The Fish That Ate the Whale

by Rich Cohen

  Zemurray lived near the docks. No one could tell me the exact address. Some building in the French Quarter, perhaps a wreck with cracks in the walls and a sloped ceiling, and the heat goes out and the fog comes in. When his business grew, he moved uptown, following the wealth of the city, which had been fleeing the French Quarter for decades. At twenty-nine, he was rich, a well-known figure in a steamy paradise, tall with deep black eyes and a hawkish profile. A devotee of fads, a nut about his weight, he experimented with diets, now swearing off meat, now swearing off everything but meat, now eating only bananas, now eating everything but bananas. He spent fifteen minutes after each meal standing on his head, which he read was good for digestion. His friends were associates, his mentors and enemies the same. He was a bachelor and alone but not lonely. He was on a mission, after all, in quest of the American dream, and was circumspect and deliberate as a result. He never sent letters or took notes, preferring to speak in person or by phone. He was described as shy, but I think his actions are more accurately characterized as careful—he did not want to leave a record or draw attention. His early life in Russia would have taught him that a Jew in the paper is a Jew in trouble.

  The office of Hubbard-Zemurray—it was already being called Cuyamel Fruit—was at 21 Camp Street, in a neighborhood of fine houses, deeper than broad, three steps to the porch. Cuyamel was operating as an importer, not growing bananas, but buying them from Central American farmers. Zemurray’s worries were about supply, setting a good price, working out deals with exporters. The firm was grossing several hundred thousand dollars a year, most of which went to pay farmers and sailors and local officials, who had to be bribed. When not traveling, he spent the entire day on the phone, shouting or being shouted at, then walked home. If he was in a bad mood, he might continue past his house. There were nights, before wife and children and the accompanying heartache and disaster of family, that he traversed the city from St. Peter Street to Audubon Park then out to the levee where the steamships threw sparks on the river. And the foghorn! And the trade wind! And the stink of the tide! If you looked into his eyes, you would see the machinery turning—that’s what Frank Brogan told me. “It’s just the sort of person he was,” explained Brogan, who worked for Zemurray in South America. “He was one of those guys, part of him is always figuring. You listen to a man like that. He knows something that can’t be taught.”

  It was not easy for Zemurray to find his place in the city, which was dominated by an ancient class-conscious, status-obsessed aristocracy. He had money, was smart and not terribly ugly, but everything else was against him. He was a foreigner—a fucking foreigner, as they said on the docks. A stranger, a flea, a Russian from the Pale. New Orleans was not a bad place to be from elsewhere. Jews had prospered in the city from its earliest days. It had been home to some of the big Hebrews of America: Judah Touro and Judah Benjamin, the secretary of state of the Confederacy, and Daniel Warburg, the first member of the banking family to settle in the United States. But Touro and Benjamin were Sephardic Jews (Warburg was German), a breed apart from the Eastern Europeans who arrived in the late nineteenth century. Erudite and refined, assimilated to the point of being unrecognizable, they formed a closed society that traced its roots in the city back a hundred years or more. These men were protective of their position, which, many feared, would be jeopardized by men like Zemurray. In this way, Sam was doubly rejected: turned away from the clubs of the German Jews just as decisively as he was turned away from the clubs of the Catholics and Protestants.

  When I talked to Thomas Lemann about Zemurray’s rejection in New Orleans—at eighty-six, Mr. Lemann is the patriarch of one of the oldest and most prominent German-Jewish families in the South; he worked for Zemurray, as did his father, Monte Lemann—he scoffed and said, “It might bother you if you’re the sort of person who’s bothered by such things, but I don’t think Mr. Zemurray was that sort of person.”

  But who’s to say? Thomas Lemann, whose family has been important in the South since the middle of the nineteenth century? Thomas Lemann, who graduated from Tulane and Harvard Law School?

  I believe Zemurray was less the sort of man who didn’t care than the sort of man who could make you believe he didn’t care. He was a human being, wasn’t he? He must have wanted status and acceptance, these being basic human desires. When he couldn’t get acceptance, he sought status; when he couldn’t get status, he sought power. He was a quiet man, did not complain, had no giveaways or tells, which does not mean he was not furious inside. He wanted and wanted, which is why he fought so hard for so long, why he pinned his enemies to the wall and studied them with a cool eye.

  Zemurray joined Temple Sinai on St. Charles Avenue, though he did not strike acquaintances there as particularly observant or engaged in spiritual affairs. He was sunk deep in the here and now. If he was religious, it was in the modern American way, a private business free of mysticism. He was one of those men who turn up in the back of temple on the High Holidays but are otherwise absent, making amends with generous contributions.

  His true religion was the waterfront, warehouses and loading bays, iron rails and boxcars—that’s where he found refuge, knew just who he was and exactly what to do. He stood in the sheds in his overcoat, long and narrow, built like a candlestick, shouting orders. By the early 1900s, the port of New Orleans had become an industrial affair, with ninety steamship lines, two barge lines, and nine railroads. There were three main banana wharves: Erato, Desire, and Pauline Street, with fourteen automatic unloaders that carried twenty-five hundred bananas an hour. Twenty-three million stems moved through the city every year. U.F. had private facilities at Thalia Street. New Orleans was a working city then, just as great as Chicago or Philadelphia. The modern town is a husk of its old self, which died on its feet but freakishly still stands. I say this to give you a better picture of Zemurray. He was not a big man in a tourist destination. He was an ambitious man trying to become big in the greatest port in the American South.

  When he was in town, he was on the docks, trading, questioning, comparing manifests to cargoes, making sure he wasn’t getting ripped off. If some streets were closed, if some houses were for sale but not to him—there was always the river. He knew everyone by name there but paid special attention to the old-timers who had been in the trade since the days of wind power. Grizzled and tobacco stained, in flop-brim hats, as sunburned as pirates, they were former big-timers now just trying to survive.

  The most colorful of them was probably Jacob Weinberger, known to everyone as Jake the Parrot King. Jake emigrated from Hungary around 1845, settling in Galveston, Texas, then a barrier island newly acquired from Mexico. He had been traveling to the isthmus since the early 1850s. He would sail a rented sloop into tiny port towns on the Atlantic coast, where he was swarmed by children and merchants. Tall and gaunt when he was young, big and fat when he was old, Weinberger was greeted as a curiosity in the South. He carried knickknacks, kerchiefs, plastic horns, mouth harps, toys, shoes, cotton, whatever he might trade for the local wares—crafts, clothes, coconuts. He brought the first shipment of bananas to Texas in the 1860s. For a time, he dealt exclusively in parrots and macaws, tropical birds picked up for nothing that he sold to the owners of general stores and pet shops. Some of the birds still spoke the filthy slang picked up from Caribbean pirates (“Crack the Jenny’s daughter”). This is how Jake made his fortune—or first fortune, anyway. The fact is, Jake Weinberger won and lost many large sums but did not seem to care. He was in it for the travel, the exotic ports of call, the experience, the fun. In Empire of Green and Gold, Charles Morrow Wilson described Jake as “an affable Southerner, who gambled wildly for the love of gambling, and mixed an excited English and dog Spanish with violent gestures in a highly original language.”

  Jake had friends in every country in the isthmus, knew the people who ran the towns and governments, understood how the deals got done. He moved to Nicaragua in 1870 to found the Bluefields Banana Company, where he gave himsel
f the title of president and resident tropical manager. “In sultry, mosquito-harried Bluefields, Jake Weinberger took over in the manner of a white-skinned Emperor Jones,” Wilson continued. “He liked the Nicaraguans, treated them hospitably and generously, gave the children candy and dolls and the men stiff drinks. It was not strange that the Nicaraguans liked ‘Hacob,’ worked for him, grew and harvested bananas for him, and helped him turn hot and swampy wastelands into productive fields.”

  In its best year, Bluefields shipped a million bananas. Jake was then dividing his time among Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, and Nicaragua. He had become a wise man of the industry, a wizard who could turn a stretch of jungle into a plantation just like that. He was one of the banana men Andrew Preston enlisted in Mobile, when he was swapping shares of United Fruit. But he was a relic when Zemurray met him in New Orleans, an ancient gunslinger kept around less for prowess than for color and knowledge. Sam hired him as a troubleshooter, a sort of banana man–at–large. Though past his prime, he knew the terrain and was on speaking terms with every honcho on the isthmus.

  That’s not all Jake had to offer: he had a daughter, too, a beautiful woman named Sarah. Zemurray probably met her at Jake’s house, as the men did business over coffee—Sam listening to Jake but thinking of the woman reading a book on the porch. I have seen three pictures of Sarah when she was young, one of them on a passport that carries her vital statistics:

  Birth Date: 13, December, 1883

  Birth Place: Galveston, Texas

  Father’s Birth Place: Hungary

  Mother’s Birth Place: Mexico

  I would like to cue the orchestra, swell the music, and picture hearts orbiting Zemurray’s head. I would like to show this man, who had been occupied by nothing but work from the age of fourteen, falling in love, but I can’t. There is no evidence it happened that way. Was there a moment of hand-holding and nervous talk? I doubt it. The relationship had the markings of an arrangement. Zemurray was thirty-one, successful but alone. He needed a wife. Sarah was beautiful but twenty-five, no longer young by the standards of the day. She needed a future, which meant a good match. A businessman marrying the daughter of a colleague has the added benefit of strengthening ties all around. That’s what people mean when they call marriage an institution.

  Samuel Zemurray and Sarah Weinberger were married in May 1908. The couple moved into a house near the new campus of Tulane. Their first child, Doris, was born on November 19, 1909. Becoming a father changes the nature of the future. What had been half believed becomes real. The inner voice begins to ask serious questions: How much do I need? What will it take to keep her safe? It was after the birth of Doris that Sam Zemurray decided he needed to get bigger and make more. The only way to do this was to expand. And the only way to do this was to plant his own bananas. It was a realization that sent Zemurray down the path he would follow for the rest of his life, a tortured path that led south into the jungle.

  Yellow

  8

  The Isthmus

  Zemurray traveled to Honduras in the early weeks of 1910. He’d been there previously, but it was his first extensive tour of the country that would eventually become his home. He went with Ashbell Hubbard and Jake Weinberger. He was looking to buy land. He learned to speak Spanish imperfectly in the cantinas and dives. No matter how long he lived in the South, Zemurray could never rise above street Spanish overlaid by his American accent, overlaid by his Russian accent. He was all overlay—identity stacked on identity, life stacked on life.

  They landed in Puerto Cortés, a low-slung cinder-block town on the sea. The streets followed the curve of the bay, then vanished into hills where colonial mansions commanded the horizon. The mountains were green in the distance but terrible wilderness up close. Everything—the stores, the palm-choked alleys—felt insubstantial. Though Puerto Cortés is one of the old places of the hemisphere—inhabited for six hundred years—it seems provisional. When Zemurray arrived, it was a kind of frontier town, untouched by government or law—less Bogotá or Quito than Dodge City or Tombstone. There was gunplay every night, the streets awash in liquor and gold. Ten feet from the dance hall, the music faded and there was only the ridgeline, the sound of the waves, the stars. It was a wicked place, small and large, unimportant and critical.

  Because Honduras had no extradition treaty with the United States, Puerto Cortés had become a criminal refuge, filled with Americans on the lam. Frank Brown, known as “Cashier Brown,” who absconded from a bank in Newport, Kentucky, with $195,000 in 1900, turned up in Puerto Cortés. Alex Odendahl, a New Orleans grain merchant who lit out with $200,000 around the same time, turned up in Puerto Cortés with a full beard and a suit of white duck, calling himself Señor Harris. Alcee Leblanc, an ex–deputy United States marshal from New Orleans, absconded, lit out, turned up. Ditto Edward Burke, who had been state treasurer of Louisiana. (He became a mining tycoon, trailed by mercenaries.) According to an article in The New York Times, under the headline “A Colony of Defaulters,” “no less than seven bank wreckers, some of them of National fame, are secreted and exiled in that tiny little republic. In fact, the country has become the home of a picturesque population, voluntary exiles, who do not dare return to their native soil, and watch each outgoing steamer with wistful eyes until it rounds the point.”

  William Sydney Porter arrived in Puerto Cortés a few years before Zemurray. A part-time Texas newspaperman, he stole several thousand dollars from a bank in Austin, where he was a teller, then hid out in the bars on Primera Avenue, soaking up the talk of revolutionaries and banana cowboys, which he turned into the book Cabbages and Kings, published in 1913 under the name O. Henry. It was O. Henry who coined the term “banana republic.” These pages, which remind me of watercolor paintings on the walls of Florida motels, capture the country as it was first experienced by Zemurray. “That segment of the continent washed by the tempestuous Caribbean, and presenting to the sea a formidable border of tropical jungle topped by the overweening Cordilleras, is still begirt by mystery and romance,” O. Henry wrote. “In past times, buccaneers and revolutionists roused the echoes of its cliffs, and the condor wheeled perpetually above where, in the green groves, they made food for him with their matchlocks and toledos. Taken and retaken by sea rovers, by adverse powers and by sudden uprising of rebellious factions, this historic 300 miles of adventurous coast has scarcely known for hundreds of years whom rightly to call its master. Pizarro, Balboa, Sir Francis Drake, and Bolivar did what they could to make it a part of Christendom. Sir John Morgan, Lafitte and other eminent swashbucklers bombarded and pounded it.… The game still goes on.”

  Zemurray and his companions stayed in the city a few nights, taking rooms in the only hotel, then rode out. It was winter, the best season on the isthmus—after the rains and before the rains. They visited the banana lands along the north coast, stopping in tiny Caribbean villages, each different, each the same. The world reverted to wilderness between the towns, the swamps east of Eden. The trees were teeming with parakeets, the underbrush filled with monkeys and tapirs. They heard stories of oso caballo, the Central American bigfoot. They slept in hotels, in the guest rooms of local traders, or wrapped in blankets on the beach. Now and then, they traveled by car, but this was the horse-powered age and the men crossed most of the country by mule. The mules of Honduras were notorious bucktoothed animals with twitchy ears and black eyes, in constant battle with their riders. His first time on, Zemurray was thrown to the ground. The second time, the animal bit his toe. The third time, the mule dropped and rolled. The fifth time, the mule carried Zemurray to the middle of a river and left him. It remained a point of pride for Zemurray—he eventually licked the famously sour mules of Honduras. As the old banana cowboys liked to say, “You will never understand the banana business until you understand the banana mule, and you can never understand a banana mule.”

  Zemurray was a habitual limit crasher. He loved feats of endurance, proving himself by watching companions flag, throw up th
eir hands, and say, “Cerveza, señor, it’s time for cerveza.” He crossed Honduras on muleback so he could learn the country, meet its people, scout its property, but also so, years later, a person like me would sit and write “the gringo who crossed the country on a mule.”

  Honduras is the size of Pennsylvania, with Guatemala on its northern border, El Salvador to the west, and Nicaragua to the south. It’s two hundred miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific at the narrowest point. When Zemurray arrived, there were a half million people in the country, the majority of them poor mestizos, that is, half-breeds. It was a divided nation, with the Atlantic lowlands more properly Caribbean than Central American—seaside, frond filled, populated by the descendants of African slaves—and the highlands reminiscent of the ancient Mayan landscape known to the conquistadores.

  The country was visited by Columbus in 1502. Following the coast, he sailed past the future sites of Omoa (Cuyamel Fruit), Tela (United Fruit), and La Ceiba (Standard Fruit). He named the country Honduras, which means the depths, though the coastal bays are quite shallow, which is why, in the early days of the trade, before the piers had been built, the cargo ships had to sit a half mile offshore waiting for rafts to ferry out the bananas. In other words, the name “Honduras” was false advertising.

  Columbus landed at the future site of Trujillo. In a letter to Queen Isabella of Spain, he described it as a “verdant and beautiful [land with] many pines, oaks, seven kinds of palms, and myrobalans like those in Hispaniola called hobi. They have an abundance of pumas, deer and gazelles.” He came across Jicaque Indians, who wore quilted jerkins. He was a man reaching out to touch a picture ever so gently. When he asked about cities of gold, the Indians motioned south, just beyond the next hill, just beyond the horizon. (El Dorado recedes before you.) He continued down the coast to the Torrid Zone, believing he was in the Far East, in the country described by Marco Polo, a ten-day walk from the Ganges River. Most European officials had already realized Columbus was not in Japan or India but somewhere strange and new; Columbus, however, was confused.