Banana Guatemala Honduras Costa Rica Panama

American republics of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica, are now the commercial banana centers of the world. But the real homeland of the crop is completely around the globe from these points, in Southern Asia, most likely in the hot wet valleys of India, where Alexander the Great encountered the crop during his conquests and described it as a crop whose seed was even then completely sterile. Having underwritten numerous dynasties and civilizations of Asia and the Orient, the non-American banana, carried to the New World in 1516 by a Spanish missionary priest, now contributes to the national economies of about a third of all American republics.

The name "banana" is neither Asiatic nor American. It is taken from a Negro dialect once current along the Guinea Coast of Africa where the plant was reputedly carried via dried-root trade from India. That lowland India was botanical home of the banana is borne out by sculptures and friezes to be seen on the walls of the Stupa of Barhut, a Buddhist monument of lower India presumably built about 175 B.C. This is probably the oldest-known representation of the fruit. But references to bananas appear frequently in Chinese writings of the Tang dynasty which were contemporary with the Early Christian Era. Chinese physicians brewed medicines from the roots of the plant; the fruit was considered a precious food and tonic, and stalk fibers were used for weaving mats.

It is probable that by the beginning of the Christian Era, banana roots were a well-established commerce of the Polynesians, having been carried by primitive ocean craft from Malayan coasts and Indonesia throughout the South Sea Islands and even to the mainlands of northeast Australia. Thus the banana circled the equator and became perhaps the nearest universal fruit of tropical man.

In 1698 Thomas Gage, soldier of fortune, commented in his report, A New Survey of the West Indies: ". . . our chief care . . . was to look to our bananas . . . The fruit pleased us all exceedingly, judging it to be as good or better as any fruit in Spain. It is not gathered ripe from the trees; but being gathered green, it is hung up some days, and so ripens and grows yellow and mellow, and every bit as sweet as honey . . ."

Writing from Cairo, Egypt, in 1831, to his sister Sarah in England, the ever-cautious Disraeli said, "...the most delicious thing in the world is a banana."

A few decades later the journals of Livingstone and Stanley tell how for almost two years Stanley and the white men of his expedition lived largely on banana flour cooked into thin gruel. For centuries there has been voluminous testimony of the banana's importance as food for tropical man and beast. It is one of the few crops to become a staff of life for man and beast alike. Fed green to livestock, the banana approximates the nutritive worth of grass and grain since starch and mineral content of the unripened pulp compare with those of grain, while the green skins are a valuable source of chlorophyll. Livestock economy of many tropical lands is considerably dependent on bananas.

But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that business minds began to realize the possibilities of bananas as a food for peoples of temperate zones. Now that these possibilities are at last being realized, the banana awakens to new and momentous social and political significances.

For today the banana is the greatest of all export fruits, a premier American business card in international trade and the one American export crop whose volume and consumption range is rapidly growing during a decade of embattled nationalism. This is another paradox with yellow skin.

Not content with exploding numerous gospels of botany, transportation, and foreign trade or the bizarre feat of hoisting a once lowly agriculture to an international post in shipping, government, and social institutions, the unique banana now begins to devise a distinctive trade arithmetic.

Travel Central America

In explaining, and in answering, the geography of Central America is more illuminating, even, than its history. Central America is made up of five tiny nations, dovetailed into one another like baroche pearls on a string. México is the northern boundary, Panamá the southern, so that Central America lies between the ninth and fifteenth parallels of north latitude, stretching six hundred miles only between México and Panamá. Thus all the five countries are wholly within the tropics, all north of South America and south of Cuba and even Jamaica, and south, too, of most of the Philippine Islands.

In general the axis of Central America runs off from northwest to southeast, so that the most westerly point is nearly south of Galveston and the easternmost directly south of eastern Florida. So, strung on their slanting line from México to Panamá are the five countries; Guatemala, richest of all, at the north, then Honduras and Salvador (the latter, smallest but most thickly populated, tucked in on the Pacific side in a corner formed by Guatemala and Honduras), next Nicaragua, largest in size, and last Costa Rica with Panamá adjoining it on the south.
Although six hundred miles long, Central America is only from seventy-five to 250 miles wide, so that every point in the whole rich expanse of its territory is within a few hours, by rail or motor car, or a few days, by ox-cart or mule, from the sea and the ships and the ports of all the world. The backbone of the five countries is a comparatively low cordillera, 6,000-foot mountains with rich slopes for coffee farms. Toward the Atlantic side, down to the Caribbean Sea, are broad, low jungle valleys, rich for banana farms and for pastures, and on the Pacific side a comparatively narrow ledge, half desert and half a most luxurious garden, the site of the chief cities and of the richest of the coffee and sugar farms.

It is toward these lands and toward their promise that we now set sail. For across seas actual as well as symbolic the traveler must go to Central America. If we are inured to the discomforts of tropical railway travel, or if we find the sea sufficiently distasteful, we might go by rail all the way from New York to Guatemala City, passing through México, with many inconveniences and no great advantage in time.

And just here a word may not be amiss as to the preparations for a journey through Central America. Life there is very much like life anywhere else, but there are a few points in which the traveler from abroad will find adaptation necessary. Primarily these are due to the fact that the Central American, although his home is a model of comfort, does not, in his traveling, enjoy the luxuries which have come to seem necessities in travel elsewhere.

As to clothes, the keynote is that the travel is in the tropics, even while the formalities are of the great world. You will need tropical clothing; palm beach or mohair suits are indispensable, and "whites" if you care to take so much baggage, will be a great comfort. Riding clothes, of course, and they will be convenient, and quite the proper thing, for traveling by train or motor as well as horseback. A bathing suit and a light bathrobe should be taken.

The woman traveler needs only to know that laundry, while quick and cheap, is not very efficient and is likely to damage finer fabrics, and also (and this affects, too, the man's choice of tropical clothing) there are no good dry cleaning establishments in Central America. The woman traveler must, on the other hand, realize that she will be the happier and indeed comfortable only if she has clothes for every occasion, with almost the demands of a summer resort at home. Indeed, in spite of the fact that Central America lies in the tropics, three of the capitals enjoy an almost temperate zone climate in the mountains, and in addition, in all of them, all official gatherings and formal affairs call for proper dress, and men as well as women should provide accordingly.