Free Banana by Dan Koeppel Page B

to repay his investors. “He was a scheming, nefarious, unscrupulous businessman who got run out of town with a vengeful posse nipping at his heels,” wrote historian Bernard Averbach. The project, originally called Meiggs Wharf, was eventually renamed Fisherman’s Wharf.
    No longer welcome in the United States, Meiggs headed to Chile, where he built that country’s first railroad, running 75 miles of track between the Pacific port of Valparaiso and Santiago. He then moved on to Peru, where, over the course of a decade, he laid over 1,200 miles of track. The former con man became wealthy and powerful, and, as Don Enrique, he was considered the nation’s de facto monarch.
    Nearly every other country in Latin America began clamoring for railroads, and for Meiggs to build them. His nephew, Minor C. Keith, was also a self-reinvented man; he’d grown up in Brooklyn, New York, but lately had become a rugged Texas cattle rancher. In 1871 Meiggs lured Keith to Costa Rica, where he was to oversee construction of a rail line between San José, the country’s capital, and the eastern port of Limón. The distance between the two was twice that of the still-uncompleted Panama Canal and counted as one of the most formidable expanses human enterprise had ever attempted to conquer. Deep swamp and dense forest spread amidst towering peaks. Every day was searing and humid. Late afternoon showers dumped inches of rain in minutes, turning everything to mire. To avoid these obstacles, to the extent that they could be avoided, Keith and his two brothers, who’d also joined him on the project, mapped out a path that first ran north through the jungle then swung south around the ten thousand-foot Irazú volcano. Conditions weren’t much better at higher altitudes. The volcano had erupted ten times since 1735, and it rarely stopped spewing smoke and ash on the land below.
    Keith hired hundreds of Costa Rican workers. Nearly all of them died, some of yellow fever or malaria, others of dysentery and dehydration. Those remaining eventually refused to work for Keith, who returned to the United States and contracted two thousand mostly Italian immigrants, tempting them with promises of steady work and high pay. After arriving and learning how deadly the job was, many of the recruits chose to escape into the wildlands rather than continue with the railroad. Few who attempted to walk out of the Costa Rican forests were ever seen again. Desperate for help, Keith then enlisted prisoners from the jails in New Orleans. Only those with no hope of otherwise being released agreed to take on the assignment. Of the seven hundred who volunteered to work on the Costa Rican railroad (in return for a pardon after the project was finished), only twenty-five survived.
    Keith had other problems. In 1877 Meiggs died, leaving his nephew with full control of the Costa Rican venture but with little of the capital that had backed him up. In 1882, with the project still thirty miles from San José, Keith went broke. So did Costa Rica’s government. But Keith was determined to complete the project. He traveled to England and borrowed £1.2 million—about $175 million today—and made an irresistible offer to Costa Rican president Próspero Fernández Oreamuno: Keith would build the railroad at no cost, in return for a ninety-nine-year concession to run the route, full control of the port at Limón, and 800,000 acres of land—tax free—adjacent to the tracks.
    The first thing Keith did along his newly acquired railroad route was to plant bananas. The fruit was initially meant only to feed his workers. But Keith soon realized that he could also carry the bananas back to Limón, and from there ship a modest amount to the United States, even before the railroad was finished. Keith’s plantations grew as the railroad inched toward completion. In 1890 the final spur into San José was laid. The effort had