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Chapter 1 Going Bananas George Bush, purser of the S.S. Chase was arrested by an officer acting as Comandante in consequence of a dispute with some negros about the payment of some rejected fruit. Consul deposited the amount in dispute to get Bush out of prison. william burchard, u.s. consul, roatán, july 15, 1881 In the mid-1840s, Thomas Young, Deputy Superintendent of the British Central American Land Company, traveled along the Río Negro, one of many rivers that cut through the narrow coastal plain that stretches along Honduras’s Caribbean coastline. Paddling upstream with a group of Miskito Indians, Young observed ‘‘thousands of banana trees growing spontaneously , the fruit of which is so much sought after by the natives, who come from very distant parts to Black River, to gather it.’’ He noted the easewith which the plant could be cultivated and added that ‘‘the ripe fruit is highly esteemed, although it is apt to disagree with Europeans if eaten shortly before or after taking spirits. The green fruit is cut into slices by the Spaniards, and exposed to the sun, and when rubbed, forms a kind of flour of which they are fond.’’1 When Young visited the Río Negro region, bananas were a novelty item in Europe and the United States, and little export-oriented agriculture of any kind took place in the Caribbean lowlands of Honduras. Most of the region’s nineteenth-century exports, including mahogany, fustic (a dyewood), deer skins, sarsaparilla, and rubber, were extracts from forested ecosystems and wetlands. As late as 1859, a traveler journeying by canoe from Omoa to Puerto Cortés described forests that extended from hillsides down to the edge of narrow sandy beaches along the coast. A large lagoon near Puerto Cortés featured an ‘‘incredible’’ number of sea nettles and ‘‘large shoals’’ of fish.2 Most of the indigenous people in the region forged livelihoods based on forestry, fishing, foraging, hunting, and live- g o i n g ba na na s 19 stock raising, supplemented by small-scale production of corn, beans, and yuca.3 Agriculture in the region can best be described as small-scale monocultures and polycultures. Extensive plantings of bananas, plantains, sugar cane, and pastureland were few and geographically dispersed. This situation started to change in the 1870s, when schooners from U.S. ports began arriving with increasing frequency in order to purchase bananas and coconuts. Around the same time, the Honduran national government began to embrace export-oriented economic development models. The institutionalization of nineteenth-century liberalism took place during Marco Aurelio Soto’s presidency (1876–1883). President Soto imagined a national landscape filled with productive citizens transforming tropical nature into wealth: ‘‘We will take advantage of what Nature has abundantly provided us. We will work so that the light of civilization reaches even the most remote forests and that through work, blessed work, the lands will be made productive so that all Hondurans may enjoy the benefits of universal progress.’’4 Soto’s government turned this vision into state policy via the Agrarian Law of 1877, which provided tax and other financial incentives for cultivators to grow crops for international markets . Surprisingly, the legislation did not make any specific reference to banana production, an activity already initiated by small-scale cultivators on the Bay Islands, a small archipelago lying to the north of Honduras’s Caribbean coastline. The abolition of slavery in Jamaica and elsewhere in the British Caribbean prompted both former slaveholders and ex-slaves to migrate to the Bay Islands. In 1861, Britain transferred sovereignty over the islands to Honduras. Shortly thereafter, schooners from New Orleans began arriving in Roatán and Utila, the two principal islands on which small-scale cultivators grew both bananas and coconuts.5 ‘‘A large majority’’ of the approximately 6,000 inhabitants on Roatán were anglophone ‘‘Creoles,’’ and most business transactions and other social activities took place in English . Island residents imported nearlyall of their provisions, building materials , and general merchandise from the United States.6 Ties to the Hispanic mainland were few and tenuous. When the Honduran government declared the island of Roatán to be the only official port of entry in 1879, disgruntled residents on the islands of Utila and Guanaja appealed to the British government. The British obliged the desires of their former colonial subjects by sending a warship to Roatán so that the matter could be ‘‘discussed’’ with local...

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