A few years ago, I helped the Wellfleet Historical Society collect oral histories. I knew when I started that Wellfleet-born sea captain Lorenzo Dow Baker had launched the modern banana industry in 1870. He had a little extra room in the hold of the ship in Jamaica and added this unknown fruit cargo to the hold. The bananas were a hit and he ended up building an entire banana industry — starting plantations in Jamaica and shipping the fruit to the United States. But I didn’t realize how many older people living here today have families that migrated to Jamaica for years and in some cases decades to live and work on Baker’s banana plantations. Joan Hopkins Coughlin is from one of those families. Her grandfather was Lorenzo Dow Baker’s brother-in-law, and he first traveled to Jamaica in the late 1800s.
"I think he was probably in his twenties," explained Joan. "They all went kind of did a spell of going to sea and then started working for the company, then he bought properties and became a supplier as well."
Banana Properties. One of these banana properties in Jamaica is where Joan’s father grew up, and where Joan spent her childhood.
"The property that my grandfather and then dad had was in the southwest of Jamaica, the end that Captain L.D. used for shipping. And the property would be inland from the coast. And that’s the end of the island that had very good agricultural fields and so forth."
Joan’s family property was called Blue Mountain.
"Because you looked out at a mountain range and um, it was a very pretty, very rural," she said. "Streams here in there and cattle and bananas were a good crop because you know it takes a year to grow a banana tree that bears."
I don't know anything about bananas. So I asked her to tell me.
"And after they bear, you know, a big bunch, then they're cut down. The tree is cut down because it's really all water. And, you know, it's a different kind of I don't know what it's called, what kind of a tree it's called, but they always have little shoots coming up. And so the shoot so the next year's crop, so the next year that little shoot would grow into a big tree and produce a big bunch of bananas. But they're fragile."
I looked this up and banana trees are fragile and watery stemmed because they’re actually not trees — botanically speaking, they’re perennial herbs. So instead of woody trunks, they form succulent stalks. And at the time when bananas were taking off in Jamaica as an export crop, this was considered to be a good thing. Sugar cane was on its way out — enslaved laborers in Jamaica were freed in the 1830s — and coconuts, which were also a cash crop, took a long time to grow back after hurricanes and could be risky. In contrast, bananas required relatively little labor, and in the face of island storms despite their fragility, the plants grew fast and recovered quickly.
"The crop was a one year type of thing, you know what I mean? So people could grow their own in their own backyards if they wanted to, and bring them to, you know, to the when they called for the fruit."
The call for fruit came from Baker’s ships in port to purchase bananas.
Joan explains, "One story was that he would have a conch shell blown, you know, and they would hear it in different places. I never thought a conch would have that amount of distance to it. But who knows? A few drums and a few whatever. And people would, you know, get busy and cut whatever they were cutting. And as long as they were in good condition, he bought them from."
When the trade first started, Baker had trouble with getting the timing of harvest and shipping right.
"And he didn’t have much luck for a couple of times, he had to throw away an awful lot of stuff. You know you see in the grocery stores the green bananas? That’s what he came to that you had to ship them green."
You had fourteen days, Joan remembers, to get the bananas from the moment it was picked to stores in the United States. These fourteen-day bananas are the same fruits we see in our stores today — though in the years since Joan’s family left Jamaica in 1951, the banana market has changed. Today, most bananas imported to the U.S. come from Central and South America. Still, the origins of the banana industry and the community connections between Wellfleet and Jamaica live on.
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Learn more about Jamaica's banana export history here.
Learn more about the Baker exhibit at the Wellfleet Historical Society.
