Banana is one of the oldest cultivated plants. Its homeland is considered to be the islands of the Malay Archipelago, where, as scientists believe, the ancient inhabitants grew them and ate them as a supplement to the fish diet. Traveling around the islands of the Pacific Ocean, they stocked up on the fruits they knew and thus contributed to the spread of bananas.
One of the first written mentions of bananas is contained in the ancient Indian manuscripts “Mahabharata”. The earliest written references to this plant have come down to us in the monument of Indian culture Rigveda (XVII-XI centuries BC) – probably by that time bananas with the help of sailors had already been moved to the Indian subcontinent.
Some scientists believe bananas were also known in South America before the arrival of Europeans. The claims are substantiated by the fact that the remains of banana leaves were found in Peruvian Indian tombs. In addition, some believe that the “paradise fruit”, in the Old Testament, which tempted Adam and Eve in paradise, meant exactly the banana. The last statement is extremely controversial, since neither the ancient Egyptians nor the ancient Jews knew anything about bananas.
After 650 bananas were brought from India to Palestine and the east coast of Africa – this time thanks to the Arabs who actively traded in slaves and ivory. In the Islamic world the banana was known as the Muz (Arabic موز, Persian موز, Turkish Muz). By the time of the active exploration of West Africa by Europeans which took place in the 15th century bananas were already well known there. After 1402 the Portuguese brought bananas from Guinea to the Canary Islands, where they began to grow them and in 1516 – only 24 years after the discovery of America by Columbus – they brought them to the island of Haiti. The last journey was led by the Spanish missionary monk Thomas de Berlanga.
Pedro de Ciesa de Leon (1553) already wrote about the active cultivation of bananas in South America in the middle of the 16th century in his Chronicle of Peru, namely that in the equator region near Puerto Viejo “there are also many Spanish and local melons; a lot of vegetables and beans bring harvest everywhere and there are a lot of orange trees and limes, and a lot of bananas. In some places extraordinary pineapples are grown.”
Despite the fact that bananas quickly gained popularity in the tropics, they remained an extremely rare exotic product for a long time in European and American countries with a temperate climate, since one of the main requirements for their transportation and storage is to maintain a constant temperature no higher than 14°C. Only in the second half of the 19th century with the invention of the first refrigeration system and the construction of railway it became possible to deliver these fruits to the northern markets, first in the USA and then in Europe. In 1866 New York merchant Carl Frank began importing small quantities of bananas from plantations near Colón, Panama, into the United States. In 1870 the captain of the American fishing vessel Telegraph Lorenzo Baker brought 160 bunches of bananas from Puerto Antonio, Jamaica to New Jersey and sold them profitably, which marked the beginning of a wide trade in these fruits.
In 1876, at an exhibition in Philadelphia dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the independence of the United States, bananas were sold by the piece, wrapped in steel, at a price of 10 cents apiece, which at that time was very expensive. In 1885, Captain Baker, businessman Andrew Preston, and nine entrepreneurs founded the Boston Fruit Company, which began buying bananas in the Caribbean. On March 30, 1899, it merged with Minor Keith’s company to the United Fruit Company.