The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  He spent two months in Honduras, then set sail. A dozen miles offshore, he was caught in a storm, the tempest that sits at the bottom of our hemispheric memory. “Rain, thunder, and lightning were so continuous that it seemed the end of the world,” Columbus wrote. “This intolerable storm continued in such a way that we saw neither the sun nor the stars as a guide. The ships were lying open to the skies, the sails broken, the anchors and shrouds lost, as were the cables … and many supplies went overboard; the crews were all sick and all were repenting their sins and turning to God. Everyone made vows and promised to make pilgrimages if they were saved from death, and, very often, men went so far as to confess to each other.” Historians say the storm lasted twenty-eight days, but Columbus said it lasted one hundred, which might be his way of saying it seemed to last forever. This is a wild country—that was the message of the storm—ringed by sea serpents and monsters.

  Honduras was settled twenty years after Columbus by Hernando Cortés and the conquistadores from Spain, fresh from their conquest of Mexico. Cortés was born in western Spain, in Extremadura, where so many of the Spanish explorers came from. My Honduran guide, Mike Valledares, said, “Cortés was a pig farmer. His father raised pigs, and so did he.”

  Neither Cortés nor his father raised pigs, but Mike’s point seemed clear: the men who destroyed the Aztec Empire were not fit for decent company.

  * * *

  The Central American isthmus is 350 miles wide at its widest point and 34 miles at its narrowest in Panama. It’s cleaved by the Cordillera, a narrow range of mountains, rocky heights, waterfalls, cliffs, and canyons. If I have used the word “Cordillera” a lot, it’s because I think it’s the most beautiful word in the language, summoning images of one-lane roads, switchbacks, and coffee plantations at the top of the world. The highest peak on the isthmus is approximately fourteen thousand feet. This is less landmass than hallway, bottleneck, cloverleaf onto the highway, passage from here to there, forever in-between, forever on the way. If you want to drive the isthmus lengthwise, down the gullet, Mexico to Colombia, where the land broadens and South America begins, your best bet is the Pan-American Highway, which starts in Alaska and continues thirty thousand miles to the bottom of the world. It’s a network of roads each charted by a conquistador or strongman. It’s disappointing in many places, rutted and small, climbing and descending, battling the jungle and mountains, then ending abruptly in the rain forest of Panama. It’s as if the road itself, defeated by nature, walked away muttering. It starts again sixty-five miles hence, on the other side of a chasm. This is called the Darién Gap. It symbolizes the incomplete nature of Central America, the IN PROGRESS sign that seems to hang over everything. Russia is the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Germany is the Autobahn. The United States is Route 66. Central America is the Darién Gap.

  It’s always been that way on the isthmus—many projects started, few brought to completion; many beginnings, few endings; each boom followed by a tremendous bust. The first came with the conquistadores: all that killing had a trickle-down effect of money and jobs. But the big bonanza came with the European discovery of Peru a generation after Cortés: palaces and mines, ribbons of silver and gold. When the jackpot was gathered up and carried off, the isthmus served as the transit point, the cut-through, the shortest walk from Pacific to Atlantic. Every doubloon was humped across that narrow neck of land. It took three weeks to haul a treasure from Veracruz on the Pacific coast of Colombia to Porto Bello on the Atlantic, where the sailors drank rum as pirates watched and waited. Witnesses described the port towns as a delirium of hustlers and con men, brass bands, horn players barefoot in the dust. In A Brief History of Central America, Hector Perez-Brignoli called the isthmus of those years “a chimerical fantasy.”

  The boom lasted for two hundred years, from the age of Balboa to the rise of North America, when the mines of Peru were finally exhausted. After the last Spanish fleet sailed from Porto Bello in 1739, the isthmus fell into a deep slumber, a sleep of centuries. With the silver went the pirates and their dreams of El Dorado. The region fell off the map, forgotten and forlorn. The population dwindled, villages were abandoned. Now and then, an entire year went by without a ship arriving from Europe. More than a century elapsed between the departure of that last silver fleet and the arrival of the first banana man. By then, the nations of Central America had broken away from Spain. Mexico, Guatemala, the others. Honduras declared independence in 1821.

  In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez describes the coming of the new age as the arrival of a single entrepreneur from the North:

  … there arrived in Macondo on one of so many Wednesdays the chubby and smiling Mr. Herbert, who ate at the house.

  No one had noticed him at the table until the first bunch of bananas had been eaten. Aureliano had come across him by chance as he protested in broken Spanish because there were no rooms at the Hotel Jacob, and as he frequently did with strangers, he took him home. He was in the captive-balloon business, which had taken him halfway around the world with excellent profits, but he had not succeeded in taking anyone up in Macondo because they considered that invention backward after having seen the gypsies’ flying carpets. He was leaving, therefore, on the next train. When they brought to the table the tiger-striped bunch of bananas that they were accustomed to hang in the dining room during lunch, he picked the first piece of fruit without great enthusiasm. But he kept on eating as he spoke, tasting, chewing, more with the distraction of a wise man than with the delight of a good eater, and when he finished the first bunch he asked them to bring him another. Then he took a small case with optical instruments out of the toolbox he always carried with him. With the suspicious attention of a diamond merchant he examined the banana meticulously, dissecting it with a special scalpel, weighing the pieces on a pharmacist’s scale, and calculating its breadth with a gunsmith’s calipers. Then he took a series of instruments out of the chest with which he measured the temperature, the level of humidity in the atmosphere, and the intensity of the light. It was such an intriguing ceremony that no one could eat in peace as everybody waited for Mr. Herbert to pass a final and revealing judgment, but he did not say anything that allowed anyone to guess his intentions.

  Mr. Herbert was Samuel Zemurray, a fruit jobber, a hustler, a man who sees not a nation with a history but a mine ribboned with silver and gold. He arrived with schemes and a bag filled with the tools of the diamond trade. (He kept quiet as he tasted because talking only drives up the price.) The original sin of the industry touched everyone: the way the banana men viewed the people and the land of the isthmus as no more than a resource, not very different from the rhizomes, soil, sun, or rain. A source of cheap labor, local color. One definition of evil is to fail to recognize the humanity in the other: to see a person as an object or tool, something to be put to use. The spirit of colonialism infected the trade from the start.

  Zemurray bought his first parcel of land on the edge of Omoa, an old colonial town on the north coast of Honduras. Much of the property ran along the southern bank of the Cuyamel River, where the country is hilly and fine, a thousand shades of green. This was long considered junk land, neither valued nor tended. For $2,000, all of it borrowed, he got five thousand acres. He was soon back in New Orleans, wondering if five thousand was enough. Would it give him the supply he needed to compete with United Fruit? It does not matter if you think it’s enough, Ashbell Hubbard told him. We’re out of money. There are times when certain cards sit unclaimed in the common pile, when certain properties become available that will never be available again. A good businessman feels these moments like a fall in the barometric pressure. A great businessman is dumb enough to act on them even when he cannot afford to.

  9

  To the Collins

  Zemurray returned to Honduras in the spring of 1910 with a plan, achingly simple, beautifully effective: head north beyond the last paved road, into the delta of the Cuyamel River, flash the roll, and buy as much land as h
e could until his cash ran out. He was playing with borrowed money. Having tapped out every line of credit in New Orleans and Mobile, he had gone on to banks in New York and Boston. Whoever was lending, he was accepting. He was out there, overextended, vulnerable. He must have worried about the risk but had to know this was his moment: the land would not be this cheap forever. You see him in the cantinas of Omoa, the big Russian in the doorway, buying drinks for everyone. Unlike most banana executives, Zemurray was comfortable with the people of the isthmus. “Sam adapted himself to the ways of life of those he contacted,” Fortune reported. “He cultivated friendship, and did not scorn to take a drink with the peasants. He acquired a wonderful command of their language [sic], including swear words, which he didn’t hesitate to employ. He became a Hondureño.” Zemurray told the locals he would bring them wealth and good jobs. When it came time to hire, he offered a wage ten times the going rate, which angered other employers. In the course of a few months, he accumulated the uncleared acres that would constitute his first plantation.

  In setting a price for the property, Zemurray took advantage of the local landowners. He had superior information, understood something important lost on the Hondurans. To the peasants, the land was swamp and disease, nothing that will still be nothing in a hundred years. Sam knew better. Because he was raised on a farm, he realized the meaning of all that black soil beneath the weeds. Because he worked as a jobber, he realized the worth of the fruit that would thrive in that soil. This land, picked up for a song, was in fact the most valuable banana country in the world. The crop wants lowland forest—bananas will not thrive above three thousand feet—and the kind of soil known as loam, as well as good drainage and eighty to two hundred inches of rain a year. Honduras has all that. “The Caribbean lowlands, which were supposed to be worthless and in which no white man could live, were discovered to be splendid soil for the growing of bananas,” Samuel Crowther wrote in Romance and Rise of the American Tropics.

  Zemurray then went all across Honduras, meeting government officials. He sat with the emissaries of Miguel Dávila, the president of the country. He was seeking sweetheart deals that would exempt his company from taxes and duties. Such corrupt understandings were common enough in the business to have a name: concessions, unofficial arrangements without which no banana man could succeed. The trade depended on cheap fruit, necessitating cheap labor, cheap land, and no extra fees. The smallest additional cost—a penny per bunch, say—would drive the price above the market rate set by United Fruit. Though the Dávila government was not the most pliable, Zemurray did eventually secure his concessions (by kickback, by bribe). In Honduras, Cuyamel would be exempted from import duties on all equipment, such as freight engines, train tracks, railroad ties, steam shovels, machetes; exempted, too, from paying property, labor, and export tax. Zemurray’s bananas would arrive in the United States unencumbered by such fees—this meant he could sell his product just as cheaply as United Fruit. Later concessions would entitle him to clear jungle and build wharves, railroads, and bridges, all of which would be privately owned by Zemurray.

  If asked to sum up Sam in these early days, when he was building his first plantation, I would use the word “drive”: it was drive, ambition, moxie, guts, or whatever you want to call it that pushed him from Selma to New Orleans, then on to the jungle towns of the isthmus, where the genie was loosed and the man went wild. Drive to make money, leave a mark, climb the pyramid, beat the bastards who gave him the high hat. Why bananas? Because it was the nearest product at hand. The Southern markets reeked of them. If he had settled in Chicago, it would have been beef; if Pittsburgh, steel; if L.A., movies. In the end, it does not matter what you’re stocking—selling is the thing. Who knows where such ambition came from? Maybe it was the pent-up energy of dozens of thwarted Jewish generations confined to the ghettos of Europe. Maybe it was the result of some forgotten childhood trauma. Maybe it was evidence of a defect or lack, a missing thing that Sam found in competition. (It’s the neediest among us who go the farthest.) Or maybe it was already with him in the cradle, the intangible thing that made him go.

  In the fall of 1910, Zemurray opened an office in Omoa, eight miles up the coast from Puerto Cortés. The office has been preserved as a museum: a shack with a desk and a window looking out on low hills to the west. The plantation was fifteen miles inland, on the Atlantic slope. In the autumn, when the rains came, he moved to a bungalow in the fields to oversee the workers—most of them Jamaicans—as they cleared the jungle and planted the first bananas.

  The process of building a banana plantation—of replacing the chaos of weeds and vines with neat rows, fences, and shacks—was a science by then, a matter of following specific steps.

  The best guide was a book published by United Fruit. Having purchased enough land for a plantation, you were instructed to send engineers into the overgrowth with field glasses, notebooks, and pencils to map every inch of every acre, every dip and rise, every gulley where the fog pooled, every course where the water flowed on its way to the sea. Using these maps, the property was divided into relatively flat plots, thirty square acres apiece, or as close as the terrain allowed. Teams of workers walked the fields, marking boundaries with string, then cleared the brush. This was sometimes done by fire, the black clouds visible as far as the coast, the burning wood redolent in the tropical air. More often it was done by hand, the machetes rising and falling—thwick, thwack, thwick. It took several weeks. In the end, the jungle was cut to stubble, nothing spared but the big trees, prehistoric monsters that reached hundreds of feet. There was the guanacaste tree, which blossoms into a canopy, or the ceiba, which rises like a column of marble, its bark mottled with spikes. The ceiba was holy to the Mayans. They considered it a portal to the underworld. A ceiba towering above a lonely stretch of countryside is an awesome sight.

  After the undergrowth had been cleared, workers marked off rows in the fields. Then two men came along: the first dug a twelve-inch hole every three feet, the second dropped in a banana rhizome. The big trees were then cut down Montana-style, West Indians pushing and pulling a massive two-man saw until the tree sways and someone yells and here comes the ancient ceiba, holy, holy, holy, falling with a rush of leaves, exploding as the trunk hits the ground. The felled trees were the best fertilizer—hundreds of years of nutrients leaked into the soil as they decomposed. A day after a big tree went down, the ground was a mess of branches and leaves. In a few months, the trunk was gone, consumed by the jungle. The workers had been through the fields dozens of times by then, calling across the crop rows as they cleared the weeds with machetes.

  This is easy for me to write, of course, sitting at my desk, looking at the winter landscape out my window, repairing to the kitchen now and then for a cup of coffee, but it was the hardest work in the world. If this is the kind of book I want it to be, it will leave you with a sense of the fields, the heat and fear, the snakes in the brush that have to be killed with a single blow, the sting of the poison that makes you want to lie down, just for a minute, in the shade of the ceiba tree, the scorpions that drop into your shirt in search of exposed skin, the mosquito swarms that portend yellow fever, the malarial dreams, the swampland and broken tools and arsenic tree; the way your health is destroyed, your hands blistered, your back ruined; the way the world appears when you have forgotten to drink enough water, a tiny image seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

  Zemurray employed hundreds of workers on the north coast. In the first weeks, they lived in tents, then moved into cabins, barracks, and bungalows. They worked from four a.m. till noon, after which it was too hot to linger outdoors. They wore sandals when they worked, shirts opened to the belly, straw hats, and pants with a machete hooked to the waist. The most popular machete, made in Connecticut, was a six-inch crescent-shaped blade embossed near the wood handle with the name of the maker: COLLINS. Now and then, when two or more workers got into a fight, someone would flash a machete and say, “I’ll stick you all the way to the C
ollins.” Over time, this phrase “to the Collins” came to stand for every kind of death that awaited a man in the Torrid Zone.

  Three weeks after sowing, the shoots would break through the soil. A few days later, the fields were covered with banana plants. The machete men went through the rows, cutting away the weeds that were forever returning. On a banana plantation, clearing weeds is breathing. Without it, the plantation dies.

  Once the plants had reached the height of small children—fourth graders, say, green and promising—the engineers would go back to work, mapping out the train tracks that would wander through the rows, so the fruit, when harvested, could be carried to the warehouse, selected, counted, and stacked into boxcars. The railroads were simple, with grass growing between the ties. (“From the day I was born I had heard it said, over and over again, that the rail lines and camps of the United Fruit Company had been built at night because during the day the sun made the tools too hot to pick up,” García Márquez wrote in Living to Tell the Tale.) The tracks were indeed laid in the cool before dawn. It took a few weeks, no more. The rails were torn up and reused if a particular field went feral or fallow. You can still see the remnants of many such lines in Honduras: an overgrown field in the Sula Valley, a storybook jungle of snakes and macaws, a glint of iron beneath the tall grass.

  Zemurray worked in the fields beside his engineers, planters, and machete men. He was deep in the muck, sweat covered, swinging a blade. He helped map the plantations, plant the rhizomes, clear the weeds, lay the track. He was a proficient snake killer. Taller than most of his workers, as strong and thin as a railroad spike, he shouted orders in dog Spanish. He believed in the transcendent power of physical labor—that a man can free his soul only by exhausting his body. A life in an office, deskbound, was for the feeble and weak who cut themselves off from the actual. He ate outside—shark’s fin soup, plantains, crab gumbo, sour wine. His years in the jungle gave him experience rare in the trade. Unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business, from the executive suite where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow. He was contemptuous of banana men who spent their lives in the North, far from the plantations. Those schmucks, what do they know? They’re there, we’re here!