As to the part of Taboga in the economy of the Canal work, we have there a sanitarium inherited from the French, and used as a place of convalescence for almost recovered patients from the hospitals of the Zone. After breathing the clear, soft air, glancing at the comfortable quarters and enjoying to the fullest a lunch costing fifty cents that would put Broadway’s best to the test, and make the expensive Tivoli dining-room seem unappetizing in comparison, we could well understand why every employee with thirty days’ sick leave to his credit gets just such a slight ailment as needs a rest at Taboga for its cure.

Near Taboga is the leper hospital and the steamer stops for a moment to send ashore supplies in a small boat. Always there are about 75 victims of this dread and incurable disease there, mostly Panamanians with some West India negroes. A native of North America with the disease is practically unknown. The affliction is horrible enough in itself, but some cause operating for ages back has caused mankind to regard it with more fear than the facts justify. It is not readily communicable to healthy persons, even personal contact with a leper not necessarily causing infection unless there be some scratch or wound on the person of the healthy individual into which the virus may enter. Visitors to the Isthmus, who find interest in the spectacle of hopeless human suffering, frequently visit the colony without marked precautions and with no reported case of infection.

To what extent the sanitation system so painstakingly built up by Col. Gorgas and his associates will be continued after the seal “complete” shall be stamped upon the Canal work, and the workers scattered to all parts of the land, is not now determined. Panama and Colon will, of course, be kept up to their present standards, but whether the war against the malarial mosquito will be pursued in the jungle as it is today when the health of 40,000 human beings is dependent upon it is another question. The plan of the army authorities is to abandon the Zone to nature—which presumably includes the anopheles. Whether that plan shall prevail or whether the United States shall maintain it as an object lesson in government, including sanitation, is a matter yet to be determined. In a hearing before a congressional committee in 1913 Col. Gorgas estimated the cost for a system of permanent sanitation for the Zone, including the quarantine, at $90,000 a year. As his total estimates for the years 1913-14 amounted to $524,000, this is indicative of a very decided abandonment of activity in sanitary work.

At all times during his campaign against the forces of fever and infection Col. Gorgas has had to meet the opposition charge of extravagance and the waste of money. It has been flippantly asserted that it cost him $5 to kill a mosquito—of course an utterly baseless assertion, but one which is readily met by the truth that the bite of a single infected mosquito has more than once cost a life worth many thousand times five dollars. To fix precisely the cost of bringing the Zone to its present state of healthfulness is impossible, because the activities of the sanitary department comprehended many functions in addition to the actual work of sanitation. Col. Gorgas figures that the average expenses of sanitation during the whole construction period were about $365,000 a year and he points out that for the same period Chicago spent $600,000 without any quarantine or mosquito work. The total expenditures for sanitation when the Canal is finished will have amounted to less than one per cent of the cost of that great public work and without this sanitation the Canal could never have been built. That simple statement of fact seems sufficiently to cover the contribution of Col. Gorgas to the work, and to measure the credit he deserves for its completion.

CHAPTER XV
THE REPUBLIC OF PANAMA

The Republic of Panama has an area of from 30,000 to 35,000 square miles, roughly approximating that of the state of Indiana. No complete survey of the country has ever been made and there is pending now a boundary dispute with Costa Rica in which the United States is arbitrator. The only other boundary, not formed by the sea, is that at which Panama and Colombia join. But Colombia says there is no boundary at all, but that Panama is one of her provinces in a state of rebellion. So the real size and bounds of the Republic must be set down as somewhat indeterminate.

The circumstances under which Panama became an independent nation have been set forth in an earlier chapter. It is safe to say that with the heavy investment made by the United States in the Canal Zone, on the strength of a treaty with the infant republic, the sovereignty of Panama will be forever maintained against all comers—except the United States itself. There are political philosophers who think that the Isthmus state may yet be the southern boundary of the Great Republic of the North. For the present however Uncle Sam is quite content with the Canal Zone and a certain amount of diplomatic influence over the government of Panama.

Panama is divided into seven provinces, Bocas del Toro, Cocle, Colon, Chiriqui, Los Santos, Panama and Veragua. Its total population by the census of 1911 was 386,749, a trifle more than the District of Columbia which has about one five-thousandth of its area, and almost precisely the same population as Montana which has less than half its size. So it is clearly not over-populated. Of its population 51,323 are set down by its own census takers as white, 191,933 as mestizo, or a cross between white and Indian, 48,967 as negro; 2313 Mongol, and 14,128 Indian. The census takers estimated that other Indians, living in barbarism remote from civilization and unapproachable by the enumerators, numbered 36,138.

All these figures have to be qualified somewhat. The mestizos are theoretically a cross between whites and Indians, but the negro blood is very generally present. It is doubtful, too, whether those classed as white are not often of mixed blood.

A singularly large proportion of the population lives in the towns. In 12 towns, exceeding 7000 inhabitants each, are more than 150,000 people. More than one-third of the people therefore are town dwellers, which is to say they are unproductive citizens. Meanwhile more than five-eighths of the arable land in the country is not under cultivation.

The five chief towns of Panama with their population in 1911 are:

Of these towns David is the capital of the Chiriqui province, the portion of the republic in which cattle growing and agriculture have been most developed. Bocas del Toro is a banana port, dependent upon that nutritious fruit for its very existence, and the center of the business of the United Fruit Company in Panama. At present the former town is reached by a 300 mile water trip from Panama City; the latter by boat from Colon. The government has under way plans for a railroad from Panama to David which give every indication of being consummated.

The soil of the Republic differs widely in its varying sections, from the rich vegetable loam of the lowlands along the Atlantic Coast, the outcome of years of falling leaves and twigs from the trees to the swamp below, to the high dry lands of the savannas and the hillsides of the Chiriqui province. All are undeniably fertile, that is demonstrated by the rapid and rank growth of the jungle. But opinions differ as to the extent to which they are available for useful agriculture. Some hold that the jungle soil is so rich that the plants run to wood and leaves to the exclusion of fruits. Others declare that on the hillsides the heavy rains of the rainy seasons wash away the surface soil leaving only the harsh and arid substratum. This theory seems to be overthrown by the fact that it is rare to see a hillside in all Panama not covered with dense vegetation. A fact that is well worth bearing in mind is that there has never been a systematic and scientific effort to utilize any part of the soil of Panama for productive purposes that has not been a success. The United Fruit Company in its plantations about Bocas del Toro has developed a fruitful province and created a prosperous town. In the province of Cocle a German company has set out about 75,000 cacao trees, 50,000 coffee bushes and 25,000 rubber trees, all of which have made good progress.

The obstacles in the path of the fuller development of the national resources of Panama have sprung wholly from the nature of its population. The Indian is, of course, not primarily an agriculturist, not a developer of the possibilities of the land he inhabits. The Spanish infusion brought to the native population no qualities of energy, of well-directed effort, of the laborious determination to build up a new and thriving commonwealth. Spanish ideals run directly counter to those involved in empire building. Such energy, such determination as built up our great northwest and is building in British Columbia the greatest agricultural empire in the world, despite seven months annually of drifting snow and frozen ground, would make of the Panama savannas and valleys the garden spot of the world. That will never be accomplished by the present agrarian population, but it is incredible that with population absorbing and overrunning the available agricultural lands of other zones, the tropics should long be left dormant in control of a lethargic and indolent people.

Benjamin Kidd, in his stimulative book, “Social Evolution”, says on this subject:

“With the filling up to the full limit of the remaining territories suitable for European occupation, and the growing pressure of population therein, it may be expected that the inexpediency of allowing a great extent of territory in the richest region of the globe—that comprised within the tropics—to remain undeveloped, with its resources running largely to waste under the management of races of low social efficiency, will be brought home with ever-growing force to the minds of the Western (Northern) peoples. The day is probably not far distant when, with the advance science is making, we shall recognize that it is in the tropics and not in the temperate zones we have the greatest food-producing and material-producing regions of the earth; that the natural highways of commerce in the world are those which run north and south; and that we have the highest possible interest in the proper development and efficient administration of the tropical regions, and in an exchange of products therewith on a far larger scale than has yet been attempted or imagined.... It will probably be made clear, and that at no distant date, that the last thing our civilization is likely to permanently tolerate is the wasting of the resources of the richest regions of the earth through lack of the elementary qualities of social efficiency in the races possessing them”.

Some of the modern psychologists who are so expert in solving the riddles of human consciousness that they hardly hesitate to approach the supreme problem of life after death may perhaps determine whether the indolence of the Panamanian is racial, climatic, or merely bred of consciousness that he does not have to work hard in order to get all the comforts of which he has knowledge. The life-story of an imaginary couple will serve as the short and simple annals of tens of thousands of Panama’s poor:

Miguel lived on the banks of the Chagres River, about half way between Cruces and Alhajuela. To him Cruces was a city. Were there not at least thirty huts of bamboo and clay thatched with palmetto like the one in which he lived? Was there not a church of sawn boards, with an altar to which a priest came twice a month to say mass, and a school where a gringo taught the children strange things in the hated English tongue? Where he lived there was no other hut within two or three hours poling up the river, but down at Cruces the houses were so close together you could almost reach one while sitting in the shade of another. At home after dark you only heard the cry of the whippoorwill, or occasionally the wail of a tiger cat in the jungle, but at Cruces there was always the loud talk of the men in the cantina, and a tom-tom dance at least once a week, when everybody sat up till dawn dancing to the beat of the drums and drinking the good rum that made them all so jolly.

But greater than Cruces was the Yankee town of Matachin down on the banks of the river where the crazy Americans said there was going to be a lake that some day would cover all the country, and drown out Cruces and even his father’s house. They were paying all the natives along the river for their lands that would be sunken, and the people were taking the pesos gladly and spending them gaily. They did not trouble to move away. Many years ago the French too said there would be a lake, but it never came and the French suddenly disappeared. The Americans would vanish the same way, and a good thing, too, for their thunderous noises where they were working frightened away all the good game, and you could hardly find an iguana, or a wild hog in a day’s hunting.

Once a week Miguel’s father went down to market at Matachin, and sometimes the boy went along. The long, narrow cayuca was loaded with oranges, bananas and yams, all covered with big banana leaves, and with Miguel in the bow and his father in the stern the voyage commenced. Going down stream was easy enough, and the canoists plied their paddles idly, trusting chiefly to the current to carry them along. But coming back would be the real work, then they would have to bend to their poles and push savagely to force the boat along. At places they would have to get overboard and fairly carry the boat through the swift, shallow rapids. But Miguel welcomed the work for it showed him the wonders of Matachin, where great iron machines rushed along like horses, drawing long trains of cars; where more people worked with shovels tending queer machines than there were in ten towns like Cruces; where folk gave pesos for bananas and gave cloth, powder and shot, things to eat in cans, and rum in big bottles for the pesos again. It was an exciting place this Matachin and made Miguel understand what the gringoes meant when they talked about New York, Chicago and other cities like it.

When he grew older Miguel worked awhile for the men who were digging away all this dirt, and earned enough to buy himself a machete and a gun and a few ornaments for a girl named Maria who lived in another hut near the river. But what was the use of working in that mad way—picking up your shovel when a whistle blew and toiling away until it blew again, with a boss always scolding at you and ready with a kick if you tried to take a little siesta. The pesos once a week were good, that was true. If you worked long enough you might get enough to buy one of those boxes that made music, but quien sabe? It might get broken anyway, and the iguanas in the jungle, the fish in the river and the yams and bananas in the clearing needed no silver to come to his table. Besides he was preparing to become a man of family. Maria was quite willing, and so one day they strolled off together hand in hand to a clearing Miguel had made with his machete on the river bank. With that same useful tool he cut some wooden posts, set them erect in the ground and covered them with a heavy thatch of palmetto leaves impervious to sun or rain. The sides of the shelter were left open during the first months of wedded life. Later perhaps, when they had time they would go to Cruces at the period of the priest’s regular visit and get regularly married. When the rainy season came on and walls were as necessary as a roof against the driving rain, they would build a little better. When that time came he would set ten stout uprights of bamboo in the ground in the shape of an oblong, and across the tops would fasten six cross pieces of girders with withes of vine well soaked to make them pliable. This would make the frame of the first floor of his house. The walls he would make by weaving reeds, or young bamboo stalks in and out betwixt the posts until a fairly tight basketwork filled the space. This was then plastered outside with clay. The dirt, which in time would be stamped down hard, formed the floor. For his second story a tent-shaped frame of lighter bamboo tightly tied together was fastened to the posts, and cane was tied to each of the rafters as we nail laths to scantling. Thus a strong peaked roof, about eight feet high from the second floor to the ridgepole was constructed, and thatched with palm leaves. Its angle being exceedingly steep it sheds water in the fierce tropic rain storms. The floor of the second story is made of bamboo poles laid transversely, and covered heavily with rushes and palmetto. This is used only as the family sleeping apartment, and to give access to it Miguel takes an 8-inch bamboo and cuts notches in it, into which the prehensile toes of his family may fit as they clamber up to the land of Nod. Furniture to the chamber floor there is none. The family herd together like so many squirrels, and with the bamboo climbing pole drawn up there is no danger of intrusion by the beasts of the field.

In the typical Indian hut there is no furniture on the ground floor other than a rough hewn bench, a few pieces of pottery and gourds, iron cooking vessels and what they call a kitchen, which is in fact a large flat box with raised edges, about eight square feet in surface and about as high from the floor as a table. This is filled with sand and slabs of stone. In it a little fire is built of wood or charcoal, the stones laid about the fire support the pots and pans and cooking goes on as gaily as in any modern electric kitchen. The contrivance sounds primitive, but I have eaten a number of excellent meals cooked on just such an apparatus.

Now it will be noticed that in all this habitation, sufficient for the needs of an Indian, there is nothing except the iron pots and possibly some pottery for which money was needed, and there are thousands of families living in just this fashion in Panama today. True, luxury approaches in its insidious fashion and here and there you will see a $1.25 white iron bed on the main floor, real chairs, canned goods on the shelves and—final evidence of Indian prosperity!—a crayon portrait of the head of the family and a phonograph, of a make usually discarded at home. But when Miguel and Maria start out on the journey of life a machete, a gun and the good will of their neighbors who will lend them yams until their own planting begins to yield forms a quite sufficient capital on which to establish their family. Therefore, why work?

It is beyond doubt to the ease with which life can be sustained, and the torpidity of the native imagination which depicts no joys to spur one on to effort that the unwillingness of the native to do systematic work is due. And from this difficulty in getting labor follows the fact that not one quarter of the natural resources of Panama are developed. Whether the labor problem will be solved by the distribution throughout the republic of the Caribbean blacks who have worked so well on the Zone is yet to be seen. It may be possible that because of this the fertile lands of Panama, or the savannas so admirably fitted for grazing, can only be utilized by great corporations who will do things on so great a scale as to justify the importation of labor. Today the man who should take up a large tract of land in the Chiriqui country with a view to tilling it would be risking disaster because of the uncertainty of the labor supply.

Another obstacle in the way of foreign settlement of Panama has been the uncertainty of land titles. Early surveyors seem to have been in the habit of noting as the identification marks of their lines such volatile objects as a blackbird in a tree, or such perishable ones as an ant hill or a decaying stump. Facilities for recording titles also have been ill arranged. One of the first tasks of the new Republic was to take up this matter and it has been reduced to fairly systematic form. The Republic is offering for sale great quantities of public lands long held as commons by various municipalities. Much of this land lies along the line of the railroad from Panama to David, and is of varying grades suitable for grazing, forestry or agriculture. A fixed price of 50 cents per hectare is charged, a hectare being practically 2¹⁄₂ acres. The government has gone quite efficiently into the task of disposing of these lands, and pamphlets explanatory of methods of securing titles, terms, etc., can be obtained by addressing the Administrator-General at Panama. The Pan-American Union, of Washington, D. C., has issued a pamphlet giving a summary in English of the Panamanian law bearing upon the subject.

With the lack of labor, and the uncertainty of land titles, the final impediment to the general development of the interior of Panama is to be found in the lack of roads. It is not that the roads are bad—that is the case in many of our own commonwealths. But in a great part of Panama there are literally no roads at all. Trails, choked by the jungle and so washed by the rains that they are merely lanes floored with boulders, are the rule. The heavy ox-cart is the only vehicle that will stand the going, and our light American farm wagons would be speedily racked to pieces. In the Canal Zone the Commission has built some of the best roads in the world, utilizing the labor of employees convicted of minor offenses. Stimulated by this example the Panama government has built one excellent road from the chief city across the savannas to Old Panama and thence onward into the interior. It is hoped that the spectacle of the admirable roads in the Zone will encourage the authorities of the Republic to go into road building on a large scale in their own country. In no other way can its possibilities be realized. At present the rivers afford the surest highways and land abutting them brings higher prices.

David, the largest interior town of Panama, is the central point of the cattle industry. All around it are woods, or jungles, plentifully interspersed with broad prairies, or llanos, covered with grass, and on which no trees grow save here and there a wild fig or a ceibo. Cattle graze on the llanos, sleek reddish beasts with spreading horns like our Texas cattle. There are no huge herds as on our western ranges. Droves of from ten to twenty are about the average among the small owners who rely on the public range for subsistence. The grass is not sufficiently nutritious to bring the cattle up to market form, so the small owners sell to the owners of big ranches who maintain potreros, or fattening ground sown with better grasses. A range fed steer will fetch $15 to $18, and after six or eight months on the potrero it will bring $30 to $35 from the cattle shipper at David. Since the cost of feeding a beeve for that period is only about one dollar, and as the demand is fairly steady the profit of the ranchman is a good one. But like all other industries in Panama, this one is pursued in only a retail way. The market is great enough to enrich ranchmen who would go into the business on a large scale, but for some reason none do.

Passing from llano to llano the road cuts through the forest which towers dense and impenetrable on either side, broken only here and there by small clearings made by some native with the indispensable machete. These in the main are less than four acres. The average Panamanian farmer will never incur the scriptural curse laid upon them that lay field unto field. He farms just enough for his daily needs, no more. The ambition that leads our northern farmer to always covet the lands on the other side of his boundary fence does not operate in Panama. One reason is, of course, the aggressiveness of the jungle. Stubborn to clear away, it is determined in its efforts to regain the land from which it has been ousted. Such a thing as allowing a field to lie fallow for two or three years is unknown in Panama. There would be no field visible for the new jungle growth.

Agriculture therefore is conducted in a small way only, except for the great corporations that have just begun the exploitation of Panama. Whether the country affords a hopeful field for the individual settler is at least doubtful. Its climate is excellent. The days are warm but never scorchingly hot as are customary in Washington and frequent in New York. The nights are cool. From December to May a steady trade wind blows over the Isthmus from north to south, carrying away the clouds so that there is no rain. In this dry season the fruits mature, so that it corresponds to the northern summer; on the other hand such vegetation as sheds its leaves, or dies down annually, does so at this season, giving it a seeming correspondence to the northern winter. In a temperature sense there is neither summer nor winter, and the variation of the thermometer is within narrow limits. The highest temperature in years at Culebra, a typical inland point, was 96 degrees; the lowest 61.

The list of natural products of the Isthmus is impressive in its length and variety, but for most of them even the home demand is not met or supplied by the production. Only where some stimulating force from the outside has intervened, like the United Fruit Company with the banana, has production been brought up to anything like its possibility. In the Chiriqui country you can see sugar cane fields that have gone on producing practically without attention for fifteen seasons. Cornfields have been worked for half a century without fertilizing or rotation of crops. The soil there is volcanic detritus washed down during past ages from the mountainsides, and lies from six to twenty feet thick. It will grow anything that needs no frost, but the province supports less than four people to the square mile, nine-tenths of the land is unbroken and Panama imports fruit from Jamaica, sugar from Cuba and tobacco and food stuffs from the United States.

The fruits of Panama are the orange, which grows wild and for the proper cultivation of which no effort has been made, which is equally the case with the lemon and the lime; the banana, which plays so large a part in the economic development of the country that I shall treat of it at length later; the pineapple, cultivated in a haphazard way, still attains so high an order of excellence that Taboga pines are the standard for lusciousness; the mango, which grows in clusters so dense that the very trees bend under their weight, but for which as yet little market has been found, as they require an acquired taste; the mamei, hard to ship and difficult to eat because of its construction but withal a toothsome fruit; the paypaya, a melon not unlike our cantaloupe which has the eccentricity of growing on trees; the sapodillo, a fruit of excellent flavor tasting not unlike a ripe persimmon, but containing no pit. With cultivation all of these fruits could be grown in great quantities in all parts of the Republic, but to give them any economic importance some special arrangement for their regular and speedy marketing would have to be made, as with the banana, most of them being by nature extremely perishable.

Northern companies are finding some profit in exploiting such natural resources of Panama as are available in their wild state. Of these the most promising is rubber, the tree being found in practically every part of the country. One concern, the Boston-Panama Company, has an estate approximating 400 square miles on which are about 100,000 wild rubber trees, and which is being further developed by the planting of bananas, pineapples, cocoanuts and other tropical fruits.

Coffee, sugar and cacao are raised on the Isthmus, but of the two former not enough to supply the local demand. The development of the cacao industry to large proportions seems probable, as several foreign corporations are experimenting on a considerable scale. Cocoanuts are easily grown along both coasts of the Isthmus. A new grove takes about five years to come into bearing, costing an average of about three dollars a tree. Once established the trees bring in a revenue of about one dollar each at present prices and, as the demand for Panama cocoanuts is steady, the industry seems to offer attractive possibilities. The groves must be near the coast, as the cocoanut tree needs salt air to reach its best estate. Given the right atmospheric conditions they will thrive where no other plant will take root. Growing at the edge of the sea, water transportation is easy.

There is still much land available for cocoanut planting, though but little of it is government land. Both coasts are fit for this industry, unlike the banana industry, which thrives only on the Atlantic shore. Panama is outside of the hurricane belt, which gives an added advantage to the cocoanut planter. Elsewhere in the Caribbean the trees suffer severely from the high winds.

The lumber of Panama will in time come to be one of its richest assets. In the dense forests hardwoods of a dozen varieties or more are to be found, but as yet the cost of getting it out is prohibitive in most sections. Only those forests adjacent to streams are economically valuable and such activity as is shown is mainly along the Bayano, Chucunaque, and Tuyra Rivers. The list of woods is almost interminable. The prospectus of one of the companies with an extended territory on the Bayano River notes eighteen varieties of timber, commercially valuable on its territory. Among those the names of which are unfamiliar are the espavé (sometimes spelled espevé), the cocobolo, the espinosa cedar, the zoro and the sangre. All are hard woods serviceable in cabinet making. The espavé is as hard as mahogany and of similar color and marking. The trees will run four to five feet thick at the stump with saw timber 60 to 70 feet in length. Espinosa trees are of the cedar type, growing to enormous size, frequently exceeding 16 feet in circumference. The cocobolo is a hard wood, but without the beauty to fit it for cabinet work. The sangre derives its name from its red sap which exudes from a gash like blood. It takes a high polish, and is in its general characteristics not unlike our cherry.

For the casual tourist the lumber district most easy of access is that along the Bayano River reached by a motor boat or steam launch in a few hours from Panama. The trip is frequently made by pleasure seekers, for perhaps nowhere in the world is the beauty of a phosphorescent sea at night so marvelously shown, and few places easily found by man show such a horde of alligators or crocodiles, as are seen in Crocodile Creek, one of the affluents of the Bayano. This river, which empties into the Gulf of Panama, is in its lower reaches a tide-water stream and perhaps because of the mingling of the salt and the fresh the water is densely filled with the microscopic infusoria which at night blaze forth in coldly phosphorescent gleams suggestive of the sparkling of a spray of diamonds. Put your hand into the stream, lift it and let the water trickle through your fingers. Every drop gleams and glistens as it falls with a radiance comparable with nothing in nature unless it be the great fire-flies of the tropics. Even diamonds have to pass through the hands of the cutter before they will blaze with any such effulgence as the trickling waters of this tropical stream. One who has passed a night upon it may well feel that he has lived with one of the world’s marvels, and can but wonder at the matter-of-fact manner in which the natives go about their tasks unmoved by the contact with so much shining glory.

There is always controversy on the Isthmus over the question whether the gigantic saurians of Crocodile Creek are in fact crocodiles or alligators. Whether expert scientific opinion has ever been called upon to settle the problem I do not know, but I rather suspect that crocodile was determined upon because it gave to the name of Crocodile Creek in which they are so plentifully found “apt alliteration’s artful aid” to make it picturesque. Whatever the precise zoological classification given to the huge lizards may be is likely to be relatively unimportant before long, because the greatest joy of every tourist is found in killing them. The fascination which slaughter possesses for men is always hard to understand, but just what gives the killing of alligators its peculiar zest I could never understand. The beasts are slow, torpid and do not afford a peculiarly difficult test of marksmanship, even though the vulnerable part of their bodies is small. They are timid and will not fight for their lives. There is nothing of the sporting proposition in pursuing them that is to be found in hunting the tiger or the grizzly. They are practically harmless, and in the Bayano region wholly so, as there are no domestic animals upon which they can prey. It is true their teeth and skins have a certain value in the market, but it is not for these the tourist kills them. Most of those slain for “sport” sink instantly and cannot be recovered.

However if you visit Crocodile Creek with a typical party you will be given a very fair imitation of a lively skirmish in actual war. From every part of the deck, from the roof of the cabin, and from the pilot house shots ring out from repeating rifles in a fierce desire to kill. The Emersonian doctrine of compensation is often given illustration by the killing of one of the hunters in the eagerness to get at the quarry. In fact that is one of the commonest accidents of the tourist season in Panama.

Crocodile Creek is a deep, sluggish black stream, almost arched over by the boughs of the thick forest along the shores. Here and there the jungle is broken by a broad shelving beach on which the ungainly beasts love to sun themselves, and to which the females resort to deposit their eggs. At the sound of a voice or a paddle in the stream the awkward brutes take to the water in terror, for there are few animals more timid than they. When in the water the crocodile floats lazily, displaying only three small bumps above the surface—the nostrils and the horny protruberances above the eyes. Once the pool in which they float is disturbed they sink to the bottom and lurk there for hours. Alligator hunting for business purposes is not as yet generally pursued on the Isthmus, though one hunter and trapper is said to have secured as many as 60,000 in a year. But as the demand for the skins, and to a lesser degree for the teeth, of the animals is a constant one, it is probable that with the aid of the tourists they will be exterminated there as thoroughly as they have been in the settled parts of Florida. While on the subject of slaughter and the extermination of game it may be noted that the Canal Commission has already established very stringent game laws on the Zone, particularly for the protection of plumed birds like the egret, and it is seriously proposed to make of that part of Gatun Lake within the Zone a refuge for birds in which no shooting shall be permitted. Such action would stop mere wanton slaughter from the decks of passing steamers, and in the end would greatly enhance the beauty and interest of the trip through the lake which would be fairly alive with birds and other animal life.

The Bayano River region beside being the center of such lumbering activities as the Zone knows at present is the section in which are found the curious vegetable ivory nuts which, though growing wild, have become one of the principal products of Panama. Only a few years ago they were looked upon merely as curiosities but are now a useful new material. They are gathered by the natives and sold to dealers in Panama who ship them north to be made into buttons and other articles of general use. Nobody has yet experimented with the cultivation of the tree, and there is reason to believe that with cultivation larger nuts could be obtained, and, by planting, considerable groves established. The trees grow well in every part of the Darien, and the demand, with the rapid diminution in the supply of real ivory, should be a growing one.

Indeed, the more one studies Panama and its resources the more one is convinced that all that is necessary to make the country a rich and prosperous one, or at any rate to cause it to create riches and prosperity for investors, is the application of capital, labor and systematic management to the resources it already possesses. In its 400 years of Spanish and mestizo control these three factors have been continuously lacking. There are men in Panama, of native birth and of Spanish origin, who have undertaken to develop certain of the land’s resources and have moderately enriched themselves. But the most striking evidence of the success to be obtained from attacking the industrial problem in Panama systematically and in a big way is that furnished by the operations of the United Fruit Company, the biggest business fact in the tropics.

Panama is, of course, only one link in the colossal chain of the operations of this company in the tropics. The rapidly increasing prosperity of many of the Central Republics is due largely to the sweeping scope of the United Fruit Company, and its impress is in evidence all along the north coast of South America and throughout the West Indies. Its interests in Jamaica are enormous. Cuba put Jamaica off the sugar map, but the United Fruit Company came to her rescue with an offer to purchase all the bananas her planters could furnish, and Jamaica now leads the American tropics with 17,000,000 bunches annually, of which the United Fruit Company obtains nearly half, the balance being handled by its competitors. The company also owns the famous Titchfield Hotel of Port Antonio, and operates the Myrtle Bank Hotel of Kingston. In Cuba the company owns 60,000 acres of sugar plantations and its two great sugar mills will this year add to the world’s product an amount with a market value in excess of $10,000,000. Its scores of white steamships, amazingly well contrived and fitted for tropical service, constitute one of the pleasantest features of travel on these sunlit seas.