by Daniel Stone
When Lathrop first visited the Andes, sometime in the 1880s, he had been struck by how his mountain guides carried heavy loads up steep hillsides without ever growing tired. Their muscles and diet seemed common, as did their environment. The only difference he could tell was a plant called coca that the men chewed as they climbed.
Lathrop was intrigued by whatever miraculous component in the leaves made this possible. He sent several samples to the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to be chemically tested. If the leaves hadn’t been ignored, Lathrop might have been the man who introduced cocaine to the United States. Instead, Lathrop never heard back from the academy and no records showed the parcel had ever been received.
Lathrop being Lathrop, he claimed omniscience anyway, retelling the tale with a self-satisfaction that he had known something brilliant from the start. But in fact, coca was well on its way to popularization already, thanks to a German chemist named Albert Niemann who in his PhD dissertation described the way he isolated coca’s potent properties—research that required ample sampling—and came to the conclusion that coca instigated “a flow of saliva and leaves a peculiar numbness, followed by a sense of cold when applied to the tongue.” The suffix “caine” was added for its anesthetic properties, as with procaine or novocaine, leaving unmentioned coca’s effects as a powerful stimulant.
This modesty for cocaine was short-lived. Within a decade, cocaine found allure as a sizable upgrade from other stimulating plant extracts, such as coffee or tea. The large pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis sold cocaine in smokable, edible, and liquid forms, the last of which came with a needle for easy injection into a user’s veins.
Around the same time, a morphine-addicted pharmacist in Georgia developed a formula for a drink that was, in its earliest versions, 2.5 percent cocaine. The product had only one obvious name, in homage to the coca plant: Coca-Cola. The world benefited from this, and many people, their brains full of distracting dopamine, welcomed the amusement. But not Lathrop. All he saw was a missed chance for glory as the patron saint of hyper human efficiency.
After the wild topography of the Andes, Chile offered a return to predictable climates and fertile soil. The land also brought a coincidence of geography, particularly to someone doing the work of American plant exploration. Chile was almost exactly as far south as the United States was north, its capital, Santiago, at the precise inverted latitude of Los Angeles, California; Lubbock, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina. No two regions on earth can be climatically identical, but if there was anything Chile could contribute, it was that its time-tested crops were ready to grow in many regions of the United States. The only delay would be that they’d have to go through Washington first.
So it would be curious for Fairchild to learn later that of all the crops that he sent from Santiago, few would ever grow in the United States. There was a mountain bamboo known as chusquea, toned with a blush that colored the stalks red. He carefully packed saplings of a low-growing tree with no common name—just its Latin name, Persea lingue—that seemed a promising candidate as a street tree along avenues in New York or Washington. His favorite was an ornamental tree, called mayten, with lazy tentacles that succumbed so much to gravity that it appeared to be weeping. It never made it to Washington.
The problem may have been more bureaucratic than botanical. With all the ornamental trees he sent, plus the new varieties of squash and watermelon, and even some collections of strange Chilean beans, there simply wasn’t capacity for such abundance. Food exploration was new, and Fairchild knew that the experimental stations to which much of this material was entrusted were not in shape to receive it.
But there was one sample that made it. History tends to favor successes, not the failures. The crop he was about to find would be mentioned in his obituary as a high achievement, perhaps the greatest of his life.
As he bit into the oily green flesh, Fairchild couldn’t have known he was holding in his hands the future crop of the American Southwest. But he had a hunch. It was a black-skinned fruit, a variety of alligator pear, or as the Aztecs called it, “avocado,” a derivative of their word for testicle. It grew in pairs, and had an oblong, bulbous shape. The fruit had the consistency of butter and was a little stringy. But unlike the other avocados he had tasted farther north, in Jamaica and Venezuela, this one had remarkable consistency. Every fruit on the tree was the same size and ripened at the same pace, rare qualities for anything that grew in the consistent warmth of the subtropics.
In Santiago, where a boat had deposited Fairchild and Lathrop, the avocado had an even greater quality. Fairchild listened intently as someone explained that the fruit could withstand a mild frost as low as twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. Such a climatic range suggested a perfect crop for America. From central Mexico, the worldwide home of the first avocados, centuries of settlers had carried the fruit south to Chile. David Fairchild mused about taking it the other way, back north. “A valuable find for California,” he wrote. “This is a black-fruited, hardy variety.”
Lathrop tagged along on the daytime expedition when Fairchild tasted that avocado. He agreed that a fruit so hardy, so versatile, would perfectly answer farmers’ pleas for novel but undemanding crops, ones that almost grew themselves, provided the right conditions. Fairchild didn’t know the chemical properties of the avocado’s fatty flesh, or that a hundred years in the future it would, like quinoa, find esteem, owing to its combination of fat and vitamins. But he could tell that such a curious fruit, unlike any other, must have an equally curious evolutionary history. No earthly mammal could digest a seed as big as the avocado’s, and certainly not anything that roamed wild through South America.
History could wait, as it often does. While a cart with a horse idled nearby, Fairchild bought every avocado he could, emptying his pockets of Chilean pesos. He hoped within the bins was piled sufficient diversity to sustain the crop in faraway soil. Most of the avocados were solid as a stone, but by the time they were packed into small boxes, some started to soften, a signal that they ripened off the tree, rather than on. Only when nearly a thousand avocados were packed was Fairchild confident that at least a few would survive the lengthy ocean voyage. On each box, he wrote in large block letters, “Washington DC, Department of Agriculture, Division of Seed and Plant Introduction,” and he watched as the crates were carried away.
* * *
—
On June 10, 1899, the day Orator F. Cook opened one of the boxes back in Washington, the first indication of Fairchild’s eager endorsement of this particular shipment was its size. Cook was the man unlucky enough to replace Fairchild as the office-based recipient of hunted plants. More than ten boxes sat in Cook’s office. He pried one open, picked up an avocado and bit into the rind, then peeled back its skin to inspect its flesh. The fruit was clearly rotten, emitting a putrid smell of brown mold. But the important part, the seed and its genetic material, was alive.
Cook had seen an avocado before, but not like this—so smooth, so green. The fruit took an express route to the greenhouse, where workers propagated the seeds, first in soil, and then suspended slightly in water. Fairchild had included written instructions that only mature trees would fruit, after several years, not months. He advised that as soon as the seedlings grew reasonable roots, they should be shipped to experiment stations in California to be shared with farmers interested in experimental crops.
Cook complied, and then mostly forgot about the avocado.
In California, that single shipment helped build an industry. Other avocados turned up as well, from travelers or tourists who packed the oversized seeds as souvenirs. There were one-off stories that avocados had been spotted in America before, in Hollywood in 1886 or near Miami in 1894. But none were as sturdy as Fairchild’s Chilean variety, prized for its versatility, color, and flavor—a résumé of strong pedigree. Fairchild’s avocado would turn out to be a mix of a Guatemalan avocado and a Mexica
n avocado and to have been only a short-term tenant in Chilean soil before Fairchild picked it up. But as with most popular fruits, the true geographic origin faded into irrelevance.
Farmers and early geneticists dissected this sample and ones that came after it to create newer cultivars attuned to more specialized climates or tastes. This work yielded a twentieth-century variety called Fuerte, Spanish for “strong,” growable in the coldest conditions ever tested on an avocado. It fell from favor after proving unable to ship even modest distances without bruising.
A different descendant of Fairchild’s shipment of avocados would endure as the lasting variety. A quarter century after Fairchild tasted his first Chilean avocado, a mail carrier in Fallbrook, California, foresaw dollar signs in the fruit and managed to collect seeds from every available avocado—from fields, from neighbors, even from the trash bins of restaurant kitchens. He wasn’t a botanist. He had dropped out of high school and had little academic training. He was simply an early enthusiast.
The man kept a garden behind his house, and in 1926, when one of the seeds sprouted completely vertical, unlike other varieties, his kids were the first to notice. Within a few months, when the small tree formed walnut-sized nuggets of fruit—at a rate of maturation far faster than any other variety—the man knew he had something different. He knelt next to the small tree, fourteen inches tall, and had his wife take a portrait, a pose later memorialized in a painting.
A decade later, on the afternoon of August 27, 1935, a full thirty-six years after Fairchild collected the Chilean ancestor avocado and ten thousand years after humans first domesticated the fruit, the man applied for a patent. He hired an artist to sketch his avocado from every angle, including the one most true to its original namesake, hanging from a tree like a drooping testicle. When it came time to name the variety that would become the world’s most popular avocado, accounting for more than 80 percent of the global market, he didn’t name it after his wife, Elizabeth, whom he was said to have met at a church picnic, or after his neighborhood of La Habra Heights in East Los Angeles, where the first seedling once grew. Lacking imagination more than vanity, he thought only to name it after himself, Rudolph Hass.
Fairchild’s avocado shipment from Chile helped launch an industry. In the following decades, avocado enthusiasts in Southern California used the fruits of Fairchild’s shipment, along with others, to incrementally develop new avocado varieties. Until one day in 1935, when a postal deliveryman named Rudolph Hass, who had poured his life savings into growing avocados, filed a patent for what would become the world’s most popular variety.
* * *
—
To journey from Chile to Argentina meant crossing more than 150 miles of jungle and mountains while riding, much to Lathrop’s disgust, atop the back of a mule. He had no desire to linger in the Andes. He wasn’t above nights in the wild—although he enjoyed camping about as much as he enjoyed drinking cheap brandy. What worried him were the rumors. He heard the stories about gangs of thieves who rifled through travelers’ bags while they slept. The guides who arranged the passage assured him protection, but he was wary of them, too. His posture and attire and the coif of his mustache betrayed his affluence.
But having little choice, Lathrop packed with a deliberate notion of defense. He assembled his valuable letters and credentials in a small package, which he placed at the center of his trunk, tucked among his soiled laundry and hardcover English novels. To find it, someone would have to rummage through everything, and if that happened, he and Fairchild would either be tied up somewhere, or dead.
Fairchild, in his usual contrast to Lathrop’s sour mood, was excited to cross the world’s longest mountain range, whose peaks climbed four miles into the sky. As the party’s mules trudged up narrow, rocky inclines, Fairchild held tight and took in the view of colossal condors that swung overhead. Their bodies, rotund and awkward, nearly four feet from head to tail, glided in careless arcs, as they took advantage of wind patterns to stay aloft while peering down for prey. Fairchild’s vertiginous fascination with the birds came partly from the coca leaves he had chewed—a remedy to distract the brain from reduced oxygen high above the sea.
His mule slipped on a patch of ice at the edge of the trail. Its front legs buckled, shifting the animal and its rider forward. Fairchild tensed as he slid.
Lathrop yelled before he could find the words, but there was nothing anyone could do, least of all Lathrop, who had tied himself to his animal so he could avoid paying attention. Everyone watched Fairchild approach the thousand-foot abyss. The animal kicked to regain its step. Then it kicked again. Fairchild grabbed at the mud, at the ice, but there was nothing to grip as he slid further. It was, he would later describe, “a horrid moment of suspense.”
Fairchild lived, but no thanks to his efforts. The mule kicked a third time, a desperate last attempt, with such force that it would either fall to the side or stand up. In one motion, it found its footing and picked its body up. Fairchild rose with it.
The moment had passed too quickly for Fairchild to comprehend such a swift and unmerciful end. No one talked for a full minute, silenced by the seriousness of the episode. The animals continued on, climbing and descending ridgelines and narrow trails, breathing heavily. Fairchild pulled his mule in from the unguarded edge.
Eventually, Lathrop broke the silence with a stream of stories about his travels, his encounter with coca leaves, and the souvenirs he sent back home for the amusement of the Bohemian Club. The journey from Santiago to Buenos Aires had started on April 16, 1899, and would take twelve days. If it meant arriving alive, Fairchild was comfortable letting his companion talk until the end of the century.
* * *
—
After crossing the Chilean Andes, the party entered Argentina and continued all the way to the Atlantic coast. Near Buenos Aires, Fairchild collected cuttings from a fast-growing and soft-wooded evergreen tree named bella sombra for its beautiful shadow. The cuttings from the tree would eventually make their way to California, where bella would be cultivated as a shade tree. A more culinary discovery was a strange mountain papaya no larger than a small plum and amenable to temperatures below freezing. Years later, Fairchild would try to merge this papaya with a more tender species. Hybrids, he would conclude, were easier to imagine than to actually make.
From Buenos Aires he and Lathrop boarded a boat—Lathrop’s choice—rather than prolong the discomforts of their overland journey, and steamed north, up the coast toward Brazil. It was dawn when they arrived at the mouth of Guanabara Bay. Low clouds hung over Sugarloaf Mountain, standing majestically above the city of Rio de Janeiro. For visitors to stay in Rio was verboten, not by law but by taboo: to spend a night was to risk yellow fever, which permeated the low-lying city like a heavy mist. As the most dangerous times for parasite activity were dawn and dusk, Fairchild and Lathrop opted to stay at the United States’ diplomatic residence in Petrópolis, a mountain municipality forty-two miles to the north.
To investigate plants in Rio’s botanical garden Fairchild had to ride a small cog railroad down the mountain, followed by a short boat ride to central Rio, a trip of nearly four hours. In an era when traveling across oceans took weeks, few people could be bothered by mere hours. But the commute restricted Fairchild’s plant surveys to the hot midday after ten A.M. At four P.M., the train would climb the mountain again and deliver its foreign passengers to their safe perch above the clouds.
Fairchild managed to get his hands around just one species that interested him, a distinctive dwarf mango called Itamaraca. He described it in his notebook as “flattened like a tomato and with a very delightful aroma and a golden color.” Dozens of mangoes had already been sent to Washington and hundreds more would follow. The competition was for the most reliable variety. The Itamaraca wasn’t it. Notable for its small size and abundance on the branch, it would prove better as a backyard novelty than something that could supp
ort an entire industry.
But Brazil wasn’t a bust. One of Lathrop’s cousins, who was living in the country, took Fairchild and Lathrop to São Paulo, where he promised to introduce them to the greatest coffee growers. Even in 1899, Fairchild knew that coffee was a futile fantasy for the United States. America had become the biggest customer of Brazil’s coffee, which would have made acquiring the plant strategic. But Fairchild knew a rival industry would never sprout back home. No part of the United States could offer the warmth and humidity the coffee tree demands, which originated in the East African tropics of Ethiopia before migrating on colonial ships to balmy Brazil.
Instead, Fairchild’s final days in Brazil centered more on matters of diplomacy than diet. Around a large table in São Paulo, he listened as half a dozen men representing different governments discussed the politics of America’s rise. The Spanish-American War, a victory for the United States, had ended the year before, bringing a pause to the fight over global hegemony.
But those around the table had the suspicion that America’s ascent was not yet complete. Things were changing, in some ways disconcertingly, revealing a decisive disruption of the world order. There, in the waning months of the final year of the nineteenth century, as red dust from coffee fields blew like powder through the air, the group of educated men of politics, diplomacy, and warfare talked long into the night, agreeing on little except that the next century would belong to the United States.
CHAPTER NINE
Grapes of a Venetian Monk
Barbour Lathrop had yet to recover fully from his bout with yellow fever. Aboard a ship that departed Brazil, his moans and complaints attracted the attention of a fellow passenger, and by the time the vessel pulled into harbor in London in June 1899, the man had persuaded Lathrop to head directly to Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, for a treatment known as the alkaline-sulfur water cure. Taken in a warm bath, the treatment was to drink alkaline water while fully stretched out to reduce stomach acidity. Lathrop became a “crusty person” when forced to consume anything he deemed distasteful, Fairchild recalled, but if it brought an end to the vomiting, Lathrop would oblige. Besides, the cure beat other rumored remedies, including one that called for repeated enemas of tea infused with cayenne pepper and petals of the flower lobelia.