Free Banana by Dan Koeppel

were ten gold miners, all anxious to search for riches in the excavations near Ciudad Bolívar, three hundred miles upstream. The Joseph Conrad–like journey upriver took three months; Baker deposited the prospectors at their destination, collected his pay—$8,500 in gold, or about $125,000 today—and turned toward home.
    The Telegraph was leaking badly, and Baker put in for repairs at Jamaica. As he prepared to head north, he spotted the bananas and decided to take on the cargo. Baker reckoned he could make the mainland in two weeks. If wind and weather were favorable—he’d keep the bananas on deck, in order to expose them to cool air—he could recoup some of the money he’d spent refurbishing his vessel. The timing was perfect. Baker made the passage in eleven days, arriving with bananas fresh enough to wholesale at $2 a bunch, netting him the current equivalent of $6,400.
    Within a year, Baker was the biggest banana exporter in the Caribbean. He became so enthusiastic about the undertaking that he bought land at Port Antonio, Jamaica, where he planted acres of fruit and built a sprawling estate. The world’s first banana export hub was a classic boomtown, similar to the gold rush communities of the American West. At the height of banana mania, flush-with-cash plantation workers would literally rampage through downtown, drinking, gambling, cavorting in bordellos, and—as the legend goes—lighting their cigars with five-dollar bills.
    The fruit grown on the Jamaican plantations was the Gros Michel, descended from the samples Jean François Pouyat carried from Martinique forty years earlier. No one would have predicted that the island’s banana surge would eventually wither; Jamaica was among the first spots to be hit by a disease—at that time unnamed—that, as we now know, would ultimately destroy the hemisphere’s entire banana crop.
    But the bust was years away. While bananas were earning huge profits, the fruit hadn’t yet become something everyone could eat and enjoy. They remained costly, and transporting them even a moderate distance from the ports that received them was impossible. Still, America’s biggest cities of the time—New York, Boston, and Philadelphia—were falling in love with the tropical import.

    ONE OF THE BENEFICIARIES OF BAKER’S INITIATIVE was Andrew Preston, a twenty-five-year-old New England produce buyer who couldn’t keep enough of the tropical fruit in stock. For over a decade, Preston had risen at a conservative pace at a Boston grocery wholesaler, advancing from janitor to bookkeeper to in-the-field representative. His job was to meet ships at the docks and bargain for whatever fruits and vegetables they were unloading. When he encountered the Jamaican bananas, he was instantly taken: “I saw ’em, I bought ’em, and I sold ’em,” he later said.

    Elegant Victorian women could eat bananas
without a trace of impropriety.
    Baker and Preston became partners in 1885. The two men couldn’t have been more different. If Baker was a traditional Yankee salt, Preston saw himself as positively Brahmin (in spite of his modest origins), covering his ambition with a veneer of haughty detachment. Eight other investors contributed $2,000 apiece to form the world’s first commercial banana company. Boston Fruit was the first of four names the endeavor would adopt. Today, it is known as Chiquita.
    Preston didn’t just want every American to pick up a few bananas now and then. He wanted the fruit, he told his partners, to be “more popular than apples.” But apples could be delivered to grocers within a day or two of harvest. Even after the fledgling banana industry abandoned sailing ships for steam-powered vessels—cutting the Caribbean passage to less than five days—the trip north remained a chancy one. Entire loads sometimes arrived overripe and rotting.
    Preston decided to