The story of the United Fruit Company began long before its official formation in 1899.1 The story begins with the banana, an important food central and south American food that has existed long before Europeans laid eyes on this part of the world. Bananas were cultivated in Colombia, Peru, Dominica, and numerous other places.2 By the early nineteenth century, bananas were being traded on an irregular and ad-hoc basis from the Caribbean and Central America. The banana that would come to dominate the banana trade, the Gros Michel, was first brought to from Martinique to Jamaica in 1835 by botanist Jean Francois Pouyat.3 This banana variety was cultivated on the island, and became very popular, and in the 1860s, North American merchants began to export fruit from Jamaica to New York. These fruits were very popular in the United States, but because of wind powered vessels and a lack of refrigeration, it was difficult to establish a regular trade. By the 1870s, the demand in the United States was high for tropical fruits, and Minor C. Keith, founder of the United Fruit Company, began to take advantage of this market.
The foundations of the United Fruit Company specifically were laid in the mid-1800s, by Minor C. Keith’s uncle, Henry Meiggs. Meiggs, a businessman in San Francisco, began acquiring huge amounts of debt.4 He eventually fled the United States in 1855 and took his family to Chile, where several attempts were made for his extradition and return to the United States.5 The Chilean government initially agreed to extradite him, but after Meiggs evaded arrest numerous times, the Chilean government eventually dropped his case. He began to engage in business, and in 1858, he signed his first contract with the Chilean government to construct the Southern Railway from Valparaiso to Santiago. This contract was the beginning of his entrepreneurship endeavors in South America and Central America.6 Over the course of the next ten years, he supervised the construction of several rail lines in Chile and developed a successful reputation for his work.
Meiggs became significant in the building of railroads in Peru when he signed his first contracts there in 1868.7 He made a contract with the Peruvian government to subsidize their railroad construction from Arequipa to the Pacific, and in 1869, he signed a contract to build a railroad across the Andes. To build these railroads, he initially relied on Chilean labor, but when the pay was not sufficient to meet the demands of laborers in Peru, he began to import and exploit Chinese workers for cheap labor. This caused conflicts with Peruvian and Chilean governments due to racism and emigration issues. Despite this, Meiggs continued to develop a reputation as a master entrepreneur in Southern and Central America.
In 1870, General Don Tomás Guardia rose to power in Costa Rica. He overthrew the old government, confiscated property, and assumed the presidency of Costa Rica.8 His new government, along with the population increase after political upheaval in Nicaraguan 1856, provided a new level of stability in Costa Rica.9 In 1871, after the adoption of the new Costa Rican constitution, General Guardia decided that a railroad needed to be built across Costa Rica so the country could develop economically and gain political prestige. At the time, there was only one major road through Costa Rica, the Camino de Matina, which was slow and costly to travel.10 News of Henry Meiggs’ railroad building endeavors throughout South America had reached Costa Rica, and Guardia sent a representative to Peru to request Meiggs to construct a transcontinental railroad. Meiggs’ nephew, Henry Meiggs Keith, was in Peru with him at the time, and Meiggs decided to hand over control of the contact to his nephew for the price of 75,000 pounds.11
After Henry M. Keith took over this operation, he recruited his younger brother, Minor C. Keith, to join him.12 Minor C. Keith, the founder of the United Fruit Company, was 23 when he joined his brother in Costa Rica in 1871.13 He had been educated at a private school in Brooklyn, and at 16, began to work in men’s furnishings on Broadway. He left this job less than a year later to take up a career in lumber in Brooklyn and only lasted there for about four years until he headed south. His father had bought Padre Island near Corpus Christi in Texas, and Minor decided to take up cattle ranching there, which is what he was doing when he was offered the railroad construction job in Costa Rica.
The Keith brothers arrived on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica in December of 1871.14 They bought mules and began the journey across Costa Rica’s rugged terrain to Límon, on the Caribbean Sea.15 Límon was to be the starting point for this transcontinental railroad, which was considered a dangerous place to live or travel to by local residents because of its endemic inflict pestilence and disease – malaria in particular. The Keith brothers’ successful journey to Límon represented the beginning of their attempts to dominate and control the lands and natural resources of Costa Rica.
In order to minimize the cost of wages, the Keith brothers outsourced labor to foreign workers from outside of Costa Rica. After reaching Límon in 1872, Minor Keith sailed back to New Orleans to hire laborers to work on the railroad.16 He arrived in New Orleans and promised anyone who would come and work on the railroad food and one dollar per day. This attracted 700 workers, some of whom had previously been with William Walker when he invaded Nicaragua. Additionally, in 1873, Keith hired about 600 Chinese workers, 300 of whom died from malaria very soon after arrival.17 Jamaican workers were hired to be a part of the project because of their willingness to work at low wages due to the sugar depression in the Caribbean.18 In total, this initial immigrant population of workers numbered about 1,500 people on the Atlantic zone of railroad operations. Coincidentally, the local hospital at Cartago increased their employment staff to 1,560 people around this time. During the first two years and 25 miles of operation, some 4000 lives were lost, including both local and immigrant workers.19 Minor Keith’s three brothers also died during this portion of construction.
Shortly before his death in 1873, Henry Meiggs Keith handed over one of the subcontracts to Minor and returned to the United States.20 At this point of the railroad construction, various segments of the railroad were subcontracted out to various companies, but these were to be later consolidated under Minor Keith. It was also during this time that Minor Keith began to experiment with banana cultivation as a way to feed workers on the railroad and to make a profit while traveling to New Orleans to acquire additional laborers. In 1872, Keith brought 250 bunches of bananas from Aspinwall to New Orleans, and after the initial success of this endeavor, he began regularly bringing bananas with him when he traveled to New Orleans.21 Banana imports into the United States began to gradually increase from this point forward, especially after Keith began experimenting with banana cultivation in Costa Rica itself in 1873.22
In 1877, Henry Meiggs died, and the following year Minor Keith assumed full responsibility of the contract with the railroad from the Costa Rican government.23 Also, in 1888 Keith’s banana plants first began to bear fruit, which officially marked the beginning of commercial banana plantations in Costa Rica.24 Keith sent his first shipment of bananas to New Orleans from Límon this year, and the following year, 1879, the first shipments were sent to New York. These small shipments marked the start of a banana empire that would eventually extend its reach throughout all of Central America and the Caribbean.
References
1 Ronald N. Harpelle, “Racism and Nationalism in the Creation of Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast Banana Enclave,” The Americas 56, no. 3 (January 2000): 29-51.
2 Robert Langdon, “The Banana as a Key to Early American and Polynesian History,” Journal of Pacific History 28, no. 1 (January 1993): 15-21.
3 John Soluri, “Bananas Before Plantations. Smallholders, Shippers, and Colonial Policy in Jamaica, 1870- 1910,” Iberoamericana 6, no. 23 (Septiembre de 2006):143- 159.
4 Margaret Hatcher, “Honest Henry Meiggs: Who Left San Francisco Discredited Later to Become South America’s Builder of Railroads,” California Historical Society Quarterly 17, no. 3 (September 1938): 200-205.
5 Ronald D. Hussey, “Some Articles in Spanish American Reviews, 1938-1940,” Pacific Historical Review 10, no. 3 (September 1941): 327-342.
6 Hatcher, 199.
7 Hussey, 1941.
8 Harpelle, 32.
9 Edwin J. Foscue, “Land Utilization in Costa Rica,” Scientific Monthly 53, no. 5 (November 1941): 430-432.
10 Rodrigo Quesada Monge, “Ferrocarriles y Crecimiento Económico: El Caso de la Costa Rica Railways Company (1871-1905),” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 9, 1983, 87-93.
11 Samuel L. Crowther, The Romance and Rise of the Tropics (Garden City: Doubleday, Dorah and Company Inc.): 143-148.
12 Monge, 95.
13 Clarence F. Jones and Paul C. Morrison, “Evolution of the Banana Industry of Costa Rica,” Economic Geography 28, No. 1 (Jan., 1952): 1-19.
14 Foscue, 430.
15 Crowther, 143.
16 Crowther, 148.
17 Monge, 95.
18 Charles W. Koch, “Jamacian Blacks and Their Descendants in Costa Rica,” Social and Economic Studies 26, No. 3 (September 1977): 340.
19 Monge, 95.
20 Monge, 95.
21 Koch, 2.
22 Jesse T. Palmer, “The Banana in Caribbean Trade,” Economic Geography 8, No. 3 (Jul., 1932): 263.
23 Monge, 98.
24 Jones and Morrison, 3.
