My first wild heliconia I spotted from a river launch in Belize. Its name, which means plant of the sun , is appropriate, because it thrives in moist, sunny jungle openings. Unlike many other species sold in flower arrangements, the modern heliconia is not the result of some plant collector's twisted years of variation and hybridization. A heliconia - in all its orange and red and purple spikes, is as brilliant in the wild as it is in the flower shops.
That its strange appearance resembles the more well known bird of paradise is not coincidental. That the colors of the ginger resemble both, or that the bright colors of each are not flowers at all, but the bracts that encapsulate and protect flowers - is not coincidental.
These are all families from the botanically bizarre taxonomic groups called the zingibers - one of the most unknown plant groups in the world. Because most groups have at least some woody ancestors, there are fossil records to track their origin. The zingibers are all herbaceous, and paleobotanists have only found their ancestors as far back as the Cretaceous. Where and when they evolved, nobody knows.
If you look at a heliconia or a bird of paradise a little bit cock-eyed, you can see that its shape loosely resembles a bunch of bananas. Again, no coincidence. Bananas are just tasty zingibers.
The bananas and plantains, once somewhat rare rainforest plants of Southeast Asia, were being cultivated in India by 1000 B.C. Arab traders found the fleshy carbohydrates to their liking, and planted them in the Middle East and Africa. Along with the fig and the pomegranate, some biblical archaeologists believe that the Garden of Eden's notorious fruit may have been the banana. The Qu'ran also possibly mentions the plant as 'the tree of paradise.'
By the age of Abraham, the fruit was common in the Middle East, and would soon be transported from Madagascar to the shores of western Africa. Portuguese sailors transplanted them in the Canary Islands, which just happened to be the last stop on missions to the new world.
This garden also contains the most memorable remains of the French army in the Lesser Antilles. A hot bath spa was ordered built by King Louis the XVI for his troops amusement.
Imagining several French military men dipping. womenless. in a hot tub reminded me that the French were never able to hold the island for very long. The French and English fought over these eastern Caribbean island scraps for hundreds of years. St. Lucia exchanged hands between the two fourteen times.
The English were settling St. Lucia by 1605, but Carib attacks kept them from creating a lasting settlement on the island. Soon, the French would begin actively pursuing their own empires in the Caribbean.
Their success would last longer in some islands, shorter in others. It was a game of chess between empires in islands populated by Africans and Caribs. In St. Lucia, like in other islands, the Africans had intermarried with the native Caribs. As the 1600's slipped into the 1700's, both the French and British would employ these Black Caribs as mercenaries, playing off their yearning for freedom to force them into battle.
By 1778, the British had secured a small peninsular stronghold at the north of the island. They sent German mercenaries into the deep mountain jungles to pick off stray Frenchmen. They launched naval assaults, and after five more years of war, the island was at last theirs.
Or so they thought. With their newfound freedom, the black Caribs feared for their future and formed freedom fighter bands across St. Lucia to engage their new enemy - the British. This loose-knit coalition, although at last it would disband in defeat, was not unique - slave rebellions were popping up across the islands. They burned the sugar cane plantations, ravaged the militaries, fought for their lives.
Rebellions broke out in St. Vincent, in Grenada, and Dominica. In Haiti, which had been under French control, the slave rebellion was so vicious that it left thousands dead, bloodied, or butchered half alive. The Haitian rebellion would leave the French military with a broken back and in sore need of funding. So broke by the slave uprisings, the French would be forced to sell off their mainland American holdings to feed their world empires elsewhere.
This sell-off, which the Americans would call the Louisiana Purchase, would transform America and help them build their own agricultural empire in the West Indies a century later.
We left Soufriere and rode the coastline north. On the steepest rocks below us grow thousands of organ pipe cactuses. This sight - the cactus in the moist tropics - is sometimes seen as odd. But the cactus is believed to actually have evolved around here somewhere.
There are two theories about where the cactus became a cactus. One place is pretty much right here in the Lesser Antilles. Another place, close by in Northern South America. Either way, it is believed that as the large super-continent called Gondwanaland was splitting apart, the Caribbean was a much drier place. The whole region was arid, like the island Aruba is today.
These plants' leaves turned to spines and their roots became swollen.
Their ultimate destiny as icons of the Mexican and Southwestern Deserts did not begin and end there. The cactus, although one plant group among several around the world that came to similar succulent means of surviving aridity, is in some ways considered the new world's most successful plant group. The tiny potbellied plant diversified itself from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in over three thousand five hundred species.
The coastline road is unpopulated for much of the way, and eventually flattens out from mountainous to valley flats - banana farms. Men and women with machetes, roaming the orchards. St. Lucia is the largest banana exporter of all the windward islands. It is a part of Derek Walcott's vision of a Caribbean that can determine its fate with or without the cruise ships.
We drove in to Marigot Bay - the view from the ridge of this bay, they say, is a delight. We walked from the jeep out towards the ridge, and a man draped in threads of clothing with white on white eyes crawled out of a nearby shed and approached us quickly. He said, "You see this palm frond?" I said I wasn't interested and kept walking. We walked across the property of a small shop to see below. The man followed and said, "I make a special for you."
He was tearing at the palm frond and looping it through itself.
A woman, a big angry-looking woman, emerged from the shop. She had a giant wooden club, and thrust it on the man. "You worthless drug addict, get off my property!" she screamed, knocking him first on the head and then in the chest. "I told you never come on my property!" she yelled, banging at him until he limped away with his hands over his head.
We looked out over Marigot Bay in the rain, and hopped toward the jeep. The vagrant approached us again, asking if maybe we wanted a donation for what now appeared to be a palm frond fish. The woman again rushed after him, and so we slammed the doors and drove off. The beating once again in the rear view mirror.
In 1890, a document was written by U.S. political strategist Alfred T. Mahan. In his book called The Influence of Sea Power upon history, 1600-1783, which advocated the taking of the Philippines, Hawaii and the Caribbean as a step in part of his thesis on how to become a world empire. At the same time, Manila (as well as Cuba) was seeing independence movements spring up from the woodwork.
As the modern history of the West Indies would begin with events in Southeast Asian islands, so too would it end. The U.S. began pressuring Spain towards war, and soon enough, Manila Bay in the Philippines was conquered. Hawaii would be annexed days later, and Guam would also be captured.
The success in the Pacific motivated the U.S. towards Cuba. New York magazines and newspapers had already been painting the Cuban freedom fighter as handsome and bold, and the public was poised to free Cuba from the clutches of Spain.
Perhaps it is a coincidence that as America was about to go to war in Cuba, Americans had just been introduced to a new fruit. They were going ape shit over the banana. So much so, that their streets were being littered by the peels. There was so much optimism in the future of the banana that American businessmen started seeing the prospects of banana empires in the close-by Caribbean.
American fruit companies, among them the United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit, began massive investment in Central American and Caribbean countries, vying for land and labor. In some economies, the meddling was so strong that local government's became puppets of the U.S. banana companies. The term banana republic would eventually be coined in reference to countries ruled by United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit.
American investments in the Caribbean soon topped over a billion dollars in value. Bananas were everything, and this fact would at least partly explain American troops engaging in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and nearby Central American economies - protecting investments, protecting bananas.
Banana fever grew, but not only in America. Islands like St. Lucia would fill the newfound European demand.
We arrived at the capital city, Castries, with its bad traffic and worse roads. We parked and walked toward the town square, littered and unkempt. There was nothing happening here but a handful of vagrants sleeping under the trees. The center of town is a park with a giant Samaan tree, 400 years old and dedicated to Derek Walcott, the poet-playwright who constantly reminded St. Lucians that there was more to their island than coddling tourists.
This is the city port city where most of the bananas leave St. Lucia. Today, United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit are called Chiquita and Del Monte. Their actions, and these bananas, still create battles between the empires in the Caribbean. Although in a modern way. St. Lucia became one of the major banana producers for Britain. Britain did so, partly to encourage democracy, partly to help their old former colonies. The exports proved an amazing economic gain. In these islands, fruit export accounts for up to sixty percent of the economy. Britain, along with other European economies, gave preferential treatment to their colonial banana friends. But as the 1990's came about, and Europe slid toward reunification, the specifics of free trade rolled onto the world stage.
The United States reckoned all of this to be protectionism. Which it was - St. Lucia was propping its prices, and Europe, so familiar with that practice, obliged.
And taste in bananas was changing, too. People wanted their bananas like they wanted their coffee and burgers - they wanted uniform, perfect, industrial cloned super bananas. They wanted Starbucks bananas. This would make things hard on the five-acre Eastern Caribbean farmers, who watched over every bunch, bruised and greenish-brown though they may be.
Only the American-run banana producers could pull off the perfect banana, in their giant Chiquita and Del Monte facilities in Latin America, run by men in expensive suits. As the 1990's neared an end, the banana plantations in St. Lucia also appeared to be near their end. The logical crop alternative became marijuana.
But to stay legitimate, St. Lucia had to fight for the banana, and that meant industrialization. Starbucks bananas for Britain. By 1999, the United States claimed it won a giant battle with Europe. The World Trade Organization ruled that Europe's import restrictions were illegal. If Europe does not abide, America has the right to fight back with trade restrictions on European luxury goods. Bananas for crocodile-skin boots.
And that's how it ended. A small industry being replaced by drugs, a nation bent on supplanting bananas with tourism. More cruise tourists littering the island with their impatient need to relax.
A man and woman with their child were walking through the square. They didn't see us, and the man lifted his child into the air over the fence protecting Derek Walcott's giant Samaan tree. The child took a leak on the tree. And this is when I asked, if the victor writes the history, who wrote the history of these islands in the Caribbean?
Everybody has that desire to see small countries write their own history. Like that schoolteacher, Emerald, saying, "I treat my students like my children." But these countries - still being pulled and tugged by the Empires, it is good to know that in the end, maybe the plants had more of a role than outside forces. The French are gone, the British have lost their colonies, the Spanish are banished. The Caribs are all but vanquished. St. Lucia is independent now, but up until now, its history was decided by a simple botanical process of evolution - desires created in the form of sugarcane, bananas and marijuana.
We continued to wander and came upon a back alley. Looking up, we saw plants making hold on the aluminum siding panels, spilling green onto the gray.
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