Read Online Banana by Dan Koeppel - Free Book Online Page B

founded, nearly the whole world was eating the fruit. Except us.

PART III
CORN
FLAKES
AND
COUP
D’ETATS

CHAPTER 9
Bringing Bananas
Home
    T HE WORLD’S BANANA MAP was fairly fixed until modern times. Starting around 150 years ago, however, the places the banana went, and the way it traveled, would become more tangled—and, for the first time, laced with tragedy. America’s part in that story, and it is the main part, began on its hundredth birthday.
    America’s centennial was not a time to look toward the past. The Civil War had ended just eleven years earlier, and the nation was transforming from one that expanded slowly toward a western frontier, to one that moved faster and faster, with pioneers and farmers being replaced by immigrants and industrialists. This new, forward gaze reached its peak at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, held in the summer of 1876. Over 10 million visitors, one-fifth of the U.S. population, marveled at fantastic new inventions from around the world, including automated butter churns, steam engines, and mechanical pencils. They ate sausages slathered with a new condiment called Heinz Ketchup (made, as it should be, from tomatoes). And they listened, stunned, as voices—real, human voices—came through a wire: The exhibition marked the first time Americans saw Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.
    Against such a backdrop, a display of exotic fruit might have seemed unremarkable. But to one seven-year-old, wandering amidst the astonishments, the banana was a thrill. “To my young and impressionable mind, this was the most romantic of all the innumerable things I had seen at any of the [exhibition’s] vast buildings. It was the tangible, living, and expressive symbol of the far-distant and mysterious tropics,” wrote Frederick Upham Adams in his 1914 book, Conquest of the Tropics . (Adams was also an inventor—he built the first streamlined locomotive, predecessor of today’s bullet trains.)
    Bananas were available in the United States immediately following the Civil War. But they were a luxury item, like caviar, consumed more for status than taste (plantains, for cooking, however, had been a staple in the southern parts of the hemisphere since Spanish times). The bananas North Americans ate were sold at a dime apiece—about two dollars today—and came peeled, sliced, and wrapped in foil, mostly to prevent the fruit’s suggestive shape from offending Victorian sensibilities, according to Virginia Scott Jenkins, author of Bananas: An American History . Shorn and overripe, these bananas offered hardly a clue that they’d one day become so widespread.
    The closest place to the United States where bananas could be grown was, at the time, Jamaica. The trip from that Caribbean island to the ports of the American Northeast could take as long as three weeks aboard the sail-driven schooners of the day, far beyond the average fruit’s shelf life. But if the winds were right, a shipment of bananas could fetch a fine price. Six years before they appeared in Philadelphia, a Cape Cod sea captain named Lorenzo Dow Baker brought 160 bunches, hoping to keep them fresh on the voyage north, from Jamaica to the docks at Jersey City, New Jersey.
    In almost every respect, Baker was the picture of a nineteenth-century New England seafarer. He was weathered, broad-chested, with a rough beard framed by sometimes-wild sideburns. He didn’t speak so much as shout, and he possessed the classic circumspection that characterizes both his home and profession. “He rarely scowled,” noted his biographer, Charles Morrow Wilson, “and rarely laughed.”
    Baker’s banana career happened almost by chance, as a byproduct of one of the era’s most daring maritime escapades. In 1870, after setting out from Cape Cod, he sailed his ship, the Telegraph , across the Caribbean, to the mouth of Venezuela’s Orinoco river. His passengers