cowboys went to central america and they were called banana cowboys and newspapers covered it like rudyard kipling's america, like a great big adventure and wrote about these colorful characters around at the beginning of the banana business and the term banana republic, a lot of people don't know this but honduras had no extradition treaty to the united states so it became a place where american criminals on the lam would hide out. there was an article in the new york times like a haven of destitutes for something and one of the criminals that was hiding out ended up writing a bunch of short stories about the scene. he is the pen name when he punished -- publish these stories. his first book was cabbages and kings about the banana company, the vesuvius banana company and use the term banana republic for the first time. >> by 1899 he sold 20,000 bananas. by 1903 he sold 574,000 bananas. within a decade he would be selling more than a thousand year. give us a sense of where the bananas were being grown. there were a number that you detail in this amazing book "the fish that ate the whale," there were