Banana

a tropical plant much prized for its fruit. Botanically speaking, it is a small-fruited form of the tropical plantain, of which Humboldt says an acre will produce as much food as forty-four acres of potatoes or one hundred thirty-three acres of wheat. Members of the plantain family are raised usually by planting suckers that spring from the base of an old plant. The leaves of a plantain enwrap each other at the base, forming a false stalk, in the larger kinds fifteen or twenty feet high, from which the leaf blades, often ten feet long and three feet wide, droop away gracefully. These false stems get their growth in from eight to fifteen months. They enwrap a flower stem that produces large spikes of flowers which are followed by hands of fruit. These hands form a large, heavy bunch which lops over and hangs downward. The plantain fruit of the Pacific islands varies in shape from the cucumber form of the banana, with slight angles, to a form almost globular. Frequently they are boiled or fried like potatoes and grated or ground for flour. Cloth may be woven from the thready part of the leaves. Cooking plantains from British Honduras reach the markets of New Orleans and are gaining in popularity as vegetables.

There are, in all, over forty species of plantain. Two of the species produce the sweet, seedless fruit known as bananas. One dwarf species is raised chiefly in the Canary Islands for the London market. It grows also in Africa. The species of plantain known as the commercial banana is cultivated chiefly in Central America and the West Indies. A strip along the very edge of the United States from Florida to California is sufficiently free from severe frosts to encourage small plantations, but the small states of Central America are the great shippers of bananas. Bananas are raised with little labor. A few acres of jungle must be cleared and plowed or grubbed up. Banana shoots are planted usually about twelve feet apart, though some planters set them in clumps twenty-five feet apart. They soon shade the soil completely. Each plant bears a bunch of bananas yearly. As soon as the fruit is cut off the stem is cut down. A circle of suckers starts up at once. About all the banana planter has to do is to market his bananas and thin out the suckers. His plants reach maturity irregularly, thus yielding a perpetual crop. The banana plant has few diseases. Were the climate more endurable, banana raising would be an easy way of making a fortune.

The marketing of bananas is an easy matter, and yet it is a business requiring skill and celerity. Green bananas require neither crates nor barrels, but should not be bruised. They ripen rapidly in transit, but they may not be carried in cold storage; for, if a banana be cooled below 50 deg. F., the process of ripening is checked and the flavor is destroyed. If a banana were ripe when it left Costa Rica, it would not keep long enough to reach the market. Bananas must be cut green and sent to ripen on the way. The business of buying and marketing is in the hands of large companies. Spur railway tracks lead into the hearts of banana plantations. Word comes to the planters by telephone that a ship load is wanted on the morrow. The plantations wake up. The green bunches, varying from thirty to one hundred pounds in weight, are placed in freight cars standing in the fields and are hurried off to the coast and, within possibly twenty-four hours after the order has come, 30,000 bunches have been cut from the stalk and stowed in the hold of a ship bound for Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, or some other Gulf port. In port the bunches are unloaded by laying them in the pockets of a hugh canvas carrier, that runs like an endless belt, and elevates the bananas at the rate of 2,500 bunches an hour. They are then sent in car lots to wholesalers in interior distributing cities who deliver bunches to local customers or send them out by train to retailers in every town and hamlet in their territory. A bunch of bananas, once cut off by the swinging machete (ma-sha'ta) of the swarthy peon, loses no time by land, sea, or rail in hurrying to the window of the village grocer. About $7,000,000 worth are brought into the gulf ports each year. American importations for 1905 were as follows:

See Panama; Tarantula; Sisal