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

experience.
    He bought 160 bunches at 24 cents a bunch. They were loaded onto the deck of the Telegraph . Then Baker raced the clock that started ticking as soon as the stems had been cut. The trip from Port Antonio to New York usually took two weeks—you could do it faster if conditions were perfect, but if the wind died it could take much longer. This was the gamble at the core of the business, the risk taken by the first banana men. You lived at the whim of forces beyond your control. Your life was weather. The early trade was less industry than art.
    Baker caught a favorable wind out of Port Antonio. As in an old-time cartographer’s illustration, you see the face of God blowing a gust that billows the sails and speeds the Telegraph across the water. He reached Jersey City in eleven days—the bananas were still green. The dock swarmed with agents, go-getters working on commission who examined everything that came in, hunting for bargains. Baker sold his bananas for $2 a bunch: a tremendous return, a jackpot he tried to replicate for years. He would sail to Port Antonio, have a glass of planter’s punch, load the Telegraph with bananas, then light out. He ran into a squall on his second trip. As the Telegraph pitched wildly, the entire cargo slid into the sea. He developed a routine: bananas in summer, mackerel in winter, oysters in spring. In July 1871, he sailed into Boston with the biggest load of bananas the city had ever seen.
    *   *   *
    Andrew Preston was on the docks the afternoon that load came in. A buyer for Seaverns & Morrison, a Boston produce dealer, Preston took a special interest in perishables. He made a career of recognizing a prize at a distance. He got his hands on everything: pineapples, persimmons, pomegranates. When Baker heaved his cargo onto Long Wharf, it was the first time Preston had ever seen bananas. Stacked in piles, they looked obscene. For years, magazines refused to run ads that pictured a banana—a photo of a woman eating a banana was verboten into our own time.
    Preston bought Baker’s entire haul. The bosses at Seaverns & Morrison were not pleased. I mean, here’s this kid, and yes, he’s a good kid, a hard worker, but he’s blown the budget on a single product, which we don’t know how to store or sell. Okay, fine, he let his heart run away, but then, as soon as that cargo was unloaded, he went out and bought another, then another, as many bananas as Baker could import. In this way, what started as an annoyance at Seaverns & Morrison became a problem. Andrew Preston would not stop talking about bananas. Like Baker before him and like Zemurray after, he had spotted a niche. He knew bananas were going to be huge, just knew it! I assume many people have comparable hunches— quadraphonic stereos are going to be huge! Beanie Babies are going to be huge! —but most are forgotten because most were wrong.
    Preston was right. He quit Seaverns & Morrison and went to work with Baker. For years, the men had an informal arrangement: Baker carried the bananas to Preston, who sold them across an ever-expanding territory. Preston meant to change the model of the business. It had been low volume, high price; he would make it high volume, with cheap bananas sold up and down the economic scale. To achieve this, Baker and Preston had to increase supply and control quality. In the early days, Baker carried whatever happened to be available—the Cavendish, the Lady Finger, the Jamaican Red. In the future, he would ship only the Big Mike: a buyer has to know what he’s going to get. The Big Mike had the advantage of being tough—stack it and it will not bruise. Its skin was moister when peeled than the skin of other bananas, which is why people stopped slipping on banana peels when Big Mike went extinct.
    In 1877, Baker moved to Port Antonio to better control supply. The roles of the men became plain, a division that would