Hawaii - James Michener [424]
"Why in hell do you suppose I came to Kauai? Because it offers an ideal combination of sugar lands and pineapple lands. Before I leave, I'll have the secret that'll make Hanakai the richest plantation in the world."
Whenever Whip looked at the land of Hawaii, with its fortunate combination of high dry fields and low wet ones, he became excited; but when he looked at his experimental pineapple beds, he became furious. For he had in his trial fields more than nineteen different kinds of pineapple, "and not one of them worth a goddamn." He showed his visitors all that he had found so far: "That one with the savage hooks along its leaves--they'd cut you into pieces trying to harvest in a field full of them--they're the Pernambuco and you can have every damned Pernambuco ever grown. The striped one is the Zebrina, looks good but the fruit's foul. That interesting one in three colors is the Bracteatus, and for a time I had hopes for it, but the fruit's too small. I have plants that look like rat tails, others that look like whips, some with teeth like sickles. The only two possibly worth bothering with are the Guatemala and the New Guinea, but they don't prosper here."
"That means you have nothing really worth working on?" agriculturists asked.
"Yep. Wouldn't try to grow any of 'em commercially."
"Then you conclude that pineapples aren't suited to Hawaii?"
"Well ... I wouldn't admit that."
"You got something else in mind? Some new breed?"
"Maybe . . . maybe some day we'll find exactly the right fruit for these islands."
At such times Hoxworth became hard and secretive, for if he was no longer obsessed by any one woman, and if he had reached a reluctant truce with the standard patterns of love, he did entertain a positive lust for something he had once seen. In 1896 a Rio de Janeiro hotel had served him a Cayenne pineapple, and the instant he had seen that barrel-shaped, sweet and heavy fruit he had known that this was the pineapple for Hawaii. He had expected that it would be simple to go to some agriculturist and say, "I'd like five thousand Cayenne plants," and he had tried to do so; but he quickly found that the French who controlled that part of the Guiana coast where this fortunate mutation of the pineapple family had developed were as excited about its prospects as he. No Cayenne plants were allowed outside the colony. At the seaport of Cayenne, outgoing luggage was minutely inspected, so that when Whipple Hoxworth and wife Ching-ching, from Rio, arrived in French Guiana, the government knew before they landed that he was the big planter from Hawaii and that he was going to try to steal some Cayenne plants. Consequently, with Gallic perfidy they served Whip an endless succession of perfect Cayenne pineapples, heavy, succulent and aromatic. But no Cayenne plant did he see. When he casually suggested a visit to one of the plantations, it rained. When he tried to bribe a scurrilous type to bring him some roots, the man was a government spy placed outside the hotel for that special purpose. And when in frustration he decided to go home empty-handed, the customs officials searched every cubic inch of his luggage with the smiling assurance that "we suspect attempts are being made to smuggle guns to the prisoners on Devil's Island." Whip smiled back and said, "I agree, you must be very careful." So he got no pineapple plants.
He bought substitutes and cared for them tenderly, for he realized that the Cayenne itself must have sprung from some chance cross-fertilization of two types which of themselves were nothing. Therefore, the meanest rat-tailed, scrawny plant in Whip's experimental field received the same care as the best Guatemala; but the fruit that resulted fell so far short of a Cayenne that Whip became increasingly morbid on the subject. From Australia he imported plants that were supposed to be Cayennes, but they did not produce the smooth-skinned fruits he had