He who would grow bananas for market must plant on the border of navigable waters giving access to some harbor or anchorage where ships may safely lie while receiving the fruit. For it is easily bruised, and wetting by salt water blackens the skins, thus injuring or preventing the sale. Plantations are usually on the banks of rivers or of estuaries, but some are beside railroads, to which the fruit is carried by carts thickly carpeted with banana leaves. A cruder way is to hang a few bunches over the back of a burro or of a mule, which plods along to the shipping place. It is evident that the entire area which can so be devoted to banana culture must be small, for most Central American and Mexican rivers are obstructed at their mouths by sandbars, over which ships cannot pass. Bluefields, Nicaragua, has been a most profitable field for banana growing, because it has a river into which sea-going ships can safely enter, and up which such ships may go fifty or sixty miles, and receive their cargoes from landings on the plantations which border the Rio Escondido. Yet millions of bunches of bananas have been shipped from the open coast of Honduras, where the one good harbor is that at Puerto Cortez. Other millions have been shipped from Port Limón and from Bocas del Toro, in Costa Rica, whence a few hundred bunches were sent as a beginning to the United States in the year 1883. Twenty years later the port of Limón itself sent 4,174,200 bunches to the markets of the world. They brought to Costa Rica credit for producing the best bananas known. For ages the native of banana lands was content with the fact that he got from his plantation more than enough food. Some thirty-five years ago a few bold men ventured to pay twelve or fifteen cents a bunch for a few cargoes in the Bay Islands, off the coast of Honduras, and carried them to the Gulf States. There they found they could sell the fruit, for there lived people who had traveled to the tropics, and learned to eat their foods. To-day millions of bunches are each year sold in the United States and even in Canada, and in 1902 ship-loads were sent from Costa Rica direct to Europe. That little republic alone received not less than $1,127,400 for bananas sold abroad during the year that ended with September, 1902. The United Fruit Company, of Boston, was formed in the year 1888, and ten years later was said to have a surplus of more than $6,000,000, owned thousands of acres of bananas, and had built expressly for its fruit carrying business four superb steamers, and employed many others.