CHAPTER III
THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA
Canal Entrance—Colon in Architectural Transformation—Unchanging Climate—Historic Waterway Routes—Columbus and the Early Explorers—Darien and San Blas—East and West Directions—Life along the Railway—Chagres River and Culebra Cut—Three Panamas—Pacific Mouth of the Canal—Functions of the Republic—Natural Resources—Agriculture and Timber—Road-building—United States Authority on the Zone—Labor and Laborers—Misleading Comparisons with Cuba—The First Year’s Experience.
WHEN the Caribbean is restive, restless is the voyager. After tossing in misery one April night I peered through the port-hole of the steamer’s cabin at what seemed a cluster of swinging lanterns dipping into the sea. They were the lights of Colon. The vessel was riding at anchor to await the morning hour when the approach to the quays could be made.
Daybreak unfolded through the mist, disclosing green foliage ridges and broken forest-clad hills sloping to a shallow bowl. This circular basin is the island of Manzanillo. The town lies as in the bottom of a saucer. Colon is not a harbor in the usual sense, for the curving Bay of Limon which it fringes is an open roadstead. The improvements by the United States will make it a commercial haven.
For all the years to come the blue horizon will be swept by the eager eye of the traveller for the Canal entrance. Seen from the ship’s deck, it is like the smooth surface of a sluggish river, broad and open. The artistic instinct of the French engineers found expression even in the prosaic work of earth excavation. They planted a village in the midst of cocoanut groves, and the palm-thatched cottages charm the eye. The bronze group of Columbus and the Indian, Empress Eugenie’s gift, allegorical of the enlightenment of the New World, may be seen through glasses, while the showy residence built for De Lesseps is discerned.
Little is noted of the town till the wharves are approached. There is a group of warehouses, a glimpse of railroad yards, a conglomeration of frame houses with peaked roofs and outside balconies and stairways, and then swamps, marshes, and hills beyond. The great transatlantic liners stretched along the docks are far more imposing than the port town itself.
Ashore, the frame structures give an impression of all that is temporary and unsubstantial. Some have been streaked with deep indigo blue, but the sun and the salt air have worn the pigment to a faded azure. Colon has little that is typically and traditionally Spanish, because when the insurgents burned it in 1885 they left only a few brick and mortar buildings. The town which then sprang up was built with economy in view, though pine lumber was not very cheap. The newer city which gradually will replace the aggregation of shanties will be more substantial and more like a permanent seaport. The Gothic brownstone church in which the Jamaica negroes and the whites who profess the Anglican form of faith worship, is the one edifice in Colon that in the transformation should be allowed to remain.
The cocoanut grove in front of the hotel, facing the Caribbean, is a pretty bit of landscape, and the statue erected to William H. Aspinwall, John L. Stephens, and Henry Chauncey, associates in the building of the Panama Railroad, if not a monument of taste, at least serves a praiseworthy purpose as a tribute to indomitable American enterprise. Ornate homes, tropical in the extreme, line the sea-front, but the residence district is a very limited one and will remain so until the swamp is filled in and the marshes cleared away. Colon may be regarded as in the process of hygienic architectural transition, and its lack of attractiveness need not be deplored. The work of reconstruction would be immensely facilitated if another fire could sweep across the marshes and leave nothing but the brownstone church, the hotel, and the wharves.
Colon is the most typically cosmopolitan place upon the Isthmus, and will continue so until the world’s commerce begins to flow through the waterway. Then the city of Panama will share with it in this respect. But Panama does not have in so full a degree the European mixture as Colon, for the crews of the transatlantic vessels seldom get across to the Pacific port. In all the mingling of tongues in Colon—German, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, dialect Indian, Greek, Swedish, and many varieties of English—nothing is so mellow and so distressing in whining intonation as the broad cockney accent of the Jamaica blacks.
The work accomplished by the Panama Railroad Company, hygienically and otherwise, serves as a basis for the physical regeneration of Colon which must accompany the Canal construction. Its provisions for its employees, its hospitals, and its general sanitary regulations were so well conceived and carried out that their value as an example and a precedent is very great. The engineering problem is comparatively simple. It is to raise the level of the island of Manzanillo, and then to provide sanitary conveniences and enforce hygienic principles both for the community and for the individual. The question of water supply is one of gathering the plentiful showers of heaven in cisterns and distilling them. A system of waterworks which will bring pure water from the springs of the Cordillera is not impracticable.
Colon is hot and humid. Its climate cannot be modified by artificial devices. During the dry season, which is from April to July, the mean temperature is nearly 90° Fahrenheit in the shade, while in the sun it is 110°. The humidity is about 77 per cent. In the rainy season the mean temperature is 85°, and the humidity varies from 86 per cent to complete saturation. The annual rainfall is seldom less than 125 inches. A man six feet in stature standing on the shoulders of another man of equal height, would just about be able to keep his shoulders above water if the two were placed in a reservoir which would catch and hold the entire rainfall of the year. But in spite of heat and humidity and precipitated moisture, existence can be made passably comfortable.
As the traveller takes his way across the Isthmus, he may wish also to view in retrospect the waterways that have been conceived in the brains of men who were ahead of their times, and the paths of trade and travel that have been followed; for now, in the presence of actual construction along a determined course, these pioneer routes quickly fade into oblivion.
The projects have been many. They were to unlock the key of the universe and to throw open a gateway to the Pacific. Columbus explored the Mosquito coast in search of the passage to the Indies, and thought he had found another Ganges, though the strait which he sought was obstinate in hiding itself. He planned colonies at the Gulf of Uraba, or Darien. Balboa and his companions, among whom was Pizarro, from near the same place, 200 miles east of the Chagres, hewed their way through tropical forest jungle and over mountains till they reached the summit of Piuri, from which they saw the Pacific and named the ocean inlet San Miguel Bay in honor of St. Michael. A few years later Balboa had “the little boats” carried over this path from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Long afterward, more than a century and a half, Sir John Morgan led his loyal buccaneers in Balboa’s footprints to the bloody sacking of the opulent city of Panama.
But the early Spaniards found a shorter route for their traffic. At different periods the Chagres was followed from its mouth till within twenty miles of Panama, and then the jungle was pierced by paths. Yet this was not the camino real, or king’s highway. That royal road was a cobble-paved mule trail from Portobello, twenty miles east of what is now Colon, to Santes on the upper Chagres, and thence to Panama. This is the route over which the traffic passed for two centuries. The land trails could be tested. The canal courses could only be dreamed or projected in the imagination.
Of the three interoceanic routes which have become historic, the early explorers, Spanish and Portuguese, thought most of the Darien or Caledonian cross-cut channel. It was to start north of the Gulf of Darien, near the bay which afterward became known as Caledonian Bay, and follow a general direction southwest to the Pacific. Señor Don Angel Savedro, one of the first petitioners to Charles V for an interoceanic waterway, had this general direction in his mind. This was the route advocated by the Scotch banker, William Patterson, in his broad scheme for Great Britain to save control of the Antilles, by seizing Havana, acquiring the Isthmus, and constructing an isthmian canal in order to carry the blessings of commerce and civilization to the Sandwich Islands.
During the nineteenth century the Darien general route was no less earnestly advocated than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the mythical low level had many believers. Frederick M. Kelley, the New York banker, who gave fortune and a life’s ambition to the project of an interoceanic waterway, also based his hopes on the Darien route. It required the explorations of Commander Selfridge and subsequent American expeditions, as well as the investigations of Reclus and Wyse for the French company, to dissipate the unfounded hopes regarding Darien.
The San Blas route, being the shortest, should have had more advocates, for it is only thirty-one miles across from ocean to ocean, but the solid mountain wall of the Cordillera discouraged most of the early explorers. Its merits and demerits were made familiar to the public through the discussions in Congress.
It was of the upper Chagres route that the intrepid Frenchman, Champlain, whose voyage to the West Indies and the Isthmus in 1602 seems to be historically established, wrote: “At Panama is a little river which rises in the mountains and descends to Porte Bello, which river is four leagues from Panama ... and being embarked on the said river there are but eighteen leagues to Porte Bello. One may judge that if the four leagues of land which there are from Panama to this river were cut through, one might pass from the South Sea to the ocean on the other side and thus shorten the route by more than 1,500 leagues; and from Panama to the Straits of Magellan would be an island, and from Panama to the Newfoundlands would be another island, so that the whole of America would be in two islands.”
The Raspadura channel, by which the Jesuit Fathers were said to have made the passage from ocean to ocean in canoes with a very short portage, lacks historical verification.
The Chagres route was included in the broad vision of the future which Lopez de Guevara had in the middle of the sixteenth century. The realization of his dreams may be for the twenty-fifth century. He proposed the union of the two oceans by three canals opening in three points,—the Chagres in Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec.
Before following the jungle-screened railway line or tracing the course of the Canal with its luxurious border of tropical vegetation, it is desirable to clear away geographical confusion. The Isthmus of Panama extends almost directly east and west. It is the contour of the two continents as formed by a neck not simply awry but completely twisted,—in popular language, a gooseneck. The entire West Coast of South America, except a slight bulge near the Equator, lies east of the longitude of Cleveland, Ohio. Panama City is about on the north and south line with Pittsburg. It is southeast of Colon, and the general direction of the Canal from the Atlantic entrance, therefore, will be southeast.
The route selected by the French engineers, and which with some variation will be continued by the United States, does not need detailed description. The course of the Canal can be observed in the railroad journey to Gatun, where the first view is had of the defiant Chagres fed by its twenty-one tributaries. I have seen the Chagres a tame, sleeping brook, losing itself in the tropical jungle or the narrow gorges, and again have looked on it when it was a wild, resistless torrent. The engineering problems never can be fully appreciated until one has seen the Chagres sweeping on in its conquering career.
Native customs and the mixed life of Canal construction are seen at the stations along the railway. Every village has its collection of parrots and monkeys. The sights differ from the scenes in other parts of the Isthmus, because of this intermingling of foreigners, largely Chinese and Jamaican. But the inhabitants are so markedly of the local type that they may be easily distinguished from the foreign mixture. The aboriginal Indian race, of which there are various branches, forms a third of the inhabitants. The Panameñan is about three-fourths Indian blood and one-fourth Spanish, although farther away from the Canal Zone a very strong negro element exists, due to the introduction of African slavery by the early Spaniards. The natives, from their familiarity with the jungles and their ability to withstand the hardships of the climate and the exposure, are useful principally to the exploring parties and the pioneering expeditions. They are too indolent for the actual work of excavation.
The Culebra Cut is not seen to full advantage from the railway, yet a fair idea may be obtained of the task involved in cutting the spine of the Cordillera or the Continental Divide at this the lowest depression, 272 feet. The excavation and removal of the material from this section is said to be the controlling factor in the Canal construction. The valley with the city of Panama huddled at the foot of Mt. Ancon, and Taboga Isle in the bay, are seen to advantage from Culebra.
There are three Panamas. One is primitive Panama, in jungle-covered ruins, a few miles from the present port. This was the city whose opulence was the envy of the world until its treasures awakened the greed of Morgan and his fellow freebooters and became their spoil. Then the new town was built and fortified. It is gloriously mediæval with all its Spanish and Moorish buildings, its cluster of emerald rocks in the bay, its high tides and its mixed nationalities, with little Italy and modernized China side by side. But the present Panama attracts only at a distance, and will be attractive only at a distance until modern sanitation can be installed and some of its picturesqueness be destroyed in the interests of public and private hygiene.
Rivalry exists between Panama and Colon over their relative climatic attractions. Panama is much drier than the Caribbean seaport, the annual rainfall usually being not more than 70 inches and the humidity of the atmosphere not so great. But 90° Fahrenheit in the shade is the average mean temperature, and the humidity is penetrating enough to serve all practical purposes of discomfort.
The new Panama is at La Boca, the Pacific mouth of the Canal. This is the railway terminus, and it is there the United States authorities created the port of Ancon and then abandoned the plan of collecting customs duties in competition with the Isthmian Republic. Wharves are located there, and for shipping the place offers some advantages over the port of Panama. The present Panama with its population of 25,000 is congested. Its old buildings are overcrowded. They are solid, substantial, and will last for centuries yet; but the natural movement of population, especially in view of the enormous rents demanded in Panama, will be to seek the new city which will grow up as a frame town with elements of stability. Much business is certain to drift to the Canal mouth, some of it in American hands. The mercantile community in the days when Colombia controlled the Isthmus was anything but Colombian. It was West Indian, Italian, Chinese, German, French, American, and English. It is the same to-day and will be the same to-morrow.
The United States is the paramount authority on the Isthmus, the control of the Canal Zone making it such, and its duty to itself and its responsibility to the world could be discharged in no other way. Yet there is also the government of the Republic of Panama,—a protected commonwealth. All that needs to be understood is Article I of the Hay-Varilla Treaty. This says that the United States guarantees and will maintain the independence of the Republic of Panama.
In its political relations the Spanish term may be adopted, and the Republic may be said to be “in function” within the sphere of the United States. I omit particulars of the governmental system in order to examine the industrial resources and prospects. Details of administration are unnecessary, because the authority exercised by the American officials in the Canal Zone, and the supervising power over sanitation in Colon and Panama, take the subject out of its local limitations. The liberality shown by President Roosevelt’s administration in adjusting the jurisdiction of the United States on the broad lines laid down by Secretary Taft, left the Panama government free to work out its commercial and industrial growth through its own measures and to the full extent of its own abilities as a commonwealth. A full account of fiscal policy may be omitted, with the general statement that international traffic in transit as taxed by port dues is not subjected to heavy burdens, while the imposts on domestic trade are not severe. While a tariff in the protective sense may not be said to exist, the system of ad valorem valuations secures a customs revenue which places all merchandise under tribute. Internal taxation has many forms, modelled, as it is, after the Spanish system. In addition the income from the $10,000,000 received from the United States assures that the government will continue to be a “going” concern, in practical operation as well as in legal phraseology.
For the student of political institutions the interest is in the moulding of the inheritance of Spanish laws and Spanish administrative system to American models and the influence of an environment so pronounced as the American control of the Canal Zone. The evolution of the civic spirit, instead of being under the shadow of an unfriendly Power, is in the sunshine of a big genial Republic.
In its soil of decayed vegetation the Isthmus, with an area equal to the State of Indiana, has natural wealth enough for the subsistence of a continent. But it is tropical natural wealth, much of which exists under conditions unfavorable for development. Timber exploitation may one day open the longitudinal path eastward from the Canal Zone through the health-destroying jungles to the Gulf of Darien. Mahogany and others of the precious hardwoods offer the temptation. But the trail will be blazed slowly, a score or so of miles each decade. The mineral deposits also lie to the east. They will aid in the conquering of this hitherto unconquered region, yet gradually.
The territory which will be developed most rapidly is that lying principally west of the Canal Zone and extending to the limits of Costa Rica. Tropical agriculture in the hands of natives of the temperate countries is entirely practicable in this region, much of which has a climate markedly superior to the belt lying between Colon and Panama in the valleys of the Chagres and the Grand Rivers. The fruit industry, and in particular banana culture, has made rapid strides, but its possibilities are only in their beginning. Coffee cultivation was becoming a profitable business until the political disturbances ruined it. The revival may be expected within the five years necessary to bring the trees to the point of commercial production. Ivory nuts, rubber, and the infinite variety of minor tropical products will be stimulated by the market that will be opened. In the extreme west along the Pacific slope, where grazing has been enough of an agricultural industry to create the flourishing town of David, an enduring basis will be given to the live-stock industry.
But none of this agricultural growth can precede the building of roads. These are totally lacking in the interior. The Panama government made sensible provision out of its first revenues for this form of internal improvement, and the policy may be looked upon as a continuous one. The railroad line of development will be from Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic slope to David on the Pacific coast. Bocas del Toro will reach the Canal Zone by a railway through the banana-producing lands, and David in time may be connected with Panama.
In the general sense the prosperity of the Isthmus for many years depends more on the excavation work and on the international commerce than on its internal resources. It is this which will swell the trade of $2,000,000 or $2,500,000 annually to greater figures. Yet the waterway is the sure harbinger of the exploitation of the productive founts. The Canal community and the Canal construction are the potent economic factors.
When all is said, the Zone is the thing. The laws administered may not in their entirety be American laws, but they are such in spirit. Actually, the Canal Zone is a semi-military camp. It must continue such for purposes of sanitation and law and order during the entire period of Canal construction. What follows is the establishment of a colony within the Republic of Panama, yet not of it. This colony, which includes laborers, civilian officials, occasional detachments of marines, and a police force, is not apt at any time greatly to exceed 25,000 persons. The early estimates of the very large number of laborers who would be required were reduced when the engineers began to make closer study of the degree to which improved machinery could be used in the excavation and other work. It will be a conglomerate mass,—Jamaican and other West Indian negroes, Chinese coolies, Mexican and Central American peons, possibly a few American blacks, Italian railway workers, and similar elements. In spite of all scepticism and detraction, the Jamaica and Barbadoes negroes will do the bulk of the work on the Canal. They did the most of what was accomplished by the French company. They built the railroads along the unhealthy coast of Costa Rica. They have shown the greatest adaptability to the climate and the best capacity for hard labor. The Panama Canal will be the monumental contribution of the despised black race to civilization.
Aside from determining the engineering conditions of the Canal, which I have no purpose of discussing in this volume, the most important functions of the United States on the Isthmus are in regulating sanitation and hygiene. This regulation could not be restricted merely to the inhabitants of the Canal Zone, for to guard them against epidemics Colon and Panama had to be protected.
I never shared the enthusiasm over the rose-colored comparisons of the region lying between Colon and Panama with Havana and Cuba. Measures of hygiene, public sanitation, and even individual cleanliness will be secured on the Canal Zone and in the seaport cities. This will be valuable in decreasing the danger from yellow fever, bubonic plague, or other epidemics. And it also may be assumed that the strict supervision given by the medical officers will in a measure serve as a preventive against dysentery and enteric diseases, which are common to the tropics and especially so to the moist lands. But the Canal Zone topographically is vastly different from the island of Cuba. The Atlantic Ocean sweeps across Cuba. Every day of the year a healthful breeze is felt in the great central belt of that island. This not only purifies the northern coast, but it also invigorates the interior region, and its effect is felt even on the south coast. But in the Canal belt are the dead calms of the Pacific on one side and the limited area of the Caribbean winds on the other side. The Atlantic breezes are lost in the marshes before they reach the ridge of the Cordillera, while the zephyr which sometimes springs up in the Bay of Panama rarely extends as far as the Culebra Cut. When the Canal is completed, it will not serve as a tube through which the breezes of one ocean will whistle to the other ocean.
I write these opinions without the purpose of opening a controversy with enthusiastic scientists, medical officers, or meteorologists, but merely as a statement of climatic conditions which cannot be changed by the agency of man. There is the peculiar configuration of the Cordillera that causes the moist blankets to hang over the Isthmus and precipitates the enormous quantities of rain. Cuba has its wet season during certain months, but these rains are normal phenomena and are not supercharged with disease.
Miasma must result from the excavation of the decayed vegetation of a thousand years which constitutes the waterway line with the exception of the Culebra Cut, and yet the central belt of the Isthmus has enough of pernicious malaria even with the earth undisturbed. Experiences at Havana and elsewhere will be utilized, and the mosquito, if not exterminated, will have its harmfulness curbed. Whatever can be accomplished by artificial means to combat disease-breeding Nature will be accomplished, and no doubt need be felt regarding the efficiency of the sanitary corps as organized under the Canal Commission. But when all is not simply said but done, it comes to this: the inherent unhealthy conditions of the Canal Zone will be reduced to a minimum. The climate will not be conquered. What may happen will be to reconcile it to the presence of a larger number of inhabitants than the region heretofore has had.
For those who will dwell and work on the Isthmus the suggestions of the sanitary corps are so complete that I can add nothing except to advise to follow these instructions and to take a vacation either to the healthful mountains of Costa Rica or down the Pacific coast or back home as often as possible. The population which will be living in the Canal Zone for the next twenty years in relation to health is to be taken in the mass, and the experiences of a few individuals who have been able to regulate their own occupations with a special view to conserving their strength are not to be accepted as applying to thousands of other individuals. Nor is the result of a few months’ life on the Isthmus in its effect on the human energies to be accepted as the index of what may be expected after several years, during which the mental and the physical faculties are concentrated on one task.
The lessons of the first year’s experience are easily learned. In the beginning was the buoyant, hopeful American temperament which goes straight forward to the task and, once determined that it shall be done, takes no note of obstacles. The Canal never would be built if the spirit of pessimism obtained at the outset. Optimism is always better in a great national undertaking. A large number of cheerful and confident Americans flocked to the Isthmus to fill positions in the engineering, the clerical, the sanitary departments and on the railroad. That there were confusion and cross-purposes in administration and complaint of red tape was not important. Actually the Washington authorities cut far more of the red tape than ordinarily can be done safely in government enterprises. But within a few months loud complaints were heard about low wages, the high cost of living, the long hours of labor, and the lack of recreation and amusement. Then the discouraged employees began to come home. They were of two classes. Many of the early home-comers were the adventurous fellows who had gone to Panama wanting a new experience and having had it more rapidly than they had anticipated, returned to spread the discontent. There was the other, and perhaps the more numerous, class who had gone in good faith, expecting to find conditions as to health and personal comfort similar to the United States, and intending to stay. It is likely, too, that both classes, working as they were for the government, expected easier conditions than would obtain in private employment.
The unvarying tendency of the returning employees was to discredit the glowing official and semi-official reports which had been made, and the promises held out of immunity from even the common ailments, including lassitude and homesickness. Then came the yellow fever epidemic of the Summer of 1905 and the long period during which the health authorities were baffled in locating the focus of infection. There was also the disagreeable evidence that pernicious malaria had had time to work havoc in many strong constitutions. The picture of the panic-stricken groups struggling to get away from Colon with every vessel may have been a little overdrawn, but that the feeling throughout the Isthmus was one of illy suppressed and contagious terror was undeniable. Yet to those experienced in tropical diseases the mortality was not an excessive one, nor were the general health conditions bad, allowance being made for surroundings. The permanent hospital records and vital statistics unquestionably will show that wonders were really worked under a scientific and systematic sanitation and provisions for conserving the health of employees. But the medical officials in their spirit of hopefulness had predicted freedom from the inevitable diseases of the Isthmus of Panama, and the failure of their prophecies caused the disappointing results to be exaggerated.
Generally, during the first year the United States suffered from too much expert opinion and advice regarding engineering and administrative work of the Canal and too little practical application to the task in hand. This was not true of the sanitary authorities, who worked harmoniously and effectively. If only they had been more conservative in their original statements, it would have been better for their reputations as prophets of health. It always is to be remembered that ditch-digging in the most humid and rainiest section of the tropics cannot be made an entirely healthful occupation, and as fast as the subsoil is turned up by the steam-shovel the earth’s resentment at being disturbed will make itself felt. The procurement of the permanent class of employees and laborers with the physical stamina and the moral fibre which the work of Canal construction requires, is necessarily an evolution and not the creation of a single year. But that class will be evolved, and the undertaking will go forward.
My own point of view is twofold. The Canal insures the industrial development of the Isthmus of Panama along the lines of tropical agriculture. It creates an international commerce and it adds to the domestic trade. It will secure an increased permanent population to replace the army of construction when the work of excavation shall be completed. This is the certainty in relation to the resources and the people. It will be good for Panama. But there is a wider good which is not local. For ten or twenty years the Canal will be a training-school in which to test and strengthen the constructive energy of the American character. Nowhere will the initiative faculty make greater demands on the individual. For those “who die victorious” the tribute of Time will be the completed Canal. For those who live the task will be from year to year out of their abundant experience to help on the industrial development of adjacent lands, among them the West Coast countries. And that is the civilization which will sweep from the Atlantic through the Canal and down the Pacific.