Panama - Fever-haunted Isthmus Of The Dead

( Originally Published 1905 )

Like stout Cortez when with eagle eye

He stared at the Pacific; and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surprise,

Silent upon a peak in Darien.

—Keats.

ACCORDING to tradition, von Moltke was aroused from a sound sleep in the middle of the night to be told that France had declared war on Germany. "In the right hand top drawer of the middle cabinet," the great strategist remarked, as he turned over and finished his sleep, and his informant went to the place indicated and found all the plans for the invasion of France. When Secretary Hay was told that the revolution had broken out in Panama, all he did was to go to the proper cabinet and draw out the portfolio labelled "Panama" and tell his subordinates to read carefully and follow instructions. I have no sympathy for Colombia. The clique at Bogota, the capital of the state, who controlled affairs, were out for "graft," to make all they could out of the canal concessions. Colombia in the game held the winning hand, but Uncle Sam, covering the lady with a six-shooter, cleaned the table, and that's the whole case in a nutshell.

The morning I arrived in Panama the temperature was that of a forcing-house, 93° in the shade.

Built on a low-lying neck of land, baked on the surface during the dry season by a sun whose vertical rays are scorching beams of heat, and deluged in the rainy season by downfalls of torrid liquid, Panama is the most unattractive city I have ever entered. The streets are narrow and unclean, lined with small houses made of infinitely light material, built for a mockery of coolness and shade, and about them, over them, and around them everywhere are growing banks of green, the most verdant, dense and rank green the eye ever beheld. Of sanitary arrangements there seemed to be none. Dirt of every kind lies about freely, to be swept away or left to putrify as fate may direct. The town has between twenty-five and thirty thousand people, and is never free from pestilence or plague of some kind. It is shunned by cooling breezes and its atmosphere is charged with the dense, overpowering vapour of tropical vegetation. Thousands of people, men and women, are moping about from morning till night, drinking, dying, always drinking and dying, and there seems to be no help for it.

In the days of old it was famous for wealth and was sacked by Morgan, the buccaneer, and by Daniels, the pirate, and in those days was an asylum for cut-throats, freebooters, pirates, and black, brown and white criminals who fled here for a safe anchorage. Panama City, from its earliest settlement, has been, and is, the dark and noise-some sepulchre of all ambition and heroism, the Nemesis of De Lesseps, and its canal will be the toughest, roughest, and rankest proposition ever undertaken by the Washington government since the Civil War. The houses and gardens of the better class are to the north of the city. Here the streets are broader and are planted with trees for shade, each house having a garden of its own with palms and creepers and a profusion of tropical flowers. Many of them are cool, airy habitations with open doors and windows, overhanging porticos and rooms into which a stray breeze may enter, but no sun. The lawns are planted in mangoes, oranges, papaws, and bread-fruit-trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. The borders of one of these lawns was blazing with varieties of the single hibiscus, crimson, pink and fawn colour, the largest I had ever seen.

I came overland from Colon on the Atlantic to this city by the Panama railroad. The iron road bridging the isthmus is forty-seven miles in length, with twenty-four stations and signal platforms. The fare for the forty-seven miles is ten dollars, and an excess of forty pounds of baggage is paid for at the rate of ten cents a pound. The Panama road is a bonanza, and its shares are so valuable that they are not listed on the market.

At Panama the company has constructed a huge dock, which, with its warehouses, cost three hundred thousand dollars. The road was begun in 1851, and it is a common saying in this city and Colon that for every sleeper or tie on the road a human life was sacrificed. This, no doubt, is an exaggeration, but one thing is certain, the company never published a list of the number who perished in the construction of the road. The Irish labourers, more exposed by reason of their exuberance of spirit and the richness of their blood, were almost exterminated, till the agents of the company at New York and New Orleans refused to forward Irish or Scottish labourers to the isthmus. Then negroes were imported in thousands from the West Indies, but though immune to yellow fever, they fell victims to the putrid water and the blazing sun. Then Chinese coolies were tried, and they died as fish die out of water. Many of them committed suicide, others died in paroxysms of chagres fever, and the rest, frightened, broken in spirit, and discouraged, returned home. The line of the railway, and Panama in particular, is a huge cemetery.

This city is teeming with weird romance. Here the pirates sold their plunder, exacted tribute, fought desperate duels and squandered the robber gains in riot and gambling. I passed over the plazuela where Johnny-crows picked the pirates' bones, and where to-day little children with chocolate-coloured faces and dark brown eyes stare timidly and curiously at the blue-eyed and fair-haired intruder from beyond the sea. To all young Canadians who may be tempted by alluring promises to come here when the Americans begin work on the canal, I say, stay away; but if you must come, engage in the best business the place affords—start a coffin factory, and with your first order have one made to your own measure.

Before I came to Panama I thought all work had long ago stopped on the canal, but I am told that up to the day of Panama's Declaration of Independence about fifteen hundred negroes were shovelling, digging, and wheeling on the great contract. To keep alive its charter the company was expected to expend at least forty-five thousand dollars monthly in prosecuting the works. From ocean to ocean as the crow flies is twenty-nine miles. When completed the canal will be about fifty miles in length, or twenty-four miles longer than our Welland. The three greatest obstacles in the building of the waterway are the Culebra (snake) Mountain, three hundred feet high, the control of the Chagres River, and the climate. The canal is more than half cut through. There is a trench one hundred and sixty feet deep already through the Culebra saddle, and only one hundred and ninety feet remain to be dug.

For a time this mountain offered an almost insurmountable difficulty. For sixty feet from the surface the cut was composed of soft, spongy, sliding soil, and the enormous mass to be removed called for machinery of great power and weight, which sank into the yielding earth. Another and seeming insurmountable obstacle was and is the control of the waters of the Chagres River. To turn into the Pacific the course of this river, which flows from the Andes to the Atlantic, or to build a huge earth dam at Bohio across the river and turn its waters westward, is a problem the American engineers will have to solve.

When finished, the distance from Liverpool to Yokohama will be shortened by four thousand miles. Thirty-six miles are now dug to a depth of twenty-eight feet. When this wonderful enterprise was begun by M. De Lesseps twenty years ago, it was calculated to a mathematical certainty that one hundred and fifty millions of dollars would complete the work.

This mathematical certainty, supported by the prestige of and admiration for the great engineer of the Suez Canal, tempted the thrifty French peasantry to pour their savings into De Lesseps' lottery-box and keep on pouring till the bubble burst, entailing ruin upon thousands and driving hundreds to suicide. Nor was M. De Lesseps far afield in his estimates. American engineers who are here looking over the ground tell me that the prodigality, unbounded extravagance and waste of material ate up more than the canal itself. In those days forty thousand men were employed on the works, and money flowed as water in a mining camp.

Speaking of the prodigality of the officials, Albert G. Smith, formerly one of the section "bosses," now living in Mexico, said to me that nothing could exceed the extravagance of the official class, and that the richest firm on earth would have gone bankrupt under similar conditions. One instance which goes to show the recklessness of these men was when Ferdinand De Lesseps expressed his intention of visiting the isthmus. Immediately the commissioners of the canal company began the erection of a $195,000 dwelling, which was completed and ready to receive the distinguished engineer upon his arrival. He remained but a few weeks, and his term of occupancy on the occasion of both visits did not exceed a month. The building has been vacant ever since, and stands near the abandoned machinery that was ordered to be dumped from the ship into the sea, because some official had been interrupted at dinner by the importunities of the captain who, having been in the harbour some days, wished to clear port.

In these few eventful years there was not grouped on any place on earth so much foul disease, such a hideous manure heap of moral and physical abomination as was then concentrated on this isthmus. Adventurers, card sharpers, keepers of dives, bunco men and fallen women all swarmed to Panama as vultures swoop upon carrion. Every one gambled, and many in sheer desperation took their lives when brooding over their losses at the gaming table. One instance in particular was that of a young man, who after saving up some fifteen thousand dollars, had decided to return to New York City, his birthplace, and build for his mother and only sister a home that would keep them comfortable for the rest of their days. The evening before sailing he took a stroll through the gambling section of the town. He watched the play of some of his friends and then, jocularly remarking that he would win his passage home, he placed a bet on the cloth. At midnight he was a beggar. Saying nothing to any one he deliberately left the room and placing a pistol to his head blew out his brains. The incident was most pathetic, and caused a deep impression at the time. The population of the state of Panama is about three hundred thousand, and is composed of various elements, Spanish, Indian, negro, mulatto, and a limited number from European countries and the United States engaged in commerce.

Colon, or Aspinwall, as it is sometimes called, has a population of about thirty-five hundred, and has one of the best hotels on the isthmus. In company with one of the canal officials I visited the works at Colon and drove four or five miles along the banks of the waterway. In the early days of the digging, owing to the awful heat and frequent rains, men died so fast that it was impossible to keep track of their deaths. The canal company and the railway company had separate hospitals at Colon and Panama, and the capacity of each was taxed all the time. The railway company had a morgue in Aspinwall, and white men were stored in its vaults ten deep awaiting burial. Men soon lost all fear of death, and despite the warnings of physicians, would carouse nightly and inhale the deadly vapours which exuded from the earth, to fall victims next day to the chagres and yellow fevers.

The canal from the Atlantic side goes through a tropical jungle and through earth feculent for unnumbered ages with parasitical and vegetable decay. It is the abode of the deadly chagres fever, typhus, dysentery and yellow fever. Here snakes abound, and mosquitoes, scorpions and centipedes make existence for the white man almost intolerable. Half buried in the rank earth lie costly machinery, dredges, pneumatic drills and steam shovels, which were found unsuited to the work and cast aside as so much scrap iron. Here came thousands of the loose negro population of the West Indies, tempted by the alluring bait of a dollar or two dollars a day. Half of them are buried along the banks of the canal; the other half returned home with enough money to buy a few acres of banana land and close out their lives in comfort and indolence.

Here, too, lie mouldering the skeletons of French engineers, sub-contractors, clerks and petty officials, who left La Belle France with glorious expectations, the promise of big pay, and the hope of rapid promotion. What killed them ? The climate ? No, the same monster that killed hundreds when Hamilton Merritt, away back in the thirties, was digging the Welland Canal. Then it was the "fever and ague" produced by foul water and air tainted by the exhalations arising from the low ground and marshes through which the lines were run. But the monster of Panama is merciless in his cruelty and rarely spares a white man. If you place but an atom of the earth that is taken from a foot below the surface under a microscope, it will palpitate with life, but it is life which means death to you.

From the disturbed soil there rises a warm vapour charged with deadly bacteria which play havoc with the strongest constitutions. This mephitic mist is the hideous wraith of the canal monster, the horrible, impalpable thing that haunts swamps and marshes and is in the earth omnipresent. Only those who have followed an Indian trail through a tropical forest where perpetual twilight reigns and damp heat prevails, have any idea of the rapid and rank vegetation of equatorial lands. It is a vegetation of matted and gigantic vines, of fleshy plants and strange trees festooned with lianas and monster creepers where insects riot, and the air is oppressive with the odour of diurnal flowers. Among these forest plants and vines the struggle for possession of the soil never ends. Even the monster trees are sometimes strangled in the grip of the tough and matted bush-rope that coils around, cuts through the bark, and saps the life out of them.

I have seen this fibrous parasite, nearly as thick as a man's body, twisted like a corkscrew around a monarch of the forest, and rearing its head high above the topmost branches. With us in Canada nearly all trees and plants are anemophilous, but here they are fertilized by insect agency. As a result the woods, marshes and swamps swarm with life, night and day. In the forest every plant is a perennial, and as no sunlight ever enters, the air is soggy and the vegetation steaming and rank. More than that, there are herbaceous trees, rich in pith, which, unlike the forest trees that grow by concentric rings, require no other conditions for their life than prevail here—a warm soil, great humidity, and an atmosphere saturated with carbonic acid gas. In this sunless heat every noxious plant and tree luxuriates. Make a few yards clearing this morning and to-morrow some new and nameless growth, with snake-like appearance, is twisting, twining and coiling, as if alive, searching for food or support.

When death comes, and death is as rapid as life in this isthmus, the decay fills the air with poisonous exhalations. This rank vegetation and insect life eternally growing and decaying for thousands of years have superimposed upon the primitive earth layer upon layer of dank mould, where myriads of deadly germs swarm, where noxious gases are germinated, and within which death in its most hideous aspects lingers. How Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific, ever cut his way through this matted forest and carried his ships in sections over the isthmus is, to this day, an almost incredible mystery.