The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  He picked up young men here and there, trying with each to re-create the magic of his partnership with Fairchild. One came close, named Drummond, the son of a friend from the Bohemian Club. Drummond had the wide-eyed ineptitude of an earlier Fairchild but lacked the spark and promise.

  Fairchild’s life was on an incline during his years with Lathrop, but Lathrop saw his own peak during their jaunts together, and afterward, begin to peter off. He wrote to Fairchild not long after their travels together ceased:

  I . . . never dreamed I’d so sadly miss the daily plant talk, the collecting, the shipping and the news of success or failure. Before these plant trips began, sight of quaint places and peoples made travel an unwearying pleasure. Now, it fails to satisfy me as it did—and during the year past I have been in some measure blasé—as I never was in all the years past. I don’t acknowledge it, or permit myself to show it—but much of the keen interest is gone and I begin to wonder as to what the future has to offer one of my restless spirit. However it ends, it will be all right—and I’ll not whine—for I have lived at least two lives in one—as compared with those other garden-wall-snail men—and can spice my mental gruel with memories of past feasts.

  Such melancholy missives show just how much Lathrop had changed since their first meeting on the SS Fulda, the Atlantic steamship where Fairchild encountered Lathrop’s peacocked ego, then big enough to fill a dozen steamships.

  Fairchild remembered their years together wistfully. But he had little time to dwell on such memories. “The work of plant introduction is going on at such a frightful pace that I have been pretty nearly snowed under,” he dictated to Marian to send to Lathrop. He made no mention of the glory days or Lathrop’s malaise, either because he didn’t miss them or because he was too occupied with the present to consider the past.

  Fairchild had other things to think about, and not all of them botanical. Every day America was changing, in ways large and, often, even larger. Every year between 1903 and 1908, a miraculous period kicked off by a pair of Ohio brothers realizing man’s supernatural dream of flying through the air, had been a sort of annus mirabilis in American history.

  Fairchild knew Orville Wright. The younger of the two brothers visited his and Marian’s house in Chevy Chase to see the cherry blossoms, and Fairchild had dined with him at the Cosmos Club, the networking hub where Fairchild met Gilbert Grosvenor, the man who introduced him to National Geographic, and ultimately, his wife. Fairchild was one of many people who asked why Orville and his brother kept their early flights so secret. The mystery had cost them credibility, especially as others were making public attempts at extended flights. The answer, as both Wrights repeated often, was to protect their design from being viewed and stolen—even though, with the hindsight of history, this precaution was mostly unnecessary.

  Still, Orville struck Fairchild as smart and ambitious, even if his appearance—baggy pants, oversized jacket, and dirty cap—lacked crispness. They also had a mutual friend, an army lieutenant named Tom Selfridge, whose father was an acquaintance of Lathrop. In 1905 Selfridge was a young man, age twenty-three, who received permission from President Roosevelt to pause his military service to join a group of men investigating flight. His eagerness to see man airborne, and eventually glide through the air himself, had made him, incredibly, the protégé of Alexander Graham Bell, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and an engineer named Glenn Curtiss, despite all competing against each other to demonstrate a heavier-than-air flying machine. None of the men minded Selfridge’s dueling associations, except for the Wrights, who suspected him of spying for Bell. “I don’t trust him an inch . . . but he makes a pretense of great friendliness,” Orville told Wilbur. Selfridge’s “great friendliness” eventually won over Orville, who in 1908 granted Selfridge the chance to become history’s first airplane passenger during a test flight at Fort Myer in Virginia. (When the plane holding Orville and Selfridge dived unexpectedly, Selfridge also became the first person ever to die in a plane crash.)

  Fairchild was partial to Bell out of family loyalty, and also for his father-in-law’s proven record for earth-changing invention. Moreover, Bell envisioned that the elusive secret to suspending man in the air would be tetrahedral kites, an idea that seemed more plausible than the oblong biplane the Wrights were developing in Ohio and North Carolina. Bell created a large board of tetrahedral cells, then affixed a single seat for a man to sit in; the only restraint would be the tightness of his grip.

  History awards the Wright brothers credit for the first manned flight, just twelve seconds, in North Carolina in 1903, even though a shortage of witnesses led to widespread skepticism. As the Wrights were refining their design, Bell, Curtiss, Selfridge, and a host of other aspirants were doing the same to theirs. By 1907 Scientific American was offering a silver sculpture of an eagle with spread wings sitting atop a globe to anyone who could fly a full kilometer in the presence of a representative from the magazine. The contest had the effect of reducing the field from many aspirants to just two: the scrappy Wright brothers and the more established and better-funded union of Bell, Curtiss, Selfridge, and a Canadian engineer named Douglas McCurdy. The Bell team spent the summer of 1907 experimenting with every imaginable way to get off the ground—biplanes, kites, it hardly mattered. The year’s most valuable currency was time.

  After each test, the men would gather to compile notes and observations, discussing necessary adjustments before the next flight. Bell, in his characteristic knickerbockers and beret, always requested more information from the group. A man motivated by grand visions of innovation had an equal hunger for detail. He would stay up all night examining measurements, plotting physics equations, and troubleshooting failures. The rising sun signaled his bedtime, after which he’d sleep until ten, and then rise for more tests and measurements, the more minute the better. He believed large discoveries were the sum of small ones put together.

  That same summer, Fairchild and Marian were visiting the Bells at their estate in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, on a sprawling peninsula that had taken Dr. Bell decades to amass. A little parcel here, another there, until it all added up to six hundred acres, which Bell had named Beinn Bhreagh, Gaelic for the “beautiful mountain” that rose at the end of the landmass. At the peninsula’s tip, nearly touching the water, was the mansion of all mansions, a redbrick palace with more than a dozen rooms for the grandchildren (and future great-grandchildren) to explore.

  Fairchild watched from a hillside, near where bald eagles nested and swooped for fish, as the group made one flight after another, each for longer time and greater distance, yet all short of a kilometer. The hill was littered with kites, some more than thirty feet long, discarded after failing in some way. “I sensed vaguely in 1907 that I had arrived at Baddeck at a critical period in the development of the heavier-than-air flying machines,” Fairchild later wrote.

  Bell’s group made meaningful progress. The next summer, in June of 1908, Glenn Curtiss invited the Fairchilds to watch him attempt the Scientific American challenge in Hammondsport, New York, in a new biplane called the June Bug, named by Bell in tribute to the delicate flight of the June beetle. On America’s birthday, July 4, 1908, the Fairchilds arrived for the attempt, the weather overcast and windy. The plane wasn’t much to look at, in Fairchild’s words, “frail but trim, with its struts, wires and white canvas surfaces mounted on bicycle wheels.” But Curtiss had been a maker of motorcycle engines, and the main requirement of an early flying machine was a powerful engine with enough thrust to leave the ground. Curtiss showed the confidence of a man who had it figured out.

  After a thunderstorm delayed the attempt, judges used a lengthy string to measure a full kilometer, along an abandoned racetrack, over a potato patch, and beside a vineyard with sharp fence posts capable of piercing a falling man.

  The engine roared. Curtiss, his long brown hair blowing in the wind, guided the plane thirty feet in the air. The flight was so loud, people cove
red their ears. But no one covered their eyes. Curtiss touched down with an ungraceful bump that bordered on a crash. He was unhurt, as was the plane. But he had landed short.

  Though running out of daylight, Curtiss was determined. Fairchild and the rest of the crowd helped push the plane back to the track where it had moments ago lifted off. Curtiss lifted off for a second time, flew over the crowd and over the mark, and then a little farther. People squealed when Curtiss emerged from the plane. Even the grouchy skeptic from Scientific American acknowledged that the feat had been accomplished and the trophy won.

  Curtiss’ achievement was notable in that it was documented. Man had flown, people had seen it, and a magazine of scientific repute had confirmed it was true. Yet this was a stunted achievement compared to the aviation milestones still to come: the hours-long test flights by the Wrights, Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic odyssey, and the great jets that would one day drop bombs on the other side of the world.

  But men of science, like Fairchild and his father-in-law, Bell, had great respect for the first breakthrough, the proof of a concept. A glass ceiling could be shattered once; after that, latecomers could only break the pieces into smaller and smaller shards. “That brief afternoon at Hammondsport had changed my vision of the world as it was to be,” Fairchild wrote. “There was no longer the shadow of a doubt in my mind that the sky would be full of aeroplanes, and that the time would come when people would travel through the air faster and more safely than they did then on the surface of the Earth.”

  The future had come, and Fairchild, again, had a front-row seat.

  * * *

  —

  Exactly three days after Curtiss’ famous flight, on July 7, 1908, Frank Meyer returned from China. His beard was longer, his eyes sunken, his skin worn like the leather of his boots. He had grown his fingernails so long over three years that they curled upward. The excitement around the office wasn’t as much because of the arrival of Meyer as it was the story behind the seeds and saplings he had sent from China, and also from Manchuria, Korea, and eastern Siberia, which he had decided to walk across, too. People wanted to know the story behind each one.

  From Shanghai, Meyer had sent seeds and cuttings of oats, millet, a thin-skinned watermelon, and new types of cotton. The staff of Fairchild’s office watched with anticipation each time one of Meyer’s shipments was unpacked. There were seeds of wild pears, new persimmons, and leaves of so-called Manchurian spinach that America’s top spinach specialist would declare was the best America had ever seen. Meyer had delivered the first samples of asparagus ever to officially enter the United States. In 1908, few people had seen a soybean, a green legume common in central China. Even fewer people could have imagined that within one hundred years, the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history, as feed for livestock, food for humans (notably vegetarians), and even a renewable fuel called biodiesel.

  1907. Meyer wrote regularly from China, sometimes attaching photos he had developed. The letters described his work and the entourage he assembled to help him navigate, communicate, and collect.

  This note reads: “5260 caravan on road from Peking to Wu-tar-chan [Wutai Shan]. Our caravan consisting of 8 mules and 7 men slowly creeping through the now dry bed of a river, the rivers become broader and broader on account of the deforestation of the mountain and all arable land is washed away. F. N. Meyer near Wu-tar-chan [Wutai Shan] Shansi [Shanxi], China, 1907.”

  Meyer also hadn’t come empty-handed. He had physically brought home a bounty, having taken from China a steamer of the Standard Oil Company that, unlike a passenger ship, allowed him limitless cargo and better onboard conditions for plant material. He arrived with twenty tons, including red blackberries, wild apricots, two large zelkova trees (similar to elms), Chinese holly shrub, twenty-two white-barked pines, eighteen forms of lilac, four viburnum bushes that produced edible red berries, two spirea bushes with little white flowers, a rhododendron bush with pink and purple flowers, an evergreen shrub called a daphne, thirty kinds of bamboo (some of them edible), four types of lilies, and a new strain of grassy lawn sedge.

  And his grand finale, two rare white-cheeked gibbons for the National Zoo, which attracted reporters in a way plants couldn’t, and generated handsome publicity for Fairchild’s office.

  It was clear his voyage hadn’t been easy. Nor had it been glamorous the way Fairchild’s high-end odysseys with Lathrop had been. Meyer relayed how Chinese villagers eyed him as a “western devil.” People watched him wash his naked body in bathhouses, sometimes full audiences gawking at the sight of a white man. Rumors spread regularly in 1906 that foreigners could be massacred at any time. He avoided death, but in February of that year, he was mugged and beaten bloody. His only defense, which allowed him to cheat death dozens of times, was a heavy sheepskin coat he wore during all seasons and that projected a strong man underneath. It was big, bulky, and irreversibly stained with layers of dirt. He wore heavy boots and a round wool hat, and let his brown beard grow untamed—altogether presenting a portrait of a frightening-looking man who may harbor fighting skills, or worse, contagious diseases.

  He was beaten several more times and nearly strangled to death at least once. He confronted hungry bears, tigers, and wolves that he managed to either outrun or outsmart. In all, over three years, he regularly marched twenty miles a day. The man who loved to walk had found his adventure, a continent as filled with danger as it was unending.

  Meyer had proved even more adept at plant hunting than Fairchild expected. His packing was meticulous, his seeds perfectly clean, all laid on beds of wrung-out peat moss to prevent drying out or molding in transit. Meyer rejected the trappings of fancy hotels and guesthouses for modest inns and local food, saving the Department—and the United States government—thousands of dollars. Even more impressive, he had come in early and under budget. He had written his itemized plant lists on thin paper to save postage. The accountants didn’t scrutinize his receipts; they marveled at them, all orderly and with angular Chinese scrawls.

  Fairchild held a barbecue at his home to celebrate Meyer’s success. Around a bonfire, Meyer regaled the office with stories of the Orient, the fashionable term for where he had been. He described Chinese quirks like when villagers were awestruck at “the candle” inside his flashlight. He recounted how people tugged his boots and pants and stared at his blue eyes. He imitated the bandits and recreated the beatings in Siberia and described how he slept on brick beds swarming with vermin and hung a mosquito net to protect himself from the locusts falling from the ceiling. During at least one winter, he said, he withstood temperatures of twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

  The cold was especially inconvenient when he came to an inn where a foreigner had written on the wall, in French, “Hotel of 1000 bedbugs.” Meyer had to choose between sleeping outside in the cold and building a fire that would fill the room with smoke and activate the bugs. He chose the warmth, and constructed a makeshift bed by pushing together three small tables. Another discomfort, he recalled, was the stench. “When I tell you that chamber pots and water closets are unknown, you may imagine the rest.”

  Still, the hardship had been worth it, both for Meyer and for America. It wasn’t yet clear, but one of the greatest successes of Meyer’s life had occurred on his first expedition. A world-changing find that he had almost missed.

  Several weeks before he left Peking, Meyer visited a small village and noticed, in a house’s doorway, a small bush with fruit as yellow as a fresh egg yolk. Meyer ignored a man who told him the plant was ornamental, its fruit not typically eaten but prized for its year-round production. The fruit looked like a mix between a mandarin and a citron (which later genetic testing would confirm). It was a lemon, but smaller and rounder—its flavor surprised him as both sweeter than a citron and t
arter than an orange. And its price, twenty cents per fruit or ten dollars per tree, suggested that people with an abundance of other citrus valued it greatly.

  Meyer had little room in his baggage, but he used his double-edged bowie knife to take a cutting where the branches formed a V, the choice spot to secure its genetic material.

  That cutting made the voyage to Washington, and then the trip to an experiment station in Chico, California, where it propped up a new lemon industry grateful to receive a sweeter variety. The lemon became known as the Meyer lemon, and from it came lemon tarts, lemon pies, and millions of glasses of lemonade.

  For this contribution, Meyer wasn’t paid much. The government sponsored his travel and his postage. His modest salary—just 1,200 dollars per year—seemed low for a man of such esteem and growing fame. After Meyer’s first expedition, Fairchild quietly increased his salary to 1,400 dollars. Fairchild also saw to it that Meyer would return to China and its surrounding areas, and then again after that, with each expedition coming the reasonable expectation that Meyer would turn up an incredible new cache of plants.

  This style of exciting and exhausting plant hunting vaulted Meyer from obscurity to national renown. Fairchild sent a telegram to Gilbert Grosvenor at National Geographic reporting, “Frank Meyer is back from three years in Northwestern China, he could give an interesting account of agricultural explorations.” Fairchild also arranged for Meyer to meet Teddy Roosevelt, a man in the sunset of his presidency but with increasing energy, and on a lively streak of environmental conservation. Fairchild thought Roosevelt might be interested in hearing about the deforestation Meyer witnessed in eastern China, and the ghastly effects of hillsides cut naked of their trees.

  Meyer grudgingly accepted the invitation, only because Fairchild insisted. He visited Roosevelt in his Long Island home in Oyster Bay, where the president spent the summer of 1908. Meyer brought photographs of the Wutai Shan mountain east of Beijing, where he had witnessed such devastating deforestation that it triggered landslides that cut off rivers, suffocated farmland, and washed away entire villages. Few men in those days said no to the gregarious Roosevelt, and so when the president asked Meyer if he could include the images in a report to Congress, Meyer, marveling at his trajectory from poor immigrant to a man asked permission by a president, agreed.