The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  Zemurray had stumbled on a niche: ripes, overlooked at the bottom of the trade. It was logistics. Could he move the product faster than the product was ruined by time? This work was nothing but stress, the margins ridiculously small (like counterfeiting dollar bills), but it was a way in. Whereas the big fruit companies monopolized the upper precincts of the industry—you needed capital, railroads, and ships to operate in greens—the world of ripes was wide open. Within a few weeks of his return to Selma, Zemurray set out again, then again, then again. It was in these months, on train platforms and in small towns, that Zemurray first came to be known as Sam the Banana Man.

  Historians later described the young Zemurray as a fruit peddler, no different from other poor Jews who pushed carts through Manhattan’s Lower East Side, except instead of a wagon, Sam worked from a boxcar. (He was “Sam the Banana Man,” according to Life, “who once used railroads as pushcarts.”) It made sense, but only in a shallow way. In truth, Sam Zemurray was more interesting and unique—as a salesman of a perishable product, he was a kind of existentialist, skirting the line between wealth and oblivion, health and rot, a rider of railroads, a chaser of time, crossing the country in a boxcar filled with reeking produce. It was life: move the fruit now or you’re ruined forever. He became a gambler by necessity—a risk taker, a salesman, a brawler. “The little fellow,” as the big wheels in Boston called him, but the little fellow would build a kingdom from ripes.

  3

  The Fruit Jobber

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the world of the banana men—which was a world of shipping companies, warehouses, plantations, ripening rooms, loading bays, and docks—had settled into a hierarchy. If you step back, you can see it laid out in a cross section, like an exhibit in a museum: at the top, you have the owners of the companies, men who sit in boardrooms and trade stock. One of the largest was Boston Fruit, dominated by old New England families. But there were others, as many as fifty small and midsized importers. They had names like Tropical Trading and Transport Company, Colombian Land Company, Snyder Banana. Beneath them were sea captains who rented cargo space. These were the sort of salts whose portraits hang in dockside taverns: bearded sailors in peacoats, their storm-tossed ships painted in the background. Such men were the backbone of the trade, which depended on speed. There were tales of ruthless sailors who did whatever it took. Captain Gus, for example, who, rather than losing days in quarantine, dumped a passenger sick with fever into the sea. Then came the bureaucrats: dock agents, purchasers, inspectors, and overseers who worked the wharves, filled the hotels and taverns, and spoke only of bananas. Then the stevedores, loaders and unloaders, African Americans and Sicilians who went everywhere with their baling hooks, always present, never seen.

  Finally, at the bottom of the trade, in the cellar beneath the basement, came the banana peddler, also known insultingly as the fruit jobber. (For the rest of his life, no matter how high he climbed, the executives at United Fruit referred to Zemurray as “the fruit jobber.”) Almost all were foreign born: Jews from Russia, Greeks from Anatolia, Italians from Sicily. It was the only work many could get. Bananas were especially disreputable, with the taint of cholera and the stink of the docks. Most jobbers were small men, feisty, excitable, voluble, prone to anger. When they argued, it made a kind of symphony. You saw the crowd whenever a ship came in, fighting for position. Sam, big, deliberate, strong, and slow, stood out from the beginning. Nothing could make him hurry. He had the sort of calm that cannot be taught. Years later, in a letter to Franklin Roosevelt, Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter described Zemurray as “one of the few statesmen among businessmen that I have encountered. He has the qualities that one usually finds in a great personality: simplicity as well as size.”

  Sam had filled out since his first years in Selma, become a man. In his prime, he was six foot etcetera, a buck eighty-five in boots, broad across the shoulders with powerful arms. He was a kind of colossus; dismissals of him as “the little fellow” were comical. In meetings where rivals expected a stooped immigrant, his size registered with shock. It was ten points on the board before the game even began.

  He moved to Mobile soon after he went into ripes. Better to live near the docks. Now and then, if business was slow, he took a job. He worked on a ship as part of a cleaning crew, scrubbing decks. He worked in a warehouse as a watchman. I’m not sure where he lived. In a cheap rental in the old part of the city, perhaps; in a boardinghouse by the harbor. He had soon made his name as a uniquely resourceful trader: the crazy Russian who bought the freckled bananas. He was pure hustle. Every morning, before first light, he was at the docks with a pocketful of bills. Foghorns blew, train wheels rattled, smoke drifted across the sky. He purchased every ripe and overripe and about-to-be-ripe he could lay his hands on. The importers were happy to get money for what, in other towns, was considered trash. He sorted these bananas, then loaded them onto the boxcars of the Illinois Central: the overripes went to markets in Mobile or towns nearby; the ripes went to stores fifty or a hundred miles up the line; the about-to-be-ripes might keep as far as Memphis or Birmingham.

  Because Zemurray discovered a patch of fertile ground previously untilled, his business grew by leaps and bounds. In 1899, he sold 20,000 bananas. In 1903, he sold 574,000. Within a decade, he would be selling more than a million bananas a year. When Andrew Preston, the president of United Fruit, visited Mobile in 1903, he asked to meet Samuel Zemurray, the Russian selling the ripes. No photos of this meeting were taken, no minutes recorded, but it was significant: the titan who began the trade shaking hands with the nobody who would perfect it. Preston later spoke of Zemurray with admiration. He said the kid from Russia was closer in spirit to the banana pioneers than anyone else working. “He’s a risk taker,” Preston explained, “he’s a thinker, and he’s a doer.”

  Zemurray signed a contract with United Fruit that year, putting their arrangement in writing. Though I’ve not been able to find the original document, I have found its language summarized in a lawsuit the attorney general of the United States brought against the Illinois Central, which, according to the Justice Department, had been unfairly favoring Zemurray. The lawsuit defines the fruit jobber’s relationship with United Fruit thus: “An importer of bananas had a contract with Z, under which all ripe bananas and all bananas that were turning ripe became his property.”

  In other words, all the bananas shipped by United Fruit, which amounted to nearly half the bananas in the world, were in the process of becoming Zemurray’s. Everything turning was turning into Sam’s.

  A few years before, Zemurray seemed like a fool buying garbage. Now look what he’d accomplished! Selling hundreds of thousands of bananas a year, he’d become one of the biggest traffickers in the trade. And he’d done it without having to incur the traditional costs. His fruit was grown for him, harvested, and shipped for free. He was like a bike racer riding in the windbreak of a semitruck—the semitruck being United Fruit. By his twenty-first birthday, he had a hundred thousand dollars in the bank. In today’s terms, he would have been a millionaire. If he had stopped there, his would have been a great success story.

  4

  Brown to Green

  Samuel Zemurray took a partner circa 1903. This was out of character. He was the solitary sort, a late-night walker and party avoider. He liked to make decisions on his own—better to ask forgiveness than permission. But he had gone as far as he could go with ripes. He wanted to move into the more respectable precincts of the trade; that’s where the real money was. For this, he would need capital and help, someone to kick in cash and tend the office while he traveled.

  Ashbell Hubbard is gone now, dead and buried, forgotten. No shadow, rumor, trail. If his name survives, it’s as a footnote in the story of Zemurray. Here was a poor bastard who lacked the nerve, who sold out too early, who quit the game a minute before the number came in. He was a product of the scene, having grown up in Mobile, a sort of elder statesman respected by everyone in the tr
ade. In him, Zemurray would have recognized a member of the club, a mild-mannered man who could reassure investors concerned by Sam’s risk taking. (Hubbard had his own contract with United Fruit, which also helps explain the partnership.) In Zemurray, Hubbard would have recognized the raw talent of the rising star. They joined with an ambitious goal: to traffic yellows and greens. This meant contracting Central American farmers for a percentage of each harvest, which Zemurray and Hubbard would import to Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston. For Sam, who had always kept down costs, this meant assuming a new level of risk.

  The Hubbard-Zemurray Company started with $30,000 in capital. The men rented an office in Mobile. There was frosted glass with a name on the door, shipping schedules, railroad tables tacked on a wall. After hours, they stopped in one of the bars on the water, where they could catch up on gossip and market talk, the smallest bit of information meaning possible advantage. By then, a group of men had gathered around Zemurray, banana men who seemed to defer to him, though he was the youngest on the scene. This ability to attract followers would prove crucial. Though he said little, he was recognized as a leader. His team was better, stronger, tighter. In my mind, young Sam, this kid who demanded fierce loyalty, resembles, crazy as it might sound, John Wayne, the gawky youth who turned up in that early Raoul Walsh Western, slouching in imitation of his own childhood hero Tom Mix, the first cowboy star. Zemurray was big and slow like that, gruff, easy, earthy, and charming, with a booming voice that commanded respect. Walking into a portside dive where the men were drinking, he would frown and say, “All right, boys, time to work.”

  In 1905, Zemurray and Hubbard purchased Thatcher Brothers Steamship Company, which was in bad financial shape. This acquisition ran upward of $10,000. Sam put up some of the money, Ashbell did the same. The balance was covered by United Fruit at the direction of Andrew Preston. (According to colleagues, Preston followed Zemurray’s progress as the general manager of the Yankees might follow a flamethrower making his way through the minors.) Such partnerships were the way of United Fruit, the style that earned the company the nickname El Pulpo, the Octopus. They wrapped their tentacles around every start-up in the industry. In those days, U.F. either owned a piece of you or was intent on your destruction. United Fruit took a 25 percent stake in Hubbard-Zemurray but remained a silent partner.

  Around this time, Hubbard and Zemurray acquired the Cuyamel Fruit Company, founded in the 1890s by the speculator William Streich, who bought a hundred acres on the Cuyamel River in Honduras and then ran out of money. Cuyamel was subsequently purchased by a consortium of Cincinnati businessmen, who invested several hundred thousand more dollars in equipment, steam shovels, and engines that turned to rust in the fields, as they followed Streich into insolvency. The banana lands were littered with defunct concerns and failed businessmen. You would see them in taverns near the harbor, in dirty suits and panama hats, cadging drinks and boasting: I used to own this; I was once head of that; I was mayor of this; I was boss of that. If you’re going to build in the jungle, build fast. Anything left for a season is lost. It turns first into a ruin, then into a story, then is forgotten altogether.

  What had Zemurray purchased?

  A strongbox filled with deeds that might or might not be honored. The acquisition of Cuyamel—it cost him $20,000—was a gamble. For the moment, the key purchase was Thatcher Brothers, picked like a plum from the bottom of the market. With Thatcher, Zemurray became the owner of steamships. This changed his status immediately.

  It’s worth lingering on the ships, as they would remain important for years. Once fancy ocean liners, they had since fallen into disrepair. Chipped and rusty, they retained a certain elegance. An upper deck, a hurricane deck, a side-wheel, a dining room. The ships once made a regular run from Liverpool, England, to Argentina—they were said to be the fastest across the Atlantic. They were warhorses and would remain in constant operation for fifty years, filled with dandies in the beginning, filled with bananas in the end. Standing in the pilothouse, the world would look different to Zemurray, his field of operation suddenly expanded. The entire Gulf of Mexico was now open, all the waterfront towns, markets, inlets, and deltas of the Central American isthmus.

  5

  Bananas Don’t Grow on Trees

  In the jungle, after a heavy rain, you can hear the banana trees growing. If you’re a tourist lost in the lowlands, it’s the ominous sound of the coming end, creepy crawlies in the depths of the lagoon. If you’re a banana man walking in your fields at sundown, it’s money.

  A banana plant, under the best conditions, can grow twenty inches in twenty-four hours. The thought can make you sick: groves of stems and monstrous leaves expanding while we sleep, desiring, it seems, to cover completely the sunny parts of the world. Which, of course, makes it an ideal crop for a businessman. It’s never out of season. A single plant can bear fruit as many as three times a year for twenty years or more. And when the stem is finally kaput, and by now you’re old and rich, you dig up the rhizome, hack it to pieces, plant each piece, and watch those grow. Thus another twenty years go by.

  The scientific name for the plant, Musa paradisiaca, the fruit of paradise, carries evidence of a medieval legend—that it was the banana, not the apple, that the snake used to tempt Eve in the Garden of Eden, a belief that, considering the shape of the fruit and the nature of man’s Fall, makes sense. According to another legend, the banana was a holy fruit from the East, sustenance for the wise men of India, the peels rotting in piles beside the bodhi tree where the Buddha attains enlightenment, where men are freed from the wheel, where the banana cowboy puts down his guns.

  This notion—carefree men living on wild bananas—comes, probably, from a sense of the fruit as the perfect, shrink-wrapped-by-God product of the jungle. You are hungry, reach up and take a bite. In fact, the fruit does not begin to ripen until picked and cannot be eaten from a tree without retching. Even in ancient times, those who ate bananas had to harvest them, then wait for the harvest to ripen in palm-frond huts, a system copied by United Fruit.

  According to scientists, the banana has its origins in the jungles of Southeast Asia, in the wilderness of our first world. These jungles have all the conditions a banana needs to thrive—conditions replicated everywhere on the equator. Sandy soil known as loam, high humidity, high temperatures, and at least 180 inches of rain a year. A frost will wipe out an entire crop. In cataloging the home country of the banana, where the fruit grows wild, the anthropologist Herbert Spinden of the Peabody Museum included “Northeast India, Burma, Cambodia and parts of Southern China, as well as the large islands of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Philippines and Formosa.”

  There are dozens of edible species in the Far East, and dozens more that will cause you pain or put you to sleep forever. The best include the Cavendish, the kind we eat today; the plantain, which has to be cooked to be enjoyed; the dwarf banana known as the Lady Finger; and the Jamaican Red, which has a pinkish peel and tastes like the banana Curious George eats.

  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.