All day and all night the bunches of green bananas are carried into the ship and packed into her great hold, where they are cooled to just the right temperature required to keep bananas. In four, five, or six days they will be unloaded at New Orleans, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, or Boston. Mov ing belts will carry them from the ship to freight cars which are waiting to whisk them away at full speed to inland cities, even to those far away in Canada or the Pacific Coast. (Fig. 301.) In summer the banana car is cooled. In winter it is heated so that the bananas will keep perfectly.
When the ship returns to get more bananas, it carries barrels of meat from the Chicago packing houses, sacks of flour from Minneap olis, clothes from New York, and machetes from Connecticut. Thus do the hot- land dwellers send away bananas and receive in return goods and utensils. The Connecticut machete is very highly prized in tropic America. It is the most important tool that the people have.
From the tall palm trees that grow near the seashore, many coconuts are sent to this country.
376. Futire.—The future of the low plains may be very different from the past, because man is learning to conquer diseases. Yellow
fever, malaria, and other diseases have in the past killed so many people that the lowlands of these countries are still almost empty and the uplands are not fully used. When work was first started on the Panama Canal, about 1880, men died like flies from yellow fever. Then no one knew how the disease spread. But when, about 1900, work was again begun on the canal, scientific men had found out that a few of the several varieties of mosquitoes carry all the yellow fever germs and all the malaria germs that man ever gets. By protecting the men from being bitten, and by killing the mosquitoes, the canal workers were kept almost as free from disease as men are in their homes in America. There is no doubt that we want the bananas, coconuts, and other products of that land, and the people there want the products of our land. As living in the tropics has been made safer for the white man by discovering how to combat diseases, we may expect the tropic population to grow, and production, trade, and prosperity to increase.