by Daniel Stone
Americans in the 1890s were familiar with citron. The country grew a little and imported two million pounds each year from abroad. The fruit had arrived not with explorers like Fairchild but with colonialism, traveling slowly over millennia from its birthplace in South Asia to Italy and Spain, and then brought by Spanish colonists, who planted the first citron groves in California. But by 1894, farmers in California had such antiquated fruit that they asked the federal government for better seeds. Taylor could think of only one man in Europe amenable to this kind of freelance work.
The trip was a success, even considering Fairchild’s brief arrest. After the gendarme let him go, and after Fairchild escaped down the mountain on his mule, and after he acquired the citron cuttings and stuck them in potatoes, he managed to leave Corsica without any further incident. The cuttings arrived in Washington several weeks later, and several months after that, word returned to him that the cuttings had proved of “real value” to American citrus growers. The saplings would bolster California’s citrus market for twenty years, from twenty thousand trees to more than a million. The fact that California’s citron market later fell from dominance was bittersweet, for the fruit was replaced not by an aggressive fruit competitor, but by a fellow citrus, an orange from Brazil with a strange cavity on its underside that resembled a belly button.
Fairchild, meanwhile, was gaining an odd practicality for a man of twenty-five. Corsica had boosted his ego, but the run-in with the policeman had also awakened him to the dangers of plant espionage. Besides, in the laboratories of Germany were fascinating questions to research, and top scientists to shadow. One, Ted Nichols, was studying the pressure of light waves, supplying knowledge that would be crucial to the later invention of the radio. A man named Röntgen used electromagnetic radiation to produce a fuzzy photo of a key and purse, an early technology that the world would come to know as X-ray photography. Of sublime interest to Fairchild was the one-eyed mycologist Oskar Brefeld, whose servant one day arrived holding a heaping platter of horse excrement with the pride of a person carrying a cake.
For the next three weeks, Brefeld stood guard over the pile, his only good eye pressed to a microscope to inspect layer after layer of mold overtaking the dung. Fairchild needed breaks to calm his stomach, but he admitted that microscopic mold had an absorbing beauty. “Incredible as it may seem,” he wrote, “after my first feeling of revulsion had passed, I spent three of the most entertaining and instructive weeks of my life studying the fascinating molds which appeared one by one.”
Fairchild bided his time at night writing letters, first to his friends in Washington, and then, on a whim, an unsolicited missive to the botanical garden of Java. He wanted to inquire, sheepishly, if anyone needed help from an American fungus scientist-in-training.
When an envelope arrived several months later, the biggest surprise was that someone had bothered to write back at all. Correspondence soon blossomed between Fairchild and the garden’s director, Melchior Treub, a Dutchman who had built Java’s botanical garden into one of the most respected in the world.
It’s possible that, at twenty-six, Fairchild might never have gone to the Malay Islands. Not because of self-doubt or laziness but for the relentless force of procrastination. In front of him were grand scientists with ambitious goals. Java could be a spectacular experience, but also a derailing distraction. The promise of one thousand dollars answered the question of how, but even one million couldn’t unveil why. Imagining an exasperated Lathrop added urgency, yet the two had met once—twice, counting the cursory encounter on the boat—and despite Fairchild’s urge to appease his impatient supporter, he wasn’t about to alter his life’s course to quell Lathrop’s anxiety.
But in one letter, Fairchild had let slip to Treub that a rich man had promised a mound of silver for Fairchild to make the trip to the East Indies. In the early days of 1896, Treub responded to say he was soon coming to Europe, and that when he returned to Java, he wanted Fairchild to join him.
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The Suez Canal was the great engineering marvel connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. It was also the official maritime divider between West and East, and as such, there were strict codes aboard the Dutch steamer regarding what women could wear on either side of the world. The first morning east of the canal, Fairchild unknowingly wandered onto the deck and caught sight of barefoot women splayed under the sun in sarongs. Men weren’t supposed to be on deck so early, he thought. But he was wrong. The women had changed to their native and more revealing Javanese garb as soon as the captain allowed. When he learned this, he returned with his camera.
Crossing Suez was a novel experience for anyone in the latter part of the nineteenth century, chiefly because the canal had only existed since 1869. The hundred-mile route through the narrowest part of Egypt was perfectly level, requiring no locks, and when the first ships passed through, the twenty-six-foot-deep canal cut the voyage, formerly around the Cape of Good Hope, by four thousand miles.
To mark its global centrality, the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi asked the Egyptian government to let him build a ninety-foot statue of an Arab peasant woman wearing robes and holding a torch above her head to welcome Eastern travelers to the Mediterranean. When Egypt declined on account of the project’s high cost, he took the idea to France, which financed the sculpture. Once the Muslim woman was refashioned into a Roman goddess, France gifted the statue to the United States, where the woman became a symbol of liberty for immigrants entering New York Harbor.
Over the next week, Fairchild reveled in his slow entrance to the tropics. The weather became warmer; the water bluer, and it teemed with birds and fish, including, occasionally, sharks. Then one day, from the ship’s railing, Fairchild watched the islands of the Malay Archipelago approach. “You approach Java with a feeling of how beautiful and lovable everything seems,” he wrote. He was taken first by the green richness. In an essay Fairchild wrote about his early impression of the tropics, he would five times use the word “verdure.”
From his first night in Java, Fairchild was enchanted. Palms and bamboos covered every square inch of Batavia, the city on the west end of Java that would later be known as Jakarta. At night, loud buzzing insects filled the air with a soundtrack of “idyllic leisureliness” no one in Washington, D.C., had ever heard. From the patio of the tony Hotel Bellevue, he could sit under tremendous banyan trees watching people shoulder bamboo sticks with buckets at both ends. No shoes or pavement meant every step was placed in silence. The barefoot people ate rice and fish from wooden bowls, without the clang of china. Even the soft and rhythmic language had the melody of a quiet song.
1895. Java had a feeling of “idyllic leisureliness,” the warm sun, the buzzing insects, and the bare feet whose only sound when one walked was the soft crunch of grass.
For a first-time visitor to the tropics, the natural wonders were like a dreamworld. Trees carried their roots above the soil, appearing to walk across the ground. Fairchild saw a tiger orchid with a thousand orange blooms, each so perfect and vibrant, as though prepared for his arrival. His first experience breaking the purple skin of a mangosteen was maddening, but far better than his first whiff of a durian, the fruit whose sweetness was belied by its putrid smell, which would linger on the lips for hours. He walked through a jungle of rattan palms that attached themselves to his clothes, and he marveled at the quick growth of bamboo, up to a foot a day.
The Dutch influence also saw that food was never in short supply for foreigners. At the Hotel Bellevue, meals were the highlight of anyone’s day, particularly Fairchild’s, who wanted with every bite to taste the simmering stew of the tropics. At lunch, he would pile his plate high with rice, followed by bits of sardines, eggs, and perhaps a banana dripping with hot oil. Down the buffet would be tiny ears of corn and roasted coconut. India’s mark in the region meant that the chutneys and curries were, to Fairchild, “as hot as l
iquid fire.” A deep burning of the chest came next, but the pain was a tolerable cost. The final course wasn’t a food but a nap, keeping with the tropical custom delivered by the Spanish, rendering the hotel silent between two and four o’clock.
1896. As a colonist in Java, Fairchild (center) donned the traditional white Dutch suit. He made friends with the European people living on the island and had his first encounters with coconuts and other curious fruits of the tropics.
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Fairchild had never had a servant, but as a white man and a scientist living the colonial life, he was granted one—and his name was Mario. Fairchild had long been averse to slavery, and he also bristled at race-based servitude. Still, despite the barrier of language, the two chatted about girls in the area and the insufferable humidity. Fairchild told Mario about the marvels of the 1893 World’s Fair, where there had been two replicas of the Liberty Bell, one made of rolled oats and the other of oranges.
In Java, the work that Fairchild decided was finally worth the lengthy trip was to study how termites built colonies. Termites struck Fairchild as ironic: blind and savage warriors that worked as elegant architects of the forest. But the question that had never been answered, at least as far as Fairchild knew, was how a colony functioned, an intricacy no other species copied. The termites would be born in an underground colony, grow wings, and then go from the dark burrows into the open air of the world. In broad daylight they coupled, two by two, and then, reveling in domestic bliss, would snap off their wings and burrow into the ground to start a new colony. Did they build the fungus gardens in their colonies, or simply eat mushrooms that were already there?
The termites weren’t eager to reveal their secrets, especially not when exposed to paralyzing light. So finding out required killing thousands of them and opening their stomachs. One afternoon, Fairchild broke open a colony. The mud was dried solid; a hammer finally cracked it in half. Inside were no worker termites, just a king and queen termite, their plump bodies motionless as if flustered to be disturbed.
The queen, the larger of the two, was as big as Fairchild’s thumb, and after he inspected her, he delayed dissecting her pudgy trunk to count the speed at which she excreted eggs. One per second, it turned out, an astounding eighty-five thousand in a day. Fairchild figured she’d give life to more than thirty million offspring, a calculation he completed twice to be sure. The work was solitary and more personally fulfilling than useful. But Fairchild believed he was discovering something new, and he imagined that studying termites could occupy him for decades.
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It took two hours to get from Buitenzorg to the port in Tanjungpriok, on Java’s north coast. On November 26, 1896, Fairchild would need every minute.
The series of events began when he received a letter from Chicago informing him that its sender, one Barbour Lathrop, would soon be arriving in Java with a small party consisting of his brother, his sister-in-law, and a woman about Fairchild’s age by the name of Carrie McCormick. A trip from Chicago to Java may have taken a month, or longer, but since Lathrop had sent the letter only days before his party departed, the missive barely beat Lathrop to the island. Contained in his note was the unsubtle implication that Fairchild would be available to stand in as the group’s tour guide.
This was the second time Lathrop called upon Fairchild, both times almost unannounced. Lathrop traveled constantly, but to journey straight from America to Java, an interminable ocean voyage few would envy and even fewer would take, makes one wonder at his motives to see, of all the people he had met in the world, this young man who had somehow captured his attention.
Fairchild rushed to the port. When he approached the group, out of breath, Lathrop was in the middle of a story.
He looked Fairchild up and down, his eyes lingering on his protégé’s white Dutch suit that buttoned up to the chin. Months in the sweaty tropics had left Fairchild thin, almost emaciated. Lathrop said he was “shocked” at Fairchild’s appearance. Never had so much money looked like so little.
Lathrop was not especially close with his brother, Bryan Lathrop, and he had agreed to the trip only after Bryan had begged. Traveling with people annoyed Barbour. Too many people brought too many opinions, which required compromise. Money was not the problem. The Lathrops were laden with means, owing to the lucrative banking career of their father, Jedediah Hyde Lathrop, who had made several wise investments, none wiser than a real estate play following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. It was hardly a gamble: the fire created the biggest redevelopment opportunity in American history.
Barbour Lathrop was pleased with his lineage—he was the grandson of the respected Governor James Barbour of Virginia. But he never got along with his father. Jedediah had pushed his son to attend law school at Harvard, which Barbour did. But when he finished, Barbour decided he couldn’t become a lawyer because, as he saw it, “a lawyer cannot tell the truth.” His incensed father responded that young Barbour would not get another cent. In Barbour Lathrop’s retelling of the story, he replied to the ultimatum with a shrug.
Poor in his early twenties, Lathrop committed his sharp wit and passion to the bombastic, first to New York, which didn’t hold him, and then to California, an upstart state awash in ambition. In the 1870s the West was still a new frontier with a spirit unencumbered by the divisions over slavery that still hung in the East. Gold had attracted opportunists to California in the 1840s and ’50s. By the seventies, the game was either mining silver or trying to predict its fluctuating price. In San Francisco, the rumor of someone discovering a new vein would cause a mining stock to rocket 1,000 percent, creating fortunes overnight. “The entire city buzzed with tales of chambermaids who bought the rooming houses they had worked in a few weeks earlier and of former ditchdiggers riding down newly fashionable Kearny Street in opulent carriages,” one historian wrote of the era. Lathrop didn’t care about wealth as much as he wanted to be somebody, so he took his first job as a reporter, or as he pretentiously put it, “a newspaperman,” for the San Francisco Morning Call, where he’d have a front-row seat to important events. He dressed aspirationally, wearing fine suits and hats. He even bought a revolver from a gun salesman who fed Lathrop’s ego by claiming—correctly—that a man of Lathrop’s status would need to use it one day.
It turned out that his father’s ultimatum had been good only in life, not in death. When Jedediah died in 1889, he made each of his three progeny instant millionaires. The money immediately changed Barbour Lathrop. He quit his job at the Morning Call and began smoking fatter cigarettes. He passed his days in the gentlemen-only Bohemian Club, a tall brick building near San Francisco’s Union Square that attracted Lathrop’s type: the wealthy, powerful, and artistically minded who sought out the company of men—and men only. Amid boisterous conversation with writers, musicians, and patrons of the arts, Lathrop emitted baritone guffaws and plotted pranks, such as the time he convinced a man with thinning hair to emulate the people in Timbuktu, who he claimed stimulated their scalps with raw onions steeped in gin. Lathrop became known as the “sire of high jinks.”
At forty-three, Lathrop was uninterested in the path of most men his age, namely to invest in property, marry, and raise a large family. He rented a room on the top floor of the Bohemian Club. His only close friends were other men he met in the dining room and in the smoking parlor, or on the streets of San Francisco. Fraternal gossip seemed to delight him, but when boredom inevitably set in, the next itch to strike him was to travel.
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By the fourth day of Fairchild’s stint as a tour guide on Java, the group was reaching its limit. Bryan Lathrop, on his maiden voyage east, was unaccustomed to humidity, and he squabbled with his brother about the indignities of foreign travel, setting Barbour’s nerves on edge. Meanwhile, Bryan’s wife annoyed everyone with incessant questions fired in scattershot fashion.
Fairchild was unperturbed. He took the young woman, Carrie McCormick, on a boat ride near an island full of bats. Had he known she came from the venerable McCormick family—the great Chicago dynasty of Robert McCormick, who invented the mechanized reaper, one of the greatest tools in agricultural history—he might have thought twice about asking the man rowing the boat to clap the oars together with such a loud thwack that bats blackened the sky above them. A sight that delighted Fairchild left the young woman rattled for days.
Lathrop, meanwhile, was anxious and lonely, and had exhausted his patience. It didn’t help that Fairchild’s command of the Malay language was poor, or that Lathrop banished him from the hotel one afternoon after Fairchild ate a noxious-smelling durian.
“Fairchild, I don’t like this traveling with a party,” Lathrop said one night in Bandung. “I’m not accustomed to it. They don’t like the same things that I do, and what’s the use?” It was time, he felt, to abandon the others and move on. He asked Fairchild to join him. “There is nothing in those termites. Leave them alone and come along with me and I will show you the world.”