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

company in the world: United Fruit, El Pulpo, the Octopus, reviled even now, decades after its empire collapsed in the South.
    Every story needs a villain.

 
    6
    The Octopus
    United Fruit, in its early years, is the tale of three lives, three men, three dreamlike adventures:
    First, Lorenzo Baker of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, son and grandson of commercial fishermen, himself something of a throwback. He might have stepped out of the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson with muttonchops gone gray before he was forty. He never smiled, never laughed; he scowled or stormed off. That’s what people remembered. He was born on Bound Brook Island, a spit of land off Cape Cod “on or about July 4, 1840.” By age fourteen, he was working on a schooner. By sixteen, he was earning a full percentage. By twenty-one, he was a captain. He stayed in the pilothouse after the ship landed and the men had gone to get drunk in Provincetown. He loved seaports: boats, hundreds of them, schooners and draggers, masts stripped of sails, nets caked with guts, sailors playing poker as the lights of town glowed in the distance. By thirty, Baker had saved enough to buy a majority share in an eighty-five-ton, three-mast fishing boat called the Telegraph . He paid $8,000 to be a principal owner, every penny he had. A week after he took possession, he was approached on the docks by a rough character wearing the sort of coat that cattlemen wore on the Plains. Having acquired the title to a gold mine, the man wanted Baker to carry him and nine other prospectors with their equipment three hundred miles up the Orinoco River to Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela, from where they would continue on horseback.
    When Christopher Columbus sighted the Orinoco in August 1498, he believed he had stumbled across one of the rivers that flowed out of the Garden of Eden. In a letter to King Ferdinand of Spain, Columbus said he had discovered the site of the terrestrial Elysium, “which none can enter save with God’s leave.” The basin of the river was explored by Alexander von Humboldt in 1800—he wrote of its pink dolphins—but the upper river was not navigated until 1951. Being asked to sail three hundred miles into the interior was like being asked to sail off the earth.
    Why did Captain Baker say yes?
    The money: $8,500 in cash. Five hundred more than Baker paid for his share in the Telegraph . Even if the worst happened, he would walk away rich enough to invest in a new boat without the help of creditors.
    Baker landed in Ciudad Bolívar on April 20, 1870. The Telegraph ’s log records it as the successful delivery of “10 gold prospectors and 4 tons of machinery.” The equipment was gathered on a pier, picks and axes wet with rain. Baker was paid the balance of his fee in French and Spanish gold, then stood on the deck of the Telegraph watching the miners fade into the jungle.
    Baker had trouble sailing down the river—currents, shallows. When he reached the sea, the Telegraph was taking on water. She limped away from the coast like a sailor stumbling away from a fight. He landed in Port Antonio, Jamaica, where the ship was put in dry dock, its hull caulked and repaired.
    Ten days later, when the Telegraph was returned to the water, Baker began to look for ballast. With this in mind he purchased bamboo, ginger, and allspice. As the cargo was being loaded, he sat in a bar near the water to have a taste of local rum. He was drinking planter’s punch when he saw his first bananas.
    What are those? he asked, pointing to the fruit piled on the wharf.
    Baker found himself in conversation with a dock agent who explained the particulars: texture, hardiness, market life—ten days to two weeks. The agent brought Baker a ripe banana.
    How do you open it? asked the captain.
    It was peeled. He took a bite. The flavor of the banana, the warmth of the rum, the sun beating down, the trade wind—it was perfect, a once-in-a-lifetime