by Daniel Stone
Unexpectedly, the ship stopped in Japan on account of an approaching typhoon, and then again in Hong Kong, where Fairchild rode a small boat upriver to Canton. This was his second visit, but this time he looked for peaches. The Chinese ate them green, so he sent unripe specimens to Washington, where they were used for breed stock with the more popular peach varieties arriving from Persia. He also collected samples of persimmons, ginger, and olives.
Rarely did Americans visit India at the turn of the century. It was faraway, unknown, and rumored to have violent clashes between untamed Indians and the noble British. On paper, India belonged to the British Empire, but there was no way anyone could have constrained India’s cultural force, a hurricane of life, energy, and enterprise. “Look where one will, whether by day or by night, everywhere he will find men living, and trying to live and making the most of their earthly career,” Rajendralal Mitra, one of India’s top cultural scholars, once said of Bombay; the description seems to transcend all time. Fairchild sat in a place where women in long yellow and red robes, their wrists covered with imitation pearls and emeralds, danced before him to earn a few coppers. Still, India, like most places outside of America and Europe in 1901, was moored in disease. Cholera and bubonic plague seemed to feast on the squalor of human density, where houses were built atop other houses with little circulation of air—“an insanitary labyrinth,” a British doctor called it. Fairchild’s visions of his earlier battle with typhoid likely contributed to his not wanting to stay in Bombay long, especially when he noticed that the boys preparing food in even the most Western hotels had dirty hands.
Fairchild knew, however, that disease kept people away. In places where it lurked was also the possibility of plants few Westerners had seen before. “The best Indian mangoes grow on this side of the peninsula,” said a man named Douglas Bennett, a Scot, in response to Fairchild’s questioning. Hundreds of mango varieties were to be found in India, but the Alphonso mango was the most popular. It was also the best example of early globalization—the fruit was introduced by the Portuguese, who had picked it up somewhere in South Asia in the sixteenth century and named it after a Portuguese general, Afonso de Albuquerque.
“I’ll give you some cuttings of the finest strain of Alphonso, on one condition,” Bennett said. “You must name it after me.”
The Alphonso was indisputably best. But Fairchild was skeptical that there could be an even better subspecies that was sweeter and less stringy. He was used to such grand endorsements for fruit that turned out to be mediocre. Still, he indulged the oddness of the request.
“I must see the tree myself,” Fairchild said. “If it is indeed superior to mangoes Europeans and Americans have tasted, then yes, you have a deal.”
The fruit checked out. Its sunset yellow flesh was tender, its flavor fruity and tropical. What made it distinct was the thinness of its shiny skin, and its slim stone, not much thicker than his finger. The Douglas Bennett Alphonso mango landed in the United States along with about eighty other mango varieties that Fairchild sent. His shipments became bigger and bigger, and he fashioned the abundance and selection of mangoes as an insurance policy for the growers in Florida, who could surely find one they liked among dozens of varieties. The Douglas Bennett Alphonso would turn out to be good for Florida and Hawaii, but not great, at least when compared to the mangoes that arrived over the next decade. Its flavor became average in a country that demanded dynamic.
Fairchild could know none of this. All he knew was that he needed to work fast. One of the stories that would follow Fairchild through the rest of his life was of the day a steamer was sounding its horn at Bombay’s busy port. A captain told him his overflowing baskets of mangoes were too large to take on board. So, with minutes to spare, Fairchild hired a group of children to eat more than a hundred mangoes, stripping them of their worthless flesh. He piled the centers into a small basket of wet charcoal as the kids chomped, giggled, and licked the stones clean.
* * *
—
Fairchild would find Baghdad captivating, perhaps in part owing to how difficult it had been to get there. A military ship was the only transportation he could find up the Persian Gulf, but before he could board, an officer told him he’d have to be vaccinated for plague. Fairchild rode a squeaky rickshaw into Karachi, to the home of a man known for vaccinating; the man tipped a young calf infected with smallpox on its side and scraped a scab on its belly with a rusted needle, then brought the needle to Fairchild’s arm. Straining to be polite, he let the man continue, but quickly after, Fairchild rubbed the wound with disinfectant, which reversed the inoculation and left him open to diseases far worse than any transmitted by the calf.
The border officials knew none of this, and Fairchild was granted permission to continue north. But two days later, there was a commotion on the ship about a case of plague, a Shiite pilgrim, one of five hundred who were going to visit the birthplace of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The plague on board would have prevented the ship from entering any new port, leaving it floating in purgatory. Fairchild was not devastated when he learned the man had “fallen” and broken his neck, thus allowing the ship to remain uncontaminated (“It certainly is a good way out of the mess,” the captain said). The man’s body was tied to a block of coal and thrown into the Persian Gulf. So little care was given the corpse that it somersaulted and splashed headfirst, which brought shrieks from his fellow pilgrims on board who saw the sloppy burial as a sign of mortal disrespect. Fairchild and another man helped calm the pilgrims and prevent a mutiny. Not long after fish started to investigate the new body on the bottom of the Gulf, all talk about the man stopped. The episode rattled Fairchild enough that he decided to sleep on the deck of the boat, where ocean air blew in gusts.
Thinking the trip couldn’t get more uncomfortable, he was awoken at dawn by pilgrims who prayed loudly each morning, their prostrated bodies facing Mecca. As the ship approached southern Iraq, Turkish authorities, who had somehow learned of the case of plague, ordered the vessel quarantined. Fairchild was lucky—he had white skin, which limited his quarantine to only one week. He spent seven days sandwiched between pilgrims, passing time with a handmade slingshot constructed from two forks and an elastic band, which he used to target chirping sparrows. He refused the quarantine food and ate only boiled onions.
The final insult, once he was released from quarantine, was that as soon as the outline of Baghdad was in sight, the small boat puttering up the Tigris River ran aground. Someone told Fairchild it was an old Mississippi steamboat that somehow found a second life as an unreliable water shuttle seven thousand miles away. Fairchild finally ran out of patience. He tossed his tripod and trunk over the side of the ship, dragged them ashore, and, making deep footprints in the riverbank, completed the final stretch to Baghdad the way people had for thousands of years—on foot.
If there was a silver lining, something to make the hellish voyage even partly worth the effort, it was that somewhere between the vaccination, the boats, the quarantine, and the long walk, Fairchild met a man who mentioned a smooth-skinned peach known as a nectarine that could be found in the city of Quetta, a part of modern Pakistan. Considering the hardships of the hot desert landscape, where at every mile lurked a new danger, he declined to investigate. Instead, he asked the man to send him seeds, and the man eventually did. The close, fuzzless relative of peaches was first mentioned by American botanists in 1722. But Fairchild’s Quetta nectarines took less than four years to become the most popular variety in America, a country hungry for novelty. Farmers in Iowa, Texas, and California later sent Washington deeply grateful letters for such a large yellow fruit, splashed with yellow and carmine, with a tart sweetness, and deemed a terrific candidate for shipping. (“This we believe to be the best of all nectarines . . . its large size, firm skin, and flesh make it particularly desirable,” one horticulturalist in Chico, California, wrote.) This appetite for better fruit, however, was
in every way insatiable, and so not long after the Quetta’s rise came its inevitable replacements. But genealogy has secured the Quetta’s presence for the long term—parts of the Quetta can still be found in nearly every nectarine grown commercially in the United States.
Meanwhile, Baghdad lived up to its allure. For thousands of years, the city had been the biggest intersection of the world, a bazaar containing great riches of a lush era of Islam. The palaces that had housed caliphate leaders for eight centuries still stood, yet the city had begun to change with the opening of new markets that received goods from ports around the globe. Iron from England, wood from Sweden, spirits from France, and porcelain dishware called china—which took its name from its origin—were all traded daily, their exotic provenance earning high prices. Consolidators assembled bulk shipments of wheat bound for London and sheep hides for America.
Sand flies bit everyone, regardless of status. But Baghdad residents could be identified by the volume of bites on their foreheads. Over time the bites would bleed, scab, and then scar into dime-sized marks known as “Baghdad buttons.” Fairchild gawked openly at the customs of Muslim people. “Women in black gowns and masks instinctively turned their backs for fear that I might see their faces,” he wrote. “A camel caravan passed—a family moving from one desert place to another, its women hidden from public gaze by an enormous basketlike arrangement covered with gay cloths. I even saw whirling dervishes, whom I had always believed to be inventions of Barnum & Bailey.”
Elbowing his way through crowded bazaars, Fairchild amassed hundreds of dates, some dry, some sticky with hardened syrup. The place where humans had farmed for centuries was also a good place to pick up new strains of wheat, millet, barley, chickpea, and even maize. Unable to read Arabic, Fairchild almost certainly collected seeds and samples that had come to Baghdad from far-flung parts of the world—perhaps even North America—without knowing, only to send them back home with a foreign postmark.
1902. In Baghdad, the intersection of world civilizations, Fairchild visited bazaars in search of the novel and exotic. On the outskirts of the city, men covered their piles of barley and wheat with large mats to protect them from hungry sparrows and the heavy morning dew.
His stays were becoming shorter, both for efficiency and because of his wariness of stigma toward Americans. Foreigners tended to view early-twentieth-century America as a paragon of modernity—a stable government, a creative population, a buoyant economy. But much like China’s rise in the twenty-first century, America’s also brought an air of skepticism.
Few people knew the United States’ intentions, or how it would wield its growing power.
Fairchild left Baghdad with arm muscles bulging under the weight of fully formed fruit. He might’ve found it easier to acquire suckers, the base offshoots of date trees, yet Fairchild knew suckers could die on a nine-week ocean voyage, so he decided to take both fruit and suckers, an insurance policy in hopes one would live.
He spread mud on the deck of the boat that carried him away. The captain watched bemused while Fairchild laid down the suckers, doused them in water, and then rolled them through the mud. When the dirt dried hard as clay, he wrapped it all in sackcloth to retain the moisture. Because of either Fairchild’s ingenuity or a simple stroke of luck, the suckers made the ocean voyage alive.
In the years following shipments like Fairchild’s, the date industry elevated the American West. Dates came to populate Southern California in a way no crop had before. By the 1910s, growers were taking the next step in agricultural innovation by selecting the dates that grew best in the microclimates of Southern California. One of those dates, the Deglet Noor, infused life and economic vitality into California’s Coachella Valley by exploiting soil and climate nearly identical to the Arabian Peninsula’s. The influence was so appreciated that in the 1930s, Coachella Valley High School named its mascot “the Arab,” not from cartoonish racism but, officials argued, in honor of an agricultural gift as meaningful to Coachella as Lady Liberty had been to New York.
1905. One of the first date palms in Walters, California, an area so enriched by Arabian dates that, ten years later, officials renamed the town “Mecca” in tribute to the Muslim holy city.
The Indian Ocean, azure and clear with clashing calm, passed by without any remarkable thought from Fairchild. Despite the perception of global travel as the height of glamour, the actual demands of spending long voyages on boats and docking in cities full of diseases were beginning to show signs of wear on a man who had by now circled the globe nearly three times. In his journal, in place of his earlier boyish fascination with discovering new things, he started to dwell on the hardships of travel. “The food was bad on the boat and everybody was very tired of it” was all that he wrote on the ship from which he departed the Persian Gulf. He was not only wary of disease, but in the diversity of all he had seen, he had become sensitive to items of low quality and the distracting drama of people fighting. Because of his aversion to violence, he avoided Karachi, where he was told he would have needed a personal guard, and instead entrusted a few dozen dollars to two fellow travelers and asked them to send more date suckers to the United States. The travelers complied, but their naïve efforts proved worthless when the plants, their roots cut too short, arrived dead.
From India, he could have gone anywhere, but he moved quickly toward Japan. Barbour Lathrop was on an adventure of his own and had suggested they meet in Yokohama, near Tokyo, a destination requiring twenty-eight days of transit.
When his boat laid over in Saigon, then a French colony, Fairchild came across a French botanist as eager to introduce new plants to France’s colonies as Fairchild was to bring them to America. Plant exploration had become more common, especially for countries with colonies to support with new crops. The Frenchman helped Fairchild find mangoes and mangosteens, two unrelated fruits. In all his travels, Fairchild would come to describe the mangosteen, with its purple rind and wedges of white flesh, as “the queen of tropical fruits. . . . It has a beautiful white fruit pulp, more delicate than that of a plum, and a flavor that is indescribably delicate and delicious.” He speculated that “its purple brown rind will . . . bring fancy prices wherever it is offered for sale.”
This prediction proved flat wrong when American farmers found the mangosteen’s skin too thick, its flesh too small, and its shape too oblong to produce at large scale. That would be especially disappointing to Fairchild. For a man who had seen dozens of countries and thousands of fruits, he would go so far as to call the mangosteen his favorite.
* * *
—
The port of Yokohama was strewn with small fishing boats and straw-hatted men, who all looked up at the site of a steamer pulling to dock. Having spent a month on a boat, any passenger would burn with desperation to escape the rocking and rediscover his balance. Fairchild knew to stand at the gangplank to be the first to disembark the ship. The air was heavy with the odor of fish. As the passengers left the steamer, the boatsmen returned to their nets, alive with twitching silver. Fairchild made his way to Lathrop’s hotel, as eager to see his friend as he was to hear English again after a month at sea.
“Don’t move!” Lathrop shouted. He was sitting up in bed, newspapers covering his lap. He had a cold, and doctors, fearing something serious, had ordered him to stay horizontal. With Fairchild frozen, Lathrop clutched a paper funnel and with two fingers tapped tiny brown shavings into a beer bottle.
“I had a hell of a time getting this seed and since those fellows in Washington want it for breeding I don’t propose to lose it now,” Lathrop said, still without looking up.
While Fairchild had been exploring India and Iraq, Lathrop had hunted tobacco in Southeast Asia, stopping in Singapore and Java. He chatted up local gardeners and farmers in hopes of finding the valuable Deli strain of tobacco, which northeast American farmers wanted as a replacement for their inferior varieties. He finally struck gold in Sum
atra. Lathrop flattered Sumatran growers with lavish praise for their agricultural wisdom, from which America could learn, but when he eventually asked for seeds in a “peaceful exchange” between the two peoples, he was laughed out of the room. Rebuffed, he let loose with his usual candor about the stupidity of the tobacco growers. One grower saw opportunity in Lathrop’s desperation and later visited him with an offer to secretly sell him a small sample of seed at a steep price, more than thirty dollars. The wealthy Lathrop happily accepted and the man sent the seed. In Lathrop’s later retelling of this story, the man apparently died before receiving his payment, thus allowing Lathrop, in his own estimation, to emerge victorious.
“What kept you so long?” he asked Fairchild after the tobacco dust was packed. “You missed the Japanese flowering cherry trees. However, I suppose you got a lot of date palms. I would like to have seen Baghdad with you but I knew you would collect more stuff if I were not along. Besides, I imagine the food was pretty bad, wasn’t it? Anyway, I’ve missed you. I’ve been laid up in the hotel for a couple of weeks now. . . . I’m in no shape to go around with you. You can do better work alone anyhow.”
Traces of the former senior-junior relationship had dissipated, as made clear by Lathrop’s eagerness to see again the younger man with whom he could indulge the most bombastic and grandiose versions of himself without fear of being ostracized or judged.
Indeed, the reason that Fairchild had rushed to Japan, without stopping for any additional exploration, was to glimpse the Japanese flowering cherry trees. Lore of the trees was known all over East Asia, and some horticulturists in Washington knew of the trees’ great springtime beauty. Fairchild wondered if the cherry trees, which didn’t produce actual cherries but only pink blossoms, would be attractive to farmers.