Cosmopolitan April 1935 Page 50/51

Go South, young man! There is still one frontier left where a man-or a woman-may go and grow up with the country. But before you start, read this article and learn the rewards-and the hazards! The author, by the way, rashly volunteers to answer letters from young men and women who want to go to Central America 

Crashing the Caribbean

by EDMUND S. WHITMAN 

Drawing by Edward A. Wilson

A newcomer on a tropical pay roll is welcomed
to hard work, adventure and opportunity.
Here's one happy hunting ground of
ambitious young Americans today.
(Below) Loading bananas in Panama.
continued on page 108

EVEN BEFORE the ship came to the dock where I was to disembark, I began to see the job possibilities in tropical America. All the way down through the Caribbean Sea my ship companions were talking about the jobs they were returning to; about samples they were taking back; about orders they were sure to get. There were a few other greenhorns who, like me, were on their way with contracts in their pockets, determined to grow bigger and better coffee beans, bananas, hemp and coconuts than had ever before flourished in this veritable Garden of Eden. 

Yes, even before the comandante of the port strode up the gangplank a representative of an American rolling-mill company proudly pointed out that his roofing had supplanted the thatch and tile of many a shack rimming that placid bay. 

And when I got ashore and had a chance to look inside some of these shacks, I found American soap, American sewing machines, American alarm clocks. Even covers from Cosmopolitan tacked to the walls! 

"Opportunity?" I queried myself. "Why, the tropics must bristle with it!" 

I poked my nose into the first nipa shack I came to. There was the senora picking her way contentedly through children and chickens underfoot. Her bare feet slapped down against a dirt floor, but under the hammock strung up in the far corner I discerned an enormous pair of women's patent leather shoes, straight from a Yankee factory. And the patron, a swarthy dock laborer, saluted me cheerfully from behind the lather of a shaving soap which he discovered through a testimonial ad of his favorite film star in a movie magazine. 

Multiply these chance observations by the thousands of other shacks that comprise the prosperous towns along the Caribbean; bear in mind that no fewer than sixteen republics exist in Central and South America; add the many islands that dot the Spanish Main, and you may begin to comprehend the great buying possibilities that await aggressive yanqui (Yankee) salesmanship down there. 

There's work and adventure in Latin America, all right-and there's a great future. I know because I once spent six years in the republics between Panama and Mexico. Six years of stirring excitement in the far-flung ramifications of the banana industry, as timekeeper, overseer, explorer and executive-six years of sweat and blood and laughter. But of all this, more later. 

What kind of jobs exist in the tropics today for our eager-to-go-to-work young men and women? What pay? What future? What adventure and what hardships? The answer is-plenty

First-remember you are dealing with sixteen republics and no end of islands that, by and large, are not within twenty years of doing their own manufacturing. But the desire to buy is there-and so is the money. Remember-more than a hundred million bunches of bananas are raised, harvested, loaded and shipped from the Caribbean countries every year. Think what this means in terms of pay rolls and export taxes alone! And there's chicle, cocoa, coffee, copper and silver, mahogany, emeralds and pearls, oil . . . 

Now, everyone of these enterprises demands honest, intelligent and courageous supervision. That means jobs for executives, lawyers, engineers, doctors, clerks, farmers, diplomats. And already smart youngsters down in the thriving seaports from Tampico to Buenos Aires are selling automobiles, tires, clothing, player pianos, phonographs, slot machines, rails, locomotives, hardware, fixtures for bars and barber shops, electric refrigerators, ranges and radios. 

Young women of character and courage do well in the tropics, too. They're a swell crowd to begin with-for only the courageous ones will forsake the bright lights and comfortable apartments for this pioneer life. And when they do sign up-as stenographers, clerks, nurses, technicians, teachers and entertainers - they are plunked down in communities where there are twenty white men to one white girl. So what? Well, there are plenty of marriages, Grasp this picture of the job possibilities existing in tropical America, visualize their significance in terms of opportunity, understand that already there is adequate steamer, airplane and rail communication-and then pack up! 

Wait a minute, though! It's not as simple as all that. You're heading into foreign lands, with foreign customs, languages and living conditions. A young man can bum his way from Maine to Florida  and can conceivably wash dishes for his keep. But in the tropics a white man without money, a job or a knowledge of the conditions is nothing but a tribulation to the American consul.

The jobs are there- the future is there, all right- but the only way to secure a foothold is by getting on the tropical pay roll of some organization operating down there before investing in a linen suit. Even as you read this, young civil engineers are sloshing through the Brazilian lagoons, sweating under the burden of their transits. Doctors are spraying Paris green on malarial swamps. A youthful consular officer is excitedly typing a report on the economic possibilities of Salvador to his chief at Washington, and a perspiring Irish hotel proprietor at Puerto Limon is just installing an electric refrigerator in his kitchen while barefooted cooks and waiters stand around, their wide-set, honest eyes filled with wonder at the humming white cabinet that makes ice cubes by a miracle. 

At the same time, a ship is warping into her berth at the sugar wharf at Kingston, Jamaica, British West Indies, her hold full of creosoted pilings, tinned gasoline and barbed wire, which she will exchange for ginger, rum and bananas. Down at Colon the sailors are exchanging good American dollars for beer and fun -and this money will shortly buy new cash registers, glassware, radios, silk dresses and hose, automobiles and money orders for the folks back in Ypsilanti. All these transactions imply sales, imply jobs, imply opportunity. . 

When somebody told me college men were being picked for assignments down in the banana plantations, I dropped my log tables and slide rule and hot-footed it to the offices of a fruit company for a job. Two weeks later, I disembarked at Tela, Honduras, with a pith helmet and "The Oxford Book of English Verse." 

Newcomers as a rule were assigned to farms near port, where homesick freshmen could get to town over weekends, to enjoy a civilized dinner on the visiting cruise liners. But that precious pith helmet consigned me to the remotest spot in the division-a "new land" farm ninety-five kilometers inland where a crew of killers and tough hombres spent three weeks out of every four hacking down giant trees, and the other week drinking up their pay and promoting machete fights. 

My associates gave me the hazing of my life. It was bitter medicine to be ignored by your own kind out there where the night and the mosquitoes fairly crashed in on you. But it was even more nerve-shattering to have to put up with the pile-driving gait of that mule they gave me to ride. 

Friendly relations commenced as soon as I threw that helmet away. I was invited to partake of the community whisky and play credit poker with coffee beans as chips. They showed me the jungle trail to the swimming hole, took me on their nocturnal alligator hunts up the river, began to educate me into the mysteries of new-land work. I learned how to price fairly and judge felling, how to distinguished between the genuine hard wood and the deceptive matapalo- that tree-killing vine which grows around the live trunk of a giant tree, choking out its life and eventually replacing the solid wood with nothing but a deceptive shell which is easily felled by experienced axmen. 

I learned how to supervise ditch-digging, under brushing, planting, and a multitude of other farm operations. They taught me how to handle labor, how to settle disputes, how to pack a gun and how to use it. 

Six months out there, standing in smudge fires as the jungle giants crashed down, or riding monotonously through stumps and decaying vegetation under the blazing tropic sun.  Six months without seeing a white girl or, having a shave! 

Then a glorious fling in port followed by promotion to a farm of my own- a rich, glossy plantation full of trees in bearing. A modern frame house with electric lights and a telephone set in the midst of fifteen hundred acres of cultivated river land, with a hundred head of live stock, an orderly labor camp, two caterpillar tractors and a brand-new timekeeper to get in my hair! 

I got seventy-five dollars a month when I was out in the bush. They upped it to one hundred when I got my own farm- and there was more in sight. Some difference from the fancy salaries they used to talk about on the college campus. But I put five hundred dollars in the bank that first year, even on my modest salary. 

Income, position, knowledge, friendships -all these grew as the years slipped by. Of the entire delegation of new men who came into the game the year I did, not one who stuck failed to get an overseer's job. 

By the end of five years, sixty percent of us were still on the job. We were through the mill by now and pushing rapidly along to promotion and pay. All of us were full-fledged banana men. We were on our way, and the sky was the limit! 

The gates of the Caribbean are wide open to intelligent, ambitious young men and women from the North. The tropics are their happy hunting ground today. More and more they are flocking beneath the Southern Cross with machinery, sample cases, obstetrical cases, law books and divining rods! 

Promotion is in direct ratio to hardship and danger. That means it's fast. Wait until you have put in a year or so on a coffee beneficio back in Colombia's mountain country. The thought of deep dish apple pie will tie your salivary glands into knots. Visions of New England orchards in the springtime- or of midwestern wheat fields rippling beneath the harvest moon- will blind you to the heady beauties of the tropical vegetation. 

The liquid dark eyes of the native girls, which stirred- you so at first, now leave you cold. You are fed up with drinking, dice rolling, coffee, the Spanish language. The sun infuriates you, and the rain makes you sullen. You straddle your riding mule, your poncho draining the water into your boots, and you curse helplessly as the rainfall strikes across the steaming backs of plodding oxen as they strain to the task of pulling solid- wheeled carts loaded with coffee through the slime. 

This is the dolce far niente of the tropics you heard so much about. Well, as far as you are concerned, perhaps you prefer a rosy-cheeked gal, a porcelain tub, some clean linen, a pressed suit, kid, gloves and the scent of spruce and fir trees! 

It's a reckless life, a primitive one, red-blooded, swift-moving. All men go mad down there at times. The pound of the surf drives them to it, or the heat of the sun. Yet as adjustments are made, obstacles dwindle. 

Stick it for ten years arid it's safe to say you're made. You're a department head in your company, or you're an independent man, in business. Your income is five thousand to ten thousand dollars, depending upon the perquisites that may go with your job-expense account, free car, furnished house and servants and all that. You are married-perhaps to a girl from back home. 

Nor are you necessarily doomed to live and die beneath the Southern Gross. I've seen young engineers evolve systems of dredging, dynamiting, reclamation of swamp and jungle that have caused them to win a transfer to headquarters, there to direct these operations on a larger scale. I've seen men on lonely farms and mines patiently gathering the material that has made them successful writers of fiction. I've seen tropical biologists become great lecturers.

Interested? That's not enough. Willing to take a crack at it? Don't bother. Believe you could take it in your stride? Let it go at that. 

But if your blood leaps to the thought of fine-spun surf and palm trees; if the glare of the sun beats in tune with your spirit; if the reek of moldy jungle is perfume to your nostrils; if the thresh of tropical rain across the Caribbean is music to your ears; if you are in love with life and your fellow man; and if the sight of a tropical tramp lifting her scarified hull over the southern horizon tears the heart out of you-you'll do-and you’ll-well!