COFFEE PLANT AT BOUQUETTE
Baron Humboldt is said to have first called the attention of civilized people to the food value of the banana, but it was one of the founders of the United Fruit Company, a New England sea captain trading to Colon, who first introduced it to the general market in the United States. For a time he carried home a few bunches in the cabin of his schooner for his family and friends, but, finding a certain demand for the fruit, later began to import it systematically. From this casual start the United Fruit Company and its hustling competitors have grown. The whole business is the development of a few decades and people still young can remember when bananas were sold, each wrapped in tissue paper, for five or ten cents, while today ten or fifteen cents a dozen is a fair price. The fruit can be prepared in a multitude of fashions, particularly the coarser varieties of plantains, and the Fruit Company has compiled a banana cook book but has taken little pains to circulate it, the demand for the fruit being at times still in excess of the supply. There seems every indication that the demand is constant and new banana territory is being steadily developed.
DRYING THE COFFEE BEANS
Several companies share with the United Fruit Company the Panama market. The methods of gathering and marketing the crop employed by all are practically the same, but the United Fruit Company is used as an illustration here because its business is the largest and because it has so closely followed the Isthmian Canal Commission in its welfare work.
The banana country lies close to the ocean and mainly on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus. The lumber industry nestles close to the rivers, mainly in the Bayano region. Cocoanuts need the beaches and the sea breezes. Native rubber is found in every part of the Republic, though at present it is collected mainly in the Darien, which is true also of vegetable ivory. The only gold which is mined on a large scale is taken from the neighborhood of the Tuyra River in the Darien. But for products requiring cultivation like cacao and coffee the high lands in the Chiriqui province offer the best opportunity.
DRYING CLOTHS FOR COFFEE
Where the planter has no regular drying floor, cloths are spread on which the berries are exposed
David is really the center of this territory. It is a typical Central American town of about 15,000 people, with a plaza, a cathedral, a hotel and all the appurtenances of metropolitan life in Panama. The place is attractive in its way, with its streets of white-walled, red-tiled dwellings, with blue or green doors and shutters. It seems to have grown with some steadiness, for though the Panama census for 1912 gave it 15,000 inhabitants, travelers like Mr. Forbes Lindsay and Albert Edwards, who visited it only a year or two earlier, gave it only from 5000 to 8000 people. Its growth, however, is natural and healthy, for the country round it is developing rapidly. You reach David now by boats of the Pacific Mail and the National Navigation Company from Panama. The quickest trip takes thirty hours. When the government railroad is built, about which there is some slight doubt, the whole country will be opened and should be quickly settled. The road in all probability will be continued to Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic coast.