INTRODUCTION

Panama.They say the word means “a place of many fishes,” but there is some dissension about the exact derivation of the name of the now severed Isthmus. Indeed dissension, quarrels, wars and massacres have been the prime characteristics of Panama for four hundred years. “A place of many battles” would be a more fitting significance for the name of this tiny spot where man has been doing ceaseless battle with man since history rose to record the conflicts. As deadly as the wars between men of hostile races, has been the unceasing struggle between man and nature.

You will get some faint idea of the toll of life taken in this conflict if from Cristobal you will drive out to the picturesque cemetery at Mount Hope and look upon the almost interminable vista of little white headstones. Each marks the last resting place of some poor fellow fallen in the war with fever, malaria and all of tropic nature’s fierce and fatal allies against all conquering man. That war is never ended. The English and the Spaniards have laid down their arms. Cimmaroon and conquistadore, pirate and buccaneer no longer steal stealthily along the narrow jungle trails. But let man forget for a while his vigilance and the rank, lush growth of the jungle creeps over his clearings, his roads, his machinery, enveloping all in morphic arms of vivid green, delicate and beautiful to look upon, but tough, stubborn and fiercely resistant when attacked. Poisoned spines guard the slender tendrils that cling so tenaciously to every vantage point. Insects innumerable are sheltered by the vegetable chevaux-de-frise and in turn protect it from the assaults of any human enemy. Given a few months to reëstablish itself and the jungle, once subdued, presents to man again a defiant and an almost impenetrable front. We boast that we have conquered nature on the Isthmus, but we have merely won a truce along a comparatively narrow strip between the oceans. Eternal vigilance will be the price of safety even there.

Photo by H. Pittier. Courtesy American Geographic Magazine. Washington.THE SENTINEL TREE

Photo by H. Pittier. Courtesy American Geographic Magazine. Washington.

THE SENTINEL TREE

If that country alone is happy whose history is uninteresting, then sorrow must have been the ordained lot of Panama. Visited first by Columbus in 1502, at which time the great navigator put forth every effort to find a strait leading through to the East Indies, it has figured largely in the pages of history ever since. Considerable cities of Spanish foundation rose there while our own Jamestown and Plymouth were still unimagined. The Spaniards were building massive walls, erecting masonry churches, and paving royal roads down there in the jungle long before thepalisades and log huts of Plymouth rose on the sandy shores of Cape Cod Bay. If the ruins of the first city of Panama, draped with tropical vines, are all that remain of that once royal city, its successor founded in 1673 still stands with parts of the original walls sturdily resisting the onslaught of time.

It appears there are certain advantages about geographical littleness. If Panama had been big the eyes of the world would never have been fastened upon it. Instinctively Columbus sought in each of its bays, opening from the Caribbean that strait which should lead to far Cathay. Seeking the same mythical passage Balboa there climbed a hill where

“—with eagle eyes,He star’d at the Pacific—and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmiseSilent upon a peak in Darien.”

Hope of a natural strait abandoned, the narrowness of the Isthmus made it the shortest route for Cortez, Pizarro and other famous Spanish robbers and murderers to follow in their quest for the gold of the Incas. As the Spaniards spoiled Peru, so the buccaneers and other pirates, belonging to foreign nations, robbed and murdered the Spaniards. The gold fever filled the narrow Isthmus full of graves, and of moldering bodies for which there was not even hasty sepulture. In time the Peruvian hoards were exhausted, Spaniards and Englishmen, buccaneers and pirates vanished. Then came a new invasion—this time by a nation unknown in the days of the Great Trade and the Royal Road. Gold had been discovered in California, and now troops of Americans fought their way through the jungle, and breasted the rapids of the Chagres River. They sought gold as had Pizarro and Cortez, but they sought it with spade and pan, not with sword and musket. In their wake came the Panama Railroad, a true pioneer of international trade. Then sprung up once more the demand for the waterway across the neck which Columbus had sought in vain.

The story of the inception and completion of the canal is the truly great chapter in the history of Panama. Not all the gold from poor Peru that Pizarro sent across the Isthmus to fatten the coffers of kings or to awaken the cupidity and cunning of the buccaneers equals what the United States alone has expended to give to the trade of the world the highway so long and so fruitlessly sought. An act of unselfish bounty, freely given to all the peoples of the earth, comes to obliterate at last the long record of international perfidy, piracy and plunder which is the history of Panama.

SCENE ON OTOQUE ISLAND, PANAMA BAY

This book is being written in the last days of constructive work on the Panama Canal. The tens of thousands of workmen, the hundreds of officers are preparing to scatter to their homes in all parts of the world. The pleasant and hospitable society of the Zone of which I have written is breaking up. Villagesare being abandoned, and the water of Gatun Lake is silently creeping up and the green advance guard of the jungle swiftly stealing over the forsaken ground. While this book is yet new much that I have written of as part of the program of the future will indeed have become part of the record of the past.

THE RANK, LUSH GROWTH OF THE JUNGLE

I think that anyone who visited the Canal Zone during the latter years of construction work will have carried away with him a very pleasant and lively recollection of a social life and hospitality that was quite ideal. The official centers at Culebra and Ancon, the quarters of the army at Camp Otis and the navy and marine corps at Camp Elliott were ever ready to entertain the visitor from the states and his enjoyment was necessarily tinged with regret that the charming homes thrown open to him were but ephemeral, and that the passage of the first ship through the canal would mark the beginning of their dismantling and abandonment. The practiced traveler in every clime will find this eagerness of those who hold national outposts, whether ours in the Philippines, or the British in India and Hong Kong, to extend the glad hand of welcome to one from home, but nowhere have I found it so thoroughly the custom as on the Canal Zone. No American need fear loneliness who goes there.

In thechapteron “Social Life on the Canal Zone” I have tried to depict this colonial existence, so different from the life of the same people when in “the states” and yet so full of a certain “hominess” after all. It does not seem to me that we Americans cling to our home customs when on foreign stations quite so tenaciously as do the British—though I observed that the Americans on the Zone played baseball quite as religiously as theBritish played cricket. Perhaps we are less tenacious of afternoon tea than they, but women’s clubs flourish on the Zone as they do in Kansas, while as for bridge it proceeds as uninterruptedly as the flow of the dirt out of the Culebra Cut.

Nobody could return from the Zone without a desire to express thanks for the hospitalities shown him and the author is fortunate in possessing the opportunity to do so publicly. Particularly do I wish to acknowledge indebtedness or aid in the preparation of this book to Col. George W. Goethals, Chairman and Engineer in Chief, and to Col. W. C. Gorgas, Commissioner and Chief Sanitary Officer. It goes without saying that without the friendly aid and coöperation of Col. Goethals no adequate description of the canal work and the life of the workers could ever be written. To the then Secretary of War, Hon. Henry L. Stimson, under whose able administration of the Department of War much of the canal progress noted in this book was made, the author is indebted for personal and official introductions, and to Hon. John Barrett, one time United States Minister to Colombia and now Director General of the Pan American Union, much is owed for advice and suggestion from a mind richly stored with Latin-American facts.

On the Canal Zone Hon. Joseph B. Bishop, Secretary of the Isthmian Canal Commission, Hon. Maurice H. Thatcher, Civil Governor, and Mr. H. H. Rousseau, the naval member of the Commission, were particularly helpful. Thanks are cordially extended to Prof. F. A. Gause, the superintendent of schools, who has built up on the Canal Zone an educational system that cannot fail to affect favorably the schools of the surrounding Republic of Panama; to Mr. Walter J. Beyer, the engineer in charge of lighthouse construction, and to Mr. A. B. Dickson who, by his active and devoted work in the development of the Y. M. C. A. clubs on the Zone, has created a feature of its social life which is absolutely indispensable.

The illustration of a book of this nature would be far from complete were the work of professional photographers alone relied upon. Of the army of amateurs who have kindly contributed to its pages I wish to thank Prof. H. Pittier of the Department of Agriculture, Prof. Otto Lutz, Department of Natural Science, Panama National Institute; Mr. W. Ryall Burtis, of Freehold, N. J.; Mr. Stewart Hancock Elliott, of Norwalk, Conn.; Mr. A. W. French, and Dr. A. J. Orenstein of the Department of Sanitation.

The opening of the Panama Canal does not merely portend a new era in trade, or the end of the epoch of trial and struggle on the Isthmus. It has a finality such as have few of the great works of man. Nowhere on this globe are there left two continents to be severed; two oceans to be united. Canals are yet to be dug, arms of the sea brought together. We may yet see inland channels from Boston to Galveston, and from Chicago to New York navigable by large steamships. But the union of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea at Suez, and the Atlantic and Pacific at Panama stand as man’s crowning achievements in remodeling God’s world. As Ambassador James Bryce, speaking of the Panama Canal, put it, “It is the greatest liberty Man has ever taken with Nature.”

RUINS OF OLD PANAMA

Dropcap T

The gray sun of a bitter February day was sinking in a swirling sea as the ship doggedly plowed its way southward along the New Jersey coast. One after another the beacons that guard that perilous strip of sand twinkled out, and one after another voyagers unused to ocean’s stormiest moods silently disappeared into secretive cabins. “It may be a stern and rockbound coast,” said one lady with poetic reminiscence, “but I wish I was on it!” For it must be set down as a melancholy truth that the voyage from New York to Colon is as a rule tempestuous.

Most who seek the Canal Zone as mere sightseers will choose winter for the trip, at which time wintry gales are the rule as far south as the Bahamas—after which the long smooth rollers of the tropical ocean will sufficiently try the unaccustomed stomach even though the breezes which accompany them be as mild as those of Araby the blest. In brief, to reach in winter our newest possession you must brave the ordinary discomforts of a rough voyage, and three days of biting cold weather as well, unless you sail from New Orleans, or the terminus of Mr. Flagler’s new over-sea railroad at Key West.

Despite its isthmian character, the Canal Zone, Uncle Sam’s most southerly outpost, may be called an island, for the travelers’ purpose. True it is bordered on but two sides by water, and thus far violates the definition of an island. But it is only to be reached by water. The other two sides are walled in by the tangled jungle where vegetation grows so rank and lush that animal life is stunted and beaten in the struggle for existence by the towering palms, clustering ferns and creeping vines. Only things that crawl on their bellies like the serpent accursed in Eden grow to their fullest estate in this network of rustling green. Lions there are, by the talk of the natives at least, but when you encounter them they turn out to be mere stunted specimens of our northern wild cat. The deer, rarely met, are dwarfed but are the largest animals to be found in the jungle, though one hears reports of giant boas. Indeed the remnants of the age of reptiles are large to our eyes, though puny in comparison with the giants that scientists christened, long centuries after they were extinct and unable to protest, with such names as ichthyosaurus. You will still find lizards or iguana, three to five feet long, if your search of the jungle be thorough. The tapir, or ant eater, too, grows to huge size. But it is not dread of wild animals that keeps man from penetrating the jungle. The swift growing and impenetrable vegetation blocks the paths as fast as cut, and he who would seek the Canal Zone must follow the oldest of highways, the sea.

TREE GROWING OUT OF A CHIMNEY IN JAMAICA

If New York be the port of departure, several lines offer themselves to the traveler, and soonafter the canal is opened their number will be increased. At present the Panama Railroad Company, owned by the government, maintains a line of ships mainly for the carriage of supplies and employes of the Canal Commission. There is already discussion of the wisdom of abandoning this line after the construction work is over, on the ground that the United States government has no right to enter into the business of water transportation in competition with private parties. If sold by the government, however, the line will doubtless be maintained under private ownership. The United Fruit Company, an American corporation with an impressive fleet of ships all flying the British flag, also carries passengers to the Isthmus from New York and New Orleans, as does the Hamburg-American Line, from New York only. My own voyage was by the Royal Mail Steam Packet line, an historic organization chartered in 1839 for the express purpose of bringing England into closer touch with its West Indian colonies. The excellent ships of this line, sailing fortnightly from New York, touch at the little port of Antilla on the northern shore of Cuba, spend twenty-four hours at Jamaica and reach Colon on the eighth day of the voyage. Thence the ship plows along through our American Mediterranean, touching at Trinidad, St. Kitts, Barbadoes and other British colonial outposts until at last she turns into the open ocean, buffeting her way eastward to Gibraltar and Southampton, her home port.

CANE RIVER FALLS

A real bit of England afloat is the “Oruba” with officers clad on festive occasions in full dress uniforms closely resembling those of the Royal Navy, and stewards who never dropped dishes in a storm but dropped their h’s on the slightest provocation. “’E’s in the ’old, mum,” explained one when a lady inquired for the whereabouts of a missing dog. It is wonderful after all how persistent are the British manners and customs in the places the English frequent. From the breakfast tea, bloaters and marmalade, to the fish knives sensibly served with that course at dinner, but which finicky Americans abjure, all about the table on these ships is typically English. In the colonies you find drivers all turning to the left, things are done “directly” and not “right away,” every villa has its tennis court, and Piccadilly, Bond St., and Regent Street are never missing from the smallest colonial towns.

But to return to the voyage. For four days we steamed south along a course as straight as though drawn by a ruler. For three days the wind blew bitter and cutting, the seas buffeted the weather side of the ship with resounding blows, and the big dining saloon displayed a beggarly array of empty seats. Betwixt us and Africa was nothing but a clear course for wind and wave, and both seemed to suffer from speed mania. Strange noises rose from the cabins; stewardesses looked business-like and all-compelling as they glided along the narrow corridors. Hardened men in the smoke room kept their spirits up by pouring spirits down, and agreed that the first leg of a voyage to Colon was always a beastly one.

But by the morning of the fourth day a change comes over the spirit of our dreams. The wind still blows, but it is soft, tempered to the shorn lamb. The ship still rolls, but the mysterious organ called the stomach has become attuned to the motion and ladies begin to reappear on the deck. The deck chairs so blithely rented at New York are nolonger untenanted, and we cease to look upon the deck steward who took our money as a confidence man. A glance at the chart at noon shows us off the northern coast of Florida and the deep blue of the water betokens the Gulf Stream. Next morning men begin to don their white suits, and the sailors wander about barefooted. A bright girl suggests that a voyage from New York to the tropics is like a shower bath taken backwards, and we all are glad that the warm water faucet is at last turned on.

THE ROAD TO MARKETA typical highway of Jamaica, followed by natives going to Kingston

The first land we sight after the Jersey coast has faded away is Watling Island, in the Bahamas. Everybody looks at it eagerly—a long, low-lying coast with a slender lighthouse, a fishing village and the wreck of a square rigged vessel plainly visible—for this is believed to be the first land sighted by Columbus. Of that there is some debate, but there is always debate on shipboard and any event that will furnish a topic is welcome. Everything about the ship now has turned tropical. The shady deck becomes popular, and the 240 pound ship’s doctor in immaculate white linen with the cutest little shell jacket after the Royal Navy pattern becomes a subject for wonder and admiration.

Antilla, the first stopping place on the way south, is a cluster of houses on a spacious bay on the northern side of Cuba, connected with Santiago and Havana. Doubtless some day it may become a notable shipping point, and indeed the shores of thebay are dotted with great sugar houses and carpeted with fields of shimmering green cane. But today only a lighter load of timber and a few tropical products are shipped—that is if we except a bunch of tourists who have come this far on the way to Colon by rail and the short sea trip from Florida to Cuba. Most of them were in doubt whether they had improved upon the discomfort of four rough days at sea by electing twenty-four hours of rough riding on the Cuban railway instead.

SPORTS ONSHIPBOARDTHE “ORUBA”

SPORTS ONSHIPBOARD

THE “ORUBA”

Past the quarantine station which, with its red-topped hospital, looks like a seashore resort, we steam, and the boat’s prow is again turned southward. Jamaica, our next port of call, is thirty-six hours away, and at last we have placid blue water from which the flying fish break in little clouds, and a breeze suggestive of the isles of spice. The ship’s company which two days back was largely content with cots, and the innumerable worthless remedies for seasickness, always recommended by people who don’t get sick, now pines for exercise and entertainment. Young men normally sane, bestride an horizontal boom and belabor each other with pillows until one or both fall to the hospitable mattress below. Other youths, greatly encouraged by the plaudits of fair ones, permit themselves to be trussed up like fowls exposed for sale, and, with ungainly hops and lurches, bunt into each other until one is toppled to the deck. The human cockfight brings loud applause which attains its apogee when some spectator at the critical moment with a shrill cock-a-doodle-doo displays an egg. A ship in the tropics is the truest of playgrounds. We are beginning to feel the content of just living which characterizes the native of the tropics. Indeed when the deck is cleared and waxed, and the weather cloths and colored lights brought forth for the ball, most of the men who left New York full of energy find themselves too languid to participate. I don’t know whether the Royal Mailexacts of its officers an aptitude for the dance, but their trim white uniforms were always much in evidence when the two-step was in progress.

BOG WALK, JAMAICAThere are no bogs along this beautiful drive. The name was originally “Bocas del Agua,” and has been corrupted to its present form

Early on the second day out from Cuba a heavy gray mass showed clear on the horizon to the southwest. It is reported by the historians that when Queen Isabella once asked Columbus what Jamaica looked like he crumpled up a sheet of stiff paper in his palm, then partly smoothing it displayed it to the Queen. The illustration was apt. Nowhere does a more crinkly island rise from the sea. Up to a height of 7000 feet and more the mountains rise sheer from the sea with only here and there the narrowest strip of white beach at the base. For the most part the tropical foliage comes unthinned down to the water. In early morn the crests of the hills are draped with clouds, and from the valleys betwixt them masses of white mist come rolling out as the rays of the sun heat the atmosphere. For forty miles or so you steam along this coast with scarce an acre of level land between the mountains and the deep until in the distance you descry the hollow in which Kingston lies embedded. A low lying sand bar runs parallel to the shore and perhaps a mile out, forming the barrier for the harbor which is indeed a noble bay well fit to shelter navies. But the barrier, though but a few feet above high water now, is sinking gradually, and the future of Kingston’s harbor is somewhat distressing. Once this low sandbar bore the most riotous and wicked townof history, for here stood Port Royal to which flocked the pirates and buccaneers of the Spanish Main, with their booty—doubloons, pieces of eight, beauteous Spanish señoritas and all the other attractive plunder with which the dime novels of our youth made us familiar. A right merry spot was Port Royal in those days and a pistol bullet or a swift stab in the back, though common enough, only halted the merriment for one man at a time. But fire purged Port Royal, and the pleasant pursuit of piracy began to fall into disrepute. Instead of treating the gallants who sailed under the Jolly Roger as gentlemen adventurers, civilized governments began to hang them—England being the last to countenance them in making Henry Morgan, wildest of the reckless lot, a baronet, and appointed him governor of Jamaica. Now Port Royal has shrunken to a fishing village, bordering upon the abandoned British naval station at the very harbor’s mouth.

GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, KINGSTONThe special type of reënforced concrete buildings with broad arcades is well adapted to the tropics

One sees there the emplacements for guns, but no guns; the barracks for marines, but no men. Even the flagstaff rises dismally destitute of bunting. No sign of military or naval life appears about the harbor. The first time I visited it a small British gunboat about the size of our “Dolphin” dropped anchor and sent four boatloads of jackies ashore for a frolic, but on my second visit the new Governor of the colony arrived on a Royal Mail ship, unescorted by any armed vessel, and was receivedwithout military pomp or the thunder of cannon.

The fact of the matter is that the ties uniting Jamaica to the mother country are of the very slenderest, and it is said that not a few Jamaicans would welcome a change in allegiance to the United States. The greatest product of the island is sugar. Our tariff policy denies it entrance to our market, though as I write Congress is debating a lower tariff. The British policy of a “free breakfast table” gives it no advantage in the English markets over the bounty-fed sugar of Germany. Hence the island is today in a state of commercial depression almost mortuary. An appeal to Canada resulted in that country giving in its tariff a 20 per cent advantage to the sugar and fruit of the British West Indies. Thus far, however, Jamaica has refused this half a loaf, wishing the preferential limited to her products alone.

KING STREET, KINGSTON, JAMAICA

Meanwhile English writers of authority are openly discussing the likelihood of Jamaica reverting to the United States. In its South American supplement the LondonTimessaid in 1911, speaking of the United States: “Its supremacy in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean Sea is today practically undisputed; there can be little doubt, therefore, that the islands of the West Indies and the outlying units of Spanish America will, upon the completion of the Panama Canal, gravitate in due course to amalgamation with the Great Republic of the North.” And Mr. Archibald Colquhoun, an authoritative writer on British West Indian policy,said about the same time: “It is certain that Jamaica, and other West Indian Islands, in view of the local geographical and economic conditions—and especially in view of the change which will be wrought in those conditions by the opening of the Panama Canal—must sooner or later decide between Canada and the United States.”

This situation may lead the Imperial Government to throw Jamaica a sop in the shape of heavy expenditures for fortifications, a large resident garrison and a permanent naval station. But it is unlikely. If Kingston is within easy striking distance of the Canal, it is within easier striking distance of our powerful naval base at Guantanamo. The monopoly of striking is not conferred on any one power, and the advantage of striking first would be open to either.

Not impressive as viewed from the water, the town is even less so when considered in the intimacy of its streets. An air of gray melancholy pervades it all. In 1907 an earthquake rent the town into fragments, and the work of rebuilding is but begun. Ruins confront you on every hand, the ruins of edifices that in their prime could have been nothing but commonplace, and in this day of their disaster have none of the dignity which we like to discover in mute memorials of a vanished past. Over all broods a dull, drab mantle of dust. The glorious trees, unexcelled in variety and vigor, have their richly varying hues dulled by the dust, so that you may not know how superb indeed is the coloring of leaf and flower except after one of the short sharp tropical rains that washes away the pall and sets the gutters roaring with a chocolate colored flood.

JAMAICA, WHERE MOTORING IS GOOD

Copyright, 1913, by F. E. WrightDUKE STREET, KINGSTON, JAMAICABeauty, dignity and pathos abide in the residence streets of the ancient colonial town. Hard times for sugar planters, even more than the earthquake, have cast a gloom over the community.

DUKE STREET, KINGSTON, JAMAICABeauty, dignity and pathos abide in the residence streets of the ancient colonial town. Hard times for sugar planters, even more than the earthquake, have cast a gloom over the community.

Making due allowance for the tropical vegetation and the multitudinous negro, there is much that is characteristically English about Kingston. The houses of the better class of people, however fragile in construction, stand somewhat back from the street, guarded by ponderous brick walls in order that the theory “every Englishman’s house is his castle” may be literally maintained. And each house has its name painted conspicuously on its gate posts. The names are emphatically English and their grandeur bears no apparent relation to the size of the edifice. Sometimes they reach into literature. I saw one six-room cottage labeled “Birnamwood,” but looked in vain about the neighborhood for Dunsinane.

WOMEN ON THE WAY TO MARKET“The woman or the donkey furnishes transportation”

The town boasts a race course, and the triple pillars of English social life, cricket, lawn tennis and afternoon tea, are much in evidence. The Governor is always an Englishman and his home government, which never does things by halves, furnishes him with a stately official residence and a salary of £5000 a year. The Episcopal Archbishop of the West Indies resident there is an Englishman. But most of the heads of official departments are Jamaicans, which is quite as it should be, for out of the 850,000 people in the island only about 1660, according to the census of 1911, were born in England, Scotland or Ireland. Furthermore the number of “men from home” is relatively decreasing, although their influence is still potent. Even the native Jamaican of the more cultivated class speaks of England as home, and as a rule he spends his holidays there. Yet the keenest observers declare that the individual Englishman in Jamaica always remains much of a stranger to the native people. He is not as adaptable even as the American, andit is asserted that American influence in the island grows even as British domination is weakened.

One home feature which the English have impressed upon the islands is good roads. The highways leading from Kingston up into the hills and across the island to Port Antonio and other places are models of road making. They are of the highest economic value, too, for in marketing farm products the one railroad is but little used. Nearly everything is brought from farm to market on the heads of the striding women, or in straw panniers slung over the backs of patient donkeys. Amazing are the loads these two patient beasts of burden—biped and quadruped—bear. Once in a while a yoke of oxen, or a one horse cart is seen, but in the main the woman or the donkey furnishes transportation. To the Jamaican there is nothing wrong with the verbiage of the Tenth Commandment to which our progressive women take violent exception. To him there is nothing anomalous in lumping in his or his neighbor’s wife with “his ox or his ass.” So the country roads on a market day are an unending panorama of human life, of women plodding to market—often a two days’ journey—with a long swinging stride, burden firmly poised on head, or returning with smaller loads gossiping and laughing with much gleaming of white teeth as the stranger passes. The roads are a paradise for automobilists—smooth, of gentle grade, with easy curves and winding through the most beautiful scenery of tropic hillsides and rushing waters. Only the all-pervading dust mars the motorists’ pleasure.

A YARD AND ITS TENANTS“The huts are inconceivably small, a trifle larger than billiard tables”

If the air is dusty, the prevailing complexion is dusky. For in this island of about 850,000 peopleonly about 15,000 are listed in the census as “white,” and the whiteness of a good many of these is admittedly tarnished by a “touch of the tarbrush.” As in every country in which any social relation between the races is not remorselessly tabooed—as it is in our southern states—the number of “colored” people increases more rapidly than that of either black or white. There were in 1834, 15,000 whites out of the population of 371,000; there are today 15,605, but the blacks and mongrels have increased to more than 800,000. The gradations in color in any street group run from the very palest yellow to the blackest of Congo black. That is hardly the sort of population which the United States desires to take to its bosom.

COALING TRANSATLANTIC STEAMSHIPS

The Jamaica negro is a natural loafer. Of course he works when he must, but betwixt the mild climate, the kindly fruits of the earth and the industry of his wife or wives, that dire necessity is seldom forced upon him. My first glimpse of industrial conditions in Jamaica was taken from the deck of a ship warping into dock at Kingston. Another ship, lying at the same dock, was being coaled. Down and up the 1000 feet or so of dock tramped long files of indescribably ragged, black and dirty figures. Those going down bore on their heads baskets piled high with coal, going back they bore the baskets empty. Of the marching figures fully two-thirds were women. With tattered skirts tucked up to the knees and the merest semblance of waists, barefooted, they plodded along. The baskets carried about 65 pounds of coal each, and for taking one from the pile and emptying it into the ship’s bunkers these women received half a cent. There was no merriment about the work, no singing as among our negro roustabouts on the Mississippi. Silently with shoulders squared, hands swinging in rhythm and basket poised firmly on the head, the women strode along, working thus for perhaps eight or nine hours and then flocking home chatting noisily as they darkened the streets and forced the white-clad tourists to shrink aside from grimy contact. On the country roads you find lines of women carrying fruit and vegetables to market, but seldom a man. Yet thus far that weaker sex has not developed a suffragette, although they support the colony.

There is much head work in Jamaica, even if there be little brain work. The negroes carry everything on their heads. The only hat I saw on a man’s kinky poll was an old derby, reversed, filled with yams and thus borne steadily along. A negro given a letter to deliver will usually seek a stone to weight it down, deposit it thus ballasted amidst his wool and do the errand. In Panama an engineer told me of ordering a group of Jamaicans to load a wheel-barrow with stones and take it to a certain spot.

“Would you believe it,” he said, “when they had filled that wheel-barrow, two of the niggers lifted it to their companion’s head, balanced it and he walked off with it as contented as you please.”

The huts in which the negroes live are as a rule inconceivably small. They are just a trifle larger than a billiard table, built of wattled cane, and plastered over with clay. The roof is usually a thatchof palm branches, though sometimes ragged strips of corrugated iron are employed with much less artistic effect. In what corresponds to our tenements, the rooming places of day laborers, the yard rather than the house is the unit. So you will see on a tiny shack about the size of a playhouse for children the sign, “Rooms for Rent,” which applies not to the pigmy edifice bearing it, but to the cluster of huts set down helter skelter in the yard. The people sleep in the huts, incidentally barring them so far as the flimsy construction permits against any possible entrance of fresh air. All the other activities of life are conducted in the open—cooking, eating, sewing, gossiping. A yard is the most social place imaginable, and the system not only contributes to health by keeping people in the open air, adds to the gayety of life by grouping so many black families in one corral, reduces the high cost of living as our model tenements never can hope to, but makes one black landlord independent, for the possession of a yard with its rooms all rented leaves nothing needed for enjoyment except a phonograph and an ample supply of the rum for which the island is famous.

MARKET WOMEN AND THEIR DONKEYSThe true industrial forces of Jamaica. Men are seldom seen as carriers or sellers of produce

Racially the Jamaica peasant is a negro, with varying admixtures of white blood. The mongrel breed is steadily increasing and the pure white population relatively decreasing. Economically the peasant is either a day laborer or a servant, and as 40,000 are classed as servants in a population where the employing class is limited, it follows that employers keep many servants and the supply always exceeds thedemand. Children come rapidly to the Jamaicans. Marriage is easy and to dispense with it easier still, so that 62 per cent of the births are illegitimate. “My people are very religious,” said a missionary proudly, “but, dear me, how immoral they are!”

When girls are about twelve years old the mothers, tired of supporting them, for that task is seldom assumed by the fathers, take them to town on the first market day. The little produce being sold, the pair proceed from house to house seeking some “kine missus” who will take a school girl. In the end the child becomes the property of whoever will clothe, feed and shelter her. Pay is not expected, though when she grows helpful she is sometimes given an occasional gift of silver. The rights of the mistress are patriarchal, and whether or not she spoils the child the rod is seldom spared. When she gets to be seventeen or so the girl suddenly disappears in the night, with a bundle of her clothing. The inevitable man has crossed her path and she has gone to be his companion and slave.

ONE WAY OF CARRYING BANANASAt the docks of the United Fruit Co., mechanical carriers, so perfected as not to bruise the fruit, have replaced the leisurely negro

When you think of it there is not much economic change in her situation. She worked for her mistress for nothing—she does the same for her husband, or more commonly for her “friend.” He may work spasmodically for her when the need of actual money compels, but as a rule she is the wage earner. Always she tends the little garden and takes its slender produce to market. Sometimes she joins the coal-bearing Amazons down at the steamship docks. Often she goes back to the family which brought her up and offers her services anew—this time for a wage. Every house has two or three boxes a few feet away serving for servants’ quarters, but a girl of this type will decline these, renting instead a shack in a “yard,” taking there daily the materials for her dinner usually provided by her mistress. At its door, in a brazier, or a tiny stove, she will cook the meal for the idle “husband” and the children who arrive with mechanical regularity. After supper there is the gossip of the dozen or more women in the yard.

The rebuilding of Kingston, compelled by the earthquake, is proceeding apace. The town will lose much in quaintness, one can see that by the ruins of some of the older structures in which stately colonial outlines can be traced. But it will gain in adaptation to the climate and the ever-present earthquake menace. The main business street—King Street, of course, being a British colony—is lined on either side with arcaded concrete buildings of a uniform type. Ceilings are high, windows large and one may walk the three long blocks of the busiest business section without emerging from the shady arcades. The government buildings, occupying two full squares and setting well back from the street, are of a type that suggests the streets of India, and are also of reinforced concrete. It is the belief of the authorities that the comparative lightness of this material coupled with its resistant powers will enable it to survive any earthquake. The whole period of the shock of 1907 barely exceeded ten seconds, but its wreckage will not be repaired in ten years.

“GWINE TO DE BIG JOB”

The cargo that we have taken on from the spice-scented dock is technically called a “cargo of black ivory,” made up of negroes sailing for Colon to work on the “big job.” Good-natured, grinning negroes these, though I have heard that, on the smaller ships that carry them by hundreds for the 500 miles for five dollars each, they sometimes riot and make trouble. With us they were inoffensive, though it is perhaps as well that the passenger quarters are to windward of them. The religious sentiment is strong upon them and as the sun goes down in the waste of waters the wail of hymn tunes sung to the accompaniment of a fiddle and divers mouth organs rises over the whistle of the wind and the rumble of the machinery. One can but reflect that ten years ago, before the coming of Col. Gorgas and his sanitation system, three out of five of these happy, cheerful blacks would never return alive from the Canal Zone. Today they invite no more risk than a business man in Chicago going to his office, and when their service is ended the United States government is obligated to return them to Jamaica where for a time their money will make them the idols of the markets, lanes and yards.

Dropcap C

Colon is the most considerable town on the Caribbean Coast north and west of Cartagena. It is in fact two towns, the older one which is still subject to the jurisdiction of the Republic of Panama and which is properly called Colon; and the new or American town which is in the Canal Zone and is called Cristobal. The two are separated only by an imaginary line, though if you want to mail a letter in Colon you must use a Panama stamp, while if you get into trouble—civil or criminal—in that camp of banditti you will have meted out to you the particular form of justice which Panamanian judges keep expressly for unlucky Gringoes who fall into their clutches. The combined towns are called Cristobal-Colon, or in our vernacular Christopher Columbus. The name is half French, half Spanish, and the town is a medley of all nations. For half a century there has been trouble of various sorts about the name of the spot—which is a sort of caldron of trouble any way. The United States wanted to call the port Aspinwall, after the principal promoter of the Panama Railroad which had its terminus there, but Colombia, which at that time controlled the Isthmus, insisted on the name Colon, and finally enforced its contention by refusing to receive at its post office letters addressed to “Aspinwall.” This vigorous action was effective and the United States postal authorities were obliged to notify users of the mails that there was no longer any such place on the world’s map as Aspinwall.

TORO POINT LIGHT

The dignity of our outraged nation had to be maintained, however, and when, a little later, the commission of our Consul at Colon expired, the State Department refused to replace him because it ignored the existence of such a place as Colon, while Colombia would not admit the existence of an Aspinwallwithin its borders. Thus for some time a good democrat was kept out of a job—it was the period of democratic ascendancy. Perhaps it was pressure for this job that led our government to yield. When the French began digging the canal they chose Limon Bay, the inlet on which Colon stands, as its Atlantic terminus and established a town of their own which they called Cristobal, being the French form of Christopher. Hence Cristobal-Colon, the official name which appears on all accurate maps of the present day.

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