The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  Fairchild replied sheepishly that he couldn’t leave Java, that his research had just begun, that he had only been on the island for eight months. But Lathrop answered the excuses with his classic dismissal.

  “You’re working too hard and you need a change,” Lathrop said.

  Fairchild felt guilty at the prospect of leaving the job Dr. Treub had created for him. But Lathrop promised to cover every expense, and to pay him the salary he would be forfeiting. Lathrop also enchanted him with a promise that, as soon as a boat could be arranged, they would head together up the west side of Sumatra, an island rich in minerals, fruits, and tribes seen by few people with white skin. Unable to say no, and convinced that Lathrop would reject his refusal anyway, Fairchild accepted.

  Lathrop arranged a steamer for his brother, sister-in-law, and Carrie McCormick to return to the United States. As soon as they departed, he made arrangements for himself and Fairchild.

  Their boat left Batavia and traveled west, through the Sunda Strait, where the passengers gathered on deck for a sight of the famous Krakatau volcano, which had erupted a decade earlier in an explosion so extraordinary that, three months afterward, officials in New York and Connecticut deployed fire engines when smoke in the distance erroneously indicated a massive blaze.

  The boat turned north to Padang, the port on Sumatra’s west coast. As the vessel approached land, Fairchild stood on the bow to watch the endless forests draw closer. The island appeared raw and green, a chain of protruding volcanoes stretching across the horizon like the backbone of a sleeping dinosaur.

  As he awaited his ship’s landing, Fairchild penned a letter to his mother in Kansas. A typical young man in the nineteenth century might live in his parents’ home until he married. Yet Charlotte Fairchild’s son had left not only his home, but his country, writing from as far from Kansas as one could possibly be. He told his mother of Barbour Lathrop, of his abundance of personality and money, and recounted his hasty departure from Java and the impending arrival in Sumatra. He assured her that, in all his time living abroad, he had yet to experience even one serious accident.

  Fate can always be tempted. As he was sealing the letter, he heard a shriek.

  A Malay man on board was tussling with a waiter in the passageway. One wielded a hatchet, the other a dirk, each flailing his appendages. They wrestled down the passageway attempting to stab each other, and then fell, their bodies interlocked, into Lathrop’s cabin and doused his trunk with blood.

  Lathrop yelled and shooed. He and the ship’s captain tried to separate the pair. It took another minute to put them in restraints and for some soldiers to drag them away on their heels, their bodies dripping a crimson trail.

  The glue on the envelope was still wet. Fairchild peeled it open and amended his letter with a postscript.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Guest and Protégé

  One of the biggest uncertainties for an American traveling in the East was what kind of people he’d meet, and whether they’d be friendly. The Malay tribes on Sumatra, in their colorful garments, looked more welcoming than the more serious people of Java. The most striking feature were women’s earrings, which looked less like ornaments than ear buttons. After getting their ears pricked, toddlers wore rolled banana leaves to enlarge the holes. When the child reached fertility, the openings would be an inch in diameter. Only after she delivered her first child would she take them out, leaving her elongated lobes to flap against her cheeks.

  Fairchild didn’t know how long he and Lathrop would stay in Padang, so he wandered around to survey the area and maybe collect a few things. A yellow raspberry caught his eye, and he pulled it to taste—tart and mealy.

  A moment later, he came across the tallest, thickest cane of bamboo he had ever seen, its shaft thirty feet tall and deep green. Bamboo isn’t a tree, but an overgrown grass, and Fairchild shook it to test its strength. The hefty joints separated and the stalk cracked in half and tumbled down around him, the weight of two-by-fours barely missing his head. Fairchild would one day describe bamboo as “the most beautiful and useful of plants,” but for the moment, he decided to leave it where it was.

  As travel companions, the botanist and the playboy were a study in contrasts. Lathrop was always immaculately dressed and groomed, his collar left open, his mustache plumped. Fairchild, by comparison, wore baggy pants that didn’t fit, and his necktie was never tied correctly. He couldn’t dance or make small talk. At times, the two men rarely spoke.

  The two-man odyssey was plagued by growing pains and, true to form, Lathrop quickly grew impatient with his companion. The tall, rich man was unable to slow down, and Fairchild, earnest and awkward, seemed incapable of moving faster. “Lathrop was a rapid traveler and I was a rather slow and deliberate collector,” Fairchild later remembered. “He didn’t propose to spend the rest of his life on that fever infested coast and I didn’t see what was the use of just a glimpse of plants that there was no time to collect.” If they had been closer to America, Lathrop at this point probably would have sent Fairchild home, conceding that the whole idea of traveling together had been foolish.

  Lathrop believed an expedition could have only one leader—him. He made all the major decisions about where they’d go and where they’d stay. He sighed loudly in frustration. But once Fairchild had experienced the full range of Lathrop’s moods, he realized that the older man’s lectures were meant to be more therapeutic than instructional, and the harsh words lost their bite. Fairchild learned to listen without listening, if only in anticipation of the several quiet hours that would follow each outburst.

  Christmas 1896. Barbour Lathrop (left) and David Fairchild aboard a steamer on the west coast of Sumatra.

  Lathrop came from Alexandria, Virginia, the kind of town that valued cultural refinement and a proper way of doing things, and where anything in violation could be decried as endangering “the public morality.” The windswept plains of Kansas where Fairchild grew up had little to offer as high-minded culture or art. Other than the rotation of visiting professors who stopped by the Fairchild family’s house, Fairchild’s parents were hardly socialites. His sheltered upbringing may go some way toward explaining his gullibility and discomfort traveling with Lathrop, and in a group. When Lathrop told a story, Fairchild would stand nearby and laugh when others did. The rest of the time, he stayed quiet. A man on board with a camera asked to take their photo. Lathrop stared at the lens while Fairchild looked to the side, feeling as small and timid as he looked.

  Most of the time, he simply didn’t know what to say. One morning, after an entire breakfast filled with one-sided conversation, Lathrop stood up and threw his napkin down. “My god, man, can’t you talk?” he yelled and stormed out.

  And yet Fairchild looked at Lathrop with reverence so deep he might’ve drowned in it. “I was the guest and protégé of the greatest world traveler and one of the greatest interviewers America had produced,” he would write of his deep fascination.

  Fairchild’s fawning obedience explains his eagerness to push on. But why would Lathrop, a man of such confidence and wealth, be drawn to compromise? Men who write little down cannot be easily analyzed. But Lathrop had developed a fondness for well-formed young men, those established in upbringing but still impressionable in character. Fairchild wasn’t the first sidekick Lathrop had taken on. Two others had come prior but had left before long, one from impatience, and the other who annoyed Lathrop to the point of dismissal.

  There’s no evidence that Lathrop ever discussed his sexuality, but signs point to his discomfort in established society, not least his apathy toward marriage in an era when it was the norm, and his eagerness to remain in feverish motion, as if evading something he couldn’t outrun. Lathrop identified himself as “bohemian,” to describe both his lifestyle quirks and his unwillingness to conform.

  It also explained where he lived. The Bohemian Club, the only place where Lathrop ever had
a permanent address, was full of other men who styled themselves bohemian, a masking word for something that didn’t quite have a name. The fashion of the so-called Gay Nineties in places like New York and San Francisco wasn’t necessarily to be with other men, but simply to revel in the strangeness of it. Only a little before the 1890s was there a clinical term—homosexuality—to describe someone’s sexual identity, and only in the 1890s did men begin to tiptoe more boldly toward the company of other men for reasons of inexplicable attraction in established smoking clubs on America’s coasts.

  If Lathrop was, in fact, drawn to men, he would have had good reason to be cagey. There was a stigma attached to being sexually different, and a deep risk of ostracism. Bans on gay bars and social clubs effectively regulated gender, outlining permissible speech patterns, attire, and demeanor in polite society. Policing gender came in the form of vigilante enforcement on the streets, where men thought to be queer were roughed up and jeered. Social punishment was worse: the loss of jobs, family, and social respect. Efforts to avoid this fate and still make oneself known to like-minded men caused distress, and from that anxiety came creative ways to both blend in and stand out. Gay men secretly announced themselves to each other with red ties and bleached hair. The best way to navigate was with multiple alibis, pushing most gay men to lead mirrored lives.

  Lathrop lived in and seemed to pass with relative ease through a world where everything had double meanings, where people were mysterious because they had to be. One way to explain his constant travel may be that, in the distant places he visited, no one knew him well enough to judge.

  * * *

  —

  “It’s a collection expedition,” Lathrop said matter-of-factly one morning, looking away from his newspaper. “We’ll be collecting things.”

  Fairchild had built up the courage to ask Lathrop what, exactly, they were doing. He had been lured by the promise of luxury travel to untouched lands. But when he sat to write letters, he struggled to explain why he had left Java. He hardly knew where they were headed next.

  After the novelty of travel began to fray, the wheels might have fallen off Fairchild and Lathrop’s odyssey—if the odyssey had wheels to begin with. With more bluster than actual purpose, they were, in a real sense, floating. Lathrop’s haughty aloofness masked the reality that he was flying blind.

  Lathrop had seen more corners of the world than almost anyone alive, but his years of solo travel had lacked an objective, or even a general direction. At each port, he stumbled across things that, for a traveler, were simply there to observe and then leave behind. Why not bring some of those oddities back? was as much of a plan as Lathrop had considered. Something small here and there, altogether a few armloads to drop on the doorstep of the American people. What or for whom didn’t matter so much as that Lathrop was repurposing personal enjoyment into a form of philanthropy.

  He must have realized that to do it effectively meant doing it scientifically, and conducting science required a scientist. Lathrop had only the training of a nonpracticing lawyer and a short stint as a reporter. To bring his plan to life, he didn’t want a botanist so much as need one.

  The relationship between the two thinned further in Padang, the port city of Sumatra that was the terminus for the new West Sumatra Railway. In silence, Fairchild and Lathrop took the train, the world’s first to work on a system of cogs with teeth carrying a locomotive up a steep mountain. Swampy jungle lined both sides of the track, punctuated with atap palms that rose from the jungle floor as small shrubs with large plumes of leaves. Jungle gave way to periodic waterfalls and beds of rising steam. The mud below them was tropical soup, home to snakes, leeches, and uncountable insects.

  For hours, Fairchild, reluctant to talk and with little to say, stared out the windows, captivated by the foliage. Each plant had its own reason to be gawked at for a boy from the Midwest. If America’s landscape was a black-and-white sketch on paper, Sumatra’s was a nuanced portrait of watercolors.

  At the hotel the next morning, Lathrop stood waiting beside his fully packed trunk. Without a word, Fairchild understood that he was ready to leave. Such an island offered thousands, even millions, of plants to collect. Fairchild could have spent a month there, three if he had his choice. But he also knew that Lathrop, when his mind was made up, couldn’t be swayed. Fairchild’s trunk joined Lathrop’s on a horse carriage, which delivered them back to the train. Without one specimen collected, the two men returned down the mountain to Padang, where a steamer was waiting to continue up the coast.

  As the steamer cut north, Fairchild and Lathrop kept to their separate quarters. One night when Lathrop and a group of Dutch officials were joking and gossiping in the smoking room, Lathrop slipped out to find Fairchild, who, with a lone candle, was hunched over a report. From the doorway, Lathrop delivered the closest thing yet to a compliment.

  “You’re a worker, Fairchild,” he said, “whatever else you aren’t.”

  When they arrived a day later in Fort de Kock, an area rich in waterfalls and sweeping gray cliffs, Fairchild left to collect. The ground was hard and the air dry, the perfect conditions for termites.

  Yet this was a poor decision. When Lathrop discovered Fairchild hunched on all fours digging in the dirt, he let loose. One can assume that in Lathrop’s entire life he had never had the occasion to position himself thus, in soil so dirty it had passed through the intestines of worms. Nor could a man of his stature understand why anyone would opt for behavior so undignified.

  Fairchild stood up, circles of mud at his knees. For the first time, he spoke back. If he was to collect things, Fairchild said, he needed time to understand what he was collecting. Collecting useful things couldn’t be done by grabbing indiscriminate handfuls of plants.

  Lathrop let silence hang for a moment.

  “If you’re going to travel with me, I’ll show you the world, but you can’t stop every minute and collect specimens, or you won’t get any general idea of the countries we travel through.” Then he walked away.

  1895. On Sumatra, simmering tension between Fairchild and Lathrop boiled over into full resentment. Their pact nearly unraveled completely. They stayed in a guesthouse with towering palms, but hardly talked.

  Fairchild felt embarrassed by the exchange, but he was also emboldened by it. If he was going to be the scientific muscle behind the expedition, he might begin acting like it, starting with speaking to Lathrop as a peer.

  The argument in the dirt gave Fairchild the confidence to seek out Lathrop that night as he read in his hotel room, novel in one hand, cherrywood cigarette holder in the other. Why, Fairchild wanted to know, had he left his unfinished studies in Germany, and his incomplete work in Java? Why had he agreed to travel to strange places and meet new people? Tourism was good enough for Lathrop, but not for Fairchild, who felt listless, anxious, and unfocused.

  “Well,” Lathrop began, a little impressed that Fairchild had grown a backbone, “what do you think we should collect?”

  Fairchild answered that he had studied crop diseases for American farmers. But nothing on the other side of the world could solve the problem of a pear grower in Minnesota. While he enjoyed the exotic allure of the Indian Ocean, he didn’t feel that he was helping farmers in need back home.

  Lathrop sat and listened.

  Fairchild continued by describing the World’s Fair and the type of farmers who came to see his pear blight demonstrations. They were provincial and distressed, far too preoccupied with the problems in their fields to care about the novelties of a faraway land. Biologists could help them, perhaps by finding foreign predators of the pests on their farms, but that kind of work was targeted and deliberate, not accidental and haphazard.

  At a pause in Fairchild’s monologue, a Catholic priest appeared in the doorway. He’d heard there was a botanist on board. Fairchild, a little flummoxed, invited him to sit.

  The priest, unaware o
f the tension in the room, described a vast collection of orchids he kept. He explained how he had built a garden of his own with new plants and rare flowers.

  The minutes turned into several hours as the man described the wonders that plants held, and how people living in subtropical places like North America or Europe were oblivious to the wondrous diversity of the Earth. The priest bored Lathrop, but he also gave Lathrop an idea.

  After the man left, Lathrop asked Fairchild if he remembered his first taste of a banana. What about a grapefruit, or even a durian? The answer was obviously yes. For a botanist, the first taste of a new plant was like meeting a new person, and recalling it flooded the mind with memories of where it had happened, what the tongue expected, and what it found instead. Lathrop explained that the sweet flavor and starchy texture of a banana was easy to remember because it had been new.

  A man as traveled as Lathrop knew there were thousands of wild plants around the world, perhaps millions, that farmers had never seen. “If I was a botanist with the opportunity to travel, I’d collect native vegetables, and fruits. There are drug plants that can help cure ailments and all types of other useful plants still unknown in America.”

  Fairchild’s citron adventure in Corsica was, at the moment, the best example. Lathrop seemed to be conjuring that episode to explain that it could be done repeatedly and for more crops—crops farmers had asked for and many more that they hadn’t. Lathrop stood up and mounted to his grand proclamation. “As a botanist, you can help farmers solve problems with their current crops, or you can bring them new crops, the seeds to start rival industries.”

  * * *

  —

  The idea was steeped in history. It also carried the sort of American ambition common in the 1890s. Lathrop was suggesting that the key to their future success was in botany, and specifically foreign crops of economic value.