The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen Read Free Book Online

to a steamship that waited in the deep water beyond the reef.
    By 1880, the trade was booming, with dozens of companies operating up and down the Atlantic coast of the United States. The trading houses were filled with banana men. In New York, the industry leaders met at the Hoffman House on Madison Square. These were the men who created the first market for the banana, which was still expensive but getting cheaper all the time. In the industrial age, when food sat in grimy piles in general stores, the banana men sold their product as a natural wonder, the most hygienic of foods, germproof in its skin. It was these men who decided the fruit should be marketed not as a delicacy for the rich but as a staple for the poor. Hence the effort to lower the price. Hence the effort to resist all taxes and duties demanded by the nations of the isthmus. In the last years of the nineteenth century, the sale of bananas doubled and doubled again. One day no one could identify the yellow fruit, the next day the banana was more popular than the apple. In 1898, Scientific American instructed readers on how to best consume a banana: “The fruit is peeled by slitting the skin longitudinally and giving it a rotary motion with the hands.”
    Like most booms, it could not last. Not because there was anything wrong with the product: the banana is perfect. Not because there was any scarcity in demand: people loved bananas from the start—the average American now consumes seventy a year. But because supply was uncertain. The banana, as I’ve said, is terribly vulnerable: to wind, cold, heat, rain, lack of rain, flood, disease. Most firms got their fruit from a single farm or valley, greatly increasing this vulnerability. The entire supply of many early traders could be wiped out by one bad storm. This became painfully clear in 1899, the Year Without Bananas. There had been a heat wave, a flood, a drought, a hurricane. The market sheds were shuttered, the pushcarts stood empty. Dozens of firms went under. It was like the natural disaster that wipes out all but a few impossible-to-kill species. The handful that did survive came away smarter, having learned basic lessons that would dictate how the business was organized in the future:
    1. Get big    A banana company needs to be fat enough, with enough capital in reserve, to weather inevitable freak occurrences, such as an earthquake or a hurricane.
    2. Grow your own    A banana company needs its own fields so it can control planting and harvesting, thus avoiding ruinous competition in the event of a down season.
    3. Diversify    A banana company needs plantations scattered across a vast terrain, stems growing in far-flung countries, so that a disaster that wipes out the crop of a particular region will not destroy the firm’s entire supply.
    If you study these lessons, you will understand the development of the banana business, how it grew from mom-and-pop trading posts into an all-powerful behemoth.
    In certain ways, Sam Zemurray was without precedent. The schnorrer, the pushcart nebbish, the fruit jobber from the docks. He came from nowhere to create not just a fortune but an archetype; he was the gringo in platonic form. He seemed to strive for the sake of striving, to hustle to prove it could be done. Swinging his machete as the sun beats down, face bathed in sweat. You see him astride his white mule, in the doorway of the cantina, his voice as gruff as the voice of William Holden in The Wild Bunch , saying, “If you’re on a man’s side, you stay on that man’s side, or you’re no better than a goddamn animal.”
    Was there a precursor?
    Of course there was. (The world is a mere succession of fortunes made and lost, lessons learned and forgotten and learned again.) In truth, Zemurray was following a path blazed by three men who had gone into the jungle a generation before. Here I speak of the titans who built the greatest banana