by Daniel Stone
The cotton boom built Cairo into not only an economic hub but an intellectual one, attracting top minds to the renewed capital. And this would lead to innovation, the kind all developed countries enjoy once they’ve figured out how to feed their people. In 1897, Egyptian farmers interbred a cotton from Georgia and a cotton from Peru to produce, as Fairchild noted, “a variety with a long, very silky and crinkly fiber of a light-brown color.”
This new cotton, he learned, was known as Jannovitch cotton. It was easy to grow and its seeds were easy to reproduce, the perfect combination to satisfy recovering Southern growers short on money and labor. The long fibers were so much softer, and so easy to distinguish from the coarse cotton traditionally grown in the American South, that only a few years after its creation, Jannovitch cotton, which was neither native to Egypt nor there for long, became known as “Egyptian cotton,” a name that grew to be global shorthand for exotic luxury.
“If you think it is such a good thing, why don’t you send more of it?” Lathrop asked one day as Fairchild obsessed over the latest shipment he was preparing for Washington. It would be his biggest yet, and he deliberated how much of each crop to send. For a month, he built a mountain of seeds and cuttings, and then took three days to pack them with precision to ensure airflow, moisture, and minimal stress on the journey across the Atlantic. He knew what it was like to receive large shipments at the Department of Agriculture and how well-curated seed parcels could languish if too big or confusing to unpack, as had been the case a few years prior when he had received a bulging package of Russian wheat seeds that died before able hands could plant it all.
He packed and repacked, and repacked again. The final parcel contained forty-three types of crops, from cantaloupes to peppers to okra, his notes as colorful as the foods themselves. There were seeds of Egyptian pumpkins (“superior, both in amount of flesh and in sweetness”), cucumbers that “ripened for the table twenty days earlier than the ordinary cucumber,” and onions that he “recommended for irrigated Western lands.” He included forms of beans, corn, and squash that he believed could outproduce native varieties in the United States.
He took particular delight in the strange names—names no one in his country had ever heard. There was a small seed called “flax” that produced oil (“grows in regions which are dry”). There was red strawberry spinach (“gives a brilliant color to vegetable dishes”) and something called the edible jute, whose leaves, when dried, could be turned into a thick gluey soup (“It forms a favorite dish of the Egyptian peasants, probably because of its cheapness”).
Finally, at the top, he placed seeds and samples of Egyptian cotton. Following Lathrop’s advice, he sent two bushels of seed instead of one, seed that on the open market would have cost an exorbitant forty dollars if a generous grower hadn’t enjoyed Fairchild’s charm and offered it for free. Both Fairchild and Lathrop were surprised when they learned the shipment would cost one hundred dollars, the monthly salary of a well-paid American. Yet with this price came the guarantee the crate would arrive safely in Washington. Unlike shipments from non-English-speaking ports that would be transferred from ship to ship, some delayed by weather, others by indifference, Fairchild’s shipment would sail directly from Cairo to New York, stopping only in Mediterranean ports, to amass a bigger transatlantic haul.
The investment turned out to be worth the price. Plant breeders in Washington had already begun experimenting with cotton, and their varieties were shipped west to California and Arizona, where growers had the optimal conditions—hot and damp—to build a new hub for high-quality cotton. Fairchild’s cotton from Egypt was the best they’d ever seen.
In Arizona, a man named A. J. Chandler was at the time working with cotton, trying to demonstrate whether it would grow well in the desert soil. Fairchild’s shipment from Egypt supplemented Chandler’s efforts, which proved more successful than he could have imagined. A new, long-grain variety raised the quality of American cotton, and thus boosted demand in a growing market. One use for cotton particularly helped: lining the insides of automobile tires, which couldn’t be made fast enough.
Jannovitch cotton was the first of Fairchild’s earliest finds to illustrate that the idea of plant exploration for the purpose of starting rival industries in America was economically valuable—and geopolitically strategic. As cotton farmers in Arizona and California increased their output, Egypt’s dominance waned. British buyers turned back to the United States, whose exporters were easier to deal with, and where large expanses of land allowed the price to stay low.
Cotton, as with any crop, continued to evolve. The early Egyptian varieties transformed into new and hardier strains that grew more easily and reliably. By the time fighting began in the Second World War, Arizona’s test plot of long-grain cotton had yielded a hundred-million-dollar industry, enough money to fuel the state, and enough cotton for every American to have a pair of britches.
From Shepheard’s Hotel, Fairchild loaded his and Lathrop’s trunks onto a camel and rode next to Lathrop to a waiting ship in the Gulf of Suez. As he watched the green hills of Egypt recede behind him, he pulsed with the confidence of a man hitting his stride, of feeling well suited for the work of a globe-trotting botanist.
And he would be, for a time. In Egypt, however, Fairchild couldn’t have known about the growing number of people back home who had begun to believe his work was unnecessary, even dangerous, and that the world, awash with new opportunity, was changing too fast.
CHAPTER TEN
Citrus Maxima
Fairchild stood in a Javanese market surrounded by oddities and trinkets as a woman strung his arms with bracelets and garters. He usually avoided these types of souvenir fairs, each an awkward chance to be ogled as a rich Westerner. Nor did he need kitschy junk to remember his travels.
But here he was, every inch of his extremities covered with yarns and gold-plated bracelets, his pockets bulging with mirrors, beads, and patches of sparkling fabric. A crowd had gathered around him, murmuring with confusion and mockery. When the woman asked him if he was finished shopping, Fairchild looked around and pointed to two small cat statues. He gave the woman a few more coins and then slipped through the crowd, the figurines in his hands.
It was impossible to know how many people he’d barter with, so he scooped up as many items as possible. The island tribes in the Indian Ocean had little exposure to anything from beyond their shores, which made strange shiny objects a sort of currency to goad tribespeople into giving him plants.
After leaving Egypt, the pair had steamed south and west aboard a luxury British steamer. So close to India, any ordinary traveler might have stopped in Bombay, a city in constant explosion. But Lathrop had no interest in the exceptional crowds, the filthiness, and the way culture burst at one’s face. Fairchild might have protested if Lathrop hadn’t promised he could visit India another day on his own (on Lathrop’s dime). Lathrop also proposed that, instead of India, they steam quickly to Java and embark on a forty-day cruise of the Malay Islands, the same islands where Alfred Russel Wallace had come to discover the mechanism of evolution. This, he knew, Fairchild would not protest.
While Fairchild shopped for items to trade, Lathrop handled the arrangements, which included visits to more than a dozen islands, many completely unexplored. The final stop would be Papua New Guinea, the bulky isle that had become Germany’s early experiment in colonialism. The Netherlands India Steam Navigation Company had begun charter service through the islands, which was previously impossible due to unpredictable danger. Rumors of the islanders’ bloodlust for white skin were easier to assume to be true than actually finding out for oneself, so they continued to circulate for decades. Even Lathrop, one of the nineteenth century’s few cultural relativists, couldn’t tell if the Steam Navigation Company had deemed the group of islands newly safe, or simply profitable.
Neither man was scared—extreme wealth had a way of ensuring a measure of
security. Yet still, American tourists weren’t warmly welcomed anywhere in the Dutch East Indies except Java, a policy more to protect against encroachment than outright violence. Fairchild suspected the Dutch “sensed the unavoidable effects that have come from our towering pyramid of wealth which scatters over the world like locusts”—or in other words, American travelers’ reputation for snooty entitlement, and America’s hot streak of taking over other peoples’ colonies. He and Lathrop were technically researchers, not tourists, but still, when he had to talk to an official, Fairchild’s words came out with the slightest tinge of an Italian accent.
The small boat, long and slender, was perfect for the voyage ahead, able to slip narrowly between islands and pass over coral reefs. As it left Java, Fairchild drank in the blueness of the water and moistness of the air. Even though he had been to Java once before, the islands of the Java Sea enchanted him anew, a paradise of marvelous plant life, insects, and bizarre animals. These were the result of active volcanoes, which kept the already-warm tropics in a perpetual hot bath that bred diversity in ways the mid latitudes were too fickle to accommodate. There were coral atolls in the water and purple mountain peaks high above, all surrounded by a stretch of blue sea smoother than glass. Despite the danger ahead, he enjoyed thinking he knew the region well.
It was an afterthought if Fairchild or Lathrop noticed that, as the boat left Java, the world inaugurated the twentieth century. Early January of 1900 felt like any other time; the ship bobbed in every direction as it rose and fell between swells.
Under the tropical sun, Fairchild and Lathrop were granted a pair of deck chairs and spent the first few days of the voyage giggling about a man they had met months before in Chile with the name Señor Izquierdo, or Mr. Left. They’d banter in colloquy, one as Mr. Left and the other Mr. Right, thoroughly confusing themselves until they’d slap their knees and double over laughing.
* * *
—
Lombok was the first stop on the forty-day itinerary. Steep volcanic hills arranged in a lazy horseshoe cast a shadow on the ship as it approached the shore. The Dutch had only recently pacified Lombok’s people, then claimed the sooty volcanic soil as their own. Large cliffs and subpar farming conditions—except close to the shore, where thirsty palm trees grew—meant there weren’t many indigenous people to begin with, maybe a few hundred. Still, colonization hardly meant harmony, and so the indigenous lived apart from the Dutch in strict separation, both by custom and by choice.
Fairchild returned to the ship with only a black-and-white lima bean and a new variety of peanut. “The native market yielded little in the way of interesting plants, and altogether our days . . . were a disappointment.” He found the same on two more islands, Bali and Sulawesi, where he believed the wondrous tropical crops he had seen in Java were hiding deep in the islands’ interior, requiring weeks of travel that Fairchild didn’t have, and a fearlessness of ornery islanders that he lacked.
In Fairchild’s diaries, notebooks, and memoirs, as in the writings of so many people in his day, there are frequent ruminations of this sort of racial insecurity, equating danger with things unknown or poorly understood. Many island civilizations at the time were indeed angry and violent to outsiders, but for reasons that were largely lost on Fairchild. As a white American of the nineteenth century, he had never known life with the indignities of colonization, and he couldn’t comprehend what a formerly free people thought about being invaded by a foreign power. As a result, he frequently judged such unfamiliar people, even pitied them. “At each place we met different types of natives who had grown up on their respective islands knowing nothing of the world beyond the waves breaking on their white beaches,” Fairchild asserted.
The natives’ knowledge of the world was, in fact, more complex than Fairchild realized. The people of these Indian Ocean islands understood they had been invaded by Europeans who had brought violence and disease, and raped the islands’ women so frequently that babies began to appear with caramel skin. Contrary to Fairchild’s opinion, the fact that the islanders didn’t kill white visitors was a sign of the islanders’ racial progress, a reluctant admission that they couldn’t keep white men away with comparatively impotent weapons like arrows and knives. Even more racially aware was the way island people were resigned to their fate of colonial subservience—to the point that when a pair of American plant explorers dropped anchor, the group of native islanders whose only possession was the island they stood on wouldn’t fight off the American visitors, but would humbly help them explore.
The best example of this came at Ceram Island. Off the eagle-shaped outcrop west of Papua New Guinea, the shallow sea at low tide moored the boat in soft sand a quarter mile from the beach. One by one, the island’s men, bare chested and with stained sarongs around their waists, sloshed through the water toward the ship, aware that fully clothed men on board wouldn’t want their trousers dampened by the waves, and would rather be carried ashore.
One had ugly red spots on his chest, and as he approached, Fairchild realized that the sickly-looking man would be, as he described the arrangement, “my horse.”
As he rode toward the shore on the spotted man’s back, silver fish jumped from the water around them and onto the thin pencil branches of mangroves. Fairchild, wearing long pants and a collared shirt, tried not to touch the man’s skin, fearful it could convey the contagious ringworm fungus. When the man dropped his cargo on the firm sand, Fairchild gave him a nod. The sand around them was light brown and looked alive, moving toward the water and away from it, shells of hermit crabs scurrying from the waves. A dog with no hair other than a single knot of blond on its head ran toward Fairchild, and right before the expected bite, the animal rubbed its face on Fairchild’s leg. He laughed, and the island men did, too.
As he waited for the other men to be ferried ashore, Fairchild couldn’t help but steal glances at the nearly naked brown bodies, all around him drowsy penises, sagging breasts, fickle clumps of hair. An American could grow up in those days without seeing a naked body, unless in an artist’s studio. For a thirty-year-old bachelor, gawking was less from deviance than from plain curiosity. Excusable, in Fairchild’s case, so long as he wasn’t caught staring.
* * *
—
Twenty-four hundred miles separated the beginning of the Java Sea voyage from the end, and within that distance were strewn thousands of islands, some a just-swimmable distance apart. Proximity united the islands, but the people divided themselves. Fairchild remarked that the squabbling seemed childish and petty, a little like “the feuds of poor whites of the Kentucky Mountains. . . . Both are evidence of the insanity of mankind at this level of culture.” On one island, several warriors escorted Fairchild to the home of their chief, where they showed him an old iron cannon that had been a conquest of a long-ago battle. The artillery didn’t work without the powder to shoot it, but their enemies coveted it, and that alone gave it value.
Farther along, the island of Dobo would offer the most vivid and tragic demonstration of violence. The boat that preceded Fairchild and Lathrop’s had sent its engineer and boatswain ashore to meet the Papuans and perhaps trade. But as soon as they touched the sand, a storm of arrows rained on them. The boatswain managed to row away, but the engineer was stranded on the beach, and his sprint into the brush amounted to accidental suicide. The captain sent a second officer in official uniform to negotiate the engineer’s rescue, but when arrows fell on his boat, too, he turned back.
If a military escort had been available, Fairchild might have made another attempt at the rescue. He knew that the military uniform of the prior man had looked threatening, and the best strategy would in fact be a slow approach, followed by exaggerated gestures to demonstrate that a white man’s presence brought respect and not a threat, and that he considered the islanders equal partners in cultural dialogue. But any remnants of Fairchild’s boyhood hubris had been replaced by the cultural wisdom tha
t some people are not to be bothered, and so he didn’t object when the captain announced they’d move along.
The next day, at the island of Sekar, a rock barely big enough to sustain a hundred people, the situation was only slightly less fraught. As Fairchild prepared to board a rowboat to cross the pristine blue water toward the white sand, he noticed the scowls of the men standing on the shore.
“Laugh,” the captain told him. “Joke and do comic ridiculous things. Don’t look serious or one of the ugly fellows may run a spear through you, too.”
Fairchild pulled the boat ashore. He maintained a permanent smile and held his arms in the air, looking a little like the clowns of his youth who had come to Kansas in the traveling circuses. He spoke in a high-pitched voice and opened his eyes as wide as they’d go.
The Papuans stared at him unmoved. By 1900, they had become bored by the antics of white men, and especially by the mirrors and beads they brought as oddities.
No one laughed, but no one killed Fairchild, either. And when his act had gone on long enough in front of the radja, the princely ruler of Sekar, Fairchild said the only thing he could think of: that he was interested in plants.
As he rowed the small boat away, next to him sat a citrus fruit shaped curiously like a pear, and nearly the size of his head. The rotund fruit was green and obese, and on the inside, as everyone on board the ship would soon learn, pink and orange. It was a pomelo, also known as a shaddock, a citrus of such girth it commanded the scientific name Citrus maxima, partly for its size and partly because of its reign as one of Earth’s few original citrus ancestors.