by Daniel Stone
In many ways, though, the world had already moved on from the pomelo. Grapefruit orchards had sprouted in America, thanks to English colonizers, who brought the fruit with them and grew it as a novelty in northern Florida, the only place where the climate was suitable. By 1885, Floridians had begun to ship grapefruit to Philadelphia and New York. Its popularity would rise, both in the United States and around the world, which made the pomelo, especially in 1900, rather old news.
Still, Fairchild thought an original pomelo specimen could be valuable breed stock. There was also the value in a fruit so large and oblong, it almost defied belief. And so he felt lucky to have one, even if it required extra attention to ensure that his only specimen stay alive. “Seeds of a large and very sour variety,” he noted while the taste was still fresh in his memory. The seeds separated from the flesh easily. He placed them in a damp cloth and wrote a reminder to keep the cloth wet until he could pack them with soil, and after that, send them to the other side of the world.
* * *
—
When the forty-day cruise of the small Malay Islands ended, Fairchild turned his desires to the Philippines, which were newly relevant in 1900, because they were newly American.
The people of the United States, empowered with victory over the Spanish in 1898, had developed a growing hunger for expansion. The spoils of the war included the islands of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, Guam in the Pacific, and the Philippines, a territory nearly as far from Washington as someone on Earth could possibly be. The Philippines belonged to the Spanish for so long the very name for the islands had come from Spain’s King Philip II, who, by 1898, had been dead for three hundred years.
Now Manila was American territory, which seemed like a convenient stepping stone to the East and the five hundred million Chinese who could become customers for American products. Rationalizing the ethics of something so nakedly self-serving, American politicians concocted elaborate explanations that it was America’s obligation to maintain control of helpless Filipino people who couldn’t “uplift themselves,” as President McKinley claimed. Albert Beveridge, an Indiana candidate for the United States Senate, argued that leaving the Filipinos to self-rule would be “like giving a razor to a babe” or “giving a typewriter to an Eskimo.”
Rhetoric like Beveridge’s did little to persuade Filipino insurgents that they should be grateful for American supervision. Instead, they swiftly turned their arms from their Spanish occupiers to their American ones, with even greater force. Filipinos escalated small battles into great acts of brutality. After an American soldier was found murdered with his stomach slit open, an American commander ordered the death of every Filipino in the village, over one thousand people, according to a young soldier who wrote home relaying the story. Americans back home largely sat back and allowed the military to figure things out. There were opponents, and none more largely named than the deep-pocketed Andrew Carnegie, who offered to buy the islands from President McKinley for twenty million dollars and set the Filipino people free. His offer was declined.
When Secretary Wilson learned that Fairchild was in the region, he sent a letter asking him to survey the agricultural potential in the United States’ newest colony. “An American military presence might work in your favor,” Wilson wrote to Fairchild.
Despite Fairchild’s credentials as an American in an American territory, Wilson’s speculation was wrong. The islands weren’t mollified. Continued uprisings by Filipinos against the Americans had left Manila constantly on the edge of violence, leaving agriculture the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. Fairchild’s arrival coincided with monsoon season, which transformed roads into quagmires of mud. He managed to find some mango varieties on the outskirts of Manila that he thought people might appreciate in Florida. His instinct turned out to be sharp when the carabao mango, as sweet as candy and not too fibrous, became known as the “champagne mango” in warm states that could grow it. Its slender body and buttery flesh shocked American taste buds that had never tasted anything so saccharine aside from pure sugar. The mango left such an impression on growers and breeders that its genes found their way into almost every American mango variety for the next century, the stuff of plant breeding dreams.
Fairchild, of course, was oblivious to this future success, another of his most significant contributions to American farmers. All he saw while visiting the Philippines was that Filipinos weren’t ready for him. The pipe dream of pacifying the islands through agriculture turned futile when Fairchild learned that the Dutch had tried with coffee, and the Spanish with farming equipment, and both efforts had ended in failure.
On the ship that took them away from the hotbed of the Philippines and, for the first time, to mainland Asia, Fairchild sat to write Secretary Wilson. “The time is not yet ripe for any comprehensive agricultural survey of the Philippines inasmuch as they are not yet sufficiently pacified,” he wrote. “What would require at the present time a year to accomplish can be done later in less than a quarter of the time and at far less expense to the country. Any explorer who might be sent out from the Department would be in constant danger, would find themselves blocked continually by the movements of the insurgents and would be able to do very little in return for the outlay of money which would be necessary to maintain them.”
Fairchild’s message was received in Washington and, through a series of emissaries, made it to the desk of President McKinley. If violent Filipinos couldn’t be pacified with force, McKinley thought they might be tamed by democracy. After consulting Fairchild’s report, McKinley sent a portly federal judge named William Howard Taft, a man oblivious about the Philippines but with the legal know-how, to set up a civilian government, wherein Filipinos could rule themselves, or at least hold the illusion that they were.
Taft tried to calm people by offering protected markets for Filipino goods in the United States. But this had the effect of even further enflaming the Filipinos, insulted at faux generosity. Upon seeing the red-hot anger of the Filipino people, Fairchild believed that nothing short of the American military leaving the island country to itself would truly pacify its people. But his opinion was either never shared or never heard. From start to finish, America’s costly entrenchment in the Philippines would last forty-eight years.
* * *
—
There was nowhere to move, nowhere to step, nowhere even to look without catching someone’s eye. People surrounded Fairchild’s every latitude. Even getting onshore had required a series of minor collisions with other boats, in them men filling net bags with fish and wearing hats as pointed as their shouts. “One’s most overwhelming sensation is of the unbelievable congestion of the mass of human beings,” Fairchild thought upon arriving in Canton, China, on his first visit to the most populous country on earth. For forty centuries, China had gone through cycles of boom and bust, of economic rise and decline, births and deaths of religious sects and governments. The only thing that hadn’t declined was its population, which seemed to rise daily with the sun until, in 1900, Chinese people accounted for almost one-third of all humanity. Such shoulder-to-shoulder volume had brought a sense of discipline and order, and Fairchild believed that such order would make seed collecting a breeze.
So much about China was surprising to the senses. Chickens hung, often alive, under shop awnings. Smells of rice and seaweed wafted with the scent of steaming vegetables. The smell that wafted heaviest was of sewage—“an overpowering stench” to Fairchild—which men with large sticks across their backs carried in pairs of buckets. One shining example of China’s ingenuity was in fertilization; no phosphorus was lost, not from humans or dogs, or even from the excretions of silkworms. Human corpses, rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, were returned directly to the soil, buried under small mounds of dirt, where the deceased had lived or died. This efficiency also extended to food; butchers wasted no part of a sheep that could be used, down to its unwashed intestines.
The only superfluous commodity in China was human energy, which existed in such wild abundance that it stood in the way of any innovation that might make people’s lives easier. Backbreaking work carrying sewage or directing the cacophony of carts and animals provided jobs, and with those jobs, the guarantee of keeping people occupied.
1901. Fairchild found fertilizer abundant everywhere he went in China. Near Canton, earthen pots full of dung made an orchard of star fruit trees “smell to heaven,” he wrote.
Luckily for Fairchild, the thickness of people seemed to be matched by the same thickness of crops. A farmer at one small market allowed him to try guava, which he had experienced before, but not like the one in his hands, which perspired with luscious pink flesh. He found a round, yellowish fruit called a Dutch eggplant and peaches so sweet he imagined them perfect for preserves. There were small citrus grapes that grew on trees (“loquats,” an Englishman told him), and peppers of varying sizes and kinds. He inquired one evening about the crunchy white disks in his chop suey. A man told him they were tubers called water chestnuts, although they weren’t nuts. They were an aquatic vegetable with the rare culinary quality of never getting soggy, even when cooked. “Worthy of consideration as a plant for cultivation in the swamps of the South,” Fairchild scrawled.
His shipment of water chestnuts indeed made it to the South. But they never caught on. They had to be grown in muddy swamps, which wasn’t a fatal flaw, but it was inconvenient and dirty, all for a small food with little flavor. If the United States had had more land or been at a point in its history when it valued more efficient use of land, farmers might have begun producing water chestnuts just because. But as with many of Fairchild’s crops, the timing just wasn’t right, and thus, water chestnuts remained an Asian food. The best evidence of this may be that in America ten decades later, water chestnuts tend to play little more than a humdrum role as supporting actors in Chinese takeout.
Instead, the top value of being in China was its rice. No one grew more rice—or grew it better—than the Chinese. Their methods had proved unmatchable. Fairchild walked through rice fields, sometimes ankle-deep in water, pulling up plants where permitted, and then later, he’d attempt the same in fields where his presence wasn’t sanctioned. He sent six rices back to Washington, including one that would eventually sprout in the Carolinas and several others that grew better in California. No country could topple China’s rice dominance, but the United States had its own contributions to make with rice. America’s limits on land, water, and labor resulted in innovations of its own. The typical American spirit of finding new and better ways of doing old things eventually yielded machines capable of planting rice, and hybrid seeds that drank less water.
It was just as difficult to leave China as it had been to arrive, and as the boat traveled back to Hong Kong, where Lathrop, who didn’t care to visit China, was waiting, Fairchild’s head spun. “Surely only a nightmare could fill my brain with such fantastic people, practices, and customs. Everything which I had experienced during my days in Canton seemed utterly unbelievable.” China had been an astonishing mix of wonder, oddity, and risk—a future superpower, one might think, if it could harness the incredible energies of its people.
* * *
—
From Hong Kong, Fairchild and Lathrop traveled to Bangkok, where the captain, wary of a coming monsoon, permitted only a single overnight stay. On the boat, Lathrop made acquaintance with an English couple who stood out among the Chinese immigrants and laborers on board. The man, Mr. Farnham, exchanged pleasantries with Lathrop about travel and the pride of being Anglo amid so many foreigners. Mrs. Farnham said nothing, but smiled politely, holding in her arms a baby whose skin glowed crimson.
Disease had chased Fairchild and Lathrop all over the world on every habitable continent. So far Fairchild remained healthy, untouched by illness, and Lathrop was feeling better with time. Yet he frequently noted that never before had illness so depressed his functionality. Only now, at fifty-two, was he feeling his age. And in an era when life teetered on the edge, a healthy body never more than one unwitting step from ruin, health was a common topic of discussion.
“I believe the baby has cholera,” Lathrop said to Fairchild later that evening. “I’m going to give them my cabin.”
He moved his luggage into Fairchild’s room, occupying the bed while Fairchild was left with an upholstered chair. In the subsequent days, the infant’s cries from the other side of the wall grew louder, then stopped. The Farnhams became absent in the ship’s dining room. Lathrop arranged for a small coffin to be delivered to the grieving couple, a gesture Fairchild noted “which so well illustrates Mr. Lathrop’s warm heart.”
With disease having already claimed one life, the passengers were eager to leave the boat when it docked in Ceylon, the British colony that would one day find the name Sri Lanka. Lathrop was the first to disembark, and soon the two traveled by coach quickly away from the boisterous activity of the port, into the mountains toward a resort near a botanical garden where more tropical crops might be found.
Fairchild had felt tired when he left the boat, and throughout the journey to the resort, he sulked in his seat, fatigued and light-headed. To reassure Lathrop—and himself—he claimed he was simply tired and in need of rest on firm ground, outside the rolling sways of the boat. But Lathrop eyed him suspiciously as Fairchild’s head drooped. By the time they reached the resort, Fairchild could hardly stand; an attendant helped him to his room.
The symptoms seemed to indicate typhoid fever, a bacterial infection spread from human to human, and likely acquired on the boat where the little girl expired. Typhoid had been among the most debilitating diseases of the nineteenth century, causing millions of deaths, until a British scientist developed a vaccine in 1896. But here in Ceylon, inoculation was impossible. At first a victim would become tremendously tired, and when he wanted nothing but sleep, great headaches and muscle aches would set in, followed by sweating, coughing, and alternating episodes of constipation and diarrhea. By the time the delirium began, the victim would usually lie on his back with eyes half-open and loudly moan in what was known as “the typhoid state.”
1902. Fairchild’s case of typhoid in Ceylon made his visit to the island uncomfortable, unproductive, and almost fatal. Either when he arrived or just prior to departing, he overlooked a beach in Mount Lavinia, near Colombo.
At first, Fairchild slept half the day, and then didn’t leave bed at all. Lathrop could do little but sit at his side as he slept, but Fairchild would awake frightened and sweating, which frightened Lathrop as well. For Barbour Lathrop, a man with no children, the person lying before him had become kin, the closest he would come to having a son, and perhaps the only person alive he could tolerate as a long-term travel companion. Out of affection he had begun calling Fairchild “Fairy,” and in return was called “Uncle Barbour.” All of Lathrop’s frequent upbraiding during their first tour had been remarkably successful, for before him lay a young man worldly in experience and confident in intellect. Moreover, their economic pursuit of plants rested on Fairchild’s expertise, effectively the rudder to their botanical adventures. Lathrop’s usual mechanism for coping was to project apathy. But as he watched the clock on the wall, he waited, anxious and scared, a feeling that anyone else, anywhere in the world, might have called love.
“He’ll have to be moved immediately,” the hotel manager announced one morning while Lathrop ate breakfast.
“Moved to where?” Lathrop asked.
“To the hospital.”
The manager had heard a rumor that a boarder might have typhoid. When he noticed that the young man who had checked in with Lathrop hadn’t come down for breakfast in several days, he realized who it was. Unlike cholera or malaria, typhoid was believed to be contagious, and the manager believed that Fairchild’s illness threatened everyone in the hotel.
Lathrop’s tenderness couldn’t check his usu
al bluster.
“I’ve seen that fetid hospital,” he said. “He won’t be going there.”
“Sir, with respect,” the manager answered, “I cannot have a case of typhoid in my inn.”
Saying nothing, Lathrop reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the shiny revolver that he carried everywhere, the tool of precaution for a traveler—at least that’s what the man down the street from the Bohemian Club had told him when he sold him the weapon. This was the first time Lathrop found it necessary to use it.
He placed the revolver on the table, then locked eyes with the hotel manager.
“He will not be moved.”
Indeed, no one moved Fairchild, nor did anyone fuss about it again. Eventually, he began to sit up, and then stand up. When Fairchild could walk unaided across the room, Lathrop decided it was time to find a more agreeable place for his companion to convalesce.
Lathrop had London in mind, and he paid a pair of men to carry Fairchild by stretcher from the hotel to a train, and a boy to accompany him to the port. The boy had never ridden a train before, and Fairchild had to throw shoes for attention as the boy hung his head out the window.
Lathrop had secured cabins on a steamer called the Prinz Heinrich that had two smokestacks and Western accommodations. For only the second time in the half-dozen years Fairchild had known him, Lathrop surrendered the first officer’s cabin. For the twenty-five days to England, Fairchild lay on a large white bed, his novels and catnaps interrupted only by the savory arrival of omelets peppered with salted ham, stews with tender chunks of beef, and a teapot refilled at what felt like every hour, all of it consumed in luxurious solitude.