One morning early in March "the boss" and I crossed the suspension
bridge over the canal. A handcar and six husky negroes awaited us, and
we were soon bumping away over temporary spurs through the jungle, to
strike at length the "relocation" opposite the giant tree near Bas
Obispo that marked the northern limit of our district.
The P.R.R., you will recall, has been operating across the Isthmus
since 1855. When the United States took over the Zone in 1904 it built
a new double-tracked line of five-foot gauge for nearly the whole
forty-seven miles. Much of this, however, runs through territory soon
to be covered by Gatun Lake, nearly all the rest of it is on the wrong
side of the canal. An almost entirely new line, therefore, is being
built through the virgin jungle on the South American side of the
canal, which is to be the permanent line and is known in Zone parlance
as the "relocation." This is forty-nine miles in length from Panama to
Colon, and is single track only, as freight traffic especially is
expected, very naturally, to be lighter after the canal is opened.
Already that portion from the Chagres to the Atlantic had been put in
use--on February fifteenth, to be exact; and the time was not far off
when the section within our district--from Gamboa to Pedro
Miguel--would also be in operation.
That portion runs through the wilderness a mile or more back from the
canal, through jungled hills so dense with vegetation one could only
make one's way through it with the ubiquitous machete of the native
jungle-dweller, except where tiny trails appear that lead to squatters'
thatched huts thrown together of tin, dynamite and dry-goods boxes and
jungle reeds in little scattered patches of clearing. Some of these
hills have been cut half away for the new line--great generous "cuts,"
for to the giant 90-ton steam-shovels a few hundred cubic yards of
earth more or less is of slight importance. All else is virtually
impenetrable jungle. Travelers by rail across the Isthmus, as no doubt
many ships' passengers will be in the years to come while their steamer
is being slowly raised and lowered to and from the eighty-five-foot
lake, will see little of the canal,--a glimpse of the Bas Obispo "cut"
at Gamboa and little else from the time they leave Gatun till they
return to the present line at Pedro Miguel station. But in compensation
they will see some wondrous jungle scenery,--a tangled tropical
wilderness with great masses of bush flowers of brilliant hues,
gigantic ferns, countless palm and banana trees, wonderfully slender
arrow-straight trees rising smooth and branchless more than a hundred
feet to end in an immense bouquet of brilliant purplish-hue blossoms.
"The boss" barely noticed these things. One quickly grows accustomed to
them. Why, Americans who have been down on the Zone for a year don't
know there's a palm-tree on the Isthmus--or at least they do not
remember there were no palm-trees in Keokuk, Iowa, when they left there.
Along this new-graveled line, still unused except by work-trains, we
rode in our six negro-power car, dropping off in the gravel each time
we caught sight of any species of human being. Every little way was a
gang, averaging some thirty men, distinct in nationality,--Antiguans
shoveling gravel, Martiniques snarling and quarreling as they wallowed
thigh-deep in swamps and pools, a company of Greeks unloading
train-loads of ties, Spaniards leisurely but steadily grading and
surfacing, track bands of "Spigoties" chopping away the aggressive
jungle with their machetes--the one task at which the native Panamanian
(or Colombian, as many still call themselves) is worth his brass-check.
Every here and there we caught labor's odds and ends, diminutive
"water-boys," likewise of varying nationality, a negro switch-boy
dozing under the bit of shelter he had rigged up of jungle ferns,
frightening many a black laborer speechless as we pounced upon him
emerging from his "soldiering" in the jungle; occasionally even a
native bushman on his way to market from his palm-thatched home
generations old back in the bush, who has scarcely noticed yet that the
canal is being dug, fell into our hands and was inexorably set down in
spite of all protest unless he could prove beyond question that he had
already been "taken" or lived beyond the Zone line.
Thus we scribbled incessantly on, even through the noon hour, dragging
gangs one by one away from their tasks, shaking laborers out of the
brief after-lunch siesta in a patch of shade. "The boss" was hampered
by having only two languages where ten were needed. In the early
afternoon he went on to Paraiso to feed himself and the traction power,
while I held the fort. Soon after rain fell, a sort of advance agent of
the rainy season, a sudden tropical downpour that ran in rivulets down
across the pink card-boards and my victims. Yet strange to note, the
writing of the medium soft pencil remained as clear and unsmudged as in
the driest weather, and so clean a rain was it that it did not even
soil my white cotton shirt. I continued unheeding, only to note with
surprise a few minutes later that the sun was shining on the dense
green jungle about me as brilliantly as ever and that I was dry again
as when I had set out in the morning.
"The boss" returned, and when I had eaten the crackers and the bottle
of pink lemonade he brought, we pushed on toward the Pacific. Till at
length in mid-afternoon we came to the top of the descent to Pedro
Miguel and knew that the end of our district was at hand. So powerful
was the breeze from the Atlantic that our six man-power engine sweated
profusely as they toiled against it, even on the downgrade of the
return to Empire.
To "Scotty" had been assigned my Empire "recalls" and I had been given
a new and virgin territory,--namely, the town of Paraiso. It lies
"somewhat back from the village street," that is, the P.R.R. Indeed,
trains do not deign to notice its existence except on Sundays. But
there is the temporary bridge over the canal which few engineers
venture to "snake her across" at any great speed, and the enumerator
housed in Empire need not even be a graduate "hobo" to be able to drop
off there a bit after seven in the morning and prance away up the
chamois path into the town.
Wherever on the Zone you espy a town of two-story skeleton screened
buildings scattered over hills, with winding gravel roads and trees and
flowers between there you may be sure live American "gold" employees.
Yet somehow the Canal Commission had dodged the monotony you expected,
somehow they have broken up the grim lines that make so dismal the
best-intentioned factory town. There are hints that the builders have
heard somewhere of the science of landscape gardening. At times these
same houses are deceiving, for all I. C. C. buildings bear a strong
family resemblance, and it is only at the door that you know whether it
is bachelors' quarters, a family residence, or the supreme court.
From the outside world "P'reeso" scarcely draws a glance of attention;
but once in it you find a whole Zone town with all the accustomed
paraphernalia of I. C. C. hotel and commissary, hospital and police
station, all ruled over and held in check by the famous "Colonel" in
command of the latter. Moreover Paraiso will some day come again into
her own, when the "relocation" opens and brings her back on the main
line, while proud Culebra and haughty Empire, stranded on a railless
shore of the canal, will wither and waste away and even their broad
macadamed roads will sink beneath a second-growth jungle.
Renson had come to lend assistance. He set to work among the negro
cabins, the upper gallery seats of Paraiso's amphitheater of hills, for
Renson had been a free agent for more than a month now and was not
exactly in a condition to interview American housewives. My own task
began down at the row of inhabited box-cars, and so on through shacks
and tenements with many Spanish laborers' wives. Then toward noon the
labor-train screamed in, with two "gold" coaches and many open
cattle-cars with long benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily six
hundred men in the six cars, who swept in upon the town like a flood
through a suddenly opened sluiceway as the train barely paused and
shrieked away again.
Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, where hundreds of
sun-bronzed foreigners, divided only as to color, packed pell-mell
around a score of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and tumble
food--yet so different from the old French catch as catch can days when
each man owned his black pot and toiled all through the noon-hour to
cook himself an unsanitary lunch. We jotted them down at express speed,
with changes of tongue so abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and
in the place where our minds should have been sounded only a confused
chaotic uproar like a wrangling within the covers of a polyglot
dictionary. Then suddenly I landed a Russian! It was the final straw. I
like to speak Spanish, I can endure the creaking of Turks attempting to
talk Italian, I can bend an ear to the excruciating "French" of
Martinique negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but I will
NOT run the risk of talking Russian. It was the second and last case
during my census days when I was forced to call for interpretative
assistance.
At best we caught only a small percentage at each table before the
crowd had wolfed and melted away. An odd half dozen more, perhaps, we
found stretched out in the shade under the mess-hall and neighboring
quarters before the imperative screech of the labor-train whistle ended
a scene that must be several times repeated, and now left us silent and
alone, to wander wet and weary to the nearest white bachelor quarters,
there to lie on our backs an hour or more till the polyglot jumble of
words in the back of our heads had each climbed again to its proper
shelf.
Speaking of white bachelor quarters, therein lay the enumerator's
greatest problem. The Spaniard or the Jamaican is in nine cases out of
ten fluently familiar with his companion's antecedents and pedigree. He
can generally furnish all the information the census department calls
for. But it is quite otherwise with the American bachelor. He may know
his room-mate's exact degree of skill at poker, he probably knows his
private opinion of "the Colonel," he is sure to know his degree of
enmity to the prohibition movement; but he is not at all certain to
know his name and rarely indeed has he the shadow of a notion when and
in what particular corner of the States he began the game of existence.
So loose are ties down on the Zone that a man's room-mate might go off
into the jungle and die and the former not dream of inquiring for him
for a week. Especially we world-wanderers, as are a large percentage of
"Zoners," with virtually no fixed roots in any soil, floating wherever
the job suggests or the spirit moves, have the facts of our past in our
own heads only. No wanderer of experience would dream of asking his
fellow where he came from. The answer would be too apt to be, "from the
last place." So difficult did this matter become that I gave up rushing
for the bus to Pedro Miguel each evening and the even more distressing
necessity of catching that premature 6:30 train each morning in Empire
and, packing a sheet and pillow and tooth-brush, moved down to Paraiso
that I might spend the first half of the night in quest of these
elusive bits of bachelor information.
Meanwhile the enrolling by day continued unabated. I had my first
experience enumerating "gold" married quarters--white American
families; just enough for experience and not enough to suffer severely.
The enrolling of West Indians was pleasanter. The wives of locomotive
engineers and steam-shovel cranemen were not infrequently supercilious
ladies who resented being disturbed during their "social functions" and
lacked the training in politeness of Jamaican "mammies." Living in
Paradise now under a paternal all-providing government, they seemed to
have forgotten the rolling-pin days of the past. It was here in Paraiso
that I first encountered that strange, that wondrous strange custom of
lying about one's age. Negro women never did. What more absurd,
uncalled-for piece of dishonesty! Does Mrs. Smith fear that Mrs. Jones
next door will succeed in pumping out of me that capital bit of
information? Little does she know the long prison sentence at "hard
labor" that stares me in the face for any such slip; to say nothing of
my naturally incommunicative disposition. Or is she ashamed to let ME
know the truth?--unaware that all such information goes in at my ears
and down my pencil to the pink card before me like a message over the
wires, leaving no more trace behind. Surely she must know that I care
not a pencil-point whether she is eighteen or fifty-two, nor remember
which one minute after her screen door has slammed behind me--unless
she has caused me to glance up in wonder at her silvering temples of
thirty-five when she simpers "twenty-two"--and to set her down as forty
to be on the safe side. Oh now, please, ladies, do not understand me as
accusing the American wives of Paraiso in general of this weakness. The
large majority were quite pleasant, frank, and overflowing with cheery
good sense. But the percentage who were not was far larger than I, who
am also an American, was pleased to find it.
But doubly astonishing were the few cases of lying by proxy. A
"clean-cut," college-graduated civil engineer of thirty-two whom one
would have cited as an example of the best type of American, gave all
data concerning himself in an unimpeachable manner. His wife was
absent. When the question of her age arose he gave it, with the
slightest catch in his voice, as twenty. Now that might be all very
well. Men of thirty-two are occasionally so fortunate as to marry girls
of twenty. But a moment later the gentleman in question finds himself
announcing that his wife has been living on the Zone with him since
1907; and that she was born in New England! Thus is he tripped over his
own clothes-line. For New England girls do not marry at fifteen; mother
would not let them even if they would.
I, too, had gradually worked my way high up among the nondescript
cabins on the upper rim of Paraiso that seem on the very verge of
pitching headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with the jar of
the next explosion, when one sunny mid-afternoon I caught sight of
Renson dejectedly trudging down across what might be called the
"Maiden" of Paraiso, back of the two-story lodge-hall. I took leave of
my ebony hostess and descended. Renson's troubles were indeed
disheartening. Back in the jungled fringe of the town he had fallen
into a swarm of Martiniques, and Renson's French being nothing more
than an unstudied mixture of English and Spanish, he had not gathered
much information. Moreover negro women from the French isles are enough
to frighten any virtuous young Marine.
"What's the sense o' me tryin' to chew the fat in French?" asked
Renson, with tears in his voice. "I ain't in no condition to work at
this census business any longer anyway. I ain't got to bed before three
in the morning this week"--in his air was open suggestion that it was
some one else's fault--"Some day I'll be gettin' in bad, too. This
mornin' a fool nigger woman asked me if I didn't want her black
pickaninny I was enumeratin', thinkin' it was a good joke. You know how
these bush kids is runnin' around all over the country before a white
man's brat could walk on its hind legs. 'Yes,' I says, 'if I was goin'
alligator huntin' an' needed bait!' I come near catchin' the brat up by
the feet an' beatin' its can off. I'm out o' luck any way, an'--"
The fact is Renson was aching to be "fired." More than thirty days had
he been subject only to his own will, and it was high time he returned
to the nursery discipline of camp. Moreover he was out of cigarettes. I
slipped him one and smoothed him down as its fumes grew--for Renson was
as tractable as a child, rightly treated--and set him to taking
Jamaican tenements in the center of town, while I struck off into the
jungled Martinique hills myself.
There were signs abroad that the census job was drawing to a close. My
first pay-day had already come and gone and I had strolled up the
gravel walk one noon-day to the Disembursing Office with my yellow pay
certificate duly initialed by the examiner of accounts, and was handed
my first four twenty-dollar gold pieces--for hotel and commissary books
sadly reduce a good paycheck. Already one evening I had entered the
census office to find "the boss" just peeling off his sweat-dripping
undershirt and dotted with skin-pricking jungle life after a day
mule-back on the thither side of the canal; an utterly fruitless day,
for not only had he failed during eight hours of plunging through the
wilderness to find a single hut not already decorated with the
"enumerated" tag, but not even a banana could he lay hands on when the
noon-hour overhauled him far from the ministrations of "Ben" and the
breeze-swept veranda of Empire hotel.
It was, I believe, the afternoon following Renson's linguistic troubles
that "the boss" came jogging into Paraiso on his sturdy mule. In his
eagerness to "clean up" the territory we fell to corraling negroes
everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying their supplies at the
commissary, sleeping in the shade of wayside trees, anywhere and
everywhere, until at last in his excitement "the boss" let his medium
soft pencil slip by the column for color and dashed down the
abbreviation for "mixed" after the question, "Married or Single?" Which
may have been near enough the truth of the case, but suggested it was
time to quit. So we marked Paraiso "finished except for recalls" and
returned to Empire.
One by one our fellow-enumerators had dropped by the wayside, some by
mutual agreement, some without any agreement whatever. Renson was now
relieved from census duty, to his great joy, there remained but four of
us,--"the boss" and "Mac" in the office, "Scotty" and I outside. A deep
conference ensued and, as if I had not had good luck enough already, it
was decided that we two should go through the "cut" itself. It was like
offering us a salary to view all the Great Work in detail, for
virtually all the excavation of any importance on the Zone lay within
the confines of our district.
So one day "Scotty" and I descended at the girderless railroad bridge
and, taking each one side of the canal, set out to canvass its every
nook and cranny. The canal as it then stood was about the width of two
city blocks, an immense chasm piled and tumbled with broken rock and
earth, in the center a ditch already filled with grimy water, on either
side several levels of rough rock ledges with sheer rugged stone faces;
for the hills were being cut away in layers each far above the other.
High above us rose the jagged walls of the "cut" with towns hanging by
their fingernails all along its edge, and ahead in the abysmal, smoky
distance the great channel gashed through Culebra mountain.
The different levels varied from ten to twenty feet one above the
other, each with a railroad on it, back and forth along which
incessantly rumbled and screeched dirt-trains full or empty, halting
before the steam-shovels, that shivered and spouted thick black smoke
as they ate away the rocky hills and cast them in great giant handsful
on the train of one-sided flat-cars that moved forward bit by bit at
the flourish of the conductor's yellow flag. Steam-shovels that seemed
human in all except their mammoth fearless strength tore up the solid
rock with snorts of rage and the panting of industry, now and then
flinging some troublesome, stubborn boulder angrily upon the cars. Yet
they could be dainty as human fingers too, could pick up a railroad
spike or push a rock gently an inch further across the car. Each was
run by two white Americans, or at least what would prove such when they
reached the shower-bath in their quarters--the craneman far out on the
shovel arm, the engineer within the machine itself with a labyrinth of
levers demanding his unbroken attention. Then there was of course a
gang of negroes, firemen and the like, attached to each shovel.
All the day through I climbed and scrambled back and forth between the
different levels, dodging from one track to another and along the rocky
floor of the canal, needing eyes and ears both in front and behind, not
merely for trains but for a hundred hidden and unknown dangers to keep
the nerves taut. Now and then a palatial motorcar, like some rail-road
breed of taxi, sped by with its musical insistent jingling bells,
usually with one of the countless parties of government guests or
tourists in spotless white which the dry season brings. Dirt-trains
kept the right of way, however, for the Work always comes first at
Panama. Or it might be the famous "yellow car" itself with members of
the Commission. Once it came all but empty and there dropped off
inconspicuously a man in baggy duck trousers, a black alpaca coat of
many wrinkles; and an unassuming straw hat, a white-haired man with
blue--almost babyish blue-eyes, a cigarette dangling from his lips as
he strolled about with restless yet quiet energy. There has been no
flash and glitter of military uniforms on the Zone since the French
sailed for home, but every one knew "the Colonel" for all that, the
soldier who has never "seen service," who has never heard the shrapnel
scream by overhead, yet to whom the world owes more thanks than six
conquering generals rolled into one.
Scores of "trypod" and "Star" drills, whole battalions of deafening
machines run by compressed air brought from miles away, are pounding
and grinding and jamming holes in the living rock. After them will
presently come nonchalantly strolling along gangs of the ubiquitous
black "powder-men" and carelessly throw down boxes of dynamite and
pound the drill-holes full thereof and tamp them down ready to "blow"
at 11:30 and 5:30 when the workmen are out of range,--those mighty
explosions that twelve times a week set the porch chairs of every
I.C.C. house on the Isthmus to rocking, and are heard far out at sea.
Anywhere near the drills is such a roaring and jangling that I must
bellow at the top of my voice to be heard at all. The entire gamut of
sound-waves surrounds and enfolds me, and with it all the powerful
Atlantic breeze sweeps deafeningly through the channel. Down in the
bottom of the canal if one step behind anything that shuts off the
breeze it is tropically hot; yet up on the edge of the chasm above, the
trees are always nodding and bowing before the ceaseless wind from off
the Caribbean. Scores of "switcheros" drowse under their sheet-iron
wigwams, erected not so much as protection from the sun, for the
drowsers are mostly negroes and immune to that, as from young rocks
that the dynamite blasts frequently toss a quarter-mile. Then over it
all hang heavy clouds of soft-coal dust from trains and shovels,
shifting down upon the black, white and mixed, and the enumerator
alike; a dirty, noisy, perilous, enjoyable job.
Everywhere are gangs of men, sometimes two or three gangs working
together at the same task. Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing gangs,
dynamite gangs, gangs doing everything imaginable with shovel and pick
and crowbar, gangs down on the floor of the canal, gangs far up the
steep walls of cut rock, gangs stretching away in either direction till
those far off look like upright bands of the leaf-cutting ants of
Panamanian jungles; gangs nearly all, whatever their nationality, in
the blue shirts and khaki trousers of the Zone commissary, giving a
peculiar color scheme to all the scene.
Now and then the boss is a stony-eyed American with a black cigar
clamped between his teeth. More often he is of the same nationality as
the workers, quite likely from the same town, who jabbers a little
imitation English. Which is one of the reasons why a force of "time
inspectors" is constantly dodging in and out over the job, time-book
and pencil in hand, lest some fellow-townsman of the boss be earning
his $1.50 a day under the shade of a tree back in the jungle. Here are
Basques in their boinas, preferring their native "Euscarra" to Spanish;
French "niggers" and English "niggers" whom it is to the interest of
peace and order to keep as far apart as possible; occasionally a few
sunburned blond men in a shovel gang, but they prove to be Teutons or
Scandinavians; laborers of every color and degree--except American
laborers, more than conspicuous by their absence. For the American
negro is an untractable creature in large numbers, and the caste system
that forbids white Americans from engaging in common labor side by side
with negroes is to be expected in an enterprise of which the leaders
are not only military men but largely southerners, however many may be
shivering in the streets of Chicago or roaming hungrily through the
byways of St. Louis. It is well so, perhaps. None of us who feels an
affection for the Zone would wish to see its atmosphere lowered from
what it is to the brutal depths of our railroad construction camps in
the States.
The attention of certain state legislatures might advantageously be
called to the Zone Spaniard's drinking-cup. It is really a tin can on
the end of a long stick, cover and all. The top is punched sieve-like
that the water may enter as it is dipped in the bucket with which the
water-boy strains along. In the bottom is a single small hole out of
which spurts into the drinker's mouth a little stream of water as he
holds it high above his head, as once he drank wine from his leather
bota in far-off Spain. Many a Spanish gang comes entirely from the same
town, notably Salamanca or Avila. I set them to staring and chattering
by some simple remark about their birthplace: "Fine view from the Paseo
del Rastro, eh?" "Does the puente romano still cross the river?" But I
had soon to cease such personalities, for picks and shovels lay idle as
long as I remained in sight and Uncle Sam was the loser.
So many were the gangs that I advanced barely a half-mile during this
first day and, lost in my work, forgot the hour until it was suddenly
recalled by the insistent, strident tooting of whistles that forewarns
the setting-off of the dynamite charges from the little red electric
boxes along the edge of the "cut." I turned back toward Paraiso and,
all but stumbling over little red-wound wires everywhere on the ground,
dodging in and out, running forward, halting or suddenly retreating, I
worked my way gradually forward, while all the world about me was
upheaving and spouting and belching forth to the heavens, as if I had
been caught in the crater of a volcano as it suddenly erupted without
warning. The history of Panama is strewn with "dynamite stories." Even
the French had theirs in their sixteen per cent, of the excavation of
Culebra; in American annals there is one for every week. Three days
before, one of my Empire friends set off one afternoon for a stroll
through the "cut" he had not seen for a year. In a retired spot he came
upon two negroes pounding an irregular bundle. "What you doing, boys?"
he inquired with idle curiosity. "Jes' a brealdn' up dis yere dynamite,
boss," languidly answered one of the blacks. My friend was one of those
apprehensive, over-cautious fellows so rare on the Zone. Without so
much as taking his leave he set off at a run. Some two car-lengths
beyond an explosion pitched him forward and all but lifted him off his
feet. When he looked back the negroes had left. Indeed neither of them
has reported for work since.
Then there was "Mac's" case. In his ambition for census efficiency
"Mac" was in the habit of stopping workmen wherever he met them. One
day he encountered a Jamaican carrying a box of dynamite on his head
and, according to his custom, shouted:
"Hey, boy! Had your census taken yet?"
"What dat, boss?" cried the Jamaican with wide-open eyes, as he threw
the box at "Mac's" feet and stood at respectful attention.
Somehow "Mac" lacked a bit of his old zealousness thereafter.
On the second day I pushed past Cucaracha, scene of the greatest
"slide" in the history of the canal when forty-seven acres went into
the "cut," burying under untold tons of earth and rock steam-shovels
and railroads, "Star" and "trypod" drills, and all else in
sight--except the "rough-necks," who are far too fast on their feet to
be buried against their will. One by one I dragged shovel gangs away to
a distance where my shouting could be heard, one by one I commanded
drillmen to shut off their deafening machines, all day I dodged
switching, snorting trains, clambered by steep rocky paths, or ladders
from one level to another, howling above the roar of the "cut" the
time-worn questions, straining my ear to catch the answer. Many a negro
did not know the meaning of the word "census," and must have it
explained to him in words of one syllable. Many a time I climbed to
some lofty rock ledge lined with drills and, gesticulating like a
semaphore in signal practice, caught at last the wandering attention of
a negro, to shout sore-throated above the incessant pounding of
machines and the roaring of the Atlantic breeze:
"Hello, boy! Census taken yet?"
A long vacant stare, then at last, perhaps, the answer:
"Oh, yes sah, boss."
"When and where?"
"In Spanish Town, Jamaica, three year ago, sah."
Which was not an attempt to be facetious but an answer in all
seriousness. Why should not one census, like one baptism, suffice for a
life-time? It was fortunate that enumerators were not accustomed to
carry deadly weapons.
Quick changes from negro to Spanish gangs demonstrated beyond all
future question how much more native intelligence has the white man.
Rarely did I need to ask a Spaniard a question twice, still less ask
him to repeat the answer. His replies came back sharp and swift as a
pelota from a cesta. West Indians not only must hear the question an
average of three times but could seldom give the simplest information
clearly enough to be intelligible, though ostensibly speaking English.
A Spanish card one might fill out and be gone in less time than the
negro could be roused from his racial torpor. Yet of the Spaniards on
the Zone surely seventy per cent, were wholly illiterate, while the
negroes from the British Weat Indies, thanks to their good fortune in
being ruled over by the world's best colonist, could almost invariably
read and write; many of those shoveling in the "cut" have been trained
in trigonometry.
Few are the "Zoners" now who do not consider the Spaniard the best
workman ever imported in all the sixty-five years from the railroad
surveying to the completion of the canal. The stocky, muscle-bound
little fellows come no longer to America as conquistadores, but to
shovel dirt. And yet more cheery, willing workers, more law-abiding
subjects are scarcely to be found. It is unfortunate we could not have
imported Spaniards for all the canal work; even they have naturally
learned some "soldiering" from the example of lazy negroes who, where
laborers must be had, are a bit better than no labor--though not much.
The third day came, and high above me towered the rock cliffs of
Culebra's palm-crowned hill, steam-shovels approaching the summit in
echelon, here and there an incipient earth and rock "slide" dribbling
warningly down. He who still fancies the digging of the canal an
ordinary task should have tramped with us through just our section,
halting to speak to every man in it, climbing out of this man-made
canon twice a day, a strenuous climb even near its ends, while at
Culebra one looks up at all but unscalable mountain walls on either
side.
From time to time we hear murmurs from abroad that Americans are making
light of catastrophies on the Isthmus, that they cover up their great
disasters by a strict censorship of news. The latter is mere absurdity.
As to catastrophies, a great "slide" or a premature dynamite explosion
are serious disaster to Americans on the job just as they would be to
Europeans. But whereas the continental European would sit down before
the misfortune and weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on his
hands, and pitches in to shovel the "slide" out again. He isn't
belittling the disasters; it is merely that he knows the canal has got
to be dug and goes ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on the
Zone. Amid all the childish snarling of "Spigoties," the back-biting of
Europe, the congressional wrangles, the Cabinet politics, the man on
the job,--"the Colonel," the average American, the "rough-neck"--goes
right on digging the canal day by day as if he had never heard a rumor
of all this outside noise.
Mighty is the job from one point of view; yet tiny from another. With
all his enormous equipment, his peerless ingenuity, and his feverish
activity all little man has succeeded in doing is to scratch a little
surface wound in Mother Earth, cutting open a few superficial veins, of
water, that trickle down the rocky face of the "cut."
By March twelfth we had carried our task past and under Empire
suspension bridge, and the end of the "cut" was almost in sight. That
day I clawed and scrambled a score of times up the face of rock walls.
I zigzagged through long rows of negroes pounding holes in rock ledges.
I stumbled and splashed my way through gangs of Martinique "muckers." I
slid down the face of government-made cliffs on the seat of my
commissary breeches. I fought my way up again to stalk through long
lines of men picking away at the dizzy edge of sheer precipices. I
rolled down in the sand and rubble of what threatened to develop into
"slides." I crawled under snorting steam-shovels to drag out besooted
negroes--negroes so besooted I had to ask them their color--while
dodging the gigantic swinging shovel itself, to say nothing of "dhobie"
blasts and rocks of the size of drummers' trunks that spilled from it
as it swung. I climbed up into the quivering monster itself to
interrupt the engineer at his levers, to shout at the craneman on his
beam. I sprang aboard every train that was not running at full speed,
walking along the running-board into the cab; if not to "get" the
engineer at least to gain new life from his private ice-water tank. I
scrambled over tenders and quarter-miles of "Lidgerwood flats" piled
high with broken rock and earth, to scream at the American conductor
and his black brakemen, often to find myself, by the time I had set
down one of them, carried entirely out of my district, to Pedro Miguel
or beyond the Chagres, and have to "hit the grit" in "hobo" fashion and
catch something back to the spot where I left off. In short I poked
into every corner of the "cut" known to man, bawling in the
November-first voice of a presidential candidate to everything in
trousers:
"Eh! 'Ad yer census taken yet?"
And what was my reward? From the northern edge of Empire to where the
"cut" sinks away into the Chagres and the low, flat country beyond, I
enrolled--just thirteen persons. It was then and there, though it still
lacked an hour of noon, that I ceased to be a census enumerator. With
slow and deliberate step I climbed out of the canal and across a pathed
field to Bas Obispo and, sitting down in the shade of her station,
patiently awaited the train that would carry me back to Empire.
Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven Zone residents had I
enrolled during those six weeks. Something over half of these were
Jamaicans. Of the states Pennsylvania was best represented. Martinique
negroes, Greeks, Spaniards, and Panamanians were some eighty per cent
illiterate; of some three hundred of the first only a half dozen even
claimed to read and write; and non-wedlock was virtually universal
among them.
Rumor has it that there are seventy-two separate states and
dependencies represented on the Isthmus. My own cards showed a few
less. Most conspicuous absences, besides American negroes, were natives
of Honduras, of four countries of South America, of most of Africa, and
of entire Australia. That this was largely due to chance was shown by
the fact that my fellow-enumerators found persons from all these
countries.
I had enrolled persons born in the following places: All the United
States except three or four states in the far northwest; Canada,
Mexico, Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Canal Zone,
Colombia, Venezuela, British Guiana (Demarara), French and Dutch
Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Chile, Cuba, Hayti and Santo
Domingo, Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent, Trinidad, Saint Lucia,
Montserrat, Dominica, Nevis, Nassau, Eleuthera and Inagua, Martinique,
Guadalupe, Saint Thomas (Danish West Indies), Curacao and Tobago,
England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden,
Norway, Russia, France, Spain, Andorra, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany,
Italy, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Servia, Turkey, Canary Islands, Syria,
Palestine, Arabia, India (from Tuticorin to Lahore), China, Japan,
Egypt, Sierra Leone, South Africa and--the High Seas.
"Where you born, boy?" I had run across a wrinkled old negro who had
worked more than thirty years for the P.R.R.
"'Deed ah don' know, boss,"
"Oh, come! Don't know where you were born?" "Fo' Gawd, boss, ah's
tellin' yo de truff. Ah don know, 'cause ah born to sea."
"Well, what country are you a subject of?"
"Truly ah cahn't say, boss."
"Well what nationality was your father?"
"Ah neveh see him, sah." "Well then where the devil did you first land
after you were born?"
"'Deed ah cahn't say, boss. T'ink it were one o' dem islands. Reckon
ah's a subjec' o' de' worl', boss."
Weeks afterward the population of Uncle Sam's ten by fifty-mile strip
of tropics was found to have been on February first, 1912, 62,810. No,
anxious reader, I am not giving away inside information; the source of
my remarks is the public prints. Of these about 25,000 were British
subjects (West Indian negroes with very few exceptions). Of the entire
population 37,428 were employed by the U. S. government. Of white
Americans, of the Brahmin caste of the "gold" roll, there were employed
on the Zone but 5,228.