Under the presidency of Andrew Preston, United Fruit had grown to be the largest fruit and sugar company in the world. But Zemurray’s Cuyamel Fruit had also grown and was now powerful enough to engage it in debilitating price wars. In 1930, United Fruit solved the problem by buying Cuyamel Fruit, paying Zemurray $31 million in United Fruit stock and giving him a seat on the board. But the Great Depression hit United Fruit hard; after Preston’s death in 1924, the company had become bloated, lazy, and mismanaged. Over the next few years, Zemurray watched United Fruit’s stock decline by over 90 percent, shrinking his stake to $2 million. He tried to offer the board advice, but was rudely rebuffed. At that point the board was dominated by members of the Protestant elite of Boston, many—though not all—of whom were ugly anti-Semites; they did not like the Jewish immigrant they had been forced to admit to the board as part of the Cuyamel deal. In a fateful meeting in 1933, Zemurray tried once again to persuade the board to consider his ideas for saving the company; the chairman, an effete Boston Brahmin named Daniel Gould Wing, listened to Zemurray’s heavy shtetl accent with open disdain and then, to the chuckles of other board members, said: “Unfortunately, Mr. Zemurray, I can’t understand a word you say.”
Zemurray was not a man to be ignored or insulted. He had come to that particular meeting with a weapon of mass destruction: a bagful of proxies from other United Fruit shareholders that gave him majority control of the company and the authority to act as he saw fit. He left the room, fetched the bag, came back in, and flung it on the table, saying: “You’re fired. Can you understand that, Mr. Chairman?” He turned to the board and said: “You’ve been fucking up this business long enough. I’m going to straighten it out.”
After ousting the chairman, president, and most of the board, Zemurray took over the gigantic, bumbling company, roused it from its stupor, and swiftly returned it to profitability. This dramatic move caused the New York Times to call Zemurray the “fish that swallowed the whale.”
With full control of United Fruit, Zemurray continued to play a heavy hand in Honduran politics until he retreated from business in 1954 to pursue philanthropy full time. In the latter part of his life, perhaps to make up for his earlier questionable dealings, Zemurray donated lavishly to Central American causes, schools, and philanthropic ventures; he played a significant role in the founding of Israel; he endowed a female professorship at Harvard, which led to the appointment of the first woman full professor at that university; and he financed the progressive magazine the Nation. Zemurray was a remarkably brilliant, complex, and contradictory man.*
But, colorful as their history was, it must be said: Preston, Zemurray, and the fruit companies left a dark colonialist legacy that has hung like a miasma over Honduras ever since. The fruit companies’ effect on Honduras’s development was deeply pernicious. Though Honduras did eventually emerge from under their yoke, this legacy of instability and corporate bullying lives on in political dysfunction, underdeveloped national institutions, and cozy relationships among powerful families, business interests, government, and the military. This weakness magnified the disastrous effects of Hurricane Mitch. The country fell prey to narcotraffickers. Effective antidrug policies and raids in Colombia in the 1990s pushed much of the drug trade from that country into Honduras. Traffickers turned Honduras into the premier drug-smuggling transshipment point for cocaine between South America and the United States, and Mosquitia was at the heart of it. Crude airstrips were bulldozed out of the jungle and used for nighttime crash landings of drugs flown from Venezuela—the drugs being worth far more than the plane and the occasional death of a pilot. The murder rate soared while law enforcement and the judicial system crumbled. Violent gangs gained control of swaths of major cities, engaging in extortion and protection rackets and creating no-go zones for the military and police, except when the police themselves were involved in the activities, which was not uncommon. The unremitting gang violence caused thousands of desperate Honduran families to send their children northward, often alone, in search of safety in the United States.
There was no way Elkins could get permits or mount an expedition in this environment. The country looked hopeless. He gave up on the search for the White City, apparently for good. He told me then: “I’ve had enough. I’m done. Maybe this will be one mystery I can’t solve.”
CHAPTER 8
Lasers in the jungle
After giving up on the White City, Elkins turned his attention to the second item on Steve Morgan’s list of mysteries: the Loot of Lima. He hoped, among other things, that the cutting-edge technology he had learned about in the search for the White City might also be applicable to a hunt for buried treasure. That search, into which he also drew me, would consume the next ten years of his life.
Also known as the Cocos Island treasure, the Loot of Lima was an alleged fortune in gold and gems—estimated to be worth around a billion dollars—that is believed to have been spirited out of Lima, Peru, in 1821, during the Peruvian War of Independence. The city of Lima was under siege, and the Spanish viceroy reportedly wanted to keep the city’s vast treasure out of the hands of the revolutionaries, should the city fall to the rebels.
The revolutionaries had blockaded the harbor but were allowing noncombatant foreign ships free passage. The viceroy secretly entrusted the treasure to a British ship captained by an Englishman he knew well. Just in case, he placed on board a contingent of Spanish soldiers and priests to guard the treasure. The plan was for the ship to sail past the blockade and then either bring the treasure back if the city repelled the invaders, or take it to the Spanish treasury in Mexico for safekeeping.
But, as the story goes, the temptation of the treasure was too much. At the first opportunity past the blockade, the British crew murdered the soldiers and priests, threw their bodies into the sea, then took off with the treasure. Pursued by the Spanish, they landed on Cocos Island, a remote, uninhabited volcanic landmass in the Pacific Ocean. There they buried the treasure and sailed off. They were soon captured by a Spanish frigate. The Spanish hanged the officers and crew for piracy, sparing only the lives of the captain and first mate, on the condition that they lead them back to the treasure.
Once they arrived back on the island, the two men escaped into the island’s mountainous interior. The Spanish hunted them for weeks until their supplies ran low and they had to give up and sail away. The captain and first mate were eventually rescued by a passing whaling ship that believed they had been shipwrecked. In secret, the British captain and first mate drew a map and prepared other documents recording the location of the buried treasure, intending to return for it at the earliest opportunity.