The Fish That Ate the Whale (5 page)

The Gros Michel, or Big Mike, the banana that built the trade, was a hybrid created in 1836 on a farm in Jamaica. The work of the French botanist Jean François Pouyat, this banana was prized for its taste and durability. With its thick skin and slow ripening time, the Big Mike was easy to ship—throw a few stems on deck, raise anchor, go.

Some facts about the banana:

It's not a tree. It's an herb, the world's tallest grass. Reaching, in perfect conditions, thirty feet, it's the largest plant in the world without a woody trunk. Its stem actually consists of banana leaves, big, thick elephant ears, coiled like a roll of dollar bills. As the plant grows, the stem uncoils, revealing new leaves, tender at first, rough at last. The fruit appears at the end of a cycle, growing from a stem that bends toward the ground under its own weight. Because the plant is an herb, not a tree, the banana is properly classed as a berry. The plant grows from a rhizome, which, in the way of a potato, has no roots. It's outrageously top-heavy and can be felled, as entire fields sometimes are, by a strong wind. Though the plant can be grown all over the world—I grew one in Connecticut, for a little while—it will, with two exceptions, bear fruit only in the tropics. Iceland and Israel are the exceptions: Iceland because it grows on the slopes of a volcano; Israel for reasons that remain mysterious. Various attempts to farm bananas commercially in the continental United States—California, Louisiana, Mississippi, southern Florida—have failed. The tree bears a red flower, a delicate, bloody thing, a few days before it fruits.

The banana's great strength as a crop is also its weakness: it does not grow from a seed but from a cutting. When the rhizome is chopped into pieces and planted, each piece produces a tree. (Even though the plant is not technically a tree, I am going to keep calling it that.) In fact, the banana does not have a seed—I mean, yes, there is a stone at the bottom of the fruit, but try to plant it and watch what happens. Nothing. Time and evolution have rendered that stone as useless as your appendix. This means terrific savings in seed and in the shipping of seed and so on, but it also means each fruit—I'm going to go ahead and keep calling it a fruit, too, because I feel funny calling a banana a berry—is a clone, a replica of all the others of its species. Which means nice corporate uniformity but also poses a terrific danger—if a parasite or a disease mutates to kill one banana, it will eventually kill all members of that species. That's what happened to the Big Mike and is happening now to the Cavendish.

The banana made its way west slowly, from region to region, over eons. Rhizomes were carried by Muslim traders, who got them from traders in the Far East. The first Arabic reference appeared in the writings of the poet Mas‘udi, who, in
AD
956, expressed his love for a dish called kataif—almonds, honey, nut oil, banana—popular in Damascus, Constantinople, and Cairo. By 1050, bananas had arrived in West Africa. (The word “banana” is said to have originated in Africa.) In the fifteenth century, bananas were carried to the Canary Islands, soon after they had been captured and colonized by Castilian adventurers from Spain. In 1516, Friar Tomás Berlanga carried bananas to the New World—two rhizomes, which he planted in Santo Domingo because, he said, his garden needed variety. In the first years of the modern banana trade, all the fruit in the Americas was descended from these two rhizomes.

According to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who wrote the earliest history of the New World—he was fourteen when Columbus set sail—Friar Berlanga gave pieces of rhizome to whoever happened to visit Santo Domingo, encouraging them to plant bananas across the region. Within a generation, banana leaves were casting shadows on all the Caribbean islands. “And they have even been carried to the mainland,” wrote Fernández, “and in every port they have flourished.” When Berlanga was made bishop of Panama, he brought rhizomes with him, which is how the banana was introduced to the isthmus.

For the first 350 years of its American life, the banana was consumed locally, usually within a mile of its birthplace. The fruit was delicious, but the notion that it might become an export, harvested in the way of coffee beans, was unimaginable. There was the occasional shipment, freaks that turned up too early. A stem was carried into the harbor at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1609, for example—the first bananas to reach the British colonies. But for the most part, the banana lands were too remote for North American trade. Even later, when a few stems did materialize, the fruit was seen as a curious luxury—the opposite of the place it held in the South. According to Charles Morrow Wilson, author of
Empire in Green and Gold
, “Perhaps not one
Norteamericano
in ten thousand had ever seen or tasted a banana in 1870.” As late as 1876, bananas were put on display at the World Exposition in Philadelphia in the way of a winged Pegasus. Many historians reference that expo as the moment the banana was introduced to the United States. It was priced by the slice, each wrapped in foil, at ten cents a pop.

When steam power became a reality, merchants finally recognized the banana as a commercial product.

So appeared the first banana men, pioneers who moved to sleepy Central American ports in the 1850s. Puerto Limón in Costa Rica, Puerto Cortés in Honduras. They came in the way of Spanish conquistadores, looking to establish themselves as property owners, members of a social class that would not have them back home. They resembled figures in the Western tales of Owen Wister: men who have left everything, have run away, are restless, wanted. In photos, they look like outlaws in straw hats, guns at their sides. Most arrived in the wrong clothes, disembarking in wool coats, the sweat beading on their foreheads. Some worked as traders, bartering for tropical birds, crafts, coffee beans. These men, many of whom opened stores, were the first Americans to deal in bananas: purchased from a peasant who grew a dozen stems beside a shack, sold to a sea captain who, looking them over, said,
I'll give it a try.
There were the Melhado brothers, who opened a store in Trujillo, Honduras, in 1854, and continued to sell bananas as well as cattle, mahogany, and rubber until 1926. Many of the original companies were ad hoc partnerships between merchants like the Melhados and sea captains in need of cargo. The names of the early firms read like Latin classifications of defunct species, evidence of ancient creation:
The Blue Fields Supply & Steam
,
The Limon Ocean Fitters.
It was an immigrant trade from the start—there was something slapdash about it. If you were the father of a girl, and that girl brought home a boy, and that boy said he worked in bananas, you and your daughter would have a talk.

The first true banana merchant was Carl Augustus Frank, a German immigrant who lived near the harbor in New York. In the 1860s, Frank was a steward on a Pacific mail ship. He prepared manifests, met dock agents, greased local police, handled mail, and made deals with merchants who rented cargo space. On a trip in 1865 or thereabouts, he spotted bananas growing in the right-of-way along some train tracks. Frank, who'd never seen a banana before, examined the fruit, then bought a bunch from a peddler in Aspinwall, Colombia. The transporting of that bunch was moonlighting. Frank snuck them aboard as you'd sneak aboard a stowaway. He reached New York in eleven days, a terrifically short run. Most of the bananas were still green and could be sold at a premium. Frank turned a profit in excess of 100 percent on his investment.

Many banana firms had a creation story that mirrors Carl Frank's: some shipping agent or sea captain happened on the strange fruit in the Caribbean, bought a stem for next to nothing, caught a strong wind, which is the breath of God, that carried him home in record time, the bananas green or turning when he arrived, the result being a huge profit, an astounding return. The banana men, the early ones, would spend the rest of their careers trying to recapture the thrill of that initial score.

In 1867, Frank set up shop as a full-time banana importer. His office was at 229 Fulton Street. Two desks, a mailbox, maps, shipping tables, a storefront that portended a flood of industry. That New York—the New York of stevedores and sailors, penny-a-night flops and laudanum-laced knockout drops—is gone, demolished, built over, forgotten. The banana business, in other words, had its beginning in a vanished land, where the funnel of the steamship was the tallest object on the skyline of the city. Frank was joined by his brother Otto. He would stay on Fulton Street while Carl traveled the isthmus, searching for bargains. The Franks leased land in Panama, where they planted their own rhizomes, vertical integration even then being the dream of the banana man. They rented space on mail ships and contracted with store owners and merchants in New York. Within a year, the brothers were selling as many bananas as they could ship.

The Franks were followed into the trade by dozens of importers, many of whom worked out of ports in the American South. Most survived no more than a season or two. In those ancient days, every firm operated in the same basic manner. A company agent would arrive in the port of a banana country. If he had worked out a deal with a grower in advance, he was met by a farmer with stems; if not, he would wander the country, posting flyers that invited farmers to meet him with their bananas. In Honduras, most early growers were Sicilians who had come in the same wave that flooded America in the 1880s. The company agent would inspect each bunch, selecting and rejecting, then turn the cargo over to local boat owners, lighters, who carried the bananas on rafts out to a steamship that waited in the deep water beyond the reef.

By 1880, the trade was booming, with dozens of companies operating up and down the Atlantic coast of the United States. The trading houses were filled with banana men. In New York, the industry leaders met at the Hoffman House on Madison Square. These were the men who created the first market for the banana, which was still expensive but getting cheaper all the time. In the industrial age, when food sat in grimy piles in general stores, the banana men sold their product as a natural wonder, the most hygienic of foods, germproof in its skin. It was these men who decided the fruit should be marketed not as a delicacy for the rich but as a staple for the poor. Hence the effort to lower the price. Hence the effort to resist all taxes and duties demanded by the nations of the isthmus. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the sale of bananas doubled and doubled again. One day no one could identify the yellow fruit, the next day the banana was more popular than the apple. In 1898,
Scientific American
instructed readers on how to best consume a banana: “The fruit is peeled by slitting the skin longitudinally and giving it a rotary motion with the hands.”

Like most booms, it could not last. Not because there was anything wrong with the product: the banana is perfect. Not because there was any scarcity in demand: people loved bananas from the start—the average American now consumes seventy a year. But because supply was uncertain. The banana, as I've said, is terribly vulnerable: to wind, cold, heat, rain, lack of rain, flood, disease. Most firms got their fruit from a single farm or valley, greatly increasing this vulnerability. The entire supply of many early traders could be wiped out by one bad storm. This became painfully clear in 1899, the Year Without Bananas. There had been a heat wave, a flood, a drought, a hurricane. The market sheds were shuttered, the pushcarts stood empty. Dozens of firms went under. It was like the natural disaster that wipes out all but a few impossible-to-kill species. The handful that did survive came away smarter, having learned basic lessons that would dictate how the business was organized in the future:

1.
Get big
   A banana company needs to be fat enough, with enough capital in reserve, to weather inevitable freak occurrences, such as an earthquake or a hurricane.

2.
Grow your own
   A banana company needs its own fields so it can control planting and harvesting, thus avoiding ruinous competition in the event of a down season.

3.
Diversify
   A banana company needs plantations scattered across a vast terrain, stems growing in far-flung countries, so that a disaster that wipes out the crop of a particular region will not destroy the firm's entire supply.

If you study these lessons, you will understand the development of the banana business, how it grew from mom-and-pop trading posts into an all-powerful behemoth.

In certain ways, Sam Zemurray was without precedent. The schnorrer, the pushcart nebbish, the fruit jobber from the docks. He came from nowhere to create not just a fortune but an archetype; he was the gringo in platonic form. He seemed to strive for the sake of striving, to hustle to prove it could be done. Swinging his machete as the sun beats down, face bathed in sweat. You see him astride his white mule, in the doorway of the cantina, his voice as gruff as the voice of William Holden in
The Wild Bunch
, saying, “If you're on a man's side, you stay on that man's side, or you're no better than a goddamn animal.”

Was there a precursor?

Of course there was. (The world is a mere succession of fortunes made and lost, lessons learned and forgotten and learned again.) In truth, Zemurray was following a path blazed by three men who had gone into the jungle a generation before. Here I speak of the titans who built the greatest banana company in the world: United Fruit, El Pulpo, the Octopus, reviled even now, decades after its empire collapsed in the South.

Every story needs a villain.

 

6

The Octopus

United Fruit, in its early years, is the tale of three lives, three men, three dreamlike adventures:

First, Lorenzo Baker of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, son and grandson of commercial fishermen, himself something of a throwback. He might have stepped out of the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson with muttonchops gone gray before he was forty. He never smiled, never laughed; he scowled or stormed off. That's what people remembered. He was born on Bound Brook Island, a spit of land off Cape Cod “on or about July 4, 1840.” By age fourteen, he was working on a schooner. By sixteen, he was earning a full percentage. By twenty-one, he was a captain. He stayed in the pilothouse after the ship landed and the men had gone to get drunk in Provincetown. He loved seaports: boats, hundreds of them, schooners and draggers, masts stripped of sails, nets caked with guts, sailors playing poker as the lights of town glowed in the distance. By thirty, Baker had saved enough to buy a majority share in an eighty-five-ton, three-mast fishing boat called the
Telegraph
. He paid $8,000 to be a principal owner, every penny he had. A week after he took possession, he was approached on the docks by a rough character wearing the sort of coat that cattlemen wore on the Plains. Having acquired the title to a gold mine, the man wanted Baker to carry him and nine other prospectors with their equipment three hundred miles up the Orinoco River to Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela, from where they would continue on horseback.