CRISTOBAL-COLON; AND THE PANAMA RAILROAD
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.
[Illustration: 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 Aspinwall within 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.
[Illustration: TORO POINT BREAKWATER
Before its construction northers often made the harbor of Colon
untenable for ships]
[Illustration: THE NEW CRISTOBAL DOCKS]
It is one of the traditions of the town that a tramp steamer, commanded
by a German, came plowing in from the sea one morning and, passing
without attention the docks of Colon, went gaily on up Limon Bay until
she ran smack into the land. Being jeered at for his unusual method of
navigation the captain produced his charts. “That town is Colon? No? Is
it not so? Vell dere are two towns. My port is Colon. Cristobal comes
first. I pass it. I go on to Colon and by thunder dere is no Colon.
Nothing but mud.” It is recorded that the skipper’s explanation was
accepted and that he was acquitted of wilfully casting away his vessel.
[Illustration: “PALMS WHICH BLEND WITH THE SEA”]
We reach Colon where lie the docks of the Royal Mail in the early
morning. To the right as we steam into Limon Bay is the long breakwater
of Toro Point extending three miles into the Caribbean, the very first
Atlantic outpost of the canal. For it was necessary to create here a
largely artificial harbor, as Limon Bay affords no safe anchorage when
the fierce northers sweep down along the coast. In the early days of
Colon, when it was the starting point of the gold seekers’ trail to
Panama, ships in its harbor were compelled to cut and run for the safer,
though now abandoned, harbor of Porto Bello some twenty miles down the
coast. That condition the great breakwater corrects. From the ship one
sees a line of low hills forming the horizon with no break or
indentation to suggest that here man is cutting the narrow gate between
the oceans for the commerce of the nations to pass. The town at a
distance is not unprepossessing. White houses with red roofs cluster
together on a flat island scarcely above the water, and along the sea
front lines of cocoanut palms bend before the breeze. No other tree
seems so fitly to blend with a white beach and blue sea as this palm.
Its natural curves are graceful and characteristic and in a stiff breeze
it bows and sways and rustles with a grace and a music all its own.
But the picturesqueness of Colon does not long survive a closer
approach. The white houses are seen to be mere frame buildings of the
lightest construction which along the seafront stand out over the water
on stilts. No building of any distinction meets the eye, unless it be
the new Washington Hotel, a good bit of Moorish architecture, owned and
conducted by the Panama Railroad which in turn is owned by the United
States. The activities of Uncle Sam as a hotel keeper on the Isthmus
will be worth further attention.
[Illustration: COLON IN 1884
The author counted twelve ocean liners one day at the docks now standing
at this spot]
As we warp into the dock we observe that Colon is a seaport of some
importance already. The day I reached there last I counted six British,
two German, one French and three American steamships. The preponderance
of British flags was the first thing to catch the eye; and somehow the
feeling that, except for the Royal Mail ship, all the vessels over which
they were waving were owned by American capital was not a little
humiliating. It is quite probable that in the course of the year every
foreign flag appears at Cristobal-Colon, for the ocean tramp ships are
ever coming and going. In time, too, the docks, which are now rather
rickety, will be worthy of the port, for the government is building
modern and massive docks on the Cristobal side of the line.
At present however one lands at Colon, which has the disadvantage of
depositing you in a foreign country with all the annoyances of a custom
house examination to endure. Though your destination is the Canal Zone,
only a stone’s throw away, every piece of baggage must be opened and
inspected. The search is not very thorough, and I fancy the Panama
tariff is not very comprehensive, but the formality is an irritating
one. Protective tariffs will never be wholly popular with travelers.
The town which greets the voyager emerging from the cool recesses of the
steamship freight house looks something like the landward side of
Atlantic City’s famous board walk with the upper stories of the hotels
sliced off. The buildings are almost without exception wood, two stories
high, and with wooden galleries reaching to the curb and there supported
by slender posts. It does not look foreign--merely cheap and tawdry.
Block after block the lines of business follow each other in almost
unvarying sequence. A saloon, a Chinese shop selling dry goods and
curios, a kodak shop with curios, a saloon, a lottery agency, another
saloon, a money-changer’s booth, another saloon and so on for what seems
about the hottest and smelliest half mile one ever walked. There is no
“other side” to the street, for there run the tracks of the Panama
railroad, beyond them the bay, and further along lies the American town
of Cristobal where there are no stores, but only the residences and work
shops of Canal workers. Between Cristobal and tinder box Colon is a wide
space kept clear of houses as a fire guard.
Colon’s population is as mixed as the complexions of its people. It must
be admitted with regret that pure American names are most in evidence on
the signboards of its saloons, and well-equipped students of the social
life of the town remark that the American vernacular is the one usually
proceeding from the lips of the professional gamblers. Merchandising is
in the main in the hands of the Chinese, who compel one’s admiration in
the tropics by the intelligent way in which they have taken advantage of
the laziness of the natives to capture for themselves the best places in
the business community.
[Illustration: FIRE-FIGHTING FORCE AT CRISTOBAL]
Most of the people in Colon live over their stores and other places of
business, though back from the business section are a few comfortable
looking residences, and I noticed others being built on made land, as
though the beginnings of a mild “boom” were apparent. The newer houses
are of concrete, as is the municipal building and chief public school.
The Panama Railroad owns most of the land on which the town stands, and
to which it is practically limited, and the road is said to be
encouraging the use of cement or concrete by builders--an exceedingly
wise policy, as the town has suffered from repeated fires, in one of
which, in 1911, ten blocks were swept away and 1200 people left
homeless. The Isthmian Canal Commission maintains excellent
fire-fighting forces both in Cristobal and Ancon, and when the local
fire departments proved impotent to cope with the flames both of these
forces were called into play, the Ancon engines and men being rushed by
special train over the forty-five miles of railroad. Of course the fire
was in foreign territory, but the Republic of Panama did not resent the
invasion. Since that day many of the new buildings have been of
concrete, but the prevailing type of architecture may be described as a
modified renaissance of the mining shack.
[Illustration: THE NEW WASHINGTON HOTEL]
It is idle to look for points of interest in Colon proper. There are
none. But the history of the town though running over but sixty years is
full of human interest. It did not share with Panama the life of the
Spanish domination and aggression. Columbus, Balboa and the other
navigators sailed by its site without heed, making for Porto Bello or
Nombre de Dios, the better harbors. San Lorenzo, whose ruins stand at
the mouth of the Chagres River, looked down upon busy fleets, and fell
before the assaults of Sir Henry Morgan and his buccaneers while the
coral island that now upholds Colon was tenanted only by pelicans,
alligators and serpents. The life of man touched it when in 1850 the
American railroad builders determined to make it the Atlantic terminus
of the Panama road. Since then it never has lost nor will it lose a true
international importance.
[Illustration: THE ONLY STONE CHURCH IN COLON
The ritual is of the Church of England; the congregation almost wholly
Jamaica negroes]
Manzanilla Island, on which the greater part of Colon now stands, was
originally a coral reef, on which tropical vegetation had taken root,
and died down to furnish soil for a new jungle until by the repetition
of this process through the ages a foot or two of soil raised itself
above the surface of the water and supported a swampy jungle. When the
engineers first came to locate there the beginnings of the Panama
railroad, they were compelled to make their quarters in an old sailing
ship in danger at all times of being carried out to sea by a norther. In
his “History of the Panama Railroad,” published in 1862, F. N. Otis
describes the site of the present city when first fixed thus:
[Illustration: NATURE OF COUNTRY NEAR COLON
Through this water-logged region the Panama railroad was built at heavy
cost in money and lives]
“This island cut off from the mainland by a narrow frith contained an
area of a little more than one square mile. It was a virgin swamp,
covered with a dense growth of the tortuous, water-loving mangrove, and
interlaced with huge vines and thorny shrubs defying entrance even to
the wild beasts common to the country. In the black slimy mud of its
surface alligators and other reptiles abounded, while the air was laden
with pestilential vapors and swarming with sandflies and mosquitoes.
These last proved so annoying to the laborers that unless their faces
were protected by gauze veils no work could be done even at midday.
Residence on the island was impossible. The party had their headquarters
in an old brig which brought down materials for building, tools,
provisions, etc., and was anchored in the bay.”
That was in May, 1850. In March, 1913, the author spent some time in
Colon. Excellent meals were enjoyed in a somewhat old-fashioned frame
hotel, while directly across the way the finishing touches were being
put to a new hotel, of reinforced concrete which for architectural taste
and beauty of position compares well with any seashore house in the
world. At the docks were ships of every nation; cables kept us in
communication with all civilized capitals. Not an insect of any sort was
seen, and to discover an alligator a considerable journey was necessary.
The completed Panama Railroad would carry us in three hours to the
Pacific, where the great water routes spread out again like a fan. In
half a century man had wrought this change, and with his great canal
will doubtless do more marvelous deeds in the time to come.
[Illustration: PANAMA POTTERY SELLERS]
Once construction of the road was begun shacks rose on piles amid the
swampy vegetation of the island. At certain points land was filled in
and a solid foundation made for machine shops. The settlement took a
sudden start forward in 1851 when a storm prevented two New York ships
from landing their passengers at the mouth of the Chagres River.
The delayed travelers were instead landed at Colon, and the rails having
been laid as far as Gatun, where the great locks now rise, they were
carried thither by the railroad. This route proving the more expeditious
the news quickly reached New York and the ships began making Colon their
port. As a result the town grew as fast and as unsubstantially as a
mushroom.
[Illustration: HINDOO LABORERS ON THE CANAL
At one time several hundred were employed but they are disappearing]
It was a floating population of people from every land and largely
lawless. The bard of the Isthmus has a poem too long to quote which
depicts a wayfarer at the gate of Heaven confessing to high crimes,
misdemeanors and all the sinful lusts of the flesh. At the close of the
damning confession he whispered something in the ear of the Saint, whose
brow cleared, and beaming welcome took the place of stern rejection. The
keeper of the keys according to the poet cried:
“Climb up, Oh, weary one, climb up!
Climb high! Climb higher yet
Until you reach the plush-lined seats
That only martyrs get.
Then sit you down and rest yourself
While years of bliss roll on.
Then to the angels he remarked,
‘_He’s been living in Colon!_’”
[Illustration: SAN BLAS BOATS AT EARLY DAWN]
With the completion of the Pacific railroads in the United States the
prosperity of Colon for a time waned. There was still business for the
railroad, as there has been to the present day, and as it is believed
there will be in the future despite the Canal. But the great rush was
ended. The eager men hurrying to be early at the place where gold was to
be found, and the men who had “made their pile” hastening home to spend
it, took the road across the plains. Colon settled down to a period of
lethargy for which its people were constitutionally well fitted. Once in
a while they were stirred up by reports of the projected Canal, and the
annual revolutions--President Roosevelt in a message to Congress noted
53 in 57 years--prevented life from becoming wholly monotonous. But
there was no sign of a renewal of the flush times of the gold rush until
late in the ’70’s the French engineers arrived to begin the surveys for
the Canal. By the way, that Isthmus from Darien to Nicaragua is probably
the most thoroughly surveyed bit of wild land in the world. Even on our
own Canal Zone where the general line of the Canal was early determined
each chief engineer had his own survey made, and most of the division
engineers prudently resurveyed the lines of their chiefs.
[Illustration: SAN BLAS INDIAN BOYS]
With the coming of the French, flush times began again on the Isthmus
and the golden flood poured most into Colon, as the Canal diggers made
their main base of operations there, unlike the Americans who struck at
nature’s fortifications all along the line, making their headquarters at
Culebra about the center of the Isthmus. But though the French failed to
dig the Canal they did win popularity on the Isthmus, and there are
regretful and uncomplimentary comparisons drawn in the cafés and other
meeting-places between the thrift and calculation of the Americans, and
the lavish prodigality of the French. Everything they bought was at
mining-camp prices and they adopted no such plan as the commissary
system now in vogue to save their workers from the rapacity of native
shopkeepers of all sorts.
[Illustration: SAN BLAS LUGGER PUTTING OUT TO SEA]
At Cristobal you are gravely taken to see the De Lesseps Palace, a huge
frame house with two wings, now in the last stages of decrepitude and
decay, but which you learn cost fabulous sums, was furnished and
decorated like a royal château and was the scene of bacchanalian feasts
that vied with those of the Romans in the days of Heliogabalus. At least
the native Panamanian will tell you this, and if you happen to enjoy his
reminiscences in the environment of a café you will conclude that in
starting the Canal the French consumed enough champagne to fill it.
[Illustration: THE ATLANTIC FLEET VISITS THE ISTHMUS]
Mr. Tracy Robinson, a charming chronicler of the events of a lifetime on
the Isthmus, says of this period: “From the time that operations were
well under way until the end, the state of things was like the life at
‘Red Hoss Mountain’ described by Eugene Field:
‘When the money flowed like likker....
With the joints all throwed wide open, and no sheriff to demur.’
Vice flourished. Gambling of every kind and every other form of
wickedness were common day and night. The blush of shame became
practically unknown.”
The De Lesseps house stands at what has been the most picturesque point
in the American town of Cristobal. Before it stands a really admirable
work of art, Columbus in the attitude of a protector toward a half-nude
Indian maiden who kneels at his side. After the fashion of a world
largely indifferent to art the name of the sculptor has been lost, but
the statue was cast in Turin, for Empress Eugénie, who gave it to the
Republic of Colombia when the French took up the Canal work. Buffeted
from site to site, standing for awhile betwixt the tracks in a railroad
freight yard, the spot on which it stood when viewed by the writer is
sentimentally ideal, for it overlooks the entrance to the Canal and
under the eyes of the Great Navigator, done in bronze, the ships of all
the world will pass and repass as they enter or leave the artificial
strait which gives substance to the Spaniard’s dream.
[Illustration: ROOSEVELT AVENUE, CRISTOBAL, ABOUT TO LOSE ITS BEAUTY]
At one time the quarters of the Canal employees--the gold employees as
those above the grade of day laborers are called--were in one of the
most beautiful streets imaginable. In a long sweeping curve from the
border line between the two towns, they extended in an unbroken row
facing the restless blue waters of the Caribbean. A broad white drive
and a row of swaying cocoanut trees separated the houses from the water.
The sea here is always restless, surging in long billows and breaking in
white foam upon the shore, unlike the Pacific which is usually calm.
Unlike the Pacific, too, the tide is inconsiderable. At Panama it rises
and falls from seventeen to twenty feet, and, retiring, leaves long
expanses of unsightly mud flats, but the Caribbean always plays its part
in the landscape well. Unhappily this picturesque street--called
Roosevelt Avenue--is about to lose its beauty, for its water front is to
be taken for the great new docks, and already at some points one sees
the yellow stacks of ocean liners mingling with the fronded tops of the
palms.
Cristobal is at the present time the site of the great cold storage
plant of the Canal Zone, the shops of the Panama Railroad and the
storage warehouses in which are kept the supplies for the commissary
stores at the different villages along the line of the Canal. It
possesses a fine fire fighting force, a Y. M. C. A. club, a commissary
hotel, and along the water front of Colon proper are the hospital
buildings erected by the French but still maintained. Many of the
edifices extend out over the water and the constant breeze ever blowing
through their wide netted balconies would seem to be the most efficient
of allies in the fight against disease. One finds less distinct
separation between the native and the American towns at this end of the
railroad than at Panama-Ancon. This is largely due to the fact that a
great part of the site of Colon is owned by the Panama Railroad, which
in turn is owned by the United States, so that the activities of our
government extend into the native town more than at Panama. In the
latter city the hotel, the hospital and the commissary are all on
American or Canal Zone soil--at Colon they are within the sovereignty of
the Republic of Panama.
[Illustration: THE DE LESSEPS PALACE]
[Illustration: THE NATIONAL GAME--COCK-FIGHTING]
At present sightseers tarry briefly at Colon, taking the first train for
the show places along the Canal line, or for the more picturesque town
of Panama. This will probably continue to be the case when the liners
begin passing through the Canal to the Pacific. Many travelers will
doubtless leave their ships at the Atlantic side, make a hasty drive
about Colon--it really can be seen in an hour--and then go by rail to
Panama, anticipating the arrival of their ship there by seven hours and
getting some idea of the country en route. Visitors with more time to
spare will find one of the short drives that is worth while a trip to
the cemetery of Mount Hope where from the very beginning of the town
those who fell in the long battle with nature have been laid to rest.
The little white headstones multiplied fast in the gay and reckless
French days before sanitation was thought of, and when riot and
dissipation were the rule and scarcely discouraged. “Monkey Hill” was
the original name of the place, owing to the multitude of monkeys
gamboling and chattering in the foliage, but as the graves multiplied
and the monkeys vanished the rude unfitness of the name became apparent
and it gave place to “Mount Hope.” It is pitiful enough in any case; but
if you will study the dates on the headstones you will find the years
after 1905 show a rapid lessening in the number of tenants.
[Illustration: HOW THE JUNGLE WORKS
Silently but persistently the advance of nature enshrouds man’s work in
living green]
If you consider the pictures of certain streets of Colon during two
phases of their history, you will have little trouble in understanding
why the death rate in the town has been steadily decreasing. In a town
built upon a natural morass, and on which more than eleven feet of water
fell annually, there was hardly a foot of paving except the narrow
sidewalks. In the wet season, which extends over eight months of the
year, the mud in these filthy by-ways was almost waist deep. Into it was
thrown indiscriminately all the household slops, garbage and offal.
There was no sewage system; no effort at drainage. If one wished to
cross a street there was nothing for it but to walk for blocks until
reaching a floating board benevolently provided by some merchant who
hoped to thus bring custom to his doors. Along the water front between
the steamship piers and the railroad there was an effort to pave
somewhat as there was heavy freight to be handled, but even there the
pavement would sink out of sight overnight, and at no time could it be
kept in good condition. The agents of the Panama Railroad and the Royal
Mail Steam Packet Company, whose freight houses adjoined, dumped into
the seemingly bottomless abyss everything heavy and solid that could be
brought by land or water, but for a long time without avail. Under the
direction of the United States officers, however, the problem was
solved, and today the streets of Colon are as well paved as those of any
American city, vitrified brick being the material chiefly used.
[Illustration: “BOTTLE ALLEY”
A typical Colon street before the Sanitary Department concluded the work
of cleaning up]
In the days when there was no pavement there were no sewers. Today the
town is properly drained, and the sewage problem, a very serious one in
a town with no natural slope and subject to heavy rains, is efficiently
handled. There was no water supply. Drinking water was brought from the
mainland and peddled from carts, or great jars by water carriers. Today
there is an aqueduct bringing clear cool water from the distant hills.
It affords a striking commentary upon the lethargy and laziness of the
natives that for nearly half a century they should have tolerated
conditions which for filth and squalor were practically unparalleled.
The Indian in his palm-thatched hut was better housed and more
healthfully surrounded than they.
Even the French failed to correct the evil and so failing died like the
flies that swarmed about their food and their garbage indiscriminately.
Not until the Americans declared war on filth and appointed Col. W. C.
Gorgas commander-in-chief of the forces of cleanliness and health did
Colon get cleaned up.
About the base of the Toro light cluster the houses of the engineers
employed on the harbor work, and on the fortifications which are to
guard the Atlantic entrance of the canal on the west side--other
defensive works are building about a mile north of Colon. To these and
other forts in course of construction visitors are but grudgingly
admitted and the camera is wholly taboo. They are still laughing in Col.
Goethals’ office at a newly elected Congressman--not even yet sworn
in--who wrote that in visiting the Canal Zone he desired particularly to
make an exhaustive study of the fortifications, and take many pictures,
in order that he might be peculiarly fit for membership on the Military
Affairs Committee, to which he aspired.
Toro Point will, after the completion of the Canal work, remain only as
the camp for such a detachment of coast artillery as may be needed at
the forts. The village will be one of those surrendered to the jungle
from which it was wrested. Cristobal will remain a large, and I should
judge, a growing town. Colon which was created by the railroad will
still have the road and the Canal to support it.
[Illustration: D STREET, COLON, PAVED
Before being sewered and paved this street was as bad as Bottle Alley on
preceding page]
Without an architectural adornment worthy of the name, with streets of
shanties, and rows of shops in which the cheap and shoddy are the rule,
the town of Colon does have a certain fascination to the idle stroller.
That arises from the throngs of its picturesque and parti-colored people
who are always on the streets. At one point you will encounter a group
of children, among whom even the casual observer will detect Spanish,
Chinese, Indian and negro types pure, and varying amalgamations of all
playing together in the childish good fellowship which obliterates all
racial hostilities. The Chinese are the chief business people of the
town, and though they intermarry but little with the few families of the
old Spanish strain, their unions both legalized and free, with the
mulattoes or negroes are innumerable. You see on the streets many
children whose negro complexion and kinky hair combine but comically
with the almond eyes of the celestial. Luckily queues are going out of
style with the Chinese, or the hair of their half-breed offspring would
form an insurmountable problem.
Public characters throng in Colon. A town with but sixty years of
history naturally abounds in early inhabitants. It is almost as bad as
Chicago was a few years ago when citizens who had reached the
“anecdotage” would halt you at the Lake Front and pointing to that
smoke-bedimmed cradle of the city’s dreamed-of future beauty would
assure you that they could have bought it all for a pair of boots--but
didn’t have the boots. One of the figures long pointed out on the
streets of Colon was an old colored man--an “ole nigger” in the local
phrase--who had been there from the days of the alligators and the
monkeys. He worked for the Panama Railroad surveyors, the road when
completed, the French and the American Canal builders. A sense of long
and veteran public service had invested him with an air of dignity
rather out of harmony with his raiment. “John Aspinwall” they called
him, because Aspinwall was for a time the name of the most regal
significance on the island. The Poet of Panama immortalized him in verse
thus:
“Oh, a quaint old moke, is John Aspinwall,
Who lives by the Dead House gate,
And quaint are his thoughts, if thoughts at all
Ever lurk in his woolly pate,
For he’s old as the hills is this coal-black man,
Thrice doubled with age is he,
And the days when his wanderings first began
Are shrouded in mystery.”
[Illustration: BACHELOR QUARTERS AT TORO POINT]
If you keep a shrewd and watchful eye on the balconies above the cheap
john stores you will now and again catch a little glimpse reminiscent of
Pekin. For the Chinese like to hang their balconies with artistic
screens, bedeck them with palms, illuminate them with the gay lanterns
of their home. Sometimes a woman of complexion of rather accentuated
brunette will hang over the rail with a Chinese--or at least a
Chinesque--baby in the parti-colored clothing of its paternal ancestors.
Or as you stroll along the back or side streets more given over to
residences, an open door here and there gives a glimpse of an interior
crowded with household goods--and household gods which are babies. Not
precisely luring are these views. They suggest rather that the daily
efforts of Col. Gorgas to make and keep the city clean might well have
extended further behind the front doors of the house. They did to a
slight degree, of course, for there was fumigation unlimited in the
first days of the great cleaning up, and even now there is persistent
sanitary inspection. The Canal Zone authorities relinquished to the
Panama local officials the paving and sanitation work of the city, but
retained it in Colon, which serves to indicate the estimate put upon the
comparative fitness for self government of the people of the two towns.
[Illustration: A COLON WATER CARRIER]
Down by the docks, if one likes the savor of spices and the odor of tar,
you find the real society of the Seven Seas. Every variety of ship is
there, from the stately ocean liner just in from Southampton or Havre to
the schooner-rigged cayuca with its crew of San Blas Indians, down from
their forbidden country with a cargo of cocoanuts, yams and bananas. A
curious craft is the cayuca. Ranging in size from a slender canoe twelve
feet long and barely wide enough to hold a man to a considerable craft
of eight-foot beam and perhaps 35 to 40 feet on the water line, its many
varieties have one thing in common. Each is hewn out of a single log.
Shaped to the form of a boat by the universal tool, the machete, and
hollowed out partly by burning, partly by chipping, these great logs are
transformed into craft that in any hands save those of the Indians bred
to their use, would be peremptory invitations to a watery death. But the
San Blas men pole them through rapids on the Chagres that would puzzle a
guide of our North Woods, or at sea take them out in northers that keep
the liner tied to her dock. Some of these boats by the way are hollowed
from mahogany logs that on the wharf at New York or Boston would be
worth $2,000.
[Illustration: AN OPEN SEWER IN A COLON STREET]
The history of the Panama Railroad may well be briefly sketched here.
For its time it was the most audacious essay in railway building the
world had known, for be it known it was begun barely twenty years after
the first railroad had been built in the United States and before either
railroad engineers or railroad labor had a recognized place in industry.
The difficulties to be surmounted were of a sort that no men had
grappled with before. Engineers had learned how to cut down hills,
tunnel mountains and bridge rivers, but to build a road bed firm enough
to support heavy trains in a bottomless swamp; to run a line through a
jungle that seemed to grow up again before the transit could follow the
axe man; to grapple with a river that had been known to rise forty feet
in a day; to eat lunch standing thigh deep in water with friendly
alligators looking on from adjacent logs, and to do all this amid the
unceasing buzz of venomous insects whose sting, as we learned half a
century later, carried the germs of malaria and yellow fever--this was a
new draft upon engineering skill and endurance that might well stagger
the best. The demand was met. The road was built, but at a heavy cost of
life. It used to be said that a life was the price of every tie laid,
but this was a picturesque exaggeration. About 6000 men in all died
during the construction period.
[Illustration: BY A COCLÉ BROOK]
Henry Clay justified his far-sightedness by securing in 1835 the
creation of a commission to consider the practicability of a
trans-isthmian railroad. A commissioner was appointed, secured a
concession from what was then New Granada, died before getting home, and
the whole matter was forgotten for ten years. In this interim the
French, for whom from the earliest days the Isthmus had a fascination,
secured a concession but were unable to raise the money necessary for
the road’s construction. In 1849 three Americans who deserve a place in
history, William H. Aspinwall, John L. Stevens and Henry Chauncy,
secured a concession at Bogota and straightway went to work.
Difficulties beset them on every side. The swamp had no bottom and for a
time it seemed that their financial resources had a very apparent one.
But the rush for gold, though it greatly increased the cost of their
labor, made their enterprise appear more promising to the investing
public and their temporary need of funds was soon met.
[Illustration: THE MANGROVES MARCHING ON STILT-LIKE ROOTS]
But the swamp and jungle were unrelenting in their toll of human life.
Men working all day deep in slimy ooze composed of decaying tropical
vegetation, sleeping exposed to the bites of malaria-bearing insects,
speedily sickened and too often died. The company took all possible care
of its workmen, but even that was not enough. Working men of every
nationality were experimented with but none were immune. The historian
of the railroad reported that the African resisted longest, next the
coolie, then the European, and last the Chinese. The experience of the
company with the last named class of labor was tragic in the extreme.
Eight hundred were landed on the Isthmus after a voyage on which sixteen
had died. Thirty-two fell ill almost at the moment of landing and in
less than a week eighty more were prostrated. Strangers in a strange
land, unable to express their complaints or make clear their symptoms,
they were almost as much the victims of homesickness as of any other
ill. The interpreters who accompanied them declared that much of their
illness was due to their deprivation of their accustomed opium, and for
a time the authorities supplied them, with the result that nearly
two-thirds were again up and able to work. Then the exaggerated
American moral sense, which is so apt to ignore the customs of other
lands and peoples, caused the opium supply to be shut off. Perhaps the
fact that the cost of opium daily per Chinaman was 15 cents had
something to do with it. At any rate the whole body of Chinamen were
soon sick unto death and quite ready for it. They made no effort to
cling to the lives that had become hateful. Suicides were a daily
occurrence and in all forms. Some with Chinese stolidity would sit upon
a rock on the ocean’s bed and wait for the tide to submerge them. Many
used their own queues as ropes and hanged themselves. Others persuaded
or bribed their fellows to shoot them dead. Some thrust sharpened sticks
through their throats, or clutching great stones leaped into the river
maintaining their hold until death made the grasp still more rigid. Some
starved themselves and others died of mere brooding over their dismal
state. In a few weeks but 200 were left alive, and these were sent to
Jamaica where they were slowly absorbed by the native population. On the
line of the old Panama Railroad, now abandoned and submerged by the
waters of Gatun Lake, was a village called Matachin, which local
etymologists declare means “dead Chinaman,” and hold that it was the
scene of this melancholy sacrifice of oriental life.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1913, F. E. Wright.
GOING TO MARKET
Jamaica country roads are gay with women in brightly colored dresses,
carrying the products of their little farms to market. The burden is
always borne on the head with the result that peasant women have a
graceful and even stately carriage.]
The railroad builders soon found that the expense of the construction
would vastly exceed their estimates. The price of a principality went
into the Black Swamp, the road bed through which was practically floated
on a monster pontoon. It is not true, as often asserted, that engines
were sunk there to make a foundation for the road, but numbers of flat
cars were thus employed to furnish a floating foundation. The swamp
which impeded the progress of the road was about five miles south of
Gatun and was still giving trouble in 1908, when the heavier American
rolling stock was put upon the road. Soundings then made indicate that
the solid bottom under the ooze is 185 feet below the surface, and
somewhere between are the scores of dump cars and the thousands of tons
of rock and earth with which the monster has been fed. The Americans
conquered it, apparently, in 1908, by building a trestle and filling it
with cinders and other light material. But every engineer was glad when
in 1912 the relocation of the road abandoned the Black Swamp to its
original diabolical devices.
[Illustration: A PICTURESQUE INLET OF THE CARIBBEAN]
Even in so great an affair as the building of railroads, chance or good
fortune plays a considerable part. So it was the hurricane which first
drove two ships bearing the California gold seekers from the mouth of
the Chagres down to Colon that gave the railroad company just the
stimulus necessary to carry it past the lowest ebb in its fortunes.
Before that it had no income and could no longer borrow money.
Thereafter it had a certain income and its credit was at the very best.
Every additional mile finished added to its earnings, for every mile was
used since it lessened the river trip to the Pacific. In January, 1855,
the last rail was laid, and on the 28th of that month the first train
crossed from ocean to ocean. The road had then cost almost $7,000,000 or
more than $150,000 a mile, but owing to the peculiar conditions of the
time and place it had while building earned $2,125,000 or almost
one-third its cost. Its length was 47 miles, its highest point was 263
feet above sea-level, it crossed streams at 170 points--most of the
crossings being of the Chagres River. As newly located by the American
engineers a great number of these crossings are avoided.
[Illustration: CHILDISH BEAUTY WITHOUT ART]
[Illustration: A CORNER OF MOUNT HOPE CEMETERY
Names of forgotten French martyrs are carved in the stones]
Traffic for the road grew faster than the road itself and when it was
completed it was quite apparent that it was not equipped to handle the
business that awaited it. Accordingly the managers determined to charge
more than the traffic would bear--to fix such rates as would be
prohibitive until they could get the road suitably equipped. Mr. Tracy
Robinson says that a few of the lesser officials at Panama got up a sort
of burlesque rate card and sent it on to the general offices in New
York. It charged $25 for one fare across the Isthmus one way, or $10
second class. Personal baggage was charged five cents a pound, express
$1.80 a cubic foot, second class freight fifty cents a cubic foot, coal
$5 a ton,--all for a haul of forty-seven miles. To the amazement of the
Panama jokers the rates were adopted and, what was more amazing, they
remained unchanged for twenty years. During that time the company paid
dividends of 24%, with an occasional stock dividend and liberal
additions to the surplus. Its stock at one time went up to 335 and as in
its darkest days it could have been bought for a song. Those who had
bought it were more lucky than most of the prospectors who crowded its
coaches on the journey to the gold fields.
Too much prosperity brought indifference and lax management and the
finances of the road were showing a decided deterioration when the
French took up the Canal problem. One of the chief values of the
franchise granted by New Granada and afterward renewed by Colombia was
the stipulation that no canal should be built in the territory without
the consent of the railroad corporation. With this club the directors
forced the French to buy them out, and when the rights of the French
Canal company passed to the United States we acquired the railroad as
well.
[Illustration: THE SOULFUL EYES OF THE TROPICS]
It is now Uncle Sam’s first essay in the government ownership and
operation of railroads. Extremists declare that his success as a manager
is shown by the fact that he takes a passenger from the Atlantic to the
Pacific in three hours for $2.40, while the privately owned Pacific
railroads take several days and charge about $75 to accomplish the same
result. There is a fallacy in this argument somewhere, but there is none
in the assertion that by government officials the Panama Railroad is run
successfully both from the point of service and of profits. Its net
earnings for the fiscal year of 1912 were $1,762,000, of which about
five-sixths was from commercial business. But it must be remembered that
in that year the road was conducted primarily for the purpose of Canal
building--everything was subordinated to the Big Job. That brought it
abnormal revenue, and laid upon it abnormal burdens. The record shows
however that it was directed with a singular attention to detail and
phenomenal success. When passenger trains must be run so as never to
interfere with dirt trains, and when dirt trains must be so run that a
few score steam-shovels dipping up five cubic yards of broken rock at a
mouthful shall never lack for a flat car on which to dump the load, it
means some fine work for the traffic manager. The superintendent of
schools remarked to me that the question whether a passenger train
should stop at a certain station to pick up school children depended on
the convenience of certain steam-shovels and that the matter had to be
decided by Col. Goethals. Which goes to show that the Colonel’s
responsibilities are varied--but of that more anon, as the story-tellers
say.
[Illustration: MARKET DAY AT DAVID]
Within a few years forty miles of the Panama Railroad have been
relocated, the prime purpose of the change being to obviate the
necessity of crossing the Canal at any point. One of the witticisms of
the Zone is that the Panama is the only railroad that runs crosswise as
well as lengthwise. This jest is partly based on the fact that
nine-tenths of the line has been moved to a new location, but more on
the practice of picking up every night or two some thousand feet of
track in the Canal bed and moving it bodily, ties and all, some feet to
a new line. This is made necessary when the steam-shovels have dug out
all the rock and dirt that can be reached from the old line, and it is
accomplished by machines called track shifters, each of which
accomplishes the work of hundreds of men.
[Illustration: SCENE ON ALMIRANTE BAY]
The Panama Railroad is today what business men call a going concern. But
it is run with a singular indifference to private methods of railroad
management. It has a board of directors, but they do little directing.
Its shares do not figure in Wall Street, and we do not hear of it
floating loans, scaling down debts or engaging in any of the
stock-jobbing operations which in late years have resulted in railroad
presidents being lawyers rather than railroad men. The United States
government came into possession of a railroad and had to run it. Well?
The government proved equal to the emergency and perhaps its experience
will lead it to get possession of yet other railroads.