The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  On Thursday, May 30, 1918, Frank Meyer fell asleep with a pain in his stomach. He had been vomiting for two weeks. His journals revealed that he dreamed of his friends in Holland, who had once urged him to immigrate to America to find its glowing spark of prosperity. He had lost weight and could hardly keep food down, and when a servant boy asked if he was okay, he lied and said he felt fine.

  He and the servant boy boarded a boat, the SS Feng Yang Maru, bound from Hankow to Shanghai, where his ordeal would finally end. Meyer paid for a cabin in Chinese first class, a cheaper alternative to foreign first class, to save the government money.

  He shuffled around the boat for two days, drinking tea and eating porridge and murmuring to himself.

  Just after midnight on Sunday, June 2, 1918, Meyer left his cabin and wandered to the ship’s railing, looking into the dark Yangtze below. He wore a white undershirt, gray trousers, and yellow shoes. There were no suspicious people on board, no one with a motive to attack a sickly foreigner on a luxury boat. Just a despondent man who held little hope for a fractured world.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, a man near where the boat had passed found Meyer’s body. It was black with dirt. He brought it to a local hospital. While everyone stood around staring at the lifeless creature, the man who found the corpse asked if he could keep Meyer’s shoes.

  A telegram reached Shanghai, which relayed the news to Washington. Someone at the State Department who had followed Meyer’s adventures responded that the man who had given America so much deserved a dignified burial.

  Samuel Sokobin, an American consular official, hurried to the village and paid a pair of Chinese men to help dig up Meyer’s body, which, in keeping with local custom, had been buried in a shallow pile of mud on the banks of the Yangtze. Sokobin put Meyer in a coffin to be taken to Shanghai. He wondered if Meyer might be Jewish and would want a Jewish burial. He wondered if Meyer’s father in Holland wanted to bury his son, or if the Department of Agriculture wanted its prized explorer to be honored in Washington. But lacking evidence for any of these possibilities, and with a decomposing body on his hands, he buried Meyer in a Protestant cemetery in Shanghai. When it came time to prepare his headstone, the consul in Shanghai summed up Meyer as best he could: “In the glorious luxuriance of the hundred plants he takes delight.”

  * * *

  —

  Several weeks later, Meyer’s final letter arrived in Washington. Hundreds of Meyer’s letters had been delivered to the Department of Agriculture, but this time, the envelope seemed like an artifact. “It often seems that we do not live ourselves any longer but that we are being lived,” he wrote. The closing salvo, of the letter and of his life, diagnosed the world with stirring accuracy that would be forever relevant: “Times certainly are sad and mad and from a scientific point of view so utterly unnecessary.”

  Fairchild’s sadness, brought on by his own loneliness as he watched his work slowly drowning in Washington bureaucracy, prevented him from comprehending what had happened to Meyer. Every bit of evidence pointed to Meyer’s suicide, to a man unequipped to silence the demons brought on by war and suffering. But Fairchild, either in denial or blinded by his own angst, wondered if what killed Meyer was vertigo or another nervous reaction. Could he have fallen over the rail? Was he pushed? For the rest of Fairchild’s life, he considered Meyer’s death a mystery.

  Fairchild held a memorial for Meyer at his house in Maryland, where the staff somberly celebrated Meyer’s work with stories and photographs of his plant conquests. Fairchild paid tribute to the man whose plants would forever be growing on American soil—in mountains, in fields, in backyards and orchards of little cottages. Wherever they are, Fairchild said, “they will all be his.”

  In his will, Meyer left one thousand dollars to the Department, to be divided among the one hundred men he had worked with. The men might have each taken ten dollars. But they agreed, unanimously, to create a medal in his honor. The Meyer Medal would be awarded annually for virtuous acts of plant introduction.

  That Meyer had given his life to introduce plants set a high bar for anyone qualified for this honor. But Fairchild could think of one. A man who had encouraged the work of plant hunting, who gave years of his life and thousands of dollars to the only work he ever found fulfilling, useful, and important. In 1920, Fairchild saw to it that the medal’s first recipient would be Barbour Lathrop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Wij Zijn Amerikanen

  The bird squawked and squealed, writhing with wild insanity. It was caged, its wings clipped, its hunting prevented by its confinement. The bird was a monkey-eating eagle, named literally for its most noteworthy skill, and Fairchild watched the animal struggle against the metal wires.

  Fairchild had escaped the dining room of the hotel to stare at the bird, its delicate gray feathers in contrast to the fury on its face. His boyhood fascination with wild things was now accompanied by the patience of an older man. It was 1940, he was seventy, and he was in the Philippines. For at least an hour, he had nowhere to be.

  After the war ended in 1918, David Fairchild mostly gave up. He was calm and composed, with the self-awareness to recognize that he had been pushed ceaselessly back. Meyer’s death had hamstrung Fairchild’s efforts to introduce novel plants, and as the war ended, tired Americans had little appetite, and even less money, for the program to rev up again. The popular Plant Immigrant Bulletin that once circulated to farmers and nurserymen around the country was terminated. David Houston, the secretary of agriculture at the time, also instituted a new regulation, Quarantine #37, which ended all private importations of plants and bulbs. The Department was exempted from this provision, but it tarnished the reputation of Fairchild’s office as a source not of valuable material but of ominous disease.

  Confrontations with Marlatt had cooled, but the radioactive embers of earlier battles were slow to decay. Any chance that Fairchild and his childhood friend would reunite and chalk up their squabbles to the fog of impending war vaporized in 1921. Still not satisfied with the laws he helped engineer, Marlatt took to the pages of National Geographic, again to celebrate his success, penning a rhetorical victory dance. His claim that quarantine measures had kept out hundreds of pests was built on data that was impossible to confirm, but it stood to reason that diligently inspecting rootstock would occasionally uncover invaders. He relegated the honest disagreement with Fairchild to a place beneath the intelligence of the American people. “If the average American knew as much of plant diseases as he does of human and animal diseases, the necessity of a quarantine against infected plants would not need to be sustained by argument,” he wrote. Fairchild might have responded, but he was tired and decided not to. He thought it’d be a better use of time to give his son, Graham, age fifteen, “the most tremendous of all experiences”: a visit to a tropical jungle. So he took him to Panama.

  As the seed collection program deflated, the part of postwar Washington that most irked Wilson Popenoe wasn’t the heated rhetoric but the budget. In 1919 and 1920, he watched his commissions dwindle. Fairchild tried to keep the office afloat by trying out new explorers, but none proved qualified for such fraught work. The new explorers spent lavishly and regularly requested new commissions for greater and greater sums. Popenoe finally had enough in 1925. He traded plant hunting for easier money—and more of it—and took a job as chief agronomist for the United Fruit Company, a corporation growing in value and prestige. Not long after he turned thirty-one, Popenoe signaled to Fairchild in the subtlest way possible that he wanted to resign. He met a smart and pretty bamboo researcher, and married her.

  Fairchild attempted to halt the losses, to reduce the office’s expenses, and to convince Popenoe to stay. Still, Fairchild’s efforts amounted to one man trying to change the currents of the Atlantic. In 1923, for the second time in Fairchild’s life, a wealthy man, this time one named Allison Armour, asked if Fairchild w
ould consult on a series of expeditions to collect plants around the world for private buyers. Fairchild accepted. Just as he had done in 1898, he explained to the secretary of agriculture that he needed to leave the program he had created. He told his staff—and himself—that he’d be gone just a short while. But this time, he didn’t go back.

  One thing that made private life more palatable for Fairchild was that he and Marian had begun to escape more often to Florida. The swampy mess Henry Flagler once imagined a future metropolis was expanding, its population booming 50 percent in the seven years after the war. New economic growth left people with more money, along with paid vacations, retirement pensions, and automobiles, which turned Florida into an attractive place to vacation. Not long after the war, the state repealed income and inheritance taxes, which brought even more people (and money) south. Property values boomed; people even bought land underwater in hopes that landfilling would turn it into beachfront property. The twenties would be a time when Americans judged one another by what they owned, and Florida became a new frontier for status and luxury.

  The Fairchilds weren’t drawn to Florida’s vogue. They liked the weather, the calm, and most of all, its tropical breezes. Only in Florida could an American feel the warm sun and midday rains and be surrounded by the crawling vines and towering palms that Fairchild loved in Java. Only in Florida could an American feel as if he actually lived in the tropics. So in 1916, when the Fairchilds came across a piece of land in Coconut Grove next to the lapping waters of Biscayne Bay, they bought it.

  Around 1920. Barbour Lathrop (left) and Alexander Graham Bell both spent part of their final years with the Fairchilds in Coconut Grove, Florida. Bell died in 1922 at his Nova Scotia estate, Beinn Bhreagh. Lathrop died five years later in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He never had a formal home or any descendants, which left no obvious place for his body to be sent. He was buried in the closest cemetery.

  On his first visit, Barbour Lathrop named the house “the Kampong,” the Malay term for a family compound. Lathrop had ceased his overseas travel in the early twenties, his health failing and arthritis flaring. The steamships of earlier days were replaced with private cars, which shuttled him from San Francisco to Chicago and Florida, where he stopped to visit friends, or to convalesce from bouts of bronchitis or laryngitis in hospitals.

  Fairchild often hosted Lathrop at the Kampong, along with the Bells and their scientific friends Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone, who sought Fairchild’s opinion on matters of botany and chemistry. Firestone, a tire magnate, was especially interested in growing rubber trees. To Edison, Fairchild told the story of the inn owner in Bangkok who left his electric chandelier burning all night. It’s hard to imagine that the “investment” Lathrop made in Fairchild could have yielded any greater return than seeing his protégé visited and consulted by the era’s most renowned scientific minds.

  After a lifetime of moving, Lathrop, nearly eighty, logged his last steps into a Philadelphia hospital room. Fairchild was in Europe when he heard the news, heartbroken not to have been at Lathrop’s bedside on May 17, 1927, the day the old man expired. His remaining wealth had secured him a plot in a cemetery on the outskirts of Philadelphia. But his having no direct descendants, along with his lifelong disinterest in writing much down, allowed death to sweep away much of the story of his extraordinary life.

  Fairchild was left the primary steward of Lathrop’s legacy. He described their thirty-three-year friendship, highlighted by eight years of travel together, as “an intimate comradeship” and “the major romance in the story of my life.” No one—not even Lathrop—truly knew how many times he had actually circled the world. One obituary would say thirteen, another twenty-five. Lathrop told people eighty-three.

  Fairchild filled his own advancing age with the same curiosity of his youth. “His blue eyes sparkle with a deep, unquenchable interest and enthusiasm for all things,” a pair of friends observed of him. He would pepper his grandchildren with questions, particularly during long drives he and Marian would make from Miami to Nova Scotia, where they built a summer house of their own at Beinn Bhreagh. “What’s the most interesting thing you learned today?” Fairchild would ask.

  He was known to offer a quarter to any youngster who could conduct an interview with a stranger and return with a previously unknown tidbit. He advised, “If you can’t be useful to someone or they can’t be useful to you, move on.”

  * * *

  —

  The voyage that Fairchild would recount most to his grandchildren wasn’t his first crossing of the Atlantic, or his adventure in Corsica. By the time his kids had kids of their own, Fairchild’s first sighting of Java and his visits to the Kingdom of Hawaii seemed to have occurred in another life.

  His favorite trip of his life, he would tell them, was an expedition to the Malay Islands with Marian and a group of their friends. It was luxury travel aboard a private yacht, as Fairchild had been accustomed to with Lathrop. And its pace was sufficiently slow for a man in the sunset of his life.

  The trip, in 1940, was part adventure, part philanthropy. A wealthy accountant, Robert Montgomery, had offered to donate land in south Florida, as much as eighty-three acres, to create America’s first botanical garden devoted solely to the flowers, vines, and fruits of the tropics. It was the kind of place Fairchild had visited in Buitenzorg, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. Fairchild resisted when Montgomery wanted to call it the Fairchild Tropical Garden. But when someone pointed out that no one alive was a more qualified authority on tropical botany, he relented.

  Having a garden required filling it. An aging Fairchild might have sent other people to collect, younger enthusiasts to travel on a private research mission to build this biological museum south of Miami. But once more in his life, Fairchild had the itch to leave the confines of land and see the illustrious Malay Archipelago. Alfred Russel Wallace, now long dead, had lit in Fairchild a lasting spark that endured like the brightness of the equatorial sun.

  1935. Marian and David continued to make annual trips to Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia, their pace of life slowed by their advancing age. But David remained enchanted by his wife (pictured) and tropical plants, including the bowl of mangoes in front of her. Several years later, in 1939, the two would decide to embark together on one last plant-hunting expedition.

  The world was again at war, again spurred by the Germans, and again threatening to engulf the planet. The aftermath of the Great War had led to another great war, particularly because Germany left the first war humbled. In a treaty signed at Versailles, German leaders were forced to admit fault, relinquish some land, and pay war debts. This was, in a nationalistic sense, humiliating. A German veteran of the war built on this vulnerability a campaign to be chancellor, giving well-attended speeches about how Germany should march forward defiantly. He won office by vowing to restore Germany to its former greatness and purity.

  Germany’s hubris didn’t threaten an expedition in the Malay Islands. Holland, which still held legal ownership of the Indies, declared itself neutral in 1939, just as it had done in the First World War. And the Philippines were still, technically, American. The bigger threats were from Japan and China, at war since 1937 over land and labor. Japan had become richer and stronger, a combination that fueled its own imperial lust.

  But Fairchild deemed the risk worth taking. He knew his own expiration loomed. “Besides,” he would write, “in our philosophy dangers to health lurk everywhere, and the majority of folk seem to die in their own houses of some accident, perhaps from slipping on the bathroom mat, or from contracting some one of the diseases which spread through civilized society possibly even faster than through the scattered societies of the more primitive world.”

  In his lifetime he had seen humanity become more guarded, more filled with fear and prone to war. And so there was, at any moment, no safer time than the present.

  He and Marian left for Los Angeles on a train much
faster than those of the 1890s. Ocean travel had advanced, too, although it was now becoming antiquated. People confident enough to fly in metal airplanes could cross oceans not in weeks but in hours. Seeds no longer had to be stripped of moisture or shipped in potatoes; they could be carried as cargo through the air, resting on nothing but damp peat. Even the inspection process had been streamlined. Officials inspected plants at seaports and airports, bypassing Washington completely.

  A typhoon hit their ship heading across the Pacific, rocking their boat so ferociously that chairs in the dining room fell over, emptying their occupants on the floor. Marian wrote to her three children, describing how surprised she was at the dangers of their voyage. “Two or three times a wave hit the boat with such a stunning blow that my heart missed a beat or two.” Fairchild tried to distract everyone by telling funny stories.

  The ship for the voyage through the Java Sea was called the Chêng Ho. It was a junk, an ancient Chinese-style sailing ship custom built in Hong Kong for the expedition. The ship was decorated in classic Chinese style, with hand-carved porcelain, a glowing sun, phoenixes, and dragons over the portholes. This time the person who underwrote Fairchild’s expedition wasn’t a man, but a woman, Anne Archbold, the heiress of John D. Archbold, who had helped start Standard Oil. Archbold offered to cover every expense; all the Fairchilds had to do was meet her in the Philippines. America had granted the Philippine Islands a measure of independence in 1935, which began its decade-long march toward full sovereignty. Long after his earlier visits, when Fairchild wondered if botany could cure the fierce antagonism between Americans and the islanders, Manila had become a quiet but functional town where automobiles brought people to jewelry stores and movie theaters.