Banana plantation

“ The single exception was the United Fruit Company's banana plantation at Sosua, about ten miles east of Puerto Plata, and even this estate is at present, in consequence of the greater attractiveness of sugar, being converted into a sugar plantation. Otherwise there has been no attempt to raise fruit for export, though the sweet and bitter orange, the lemon, the lime, the grapefruit and the paradoxical sweet lemon, grow wild. Pineapples are raised only for the small home consumption. ”

“ Out from Almirante and Puerto Limon range the tracks of the plantation railroads through hundreds of miles of banana forests, where the black man supplies the labor for the largest farms in the world. Forty or fifty thousand of these people live on and about the plantations of the Atlantic coast and without them the largest agricultural enterprise ever carried on under one management would collapse. ”

“ The life of a banana plantation averages from twelve to fourteen years, but for eighteen months no return is obtained, except from the potato crop which is planted in between the young plants, or, rather, the old stumps, from which a young sucker will spring up and bear fruit. ”

“ Here too were rows of red-berried coffee-trees, thorny limes, and low-growing lemons, with here and there a dark-leafed grape-fruit. The whole plantation was more or less choked with weeds and undergrowth, clearly indicating abandonment, perhaps for years.
Near by were the great banner-like leaves of the banana and plantain, in abundance. This was a most valuable find, and it removed from my mind all fear of lack of food. Man can live almost upon the plantain alone. ”

“ As the cost of producing bananas after the first crop from a plantation is confined to cultivating and harvesting, which may be done for $10 per acre yearly, it is scarcely wonderful that Judge O’Hara, late U. S. Consul at Greytown, Nicaragua, a lawyer whose acute mind is trained to sifting evidence, reported to the Department of State at Washington regarding banana-growing on the Atlantic coast of that republic, that:
It seems reasonably certain that bananas on the Bluefields River pay better than many crops in the United States. ”

“ Bananas meant money, but if we have no facilities for shipping what would be the good of planting?”
One of the best authorities in the island on agricultural possibilities and prospects informed me, not long since, that there were old sugar estates to be bought in the neighbourhood of Falmouth for a mere song, which, if purchased now that there is the certainty of improving the harbour, would in a year or so return 100 per cent. if turned into banana plantations. ”

“ The limit of profitable yield for a plantation varies especially with the soil. But the maximum for deep and moist banana lands may be said to be about ten years. Then the ground must be cleared and a new culture begun with fresh sets. Very little is done in rotation of crops, and the soil has as yet received little fertilization except such as results from the decay of the old, plants.
It is not alone on the great estates, nor even chiefly on them, that our enormous supplies of fruit are being produced. Scattered ”

“ The returns are quick, the income regular and the profits large. I travelled through the banana region of Honduras, where for thirty miles the railroad passed by one plantation after another of the broad-leaved banana plants growing as high as fifteen feet. Great fortunes have been made by the banana-growers of that country and Costa Rica. This fruit flourishes best in the lowlands. The preparation of the ground is very simple, for the young banana plants are set out among the piles of underbrush left after clearing and which soon decay in that climate. ”

“ It is a fortune for a family to have a cocoa plantation, for the trees produce from fifty to eighty years, and need little attention after the first year or two. They are very easy to raise. After planting, the weeds are kept away from the trees, and during the first year, banana plants are grown between the rows to shade the young trees. The fourth year the first crop is gathered and the trees produce two hundred clusters of fruit with thirty [64] or forty nuts each. People net about sixty thousand dollars a year from a plantation of fifty thousand trees. ”

“ With the exception of the plantain, or banana as it is called in this country, the season for fruit was not. This exception, however, was sufficiently luscious to make the appetite grow by what it fed on. It is a fruit that nature has provided with a whole list of recommendations; it is obtainable all the year round, as the young shoots spring up of themselves from the rhizomes, causing the plantation to spread independently ”

“ Here some two hundred acres of genuine "banana land" are now under cultivation, and the area is being steadily increased. A visit to this plantation will give the best idea of the details of banana culture. The road takes us directly away from the coast through the hills that come down to the very shore almost everywhere in eastern Jamaica. The fine government roads make driving a pleasure, and the magnificent hill views and wonderful vegetation are an unfailing delight. ”

“ Like the valley of the lower Magdalena, this part of Costa Rica is habitable only by negroes. The white men who are called there by business make their sojourn as brief as possible.
It is along this route that are found the best and most extensive platanales—banana plantations—of the country and, as a consequence, there are many settlements and villages all along the railroad. And what banana plants are seen here! In height they resemble trees rather than plants. We saw some that were thirty-five feet high, bending under golden clusters of fruit weighing at times nearly a hundred pounds. ”

“ While sailing along the Orinoco and the Meta we thought that the platanales we saw on their banks were [410] unrivaled for magnitude of plants and wealth of fruitage, but they were fully equaled if not surpassed by those of Costa Rica.
Most of the labor connected with the cultivation and shipment of bananas is performed by negroes from Jamaica and other West Indian islands. One sees their little frame houses, or shacks, scattered all along the road in the banana region, and their occupants have the same jovial, happy-go-lucky disposition that characterizes the negro the world over. ”

“ This is certainly a very wasteful method of utilising our land, and the time will come, sooner or later, when greater care will have to be given to it, and that once land has become impoverished by banana culture, it will have to be put under a suitable rotation of crops, so as to fit it for being again planted to bananas. ”

“ Every little while along the way, jolly, muscular negro laborers swing up over the tail-board until by the time we have reached Golden Vale, said to be the oldest export banana farm in the world, there are enough of them to load the truck in a bare twenty minutes. It is scarcely necessary to say, I suppose, that bananas grow on a species of mammoth weed rather than a tree, that each produces a single bunch, that this grows “upside down” from our fruit-stand point of view, and that they must be cut before they are ripe. ”

“ After bearing, the stalk and top die, but it sprouts up again from the roots, once more to go through the liberal process of producing a crop of luscious fruit. It is said that the banana is more productive and requires less care or cultivation than any other food-producing growth in the tropics or elsewhere.
Neither Florida nor Cuba can furnish finer oranges than are grown in vast quantities in the region round about Cordova. ”

“ Some foolish person, a benighted Democrat like as not, might timidly suggest that bananas were a greater public blessing when they came from Jamaica and were three for a nickel, but what patriotic citizen would listen for a moment to the criticisms of a person without any conception of the beauty and glory of the great American banana industry, without realization of the proud significance of the fact that Old Glory floats over the biggest banana hothouses in the world! ”

“ It is uninteresting, and the heat and the humidity of the climate render it almost insupportable in certain seasons and hours of the day. The repugnance to labor of tropical people, whether natives or white immigrants, is proverbial. Every one in the banana zone, therefore, seeks to shift his burden upon another. ”

“ So the planter of bananas has each year four and a half times as much palatable food from an acre as the farmer gets from his potatoes: and there is the [12] further difference that the one has bananas at no other cost than that of keeping down bush and grass and vine, that would quickly cover every spot to which the sunshine could penetrate, along the edges of the plantation. For bananas yield year after year without replanting. Each new stalk springs from the foot of its parent, grows to a height of fifteen to thirty-five feet, bears its burden of luscious fruit, and dies ”

“ There is, perhaps, no industry in Central America that is more attractive to men of small capital than banana growing, from the fact that the clearing of the land is effected cheaply, and from the small cost of after-cultivation, which is limited only to such clearing of weeds and undergrowth as may be sufficient to allow access to the trees, and the short time necessary to produce a paying crop. ”

“ As the demand for this fruit has increased, the banana fields of Porto Rico, Jamaica and Costa Rica have been immensely enlarged until regular lines of steamers from those places now bring into the United States twenty-five millions of bunches annually, or twenty-five hundred millions of bananas, enough to supply annually thirty bananas to every man, woman and child, including negroes. ”

“ He formed a partnership with one Andrew W. Preston, the first man to transport bananas in any quantity to the United States, and out of that combination grew the United Fruit Company, which to-day has plantations in Jamaica, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and British Honduras, and controls the banana industry of the world. It owns railways throughout Central America, and operates its own line of ships. It is said to make and unmake governments, although no one ever proves the accusation. ”

“ It is evident that the entire area which can so be devoted to banana culture must be small, for most Central American and Mexican rivers are obstructed at their mouths by sandbars, over which ships cannot pass. ”

“ He who would grow bananas for market must plant on the border of navigable waters giving access to some harbor or anchorage where ships may safely lie while receiving the fruit. For it is easily bruised, and wetting by salt water blackens the skins, thus injuring or preventing the sale. Plantations are usually on the banks of rivers or of estuaries, but some are beside railroads, to which the fruit is carried by carts thickly carpeted with banana leaves. A cruder way is to hang a few bunches over the back of a burro or of a mule, which plods along to the shipping place. ”

“ As the suckers do not all rise simultaneously, the stages of growth of the young fruit-bearing trees vary, so that there is a constant supply all the year round. Moreover, it is customary to cut down, and hang up in the house, the stalk sustaining the fruit before it is ripe, so that each fruit can be eaten as it matures. The glossy leaves of the banana-plantain are exceedingly beautiful. They are used for polishing hardwood floors; they serve as a substitute for plates at the tiánguis and for wrapping-paper at the small native and Chinese grocersʼ shops. ”

“ By cutting down a few trees and loosening the ground with sharpened sticks the plantains, a species of coarse banana, could be made to yield many hundred fold. The greater part of the little agricultural work done fell on the women, for it was considered degrading by the men. ”

“ The consumption of bananas is enormous: more bananas are eaten than vegetables; and more banana-trees are yearly being cultivated. The negro seems to recognize instinctively that economical value of the banana to which attention was long since called by Humboldt, who estimated that while an acre planted in wheat would barely support three persons, an acre planted in banana-trees would nourish fifty.
Bananas and plantains hold the first place among fruits in popular esteem;—they are cooked in every way, and served with almost every sort of meat or fish. ”

“ Adjacent to the banana zone are zones of agriculture, where slaves are in great request, and, during the European connection with the slave trade, the normal demand for slaves in this zone was greatly heightened. Among the Niam Niam all prisoners belong to the monarch. He sells the women and keeps the children for slaves. Hence, the banana zone has been the great reservoir for supplying slaves to other parts of the world. Hundreds of thousands of slaves came from this zone to the West Indies, and to the slave states of North and South America. ”

“ As this process is repeated indefinitely it follows that unless these surplus stalks are cut out, a banana field would soon become a miniature jungle. Some growers follow the plan of allowing four shoots to grow in one hill, and their gradations are so arranged that while the oldest is bearing fruit the second is in blossom, the third is half-grown, and the fourth is just coming forth from the ground. In the majority of cases a new shoot will spring up from the old stalk if cut near the ground and there is plenty of rain. ”

“ But it has developed a large section of jungle-land that once was considered worthless and uninhabitable; the money it pays in taxes for its concessions is the mainstay of more than one Central-American nation’s finances; and it supplies the world with bananas on a policy of “small profits on a tremendous scale.”
Guatemala is one of its smallest production sources, and Quiriguá is one of its smallest Guatemalan plantations, yet I spent an entire day riding through the banana groves on a motor-car with a superintendent, and saw but a small part of them. ”