Bananas reach their best estate on the low, deep alluvium near the Caribbean coast, where the temperature never sinks below 60° and is seldom below 80° F. Such low lands serve all the better if flooded two or three times in the year, for the banana will drink much water, and such floods bring silt from the hills, and thus keep the ground fertilized without cost to the owner. In 1897 famed banana fields of the Rio Escondido were so deeply flooded that the steamship “Saga” voyaged through the main streets of Rama, fully sixty miles from the mouth of the river, to pick off from their roofs the dwellers in that town. The bananas barely showed their tops above the yellow flood. Along the coast flew reports that the plantations were ruined; subscriptions were asked to help the planters: and three months later they were harvesting better crops than in years before. Their plantations had been so enriched that they bore most bountifully.
Bananas may be grown wherever there is some moisture and no near approach to the frost line; but a touch of frost cuts down the banana as a breath from a fiery furnace would blight a tender lily. The city of Tegucigalpa is 3,600 feet above the level of the sea, yet in that town is a field some thirty feet above the current in the swift river which it borders. It is very dry during months of each year, but in that field are plátanos which reach a height of more than twenty feet and bear bunches enough comfortably to support the owner. In narrow cañon and wider valley near that place are many patches of bananas which bring to their planters a sufficient income. And at that altitude the mercury sometimes falls below 65° Fahrenheit.
In the land of bananas, cats, dogs and pigs, mules, horses and cattle, parrots, babies and all other domestic animals thrive on this perfect nature-food, when they can get it. I have seen an Indian woman pry open with her fingers the jaws of a baby peccary, and with a gruel of green bananas choke off its incessant, rasping cry of “ma, ma!” And the next instant she put that same calabash of gruel to the lips of her own babe of three or four months. I’ve seen other Indians feed infant tapir, suckling jaguar, skinny squabs of parrots and very young monkeys on such pap, which those folk call wabool. I, myself, have safely carried abandoned cardinals through from their infant days of a beggarly few pin feathers to those of full regimentals of brilliant scarlet and epaulets of jet; and they were as overflowing with joyful song and saucy happiness as they could have been had worms and bugs been the chief of their diet every day of their lives, instead of the bananas on which they had been largely fed.
Why not, indeed, when cakes and beer, brandy and sugar, pies, puddings and sauce, and many another thing good for man to take for his stomach’s sake, are made from bananas. So, too, are paper and laces, brushes and cloth, and cordage enough to pull up the earth by its roots, if only we had a place to hook the tackle.
HARVESTING BANANAS
HARVESTING BANANAS