The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  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 reserv
e, 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.

  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.