“I retain a fairly vivid recollection of eating my first banana. It was in 1876, and I, then a youngster, was visiting the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia with my father as guide and treasurer. When a young man, my father had spent some time in the tropical sections of Central America and the West Indies, and I had often heard him talk of reveling in bananas and other fruits of those then fever-stricken districts.”
Thus does Frederick Adams begin his 1914 book, Conquest of the Tropics. This is a rather colonialism-celebrating book on “the story of the creative enterprises conducted by the United Fruit Company.” If we approach this work with out foisting judgment upon people who toiled in a different time than our own, we can learn a great deal about a period of explosive change in our nation’s history.
Adams continues:
“On the afternoon of the day when I encountered my first imported banana we had visited the horticultural department of the great exposition, and there was then pointed out to me one of the leading attractions of that exhibit, a scrubby banana tree from beneath whose fronds actually grew a diminutive bunch of bananas.”
(As a delightful aside, Rick is privileged to pass by the one structure that remains from the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, the first official World’s Fair in the United States, which was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from May 10 to November 10, 1876, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Memorial Hall is now home to the Please Touch Museum.)
“My recollection is that this was a part of the government exhibit. In any event it was surrounded by a crowd of spectators, most of whom would have been delighted to have plucked a banana, a strip of bark, or even a bit of the earth which surrounded its roots in the huge box that served that purpose. The craze for the collection of ‘souvenirs,’ regardless of property rights or possible damage, was then already in vogue,though it had not sunk its victims to such deplorable depths of peculation as at present.”
(Another aside here: “peculation” is an absolutely gobsmacking word.)
The reason that Frederick and most of the other ten million(!) visitors to the Centennial Exhibition had never seen a banana before was that they were living in the Age of Sail. The proper climate for banana plantations was in Central America and the West Indies. The sailing ships of the day, as magnificent and evocative as they look in oil paintings, were at the mercy of the wind. If a sea captain decided to purchase a cargo of bananas in, say, Honduras, by the time he reached Baltimore or New York or Philadelphia… well, let’s let Frederick Adams continue his story.
“The ‘long arm of coincidence,’ as literary experts term it, was extended to me that day. On the same evening we took a walk along one of the business streets of Philadelphia. My father was fond of fruits, and he paused at a store and we looked over the tempting array. He was about to buy some peaches, when his attention was diverted to a basket containing small, cylindrical objects wrapped in tin foil.
‘What are those?’ he asked of the clerk, taking one from the basket and looking at it curiously.
‘Bananas,’ proudly replied the salesman. ‘Bananas just imported from South America. They are a great luxury, sir, and this is the only place in Philadelphia which handles them.’
‘Bananas in tin foil!’ exclaimed my father. ‘I presume most of your customers think they grow that way?’
‘They are a novelty, sir, and only our best customers call for them. May I wrap some up for you?’
‘How much are they?’
‘Ten cents apiece, or six for half a dollar.’
‘That is more money than the native who raised them could earn in a month,’ laughed my father. ‘I will take half a dollar’s worth.’”
(Half a dollar in 1876 is something vaguely akin to $13 today, in 2019.)
“Back in the room in our hotel I stripped the tin foil from one of them and revealed a substance which looked like the bananas I had seen that afternoon, save that this one was nearly black and the growing ones were green. I was about to bite into the skin when my father interfered and removed the peel, looked at the interior critically and rather doubtfully, tasted it, and gave it to me.
‘It is not very good, but it is a banana,’ he said, peeling one for himself. ‘How do you like it?’
I assured him that it was delicious, but I presume that the novelty of the thing gave my taste a zest and the fruit a flavor not justified by its condition. Two of the six bananas were in such an advanced stage of decay that they were rejected, but we shared the others. They were small bananas, and it would have taken three of them to make the bulk of one of the delicious yellow bananas now at the cheap command of practically every consumer in the United States.”
Such were the physical constraints on the life of consumers in the late 1800s!
Right, then—so how did American consumers finally gain consistent access to a proper banana?
It all began in June of 1870. Lorenzo Dow Baker was captain of the 85-ton schooner Telegraph,based out of Wellfleet, Massachusetts. While his ship was docked in Port Morant, Jamaica, Captain Baker bought several hands of green bananas on a whim. Eleven days later, he sold those bananas in New York for fifteen times what he had paid for them.
Captain Baker tried this transaction again, many times. The trouble was, in that bygone Age of Sail, one’s success with any perishable cargo had everything to do with the wind. And winds are fickle things. Time and again, Baker, becalmed during his journey, was forced to dump tons of expensive and spoiled fruit into the commercial harbors of New York and Boston. And yet he persisted—because at a potential fifteen-fold profit, how could he not?
Technological change came just at the right time for Lorenzo Baker—or perhaps we could say that Lorenzo Baker was at the right place and time to make incredibly effective use of a technological change. By the 1880s, he possessed a new schooner that sported an auxiliary steam engine. Now, he was able to make a steady eight knots no matter what—and was sure of covering the 1,700 miles from Jamaica to Boston in a under a week and a half. That was just within the window of time in which green bananas start to turn their appealing shade of yellow, and before any brown flecks turn up on their skin.
Transportation was not, in itself, sufficient to create a business empire. All those bananas had to be sold, and in short order, Captain Baker partnered with Andrew Preston, a Boston importer. They put together a small fleet of refrigerated steamships. These ships, and all that came later, were painted white, to best reflect the tropical sun. Captain Baker, with a flourish, named their ships The Great White Fleet. Baker and Preston were now able to predictably transport bananas to any East Coast seaport with no significant risk of spoilage.
As demand increased, growing bananas had to keep pace. Cultivation, the third pillar of the developing banana importing empire, was provided by a young adventurer named Minor Keith. Costa Rica had given Keith the task of building a railroad from their capitol, San Jose, to Port Limon. Their government ran out of money in the middle of this project, which was vital to their very existence. Most of Costa Rica’s agriculture, business and civilization was in the west—but all their potential markets, the U.S. and Europe, were accessible to shipping only from ports in the east. Keith successfully borrowed money from banks in England and made the Costa Rican government an offer they couldn’t refuse: he would build the railroad at absolutely no cost to the Costa Rican government, in return for a 99-year deal to run the railroad, full control of Port Limon, and nearly a million acres of land adjacent to the tracks, tax-free. Land upon which he planned to grow bananas.
Thus, in the late 1890s, Minor Keith personally owned seven percent of an entire Central American nation. Plus its only railroad, and control over its most important port.
Once Andrew Preston and Minor Keith met, there was, as you can imagine, no ceiling on their business accomplishments. They made banana/railroad deals in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Jamaica, Colombia and Ecuador. And on March 30, 1899, Preston, Keith and Baker formed The United Fruit Company.
Just as the twentieth century began, wireless (radio) started being installed on ships. United Fruit made excellent use of this innovation. Their banana shipping routes started in all the aforementioned Central and South American countries, but they all converged on New Orleans. From the Desire Street Wharf, bananas were loaded onto the trains of the Illinois Central for shipment to points north, east and west. Company agents in New Orleans strove to sell every single hand of bananas before they arrived at the New Orleans docks, to avoid “rollers”—unsold bananas riding the rails. Without a buyer, the chances of spoiling before the final, retail sale skyrocketed. To prevent this, the wireless telegraphs between the ships of the Great White Fleet and the land-based United Fruit sales agents streamed information back and forth at the speed of light.
It was exactly like our modern internet, only with a slower bit-rate.
United Fruit also employed hundreds of banana messengers. These were agents who rode the rails on the unit trains of refrigerated banana cars (“reefers,” in railroad parlance). Banana messengers took care of every aspect of the transport of this perishable fruit. They saw to it that the reefers were iced correctly. Temperature was a classic Goldilocks Problem: not so warm that the fruit ripened early, but not so cold that it froze. They protected their bananas from theft. And they worked with the sales agents to ensure that each reefer arrived at its proper point of sale on time.
The itinerant, unfettered lifestyle of a banana messenger suited our character Unctual Natchez perfectly.
The United Fruit Company grew faster than any of the principals had anticipated. And as it grew, UFCo began to take control over the countries and cultures in which it operated. United Fruit became an aggressive, unfettered corporation, much like the oil companies, steel manufacturers, coal mines and railroads of its day—an era of laissez-faire capitalism. United Fruit enjoyed one additional advantage over its peers, however: UFCo operated largely outside of the U.S. and its laws.
And so United Fruit crushed any and all rivals in price wars. At times, they would even buy up bananas and let them rot, so that no other company could sell them, and then the price would increase due to the resultant shortage. Their treatment of the workers in the banana-growing regions was complex. The cinder block shells they build as housing for plantation workers were better than the huts they’d had before—but then, company executives and managers enjoyed mansions with swimming pools, motor yachts and servants. There were countless company golf courses—upon which grounds no worker was allowed, unless it be to tend those grounds. There were hospitals—but separate ones for managers and workers. One can only imagine the difference between those facilities.
Perhaps worst of all, United Fruit paid its tens of thousands of Central and South American workers in company scrip—not U.S.dollars, or the currency of the home nation. In this way, the workers could only use their pay in company stores. The local economy was not at all boosted by the presence of an astonishing amount of international business—a fact which must have preyed upon the minds of those workers each and every day.
The company did reward those who cooperated with it, and at the same time, grew increasingly brutal to those who took any sort of stand against it, from workers to presidents of governments. Thus, United Fruit came to have two nicknames; antonyms in their way: “Mamacita” and “El Pulpo”—“The Octopus.”
We shall leave the darker machinations of United Fruit to our novel, however. Let us now go back in time to sail on the glorious steamships of United Fruit. For the ships of the Great White Fleet carried more than bananas: they hosted passengers. One hundred twelve first-class passengers, to be precise. They enjoyed a level of service and elegance which astounds to this day, and which we shall explore in a moment through original source materials.
(And yet even when it came to their passengers, United Fruit had its dark side. Whereas the official company motto was, “Every passenger a guest,” company executives, peering always at the bottom line, favored the arch expression, “Every banana a guest, every passenger a pest.”)
Here are some United Fruit artifacts which have survived to the present day:
This is what the United Fruit headquarters in New Orleans used to look like:
Now, on to the glorious Great White Fleet. The ships may be long gone, but we can still find deck plans! Abangarez is the ship that Unctual and Lorena Pacheco traveled on in 1929:
This is what she looked like in those halcyon days:
Such beautiful ships.
United Fruit advertised its cruises with reference to the exotic nature of the tropics and their cultures.
The cabins of the passenger accommodations on the Great White Fleet were so splendid; they really marketed themselves via their excellence:
As were the dining rooms. All the 112 passengers dined together in one sitting, an arrangement that fostered conversation and relationships.
The pace of life on a cruise ship in the 1930s was a great deal slower and more relaxed than the high-energy, frenetic, food-overloaded cruising culture of today. Letter-writing was a big part of it–the social media of the day.
As was music. Not from hired professional musicians, but music drawn from the talents of the passengers themselves.
And then there was the quiet solace of the ship’s library.
Ah, but there already was electronic media, at least on the ultra-modern United Fruit fleet. Wireless–soon to be called radio–was available onboard. This was a remarkable advance for the time. Great White Fleet passengers would have been utterly charmed and amazed by the novel experience of hearing what’s going on back home when they were hundreds of miles out to sea.
Mahjong was a tremendous craze in America in the late Twenties and each ship had a set.
And then of course, passengers would venture out on deck. Apparently, in those days, shuffleboard had its own uniform.
United Fruit crews also staged “horse races” for their passengers.
And last, but certainly not least, those menus.
Today in the United States we are experiencing an explosion of creativity in the culinary arts. And let’s face it, there was a long sad period of stagnation and bland-food-prepared-by-corporations in our past. But as we can see from the 1920s-era menus of the Great White Fleet, there was an earlier time of high culinary innovation as well.
Perusing old Great White Fleet menus is how we came up with ideas for the menus at Stuyvesant’s and other restaurants mentioned in Shrub.
Here are more of these fascinating windows into America’s culinary past.
And now, astonishingly, I found a 1,250th scale metal model of a United Fruit Great White Fleet ship! She’s too small to have the ship name on the bow, so naturally this little gem shall be christened the Abangarez.
If you look closely, perhaps you’ll spot Lorena and Unctual playing shuffleboard on the promenade deck. But then again … they might just be in their cabin …
Well, that’s all for now. Check back again later though, for more updates and uploads from the Golden Age of White UFCo Ships!