Boston Beach | |
|---|---|
Beach | |
  Boston Beach | |
| Coordinates: 18°09′30″N76°21′18″W / 18.1584221°N 76.3550127°W Coordinates: 18°09′30″N76°21′18″W / 18.1584221°N 76.3550127°W [1] | |
| Country | Jamaica |
| Parish | Portland |
| Time zone | UTC-5 (EST) |
Boston Beach is a coastal community on the north coast of the island of Jamaica, with a public beach which is one of the few beaches in Jamaica attracting surfers. [2] It is located nine miles east of the town of Port Antonio.
Around 1870 traders from Boston, Massachusetts began transporting Bananas from Portland Parish, Jamaica to Boston for sale. The Boston Fruit Company was established and the area experienced an economic boom. Eventually the company would merge with others and become the United Fruit Company which would go on to dominate the banana trade in the Caribbean and Latin America. The United Fruit Company would eventually become United Brands in the 1970s and eventually be bought by Del Monte Corporations.
The western side of the beach itself was donated to the Jamaican Government by the author Robin Moore. [3]
Boston Beach is known for its "jerk" pork and chicken stands and could be considered the birthplace of the spicy jerk seasoning for which Jamaica is known. [4] In Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, there is a popular local take out restaurant known as "Boston Jerk."
The economy of Jamaica is heavily reliant on services, accounting for 70% of the country's GDP. Jamaica has natural resources, primarily bauxite, and an ideal climate conducive to agriculture and also tourism. The discovery of bauxite in the 1940s and the subsequent establishment of the bauxite-alumina industry shifted Jamaica's economy from sugar and bananas. By the 1970s, Jamaica had emerged as a world leader in export of these minerals as foreign investment increased.
A banana is an elongated, edible fruit – botanically a berry – produced by several kinds of large herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa. In some countries, bananas used for cooking may be called "plantains", distinguishing them from dessert bananas. The fruit is variable in size, color, and firmness, but is usually elongated and curved, with soft flesh rich in starch covered with a rind, which may be green, yellow, red, purple, or brown when ripe. The fruits grow in clusters hanging from the top of the plant. Almost all modern edible seedless (parthenocarp) bananas come from two wild species – Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana. The scientific names of most cultivated bananas are Musa acuminata, Musa balbisiana, and Musa × paradisiaca for the hybrid Musa acuminata × M. balbisiana, depending on their genomic constitution. The old scientific name for this hybrid, Musa sapientum, is no longer used.
The United Fruit Company was an American corporation that traded in tropical fruit grown on Latin American plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. The company was formed in 1899, from the merger of Minor C. Keith's banana-trading concerns with Andrew W. Preston's Boston Fruit Company. It flourished in the early and mid-20th century, and it came to control vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and the West Indies. Though it competed with the Standard Fruit Company for dominance in the international banana trade, it maintained a virtual monopoly in certain regions, some of which came to be called banana republics, such as Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Allspice, also known as Jamaica pepper, myrtle pepper, pimenta, or pimento, is the dried unripe berry of Pimenta dioica, a midcanopy tree native to the Greater Antilles, southern Mexico, and Central America, now cultivated in many warm parts of the world. The name "allspice" was coined as early as 1621 by the English, who valued it as a spice that combined the flavour of cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove.
Jamaican cuisine includes a mixture of cooking techniques, flavours and spices influenced by Amerindian, African, Irish, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Indian, Chinese and Middle Eastern people who have inhabited the island. It is also influenced by the crops introduced into the island from tropical Southeast Asia. All of which are now grown locally in Jamaica. A wide variety of seafood, tropical fruits and meats are available.
Chiquita Brands International Sàrl, formerly known as Chiquita Brands International Inc., is an American producer and distributor of bananas and other produce. The company operates under a number of subsidiary brand names, including the flagship Chiquita brand and Fresh Express salads. Chiquita is the leading distributor of bananas in the United States.
The term euromyth is used to refer to exaggerated or invented stories about the European Union (EU) and the activities of its institutions, such as purportedly nonsensical EU legislation.
Negril is a small but widely dispersed beach resort town located across parts of two Jamaican parishes, Westmoreland and Hanover.
Tela is a town in Honduras on the northern Caribbean coast. It is located in the department of Atlantida.
Portland, with its capital town Port Antonio, is a parish located on Jamaica's northeast coast. It is situated to the north of St Thomas and to the east of St Mary in Surrey County. It is one of the rural areas of Jamaica, containing part of the Blue Mountains, where the Jamaican Maroon communities of Moore Town and Charles Town, Jamaica are located.
Port Antonio is the capital of the parish of Portland on the northeastern coast of Jamaica, about 60 miles (100 km) from Kingston. It had a population of 12,285 in 1982 and 13,246 in 1991. It is the island's third largest port, famous as a shipping point for bananas and coconuts, as well as one of its most important tourist attractions, tourism being a major contributor to the town’s economy.
Fyffes plc is a Japanese-owned fruit and fresh produce company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The Fyffes brand is most closely associated with the banana industry, although it is applied to a wide range of fruits and fresh produce, including the Fyffes Gold Pineapples, mushrooms and Fyffes melons.
Minor Cooper Keith was an American businessman whose railroad, commercial agriculture, and shipping enterprises much influenced the national economies of the Central American countries, and that of Colombia. His pioneering banana interests were absorbed by the then powerful United Fruit Company, today industry dominating giant Chiquita Brands International.
Treasure Beach is the name given to a stretch of four Jamaican coves and their associated settlements: Billy's Bay, Frenchman's Bay, Calabash Bay and Great Pedro Bay.
In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the exportation of a limited-resource product, such as bananas or minerals. In 1901, the American author O. Henry coined the term to describe Honduras and neighbouring countries under economic exploitation by U.S. corporations, such as the United Fruit Company. Typically, a banana republic has a society of extremely stratified social classes, usually a large impoverished working class and a ruling-class plutocracy, composed of the business, political, and military elites of that society. The ruling-class controls the primary sector of the economy by way of the exploitation of labour; thus, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile dictatorship that abets and supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.
Banana boat was a term, a descriptive nickname, given to fast ships also called banana carriers engaged in the banana trade designed to transport easily spoiled bananas rapidly from tropical growing areas to northern markets that often carried passengers as well as fruit. During the first half of the twentieth century, the refrigerated ships, such as SS Antigua and SS Contessa, engaged in the Central America to United States trade also operated as luxurious passenger vessels. Surplus naval vessels were converted in some cases in the search for speed with Standard Fruit converting four U.S. Navy destroyer hulls, without machinery, to the banana carriers Masaya, Matagalpa, Tabasco and Teapa in 1932. Transfers to naval service served as transports and particularly chilled stores ships such as USS Mizar, the United Fruit passenger and banana carrier Quirigua, and the lead ship of a group that were known as the Mizar class of stores ships. Modern banana boats tend to be reefer ships or other refrigerated ships that carry cooled bananas on one leg of a voyage, then general cargo on the return leg.
The Boston Fruit Company (1885-1899) was a fruit production and import business based in the port of Boston, Massachusetts. Andrew W. Preston and nine others established the firm to ship bananas and other fruit from the West Indes to north-eastern America. At the time, the banana was "considered a rare and delicious treat" in the United States. The major challenge for all banana importers was to get the highly perishable fruit to the American market before it spoiled." Ship captain Lorenzo Dow Baker served as president of the company and manager of the tropical division. By 1895 "the corporation own[ed] nearly 40,000 acres, included in 35 plantations, and deep-water frontage [in Jamaica] in the harbors of Port Antonio and Port Morant. They owned their own lines of steamships, which they operated between those ports and Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Besides carrying their own fruits, they carried some outside freight, and afford passenger accommodations for many tourists visiting the West-India Islands."
Although bananas have been planted for thousands of years, the development of an intercontinental trade in bananas had to wait for the convergence of three things: modern rapid shipping (steamships), refrigeration, and railroads. These three factors converged in the Caribbean in the 1870s, and would lead to the development of large-scale banana plantations, usually owned and operated by highly integrated large corporations such as Dole and Chiquita Brands International.
Cuyamel Fruit Company, formerly the Hubbard-Zemurray Steam Ship Company, was an American agricultural corporation operating in Honduras from 1911 until 1929, before being purchased by the United Fruit Company. Samuel Zemurray, a Jewish Russian immigrant to the United States, founded Cuyamel to export bananas and sugar from the northwestern Cortés region of Honduras to international markets. Zemurray would later become the head of the United Fruit Company. Both Cuyamel and United Fruit are corporate ancestors of the modern-day firm Chiquita Brands International.
Rosario di Giorgio was a steam cargo ship built in 1907 by the Nylands Verksted of Kristiania for Bernhard Hanssen of Flekkefjord. The ship was primarily employed as a fruit carrier during her career. She was named after Rosario di Giorgio, manager of Baltimore branch of Atlantic Fruit Company, and brother of Joseph di Giorgio, founder of the company.
