ON THE ISTHMUS OF PANAMA
IF Ulysses in his wanderings had attempted to cross the Isthmus of Panama his account of the adventure would not have been filled with engineering reports or health statistics, nor would it have dwelt with horror on the irregularities of the canal company. He would have treated the isthmus in language full of imagination, and would have delivered his tale in the form of an allegory. He would have told how on such a voyage his ship came upon a strip of land joining two great continents and separating two great oceans; how he had found this isthmus guarded by a wicked dragon that exhaled poison with every breath, and that lay in wait, buried in its swamps and jungles, for sailors and travellers, who withered away and died as soon as they put foot upon the shore. But that he, warned in time by the sight of thousands of men’s bones whitening on the beach, hoisted all sail and stood out to sea.
It is quite as easy to believe a story like that as to believe the truth: that for the last century a narrow strip of swamp-land has blocked the progress of the world; that it has joined the peoples of two continents without permitting them to use it as a thoroughfare; that it has stopped the meeting of two great oceans and the shipping of the world, and that it has killed with its fever half of those who came to do battle against it. There is something almost uncanny in the manner in which this strip of mud and water has resisted the advance of man, as though there really were some evil genius of the place lurking in the morasses and brooding over the waters, throwing out its poison like a serpent, noiselessly and suddenly, meeting the last arrival at the very moment of his setting foot upon the wharf, arrogant in health and hope and ambition, and leaving him with clinched teeth and raving with madness before the sun sets.
DREDGES IN THE CANAL
It is like the old Minotaur and his yearly tribute of Greek maidens, with the difference that now it is the lives of men that are sacrificed, and men who are chosen from every nation of the world, speaking every language, believing in every religion; and to-day the end of each is marked by a wooden plank in the Catholic Cemetery, in the Hebrew Cemetery, in the French Cemetery, in the English Cemetery, in the American Cemetery, for there are acres and acres of cemeteries and thousands and thousands of wooden head-stones, to which the evil spirit of the isthmus points mockingly, and says, “These are your failures.”
The fields of Waterloo and Gettysburg saw a sacrifice of life but little greater than these fifty miles of swamp-land between North and South America have seen, and certainly they saw no such inglorious defeats, without a banner flying or a comrade cheering, or the roar of musketry and cannon to inspire the soldiers who fell in the unequal battle. Those who died striving to save the Holy Land from the unspeakable Turk were comforted by the promise of a glorious immortality, and it must have been gratifying in itself to have been described as a Crusader, and to have worn the red cross upon one’s shoulder. And, in any event, a man who would not fight for his religion or his country without promises or pensions is hardly worthy of consideration. But these young soldiers of the transit and sailors of the dredging-scow had no promises or sentiment to inspire them; they were not fighting for the boundaries of their country, but redeeming a bit of No Man’s Land; not doing battle for their God, but merely digging a canal. And it must strike every one that those of them who fell doing their duty in the sickly yellow mist of Panama and along the gloomy stretches of the Chagres River deserve abetter monument to their memories than the wooden slabs in the cemeteries.
It is strange that not only nature, but man also, should have selected the same little spot on the earth’s surface in which to show to the world exactly how disagreeable and unpleasant they can make themselves when they choose. It seems almost as though the isthmus were unholy ground, and that there was a curse upon it. Some one should invent a legend to explain this, and tell how one of the priests who came over with Columbus put the ban of the Church upon the land for some affront by its people to the voyagers, and so placed it under a curse forever. For those whom the fever did not kill the canal company robbed, and the ruin that came to the peasants of France was as irredeemable as the ravages of the fever, and the scandal that spattered almost every public man in Paris exposed rottenness and corruption as far advanced as that in the green-coated pools along the Rio Grande.
THE BAY OF PANAMA
Ruins are always interesting, but the ruins of Panama fill one only with melancholy and disgust, and the relics of this gigantic swindle can only inspire you with a contempt for yourself and your fellow-men, and you blush at the evidences of barefaced rascality about you. And even the honest efforts of those who are now in charge, and who are trying to save what remains, and once more to build up confidence in the canal, reminded me of the town councillors of Johnstown who met in a freight depot to decide what was to be done with the town and those of its inhabitants that had not been swept out of existence.
There are forty-eight miles of railroad across the isthmus, stretching from the town of Panama on the Pacific side to that of Colon—or Aspinwall, as it was formerly called—on the Caribbean Sea. The canal starts a little north of the town of Panama, in the mouth of the Rio Grande River, and runs along on one side or the other of the railroad to the port of Colon. The Chagres River starts about the middle of the isthmus, and follows the route of the canal in an easterly direction, until it empties itself into the Caribbean Sea a little north of Colon.
The town of Panama, as you approach it from the bay, reminds you of an Italian seaport, owing to the balconies which overhang the water and the colored house-fronts and projecting red roofs. As seen from the inside, the town is like any other Spanish-American city of the second class. There are fiacres that rattle and roll through the clean but narrow streets behind undersized ponies that always move at a gallop; there are cool, dark shops open to the streets, and hundreds of negroes and Chinese coolies, and a handsome plaza, and some very large municipalbuildings of five stories, which appeared to us, after our experience with a dead level of one-story huts, to tower as high as the Auditorium. Panama, as a town, and considered by itself, and not in connection with the canal, reminded me of a Western county-seat after the boom had left it. There appeared to be nothing going forward and nothing to do. The men sat at the cafés during the day and talked of the past, and went to a club at night. We saw nothing of the women, but they seem to have a greater degree of freedom than their sisters in other parts of Spanish America, owing, no doubt, to the cosmopolitan nature of the inhabitants of Panama.
PANAMA CANAL ON THE PACIFIC SIDE
But the city, and the people in it, interest you chiefly because of the canal; and even the ruins of the Spanish occupation, and the tales of buccaneers and of bloody battles and buried treasure, cannot touch you so nearly as do the great, pretentious building of the company and the stories of De Lesseps’ visit, and the ceremonies and feastings and celebrations which inaugurated the greatest failure of modern times.
The new director of the canal company put a tug at our disposal, and sent us orders that permitted us to see as much of the canal as has been completed from the Pacific side. But before presenting our orders we drove out from the city one afternoon and began a personally conducted inspection of the machine-shops.
We had read of the pathetic spectacle presented by thousands of dollars’ worth of locomotive engines and machinery lying rotting and rusting in the swamps, and as it had interested us when we had read of it, we were naturally even more anxious to see it with our own eyes. We, however, did not see any machinery rusting, nor any locomotives lying half buried in the mud. All the locomotives that we saw were raised from the ground on ties and protected with a wooden shed, and had been painted and oiled and cared for as they would have been in the Baldwin Locomotive Works. We found the same state of things in the great machine-works, and though none of us knew a turning-lathe from a sewing-machine, we could at least understand that certain wheels should make other wheels move if everything was in working order, and so we made the wheels go round, and punched holes in sheets of iron with steel rods, and pierced plates, and scraped iron bars, and climbed to shelves twenty and thirty feet from the floor, only to find that each bit and screw in each numbered pigeon-hole was as sharp and covered as thick with oil as though it had been in use that morning.
This was not as interesting as it would have been had we seen what the other writers who have visited the isthmus saw. And it would have given me a better chance for descriptive writing had I found the ruins of gigantic dredging-machinesburied in the morasses, and millions of dollars’ worth of delicate machinery blistering and rusting under the palm-trees; but, as a rule, it is better to describe things just as you saw them, and not as it is the fashion to see them, even though your way be not so picturesque.
As a matter of fact, the care the company was taking of its machinery and its fleet of dredging-scows and locomotives struck me as being much more pathetic than the sight of the same instruments would have been had we found them abandoned to the elements and the mud. For it was like a general pipe-claying his cross-belt and polishing his buttons after his army had been routed and killed, and he had lost everything, including honor.
HUTS OF WORKMEN EMPLOYED ON THE CANAL
There was a little village of whitewashed huts on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, wherethe men lived who take care of the fleet and the machine-shop, and it was as carefully kept and as clean as a graveyard. Before the crash came the quarters of the men used to ring with their yells at night, and the music of guitars and banjos came from the open doors of cafés and drinking-booths, and a pistol-shot meant no more than a momentary punctuation of the night’s pleasure. Those were great days, and there were thousands of men where there are now a score, and a line of light and deviltry ran from the canal’s mouth for miles back to the city, where it blazed into a great fire of dissolute pleasure and excitement. In those days men were making fortunes in a night, and by ways as dark as night—by furnishing machinery that could not even be put together, by supplying blocks of granite that cost more in freight than bars of silver, by kidnapping workmen for the swamps, and by the simple methods of false accounts and credits. And while some were growing rich, others were living with the fear of sudden death before their eyes, and drinking the native rum that they might forget it, and throwing their wages away on the roulette-tables, and eating and drinking and making merry in the fear that they might die on the morrow.
Mr. Wells, an American engineer, was in charge of the company’s flotilla, and waited for us at the wharf.
“I saw you investigating our engines,” hesaid. “That’s all right. Only tell the truth about what you see, and we won’t mind.”
We stood on the bow of the tug and sped up the length of the canal between great dredging-machines that towered as high above us as the bridge of an ocean liner, and that weighed apparently as much as a battle-ship. The decks of some of them were split with the heat, and there were shutters missing from the cabin windows, but the monster machinery was intact, and the wood-work was freshly painted and scrubbed. They reminded me of a line of old ships of war at rest in some navy-yard. They represent in money value, even as they are to-day, five million francs. Beyond them on either side stretched low green bushes, through which the Rio Grande bent and twisted, and beyond the bushes were high hills and the Pacific Ocean, into which the sun set, leaving us cold and depressed.
THE TOP OF A DREDGE
Except for the bubbling of the water under our bow there was not a sound to disturb the silence that hung above the narrow canal and the green bushes that rose from a bed of water. I thought of the entrance of the Suez Canal, as I had seen it at Port Said and at Ismaïlia, with great P. & O. steamers passing down its length, and troop-ships showing hundreds of white helmets above the sides, and tramp steamers and sailing-vessels flying every flag, and compared it and its scenes of life and movement with this dreary waste before us, with the idle dredges rearing their iron girders to the sky, the engineers’ sign-posts half smothered in the water and the mud, and with a naked fisherman paddling noiselessly down the canal with his eyes fixed on the water, his hollowed log canoe the only floating vessel in what should have been the highway of the world.
There were about eight hundred men in all working along the whole length of the canal while we were there, instead of the twelve thousand that once made the place hum with activity. But the work the twelve thousand accomplished remains, and the stranger is surprised to find that there is so much of it and that it is so well done. It looks to his ignorant eyes as though only a little more energy and a greater amount of honesty would be necessary to open the canal to traffic; but experts will tell him that one hundred million dollars will have to be expended and seven or eight years of honest work done before that ditch can be dug and France hold a Kiel celebration of her own.
But before that happens every citizen of the United States should help to open the Nicaragua Canal to the world under the protection and the virtual ownership of his own country.
Our stay in Panama was shortened somewhat on account of our having taken too great an interest in the freedom of a young lawyer and diplomat, who was arrested while we were there, charged with being one of the leaders of the revolution.
STREET SCENE IN PANAMA
He was an acquaintance of Lloyd Griscom’s, who took an interest in the young rebel because they had both been in the diplomatic service abroad. One afternoon, while Griscom and the lawyer were sitting together in the office of the latter, five soldiers entered the place and ordered the suspected revolutionist to accompany them to the cartel. As he happened to know something of the law, he protested that they must first show him a warrant, and while two of them went out for the warrant and the others kept watch in the outer office Griscom mapped out a plan of escape. The lawyer’s office hung over the Bay of Panama, and Griscom’s idea was that he should, under the protection of the darkness, slip down a rope from the window to a small boat below and be rowed out to theBarracouta, of the Pacific Mail Company’s line, which was listed to sail that same evening up the coast. The friends of the rebel were sent for, and with their assistance Griscom made every preparation for the young rebel’s escape, and then came to the hotel and informed Somerset and myself of what he had done, and asked us to aid in what was to follow. We knew nothing of the rights or the wrongs of the revolutionists, but we consideredthat a man who was going down a rope into a small boat while three soldiers sat waiting for him in an outer room was performing a sporting act that called for our active sympathy. So we followed Griscom to his friend’s office, and, having passed the soldiers, were ushered into his presence and introduced to him and his friends. He was a little man, but was not at all alarmed, nor did he pose or exhibit any braggadocio, as a man of weaker calibre might have done under the circumstances. When we offered to hold the rope for him, or to block up the doors so that the soldiers might not see what was going forward, he thanked us with such grateful politeness that he made me feel rather ashamed of myself; for my interest in the matter up to that point had not been a very serious or a high one. Indeed, I did not even know the gentleman’s name. But as we did not know the names of the government people against whom he was plotting either, we felt that we could not be accused of partiality.
The prisoner did not want his wife to know what had happened, and so sent her word that important legal business would detain him at the office, and that his dinner was to be brought to him there. The rope by which he was to escape was smuggled past the soldiers under the napkin which covered this dinner. It was then seven o’clock and nearly dark, and as our rebelfriend feared our presence might excite suspicion, he asked us to go away, and requested us to return in half an hour. It would then be quite dark, and the attempt to escape could be made with greater safety.
But the alcalde during our absence spoiled what might have been an excellent story by rushing in and carrying the diplomat off to jail. When we returned we found the office locked and guarded, and as we walked away, in doubt as to whether he had escaped or had been arrested, we found that the soldiers were following us. As this continued throughout the evening we went across the isthmus the next morning to Colon, the same soldiers accompanying us on our way.
THE CANAL IN THE INTERIOR
The ship of warAtlantawas at Colon, and as we had met her officers at Puerto Cortez, in Honduras, we went on board and asked them to see that we were not shot against church walls or hung. They were exceedingly amused, and promised us ample protection, and though we did not need it on that occasion, I was impressed with the comforting sense that comes to a traveller from the States when he knows that one of our White Squadron is rolling at anchor in the harbor. And later, when Griscom caught the Chagres fever, we had every reason to be grateful for the presence in the harbor of theAtlanta, as her officers, led by Dr. Bartolette and his assistant surgeon, Mr. Moore, helped him through his sickness, visiting him daily with the greatest kindness and good-will.
Colon did not impress us very favorably. It is a large town of wooden houses, with a floating population of Jamaica negroes and a few Chinese. The houses built for the engineers of the canal stretch out along a point at either side of a double row of magnificent palms, which terminate at the residence intended for De Lesseps. It is now falling into decay. In front of it, facing the sea, is a statue of Columbus protecting the Republic of Colombia, represented by an Indian girl, who is crouching under his outstretched arm. This monument was presented to the United States of Colombia by the Empress Eugenie, and the statue is, in its fallen state, with its pedestal shattered by the many storms and time, significant of the fallen fortunes of that great lady herself. If Columbus could have protected Colombia from the French as he is in the French statue protecting her from all the world, she would now be the richest and most important of Central-American republics.
Colon seems to be owned entirely by the Panama Railroad Company, a monopoly that conducts its affairs with even more disregard for the public than do other monopolies in better-known localities. The company makes use ofthe seaport as a freight-yard, and its locomotives run the length of the town throughout the entire day, blowing continually on their whistles and ringing their bells, so that there is little peace for the just or the unjust. We were exceedingly relieved when the doctors agreed that Griscom was ready to put to sea again, and we were able to turn from the scene of the great scandal and its fever fields to the mountains of Venezuela, and of Caracas in particular.