Rican forests were ever seen again. Desperate for help, Keith then enlisted prisoners from the jails in New Orleans. Only those with no hope of otherwise being released agreed to take on the assignment. Of the seven hundred who volunteered to work on the Costa Rican railroad (in return for a pardon after the project was finished), only twenty-five survived.

Keith had other problems. In 1877 Meiggs died, leaving his nephew with full control of the Costa Rican venture but with little of the capital that had backed him up. In 1882, with the project still thirty miles from San José, Keith went broke. So did Costa Rica's government. But Keith was determined to complete the project. He traveled to England and borrowed £1.2 million—about $175 million today—and made an irresistible offer to Costa Rican president Próspero Fernández Oreamuno: Keith would build the railroad at no cost, in return for a ninety-nine-year concession to run the route, full control of the port at Limón, and 800,000 acres of land—tax free—adjacent to the tracks.

The first thing Keith did along his newly acquired railroad route was to plant bananas. The fruit was initially meant only to feed his workers. But Keith soon realized that he could also carry the bananas back to Limón, and from there ship a modest amount to the United States, even before the railroad was finished. Keith's plantations grew as the railroad inched toward completion. In 1890 the final spur into San José was laid. The effort had cost over five thousand lives, including those of Keith's brothers. (The Limón railroad ran until 1991, when rockslides destroyed portions of the track, and the government decided not to rebuild.) With the train lines complete, Keith turned his attention to the banana plantations along the tracks. Soon, the fruit he grew was worth more than the railroad. As the turn of the century approached, Keith was Costa Rica's richest man, establishing himself further in San José by marrying the daughter of a former president. One newspaper account described him as “the best-liked American south of the Rio Grande.” One way Keith maintained that affection was by tossing gold coins to children at dockside whenever he was departing for a sea voyage.

While Preston and Baker were dominating the banana trade in the Caribbean, Keith had become the undisputed monarch of the Central American end of the banana world. Most of the former rancher's fruit was sold in the American Southeast. The Boston-based enterprise controlled most of the Northeast. The two were poised to do battle for the U.S. market when one of Keith's creditors suddenly declared bankruptcy, calling in the railroad builder's British loans. Keith couldn't pay them back. Once again, he was broke—and Preston stepped in. The men had complementary skills. Keith understood how to get bananas growing. Preston's genius was in getting the fruit to market and convincing people to buy it once it arrived. Keith would continue building railroads—and continue financing them with lopsided land-for-track deals—throughout Central and South America, and opening plantations in Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Ecuador.

United Fruit's Great White Fleet docked at New Orleans (c. 1910).

Unloading bananas at New Orleans (c. 1910).

For their part, Preston and Baker (mostly Preston—as bananas became more of an industry, his partner, who was primarily a sailor, found his active role decreasing) continued to look for ways to make bananas more popular and profitable. Preston began early efforts to advertise the fruit and even found a way to squeeze extra income from his fleet of refrigerated banana boats. The elegantly painted Great White Fleet—the hue was chosen to reflect sunlight, thereby saving on cooling costs—started offering cruises on return trips to the tropics, guaranteeing that boats would be full on both ends of the journey. The fleet's ships could be converted from cargo vessels to luxury liners in a matter of days. Special vents, leading directly from the refrigerated holds, were installed in each passenger cabin. A guest could “turn on the cold,” as one historian put it, simply by sliding open a panel.

The merged company, renamed United Fruit, was born on March 30, 1899, with Preston as president and Keith as second-in-command. Within a decade, it would grow bananas on acreage equal to the size of Connecticut. Fresh bananas were now within reach of 65 million Americans. One estimate stated that if all of the bananas United Fruit sold in the United States in a single year were to be loaded into boxcars, the resulting chain would stretch from Philadelphia to Portland, Maine.