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View Gutenberg source #15003About 40 minutes
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Perry opens with a provocative claim: the banana, which he calls "Nature's Institution for the Promotion of Laziness," may have been the forbidden fruit of Eden. He cites the cross-shaped pattern in a sliced banana and the Latin names Musa paradisiaca and Musa sapientum—fruit of paradise and fruit of knowledge—as evidence, adding wryly that "less evidence has served well enough to burn heretics at the stake." This blend of botanical fact, biblical allusion, and irony sets the tone for a work that is part horticultural manual, part economic argument, and part cultural critique.
Perry provides a clear, if dated, taxonomy of the Musa genus, dividing it into three groups: giant bananas (with inedible, leathery fruit), fleshy-fruited bananas (the edible M. sapientum), and ornamental bananas (with erect spikes and persistent bracts). He emphasizes that the banana is not a tree but a "gigantic herb," a detail that underscores its rapid growth and productivity. The classification is presented without fuss, but Perry's choice to include it early signals that the book will ground its economic arguments in natural history. Readers unfamiliar with the plant's biology will find a concise primer that avoids jargon, though the grouping by Dr. Sagot may feel obscure to modern audiences.
A central section compares the per-acre value of bananas with eight major U.S. crops using 1897 data. Perry calculates that bananas yield five and a half times the average return of barley, corn, wheat, and others—$87.66 per acre versus $18.28. The numbers are presented in a stark table, but Perry's real interest lies in the cultural implications. He recounts conversations with native planters who, when asked why they do not plant more, reply: "Why should I do that? Have I not plenty to eat? I have enough money; if I plant more I shall have to do more work to get more money which I don't need." This exchange is the heart of Perry's argument: the banana's generosity enables a deliberate rejection of overwork, a stance he treats with a mixture of admiration and bemusement.
Perry quotes U.S. Consul Burchard's complaint that banana wealth in Honduras has not produced "public and private schools, churches and banks, newspapers and libraries." Yet Perry predicts that such institutions will soon arrive, as European and American settlers bring their industrious habits. He then pivots to a practical opportunity: drying bananas for export. Citing examples from Trinidad and Jamaica, he calculates that dried fruit can yield $783 per acre, far more than fresh bunches. The section includes a nod to Stanley's In Darkest Africa, which praised banana flour as "invaluable nourishing and easily digested food." This blend of boosterism and practical advice reveals Perry's dual audience: the armchair reader amused by the laziness thesis and the planter seeking profit.
The text is introduced as a chapter from a forthcoming work, Tropical America: Its Planters and Plantations, and a blurb from Sports Afield praises the author's "long-trained habits of observation" and ability to present "bottom facts" clearly. This framing matters: Perry is not a disinterested botanist but a writer with a specific agenda—to promote tropical agriculture as both profitable and culturally transformative. The revised edition note (dated 1903) suggests the chapter had a prior life, and the blurb's emphasis on concision and clarity hints at the author's intended audience: practical men, not academics. Readers should approach the text as a period piece that uses scientific and economic data to advance a particular vision of progress, one that is skeptical of Northern industriousness yet eager to harness the banana's potential.
Perry's chapter is best read as a layered argument: the banana's biology enables a lifestyle that challenges the Protestant work ethic, yet the author cannot resist quantifying that lifestyle in dollars per acre. The tension between celebrating laziness and calculating profit gives the text its peculiar energy. Readers interested in the history of agriculture, colonial economics, or the cultural construction of "tropical" idleness will find ample material here, provided they treat Perry's figures as rhetorical rather than definitive.
That afternoon, rain ticking the window, Perry’s Bananas made me laugh—his sly nod to laziness as a quiet rebellion. It lingered, that idea of slow pleasure. Later, thumbing shelves, I found myself holding a different old handbook, its pages smelling of sun-cured leaves: Tobacco: Growing, Curing, & Manufacturing A Handbook for Planters in All Parts of the World — Reading Notes. Same patient craft, same unspoken wink.
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