The Fish That Ate the Whale (10 page)

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 Collins.” 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!

After the fields had been planted, the plantation town was built. Most of these were like small American villages sunk in the isthmian wilderness: a crossroads, a steeple, a green; a hospital, a grocery, a five-and-dime. There was a club for top executives with a polished bar and dance floor; a club for employees of the midrank, with pool and poker tables; a club for workers with kegs of beer, whiskey, and fights. Zemurray imported boa constrictors to keep violence in check, believing the presence of the snakes would force his men to stay sober.

He eventually built many banana towns, each laid out in the same basic pattern: the houses of the executives on a hill, the more important the executive, the higher up the hill. The manager's house was at the peak. If the plantation had been laid on flat ground, a hill was constructed. In this way, the landscape was made to reflect the hierarchy of the company. “I noticed that the railroad depots in cowboy movies looked like our train stations,” wrote García Márquez.

Later, when I began to read Faulkner, the small towns in his novels seemed like ours, too. And it was not surprising, for they had been built under the messianic inspiration of the United Fruit Company and in the same provisional style of a temporary camp. I remembered them all, with the church on the square and little fairy-tale houses painted in primary colors. I remembered the gangs of black laborers singing at twilight, the shanties on the estates where the field hands sat to rest and watch freight trains go by, the ditches where the morning found the cutters whose heads had been hacked off in the drunken Saturday-night brawls. I remembered the private cities of the gringos in Aracataca and Sevilla, on the other side of the railroad tracks, surrounded, like enormous electrified chicken yards, by metal fences that on cool summer dawns were black with charred swallows. I remembered their slow blue lawns with peacocks and quail, the residences with red roofs and wire grating on the windows and little round tables with folding chairs for eating on the terraces among palm trees and dusty rosebushes. Sometimes, through the wire fence, you could see the beautiful languid women in muslin dresses and wide gauze hats cutting the flowers in their gardens with golden scissors.

Zemurray reaped his first harvest in 1910, soon after he arrived in the country. A banner crop, cut and stacked, carted out of the rows, counted and loaded onto straw-filled boxcars. The door is shut with a clang. A crewman gives a thumbs-up, the engineer nods, the train moves into open country with a shriek, slow at first, then gaining speed, the wheels seen close up, spinning into a void. The train snakes out of the hills, breaking through the jungle, appearing on the outskirts of the old colonial towns, rattling past alleys and back doors where chicken bones are piled and stray dogs roam. There were a half dozen cars on the early trains, jammed with bananas, thousands of hands reeking in the heat. A team of men worked each run, the conductor in the engine room, the foreman in the caboose, guards on the roof with rifles on the lookout for hijackers. This was wild country, the banana frontier. If Zemurray was not on the plantation or riding the train, he was looking out the window of his office as the railroad sped through Omoa on its way to the harbor.

The first shipment was followed by a second, a third, a fifth, a fifteenth. It's one of the great things about bananas—unlike corn or cotton or tobacco, they have no season, or one season that lasts forever, an endless summer broken now and then by hurricane or drought. The winter, the frost, the early darkness and first flurries—that's another world, banished. Planted correctly, a banana plantation is a never-ending bounty.

Zemurray began scouting for still more property, which would mean more rails, workers, and houses, which would require more money. But he was already overextended. He had taken loans from banks across America. When he realized no creditor would lend him another dime, he went in search of other sources. If you were Zemurray, an entrepreneur at the key moment, when you knew, just knew, you had to risk everything, that this was your shot, but the banks had turned you down and your money was on the table and you had neither wealthy uncles nor elite contacts, where would you go? The history books and articles say he secured the needed funds from unorthodox sources, borrowed on stringent terms, at rates approaching 50 percent. Which of course means gangsters, wiseguys in flashy suits on the corner of St. Claude and Dumaine.

Ashbell Hubbard had agreed to the first round of bank loans and land purchases, and had agreed to the second, if less enthusiastically. But this was too much. Whereas Zemurray thought everything should be risked now, while the opportunity presented itself, Hubbard believed the business should be given time to become established. First plant the land we've acquired, pay off some loans, then we can think about acquiring more acres. But Zemurray must have realized the business had to get big to survive. Go all in, or get out. Sam was young and wanted to bet everything: great fortunes come from big plays. Hubbard did not have the fortitude for such risks. He had become a nervous partner who considered the actions of the Russian with alarm. Asked to describe Zemurray by a New Orleans newspaper reporter, the best Hubbard could say was,
He's a man with big ideas.

When Hubbard couldn't take it anymore, Zemurray agreed to buy out his share of the company—a 45 percent stake in Cuyamel Fruit. This left Zemurray with 90 percent of the company and United Fruit with the remaining 10 percent. The terms of the deal were never reported, but the company was valued at $400,000, meaning Zemurray paid something like $160,000, money that he surely borrowed from the same nefarious characters who lent him all the other money.

What was Sam thinking, piling debt on debt, risk on risk? By buying out Hubbard, he was taking it all on his own shoulders. But what did it matter? If he failed by himself, he would lose the exact same amount as if he failed with a partner: everything.

 

10

Revolutin'!

A businessman can live with a certain amount of corruption. Maybe he prefers it. If he's paying off an official, kicking a percentage back to a bureaucrat who landed him a concession, at least he knows where he stands. In New York, they call it honest graft. In Chicago, they call it the Machine. A deal is a deal. Paid for is owned. But if a bribed official refuses to deliver, or if a bought politician suddenly becomes unbought, how can a man do business? This is the other kind of corruption, the corrupt kind, and it leads to bankruptcy and ruin. It's not a question of right versus wrong, it's a question of ethics. If you buy a man, you have a right to expect him to stay bought.

And yet before he had even established himself as a grower, Zemurray began to hear whispers: all the deals he had made in Honduras, or was hoping to make (the Dávila government was not the most pliable), were in jeopardy. Honduras owed millions to bankers in London, far more than it could ever repay. The debt had been outstanding since the 1860s, when the government took out four loans, issued as bonds, with British banks to finance a national railroad. The story of the Honduran railroad epitomizes life on the isthmus. In 1870, the government hired an engineer named John C. Trautwine to lay track from Puerto Cortés on the Atlantic to the Bay of Fonseca on the Pacific, passing through Tegucigalpa, but made the mistake of paying him by the mile. When the project went bust in 1880, Honduras was left with sixty miles of track that wandered aimlessly here and there through the lowlands. (Tegucigalpa remains the only national capital without train service.) In 1900, the amount owed the bondholders, principal plus forty years of compounded interest, had reached $100 million. The bankers demanded settlement, ominously suggesting the issue might be resolved by the British navy. In 1894, British marines had in fact landed in Puerto Corinto, on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, to collect a debt of just £74,000.

President William Howard Taft was concerned. Anything that resulted in European military action in the Western Hemisphere challenged the Monroe Doctrine. Philander Knox, the secretary of state, devised a plan. He recruited J. Pierpont Morgan, the most powerful banker in America, to buy all of the outstanding Honduran railroad bonds, satisfying the British banks. Morgan would then refinance the debt, issuing $5 million in new loans to the government of President Miguel Dávila. Morgan agreed under the following condition: in return for money and services, officials from the Morgan bank would be seated in the customshouse in Puerto Cortés, where they would collect a duty on all imports. After taking the bank's percentage, the officers would forward the balance to the Honduran government. Morgan insisted that these terms be written in a treaty and ratified by the congress in Tegucigalpa. This infuriated many Hondurans, who considered the terms a forfeit of national sovereignty.