The Fish That Ate the Whale (6 page)

When Christopher Columbus sighted the Orinoco in August 1498, he believed he had stumbled across one of the rivers that flowed out of the Garden of Eden. In a letter to King Ferdinand of Spain, Columbus said he had discovered the site of the terrestrial Elysium, “which none can enter save with God's leave.” The basin of the river was explored by Alexander von Humboldt in 1800—he wrote of its pink dolphins—but the upper river was not navigated until 1951. Being asked to sail three hundred miles into the interior was like being asked to sail off the earth.

Why did Captain Baker say yes?

The money: $8,500 in cash. Five hundred more than Baker paid for his share in the
Telegraph
. Even if the worst happened, he would walk away rich enough to invest in a new boat without the help of creditors.

Baker landed in Ciudad Bolívar on April 20, 1870. The
Telegraph
's log records it as the successful delivery of “10 gold prospectors and 4 tons of machinery.” The equipment was gathered on a pier, picks and axes wet with rain. Baker was paid the balance of his fee in French and Spanish gold, then stood on the deck of the
Telegraph
watching the miners fade into the jungle.

Baker had trouble sailing down the river—currents, shallows. When he reached the sea, the
Telegraph
was taking on water. She limped away from the coast like a sailor stumbling away from a fight. He landed in Port Antonio, Jamaica, where the ship was put in dry dock, its hull caulked and repaired.

Ten days later, when the
Telegraph
was returned to the water, Baker began to look for ballast. With this in mind he purchased bamboo, ginger, and allspice. As the cargo was being loaded, he sat in a bar near the water to have a taste of local rum. He was drinking planter's punch when he saw
his
first bananas.

What are those?
he asked, pointing to the fruit piled on the wharf.

Baker found himself in conversation with a dock agent who explained the particulars: texture, hardiness, market life—ten days to two weeks. The agent brought Baker a ripe banana.

How do you open it?
asked the captain.

It was peeled. He took a bite. The flavor of the banana, the warmth of the rum, the sun beating down, the trade wind—it was perfect, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

He bought 160 bunches at 24 cents a bunch. They were loaded onto the deck of the
Telegraph
. Then Baker raced the clock that started ticking as soon as the stems had been cut. The trip from Port Antonio to New York usually took two weeks—you could do it faster if conditions were perfect, but if the wind died it could take much longer. This was the gamble at the core of the business, the risk taken by the first banana men. You lived at the whim of forces beyond your control. Your life was weather. The early trade was less industry than art.

Baker caught a favorable wind out of Port Antonio. As in an old-time cartographer's illustration, you see the face of God blowing a gust that billows the sails and speeds the
Telegraph
across the water. He reached Jersey City in eleven days—the bananas were still green. The dock swarmed with agents, go-getters working on commission who examined everything that came in, hunting for bargains. Baker sold his bananas for $2 a bunch: a tremendous return, a jackpot he tried to replicate for years. He would sail to Port Antonio, have a glass of planter's punch, load the
Telegraph
with bananas, then light out. He ran into a squall on his second trip. As the
Telegraph
pitched wildly, the entire cargo slid into the sea. He developed a routine: bananas in summer, mackerel in winter, oysters in spring. In July 1871, he sailed into Boston with the biggest load of bananas the city had ever seen.

*   *   *

Andrew Preston was on the docks the afternoon that load came in. A buyer for Seaverns & Morrison, a Boston produce dealer, Preston took a special interest in perishables. He made a career of recognizing a prize at a distance. He got his hands on everything: pineapples, persimmons, pomegranates. When Baker heaved his cargo onto Long Wharf, it was the first time Preston had ever seen bananas. Stacked in piles, they looked obscene. For years, magazines refused to run ads that pictured a banana—a photo of a woman eating a banana was verboten into our own time.

Preston bought Baker's entire haul. The bosses at Seaverns & Morrison were not pleased. I mean, here's this kid, and yes, he's a good kid, a hard worker, but he's blown the budget on a single product, which we don't know how to store or sell. Okay, fine, he let his heart run away, but then, as soon as that cargo was unloaded, he went out and bought another, then another, as many bananas as Baker could import. In this way, what started as an annoyance at Seaverns & Morrison became a problem. Andrew Preston would not stop talking about bananas. Like Baker before him and like Zemurray after, he had spotted a niche. He knew bananas were going to be huge, just knew it! I assume many people have comparable hunches—
quadraphonic stereos are going to be huge! Beanie Babies are going to be huge!
—but most are forgotten because most were wrong.

Preston was right. He quit Seaverns & Morrison and went to work with Baker. For years, the men had an informal arrangement: Baker carried the bananas to Preston, who sold them across an ever-expanding territory. Preston meant to change the model of the business. It had been low volume, high price; he would make it high volume, with cheap bananas sold up and down the economic scale. To achieve this, Baker and Preston had to increase supply and control quality. In the early days, Baker carried whatever happened to be available—the Cavendish, the Lady Finger, the Jamaican Red. In the future, he would ship only the Big Mike: a buyer has to know what he's going to get. The Big Mike had the advantage of being tough—stack it and it will not bruise. Its skin was moister when peeled than the skin of other bananas, which is why people stopped slipping on banana peels when Big Mike went extinct.

In 1877, Baker moved to Port Antonio to better control supply. The roles of the men became plain, a division that would characterize the industry: Preston stayed in Boston, where he managed the market; Baker stayed in the tropics, where he handled the product. When sales boomed, the partners decided to form a corporation. They had reached a point where the only way forward was to expand. For this, they needed capital. But when they went to the banks, their loan applications were denied as too risky:
one bad season, you're done.
They established a partnership of investors instead, each of whom would put up money in return for stock. Boston Fruit was founded in 1885. The original investors were Preston, Baker, and ten other Bostonians, most of whom invested $1,500.

By 1897, Boston Fruit had $4 million in assets and was growing fast. Yet the company kept running into the same wall: supply could not keep up with demand. Sooner or later, prices would rise, destroying the business model that made the company successful. What's more, all their bananas came from Jamaica, making Boston Fruit vulnerable. That's why Preston was turned away by the banks: too much could go wrong. Though Preston and Baker were making big money—by 1899, Boston Fruit controlled 75 percent of the U.S. banana market—they were regarded as akin to mushroom harvesters, entirely dependent on the rain.

When the worst happened in 1899, the Year Without Bananas, Preston went back to the banks. Only this time, he went with a pitch: Some think the problem is we've grown too big, but the real problem is that we're still too small. We must get bigger, much bigger. We must grow so many bananas in so many places that no single storm can ever put us in such dire straits again. In other words, United Fruit was born of disaster. As Bo Diddley might sing, it was the son of a lightning bolt, sired by a hurricane.

There were two ways for the company to grow: Preston could scout property, plant fields, and harvest bananas, or he could find someone who had done these things already.

*   *   *

By his fiftieth birthday, Minor Keith owned land in six republics on the isthmus, and the hundred-peso note of Costa Rica showed his face: small, dark, and filled with mischief.
Fortune
magazine described him as “an apple-headed little man with the eyes of a fanatic.” He had grown monstrously fat, a tiny, corpulent tycoon squeezed into expensive shoes. Brooklyn born, he traveled everywhere before making his way to Costa Rica in 1871, where his older brother Henry, because of family connections, had been hired to build a railroad across the isthmus. Henry, who knew little about trains, met Minor in Puntarenas on the Pacific. Spreading out a map, Henry traced a route that looked easy: fifty-four miles of flat ground and modest hills from Puntarenas to Puerto Limón. Wanting to see the terrain up close, they crossed the country by foot and mule—the brothers in Western gear, boots dragging on the ground. They climbed the Cordillera, the spine of mountains that runs the length of the isthmus. After three days, they reached San José, 3,500 feet above sea level. The country grew more rugged as they went. The valleys were choked with undergrowth. Most of the jungle was uninhabited, forsaken, diseased, the home of yellow fever and cholera. The Indians never lived there. They built their villages in the high country. The Spanish did the same. It was a factor in the success of the banana companies: the cheap prices paid for land by the gringos was considered a windfall by local owners, who believed the lowlands a dangerous waste with no value at all.

From the last hill, the Keith brothers could see Puerto Limón tucked into a cove on the Caribbean. They followed a path into town, then walked into the first tavern. When Minor told the bartender how they had come—across the Cordillera by mule—he bought them drinks. “There's an old saying,” said the bartender. “A man who makes the trip to the Caribbean by land once is a hero, the man who does it twice is a fool.”

For now, let the Keiths be heroes—soon enough, they will be fools.

The first railroad tie was laid a few months later. In the public announcement, Henry Keith said the train would reach the Cordillera within a year. It's not clear when he realized the work was going to be a lot harder than he'd imagined. A few days into the job is my guess. Laying track on the isthmus is a nightmare. There is no bedrock in the jungle. As soon as a section of rail had been laid, it began to shift. Now and then, after a big rain, an entire stretch would slide into a valley. Weeds wrapped around the ties, roots buckled the beds. The workers were tormented by heat and disease. More than three hundred died the first year; just four miles of track were completed.

Halfway through the second summer, Henry Keith was not feeling well. Feverish, hot to the touch. And his eyes—
my God
,
his eyes!
Yellow fever. Minor told his brother to go home to Brooklyn, recover, then return. But less than a month later, Henry was back in Puerto Limón. Soon after that, he was dead. Minor moved into his brother's tent and carried on. He sent for his little brother Charlie, as he had been sent for. When that brother died, he sent for his youngest brother, John. When John died, he continued alone. This made him a hero in Costa Rica, a man whose commitment could not be questioned, who fed his own brothers to the jungle.

The railroad made its first run on December 7, 1885. Fifteen years, at least four thousand dead. The conductor stopped short of the Devil's Elbow, a precarious stretch in the mountains where the track crossed a rickety bridge. He was afraid it would collapse. Minor argued with the man, then grabbed an American flag and sat on the cow catcher. Looking ahead, he shouted, “Go!” The train reached Puntarenas at eleven p.m., where it was greeted by a huge crowd. Keith gave a short speech, his command of Spanish being barely serviceable: “
Señores: suplico darme su perdón: yo no ser hablador; ser puramente trabajador.
” Gentlemen, please pardon me; I no be speaker. I be purely worker.

In his spare time, Minor Keith roamed Central and South America, exploring its cities and towns. It was in this way that he saw
his
first bananas—a stem of fat fingers creaking in the warm wind. That was 1873, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where the Big Mike made its first appearance on the Spanish Main. Not long after, Keith heard that the Frank brothers of New York were planting bananas along the tracks of the Panama Railroad. And selling them in New York! He went to see Carl Frank, who explained the business. The early traders did not fear competition. It seemed there would never be enough bananas to meet the demand.

It was Carl Frank who sold Minor Keith the rhizomes he planted along the Costa Rican railroad. Keith thought bananas would serve as a cheap food for his own workers, but soon realized, as Frank had before him, that there was a tremendous market for bananas in the North. He formed the Tropical Trading and Transport Company to carry his fruit but sold most of his crop to other suppliers. Though he considered himself a railroad man—it was his dream to build a train from New York to Tierra del Fuego—his business was supported by bananas. He planted rhizomes across the region. By 1882, he was growing bananas in Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. In 1883, he shipped 110,801 stems; in 1890, he shipped more than a million. In 1894, Keith signed a contract with Boston Fruit. He agreed to sell the company his entire banana harvest.

Despite this, Keith's economic situation was perilously uncertain. It was the nature of train building: you lived at the whim of creditors. You might appear rich, but if a lender called in a loan, you were done. Keith owed millions of dollars to banks, money he borrowed to complete his railroad. In late 1898, one of these lenders, Hoadley and Company of New Orleans, went bankrupt. The creditors who took over gave Keith ninety days to repay $1.5 million.

Preston and Baker followed these developments. Keith was their biggest supplier. If he went under, so would they. Boston Fruit had money but needed bananas. Minor Keith had bananas but needed money. In March 1899, Minor Keith, forty-nine years old, boarded a ship for Boston.