REVOLUTIONS AND THE FRENCH REGIME
The history of the Isthmus from the fall of Old Panama to the time when
the government of the United States, without any particular pomp or
ceremony, took up the picks and shovels the French had laid down and
went to work on the Canal, may be passed over here in the lightest and
sketchiest way. It is of Panama of the Present, rather than Panama of
the Past, that I have to tell even though that past be full of
picturesque and racy incident. Curious enough is the way in which
through all those centuries of lawless no-government, Spanish
mis-government, and local self-government, tempered by annual
revolutions, there appears always the idea that some day there will be a
waterway across the neck of the continent. It was almost as hard for the
early Spaniards to abandon the idea that such a natural waterway existed
as it has been in later years to make the trans-continental railroads
understand that the American people intended to create such a strait.
The search for the natural waterway had hardly been abandoned when
discussion arose as to the practicability of creating an artificial one.
In its earlier days this project encountered not only the physical
obstacles which we had to overcome, but others springing from the rather
exaggerated piety of the time. Yet it was a chaplain to Cortez who first
suggested a canal to Philip II of Spain in words that have a good
twentieth-century ring to them, though their form be archaic: “It is
true,” he wrote, “that mountains obstruct these passes, but if there be
mountains there are also hands.” That is the spirit in which Uncle Sam
approached the Big Job. But when the sturdy chaplain’s appeal came to
King Philip he referred it to the priests of his council, who ruled it
out upon the scriptural injunction, “What God hath joined together let
no man put asunder,” and they were backed up by a learned prelate on the
Isthmus, Fray Josef de Acosta, who averred, “No human power will suffice
to demolish the most strong and impenetrable mountains, and solid rocks
which God has placed between the two seas, and which sustain the fury of
the two oceans. And when it would be to men possible it would in my
opinion be very proper to fear the chastisement of heaven for wishing to
correct the works which the Creator with greatest deliberation and
foresight ordained in the creation of this universe.”
[Illustration: SAN PABLO LOCK IN FRENCH DAYS]
Doubtless the Fray de Acosta was the more orthodox, but we like better
the spirit of the cleric who held the somewhat difficult post of
spiritual adviser to Cortez. His belief that “if there are mountains
there are also hands” is good doctrine, and we can believe that the good
father would have liked to have seen some of Col. Goethals’ steam
shovels biting into those mountains at five cubic yards a bite.
It seems strange that the four canal routes over the respective merits
of which the Senate of the United States was engaged in seemingly
interminable wrangle only a few years ago--Nicaragua, Darien, Panama and
Tehuantepec--should have been suggested by Cortez in the sixteenth
century. Nearly 250 years before the birth of the republic destined to
dig the canal this stout explorer from old Spain laid an unerring finger
upon the only routes which it could follow. Doubtless it was as well
that no effort was made at the time, yet it would be unwise for us with
smug twentieth-century self-sufficiency to assert that no other age than
ours could have put the project through. Perhaps the labor and skill
that raised the mighty city of Palmyra, or built the massive aqueducts
that in ruins still span the Roman Campagna, or carved the Colossi of
the Egyptian desert, might have been equal to the Panama problem.
In 1814 the Spanish cortes ordered surveys made for a canal, but nothing
came of it, and the great project lay quiescent as long as Spain’s power
in the Isthmus remained unshaken. More by the indifference of other
nations than by any right of their own, the Spanish had assumed
sovereignty over all of South and Central America. That they held the
country by virtue of a papal bull--such as that may be--and by right of
conquest is undeniable. But men begun to say that the Pope had given
Spain something he never owned, while so far as conquest was concerned
Morgan had taken from the Spanish all they ever won by force of arms on
the Isthmus. He did not hold what he had taken because he was a pirate
not a pioneer.
[Illustration: PART OF THE SEA WALL AT PANAMA]
The only serious effort to colonize in the Panama region by any people,
save Spaniards, was the founding of a colony of Scotch Presbyterians,
headed by one William Patterson, who had occupied a Scotch pulpit.
Beside theology he must have known something of finance, for he
organized, and was one of the first directors of, the Bank of England.
His colonization project in Panama was broadly conceived, but badly
executed. Taking the rich East India Company for a model he secured a
franchise from Scotland, granting him a monopoly of Scottish trade in
the Indies in return for an annual tribute of one hogshead of tobacco.
Capitalizing his company for $600,000, he backed the shares with his
reputation as a founder of the bank and saw the capital over-subscribed
in London. But the success woke up his rivals. They worked on the King,
persuaded him to denounce the action taken in Scotland and pushed a law
through the English Parliament outlawing the Scotch company in England.
In every country the people interested in the established companies
fought the interloper who was trying to break into their profitable
demesne. But the Scotch stuck to their guns. They rallied at first about
Patterson as in later years the French flocked to the support of De
Lesseps. Ships were built in Amsterdam, pistols were bought by
wholesale, brandy and bibles were both gathered in large quantities, and
in 1768 volunteers were called for to join the expedition. Every settler
was promised fifty acres of agricultural land and one fifty-foot town
lot.
[Illustration: THE PELICANS IN THE BAY OF PANAMA]
Politics had bothered Patterson at the outset by arraying the English
against the Scotch. Now religion added to the dissension. The church and
the kirk factions--or the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians--fell
afoul of each other. The kirk carried the executive council and
Patterson, the only man who knew anything about the expedition, was
permitted to accompany it only as an ordinary settler. Graft stepped in
and though the colonists paid for six months’ provisions they discovered
when far out at sea that they had but enough for two. Moreover nobody on
the ships knew where they were going to settle, for they sailed under
sealed orders. When these were opened and the tidings spread that Panama
and not the East Indies was the destination, there was renewed distrust
and disaffection.
[Illustration: ROAD FROM PANAMA TO LA BOCA]
The story of this luckless enterprise is short and dismal. On the voyage
out forty-four of the adventurers died, and after landing the deaths
continued with melancholy regularity. They were spared trouble with the
Indians who, on learning that they were no friends to the Spaniards,
welcomed them warmly, and urged them to join in driving the Spaniards
from the land. But illness held the 900 colonists gripped, and malaria,
the ruling pest of those tropical shores, is not wont to stimulate a
militant spirit. They had settled on the Atlantic coast in the Darien
region, as far from the rich traffic of the East Indies as though they
were in their old Caledonian homes. Curiously enough they made no effort
to get across to the Pacific, whence only could trade be conducted, but
perhaps that was as well, for the Spaniards though much broken by the
recent invasion of the buccaneers would have resisted such an advance to
their utmost.
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT. 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT
OLD FRENCH CANAL AT MOUNT HOPE
Our engineers abandoned the French canal except as a docking place for
vessels and a waterway for carrying material to the foot of Gatun
locks.]
So the unhappy colonists of New Caledonia found themselves on a
miasmatic bit of land, remote from anything like civilization, with no
sign of trade to engage their activities, an avowed enemy at their back
and surrounded by Indians, the price of whose friendship was a
declaration of war upon the Spaniards. To make matters worse, the
King issued a proclamation prohibiting all governors of English colonies
in the West Indies from giving them aid or comfort, denouncing them as
outlaws.
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
THE CITY PARK OF COLON]
Disheartened, the first colony broke up and sailed away, just when the
Company was dispatching two more ships from Scotland. The fugitives
sailed for New York, and on one of their ships carrying 250 men, 150 are
said to have died before reaching that port. As for the new colonists,
they reached the deserted fort of St. Andrew, and saw the mute evidences
of death and despair. From the Indians they learned the details of the
story, and a great majority voted to sail away without further delay.
Twelve however elected to stop, and being landed with a generous supply
of provisions, kept foothold in the colony until the third expedition
arrived. This consisted of four ships, which had left the Clyde with
about 1300 colonists. About 160 however died on the way out, and the
survivors were mightily distressed when instead of finding a thriving
colony of a thousand or more awaiting them, they discovered only twelve
Scotchmen living miserably in huts with the Indians.
The imaginative prospectus writer seems to have been no less active and
engaging at that time than in these days of mining promotions, and many
of the new colonists had come in the expectation of finding a land
watered by springs, the waters of which were “as soft as milk and very
nourishing,” a land wherein people lived 150 years, and to die at 125
was to be cut off in the flower of one’s youth. What they found was
twelve haggard Scotchmen in a primeval forest, ill-fed, unclothed,
dependent largely on the charity of the Indians, and who, so far from
looking confidently forward to an hundred more years of life cried
dolorously to the newcomers, “Take us hence or we perish.”
The new colonists, however, had pluck. Stifling their disappointment,
they disembarked and settled down to make the colony a success.
According to the records they had brought five forces for disintegration
and failure along with them--namely four ministers and a most prodigious
lot of brandy. The ancient chroniclers do not say upon which of these
rests the most blame for the disasters that followed. The ministers
straightway set up to be rulers of the colony. When stockades should be
a-building all were engaged in erecting houses for them. As but two
could preach in the space of one Sunday, they designated two holy days
weekly whereon they preached such resounding sermons that “the regular
service frequently lasted twelve hours without any interruption.” Nor
would they do other work than sermonizing. As for the brandy, all the
records of the colony agree that much too much of it and of the curious
native drinks was used by all, and that the ministers themselves were
wont to reinvigorate themselves after their pulpit exertions by mighty
potations.
[Illustration: CHILDREN IN A NATIVE HUT]
Yet the colony was not wholly without a certain sturdy self reliance.
Seeing it persist despite all obstacles, the Spaniards dispatched a
force of soldiers from Panama to destroy it. Campbell waylaid them in
the jungle and overthrew them. Then the King of Spain became alarmed and
sent eight Spanish men-of-war to make an end of these interlopers--the
King of England and Scotland coldly leaving them to their fate. But they
fought so bravely that in the end the Spanish, though their fleet had
been reënforced by three ships, were obliged to grant them capitulation
with the honors of war, and they “marched out with their colors flying
and drums beating, together with arms and ammunition, and with all their
goods.”
[Illustration: THE WATER FRONT OF PANAMA]
So ended the effort to make of Darien an outpost of Scotland. In the
effort 2000 lives and over £200,000 had been lost. Macaulay explains it
by saying, “It was folly to suppose that men born and bred within ten
degrees of the Arctic circle would enjoy excellent health within ten
degrees of the equator.” But Lord Macaulay forgot to reckon on the
hostility of the East India Company, whose monopoly was threatened, the
plenteousness of the brandy and the zeal of the four ministers.
[Illustration: THE WATER GATE OF PANAMA]
After the expulsion of the Scotch, the domination of the Isthmus by the
Spaniards was never again seriously menaced by any foreign power. All
the vast South and Central American domain was lost to Spain, not by the
attacks of her European neighbors, but by the revolt of their people
against a government which was at one time inefficient and tyrannical.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic upheaval in Europe found their
echo in South America, where one after another the various states threw
off the Spanish yoke. But Panama, then known as Terra Firma, was slow to
join in the revolutionary activities of her neighbors. It is true that
in 1812 the revolutionists became so active in Bogotá, the capital of
the province, that the seat of government was temporarily removed to
Panama City. But the country as a whole was sluggish.
Four classes of citizens, European Spaniards, their sons, born on the
Isthmus, and called creoles, the Indians and the negroes, made up the
population and were too diverse by birth and nature to unite for any
patriotic purpose. Accordingly through the period of breaking shackles,
which made Bolivar famous the world over and created the great group of
republics in South America, the state of which the Isthmus was a part
remained quiescent. In 1814 revolutionists vainly tried to take Porto
Bello, but that famous fortress which never resisted a foreign foe
successfully, beat off the patriots. Panama was at this time in high
favor at Madrid because of its loyalty and the Cortes passed resolutions
for the building of a canal, but went no further. But all the time the
revolutionary leaven was working beneath the surface. In 1821 a field
marshal from Spain, charged with the task of crushing out the revolution
in Colombia and Ecuador, stripped Porto Bello, San Lorenzo and Panama of
the greater part of their garrisons and took them to Guayaquil. By
bribes and promises the local patriots persuaded the few soldiers
remaining to desert and, with no possibility of resistance, the
independence of Panama from Spain was declared. Early in 1822 Panama
became the Department of the Isthmus in the Republic of Colombia.
It would be idle to describe, even to enumerate, all the revolutions
which have disquieted the Isthmus since it first joined Colombia in
repudiating the Spanish rule. They have been as thick as insects in the
jungle. No physical, social or commercial ties bound Panama to Colombia
at any time during their long association. A mountain range divided the
two countries and between the cities of Panama and Bogotá there was no
communication by land. In foreign commerce the province of Panama
exceeded the parent state, while the possession of the shortest route
across the Isthmus was an asset of which both Bogotáns and Panamanians
keenly realized the value.
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
ENTRANCE TO MT. HOPE CEMETERY]
Revolutions were annual occurrences, sometimes hard fought, for the
people of Panama have plenty of courage in the field; sometimes ended
with the first battle. The name of the parent state has been sometimes
Colombia, sometimes New Granada; Panama has at times been independent,
at others a state of the Federation of New Granada; at one time briefly
allied with Ecuador and Venezuela. In 1846 the volume of North American
travel across the Isthmus became so great that the United States
entered into a treaty with New Granada in which we guaranteed to keep
the Isthmus open for transit. That and the building, by American capital
of the Panama Railroad, made us a directly interested party in all
subsequent revolutions. Of these there were plenty. President Theodore
Roosevelt, defending in 1903 the diplomatic methods by which he “took”
Panama, enumerated no fewer than fifty-three revolutions in the
fifty-seven years that had elapsed since the signing of the treaty. He
summed up the situation thus:
“The above is only a partial list of the revolutions, rebellions,
insurrections, riots, and other outbreaks that have occurred during the
period in question; yet they number fifty-three for the last fifty-seven
years. It will be noted that one of them lasted nearly three years
before it was quelled; another for nearly a year. In short, the
experience of nearly half a century has shown Colombia to be utterly
incapable of keeping order on the Isthmus. Only the active interference
of the United States has enabled her to preserve so much as a semblance
of sovereignty. Had it not been for the exercise by the United States of
the police power in her interest, her connection with the Isthmus would
have been severed long ago.”
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL PLAZA, PANAMA
The building in the center was by turns the French and the American
Administration Building]
We are apt to think of these revolutions as mere riots, uprisings
somewhat after the sort of Falstaff’s seven men in buckram, and savoring
much of the opera bouffe. Such, to a great extent they were, and
curiously enough none of them, except for its outcome, was less serious
or dignified than the final one which won for Panama its freedom from
Colombia, and for the United States the ten miles’ strip across the
ocean called the Canal Zone. That was perhaps the only revolution in
history by which was created a new and sovereign-state, and the issue of
which was finally determined by the inability of a commanding general
to pay the fares for his troops over forty-eight miles of railroad. Of
that, however, more hereafter.
[Illustration: AVENIDA CENTRALE
The building with the rounded corner balcony is the American Consulate]
Of course, during all the revolutions and counter revolutions the idea
of the canal had steadily grown. England at one time took a mild
interest in it and sent one Horatio Nelson to look over the land. The
young naval officer’s health failed him and he returned to become in
later years the hero of Trafalgar and the Nile. Later, the great German
scientist, Baron von Humboldt, in the course of a famous voyage to South
America, spent some time on the Isthmus, and wrote much of its natural
features, enumerating nine routes for a canal including of course the
one finally adopted. Louis Napoleon, though never on the Isthmus,
dreamed out the possibilities of a canal when he was a prisoner in the
fortress of Ham. Had he succeeded in maintaining Maximilian on the
throne of Mexico he might have made the Isthmian history very different.
Among our own people, De Witt Clinton, builder of the Erie Canal, and
Henry Clay, were the first to plan for an American canal across the
Isthmus, but without taking practical steps to accomplish it.
Canal schemes, however, were almost as numerous as revolutions in the
years preceding 1903. Darien, Panama, Tehuantepec, Nicaragua have all
been considered at various times, and the last named for some time was a
very close second to Panama in favor. There is reason to believe that
the government of the United States deliberately “nursed” the Nicaragua
project in order to exact better terms from Colombia, which held the
Panama route at an exorbitant figure.
[Illustration: ANCON HILL AT SUNSET]
The honor of actually inaugurating the canal work must ever belong to
the French, as the honor of completing it will accrue to us. It is not
the first time either that the French and the Americans worked together
to accomplish something on this continent. Yorktown and Panama ought to
be regarded as chapters of the story of a long partnership. In 1876
Ferdinand de Lesseps, with the glory of having dug the Suez Canal still
untarnished, became interested in the Panama situation as the result of
representations made by a French engineer, Napoleon B. Wyse. Lieut. Wyse
had made a survey of the Isthmus and, in connection with Gen. Stephen
Turr, a Hungarian, had secured a concession from Colombia to run
ninety-nine years after the completion of the canal, with a payment to
Colombia of $250,000 annually after the seventy-fifth year had expired.
This franchise was transferable by sale to any other private company but
could not be sold to a government--a proviso which later complicated
greatly the negotiations with the United States.
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
ABANDONED FRENCH MACHINERY ON THE CANAL]
De Lesseps was instantly interested. The honors which had been heaped
upon him as the result of his successful operation at Suez were very
grateful to him. The French temperament is particularly avid of praise
and public honor. Moreover, he sincerely believed in the practicability
of the plan and, neither at the outset or later, did any one fully
enlighten him as to the prodigious obstacles to be encountered. Lieut.
Wyse had interested a group of financiers who scented in the scheme a
chance for great profits, and to their project the name of De Lesseps
was all important. For advertising purposes it had the value of that of
Roosevelt today. To launch the project successfully money was needed,
and this they found. Some sort of professional approval, in addition to
the De Lesseps name, was desirable and this they provided by calling
together an International Scientific Congress at Paris to discuss the
great undertaking. One hundred and sixty-four delegates were present, of
whom forty-two were engineers and only eleven Americans. It was charged
at the time that the congress was more political than scientific and
furthermore that it was “packed” so as to register only the will of De
Lesseps, who in turn recommended in the main such measures as the
syndicate putting up the money desired. However, the Congress gave a
quasi-public and scientific appearance to a project which was really
conceived only as a money-making proposition by a group of financiers.
There was and has since been bitter criticism of the vote by which the
Congress declared for a sea-level canal--a decision which the French
themselves were forced to reverse and which the United States definitely
abandoned early in its work. In the French Congress there were less than
100 of the 164 delegates present when the vote was taken. Seventy-eight
voted for sea-level and a majority of the engineers voted against it.
[Illustration: OVERWHELMED BY THE JUNGLE]
[Illustration: A LOTTERY TICKET SELLER]
In my description of the canal work the fundamental differences between
the respective advantages of the sea-level and the lock type of canal
will continually reappear. At this moment it is enough to say that the
obstacles to the sea-level plan are to be found in Culebra Hill and the
Chagres River. In the lock type of canal the cut at Culebra is 495 feet
below the crest of Gold Hill and 364 feet below the crest of
Contractor’s Hill opposite. The top width of this cut is over half a
mile. To carry the canal to sea-level would mean a further cut of
eighty-five feet with vastly enhanced liability of slides. As for the
Chagres River, that tricky stream crosses the line of the old French
canal twenty-three times. As the river is sometimes three or four feet
deep one day and nearly fifty feet deep at the same point the next--a
turbid, turbulent, roaring torrent, carrying trees, huts and boulders
along with it--the canal could obviously not exist with the Chagres in
its path. The French device was to dam the stream some miles above the
point at which the canal first crossed it and lead it away through an
artificial channel into the Pacific instead of into the Atlantic, where
it now empties. This task the American engineers have avoided by damming
the Chagres at Gatun, and making a great lake eighty-five feet above the
level of the sea through which the canal extends and which covers and
obliterates the twenty-three river crossings which embarrassed the
engineers of the sea-level canal.
It is fair to say, however, that today (1913), with the lock canal
approaching completion, there is a very large and intelligent body of
Americans who still hold that the abandonment of the sea-level plan was
an error. And it is a curious fact that while De Lesseps was accused of
“packing” his congress so as to vote down the report for a lock canal
which a majority of the engineers voting favored, Roosevelt, after a
majority of his “International Board of Consulting Engineers” had voted
for a sea-level canal, set aside their recommendation and ordered the
lock type instead.
[Illustration: MACHINERY SEEMINGLY AS HOPELESS AS THIS WAS RECOVERED AND
SET TO WORK]
Immediately after the adjournment of the International Congress at Paris
the stock of the canal company, $60,000,000 as a first issue, was
offered to the investing public. It was largely over-subscribed. The
French are at once a thrifty and an emotional people. Their thrift gives
them instant command of such sums of ready cash as astound financiers
of other nations. Their emotionalism leads them to support any great
national enterprise that promises glory for _La Patrie_, has in it a
touch of romance and withal seems economically safe. The canal
enterprise at the outset met all these conditions, and the commanding
figure of De Lesseps at its head, the man who had made Africa an island
and who dogmatically declared, “the Panama Canal will be more easily
begun, finished and maintained than the Suez Canal,” lured the francs
from their hiding places in woolen stockings or under loose hearth
stones.
[Illustration: THE POWER OF THE JUNGLE
Note how the tree has grown around and into this steel dump car at San
Pablo]
[Illustration: LA FOLIE DINGLER
This house, built by the French for $150,000, was sold for $25.00 by the
Americans]
[Illustration: NEAR THE PACIFIC ENTRANCE TO THE CANAL
The suction dredge is an inheritance from the French and still working]
It has been the practice of many writers upon the canal to ridicule the
unsuccessful effort of the French to complete it; to expatiate upon the
theatrical display which attended their earlier operations, and the
reckless extravagance which attended the period when the dire
possibility of failure first appeared to their vision; to overlook the
earnest and effective work done by the Frenchmen actually on the Isthmus
while riveting attention on the blackmailers and parasites in Paris who
were destroying the structure at its very foundations. It is significant
that none of the real workers on the canal do this. Talk with the
engineers and you will find them enthusiastic over the engineering work
done by the French. Those sturdy, alert Americans who are now putting
the Big Job through will take pains to give their predecessors the
fullest credit for work done, for dirt moved, for surveys made and for
machinery designed--a great lot of it is in use on the line today,
including machines left exposed in the jungle twenty years. Hundreds of
their buildings are still in use. If, after listening to the honest and
generous praise expressed by our engineers, the visitor will go out to
the cemetery of Mount Hope, near Cristobal, and read the lines on the
headstones of French boys who came out full of hope and ambition to be
cut down at twenty-two, twenty-five--all boyish ages--he will reflect
that it is ill to laugh because the forlorn hope does not carry the
breastworks, but only opens the way for the main army. And there are
many little French graveyards scattered about the Isthmus which make one
who comes upon them unawares feel that the really vital thing about the
French connection with the canal was not that the first blast which it
had been prepared to celebrate with some pomp failed to explode, or that
the young engineers did not understand that champagne mixed but badly
with a humid and malarial climate, but that the flower of a great and
generous nation gave their lives in a struggle with hostile nature
before science had equipped man with the knowledge to make the struggle
equal.
[Illustration: WHERE THE FRENCH DID THEIR BEST WORK
The greatest amount of excavations by the French was in Culebra Cut]
Today along a great part of our canal line the marks of the French
attainments are apparent. From Limon Bay, at the Atlantic end of the
canal, our engineers for some reason determined upon an entirely new
line for our canal, instead of following the French waterway, which was
dug for seven miles to a depth of fifteen feet, and for eight miles
further, seven feet deep. This canal has been used very largely by our
force in carrying material for the Gatun dam. At the Pacific entrance
they had dug a narrow channel three miles long which we are still using.
We paid the French company $40,000,000 for all its rights on the
Isthmus. There are various rumors as to who got the money. Some, it is
believed, never went far from New York, for with all their thrift the
French are no match for our high financiers. But whoever got the money
we got a good bargain. The estimate of our own commission in 1911 values
the physical property thus transferred at $42,799,826.
Bad luck, both comic and tragic, seemed to attend the French endeavors.
Count De Lesseps, with a national fondness for the dramatic, arranged
two ceremonies to properly dignify the actual beginning of work upon the
canal. The first was to be the breaking of ground for the Pacific
entrance, which was to be at the mouth of the Rio Grande River in the
Bay of Panama. A distinguished company gathered on the boat chartered
for the occasion at Panama, and there was much feasting, speaking and
toasting. Every one was so imbued with enthusiasm that no one thought
of so material a thing as the tide. On the Pacific coast the tide rises
and falls twenty feet or more, and while the guests were emptying their
glasses the receding tide was emptying the bay whither they were bound.
When they arrived they found that nearly two miles of coral rock and mud
flats separated them from the shore where the historic sod was to be
turned. Accordingly, excavation was begun _pro forma_ in a champagne box
filled with earth on the deck of the ship. The little daughter of De
Lesseps dealt the first blow of the pick, followed by representatives of
Colombia. To complete the ceremony the Bishop of Panama gravely blessed
the work thus auspiciously begun, and the canal builders steamed back to
Panama.
[Illustration: AN OLD SPANISH CHURCH
This edifice, still standing at Nata, is said to be the oldest church in
Panama]
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
JUNCTURE OF FRENCH AND AMERICAN CANALS
The American Canal is the wider, and affords the more direct route to
the sea]
Later, the same party assembled to witness the first blast at
Culebra--for the French made the first attack on that redoubtable
fortress, which after the lapse of thirty-five years is stubbornly
resisting our American sappers and miners. But after due preparations,
including wine, the fair hand of Mlle. Ferdinande De Lesseps pressed the
button--and nothing happened. Some fault in the connections made the
electric spark impotent, and the chroniclers of the time do not record
exactly when the blast was actually fired. But in the official canal
paper the ceremony was described as “perfectly successful,” and the
reporter added that picturesque detail which Koko said “imparts an
artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and uninteresting
statement of fact,” by saying that the rocks were “much less resistant
than we had expected.”
[Illustration: PART OF THE TOLL OF LIFE
This cemetery on the westerly slope of Ancon Hill is one of the Zone’s
pathetic spots]
These needless ceremonies and the false reports which attended them were
merely what in our cynical age and nation are called press-agent
“stunts,” and were necessitated by the need for interesting the French
people in the work, lest they let the market for the shares slump. They
were early symptoms of the evil that culminated in the revelations of
blackmail and forced tribute paid the French press when the final
collapse was impending and inevitable.
De Lesseps indeed was a master in the art of “working the press,” and
had he confined his activities to that, without interfering with his
engineers, history might have told a different story of his canal
management. But lest doubt should seize upon would-be investors, he
continually cut down the estimates of his engineers, and issued
flamboyant proclamations announcing triumphs that had not been won and
prophesying a rate of progress that never could be attained. When his
very capable Technical Commission, headed by Col. George M. Totten, the
builder of the Panama Railroad, estimated the total cost of the canal at
$168,600,000, he took the report to his cabin on shipboard and there
arbitrarily, with no possible new data, lopped off about $37,000,000.
Even at that, he calmly capitalized his company at 600,000,000 francs or
$120,000,000, though his own estimate of the cost of the canal exceeded
that amount by more than $12,000,000. One-half of his capital stock or
$60,000,000 the Count had reserved for the United States, but sold not a
dollar’s worth. The $60,000,000 first offered in France was, however,
eagerly subscribed. Of course it was wholly insufficient.
We know, what the unfortunate French investors could not, and their
directors probably did not know, that the canal could never be built by
a private company seeking profit. Neither could it be built by private
contract, as we discovered after some discouraging experiences of our
own. The French builders were at the mercy of the stock market. A
hurtful rumor, true or false, might at any time shut off their money
supplies. Experience has pretty thoroughly demonstrated that the
confidence of the investing public cannot long be maintained by false
reports or futile promises, but both of these devices the French worked
until the inevitable catastrophe.
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
THE ANCON HOSPITAL GROUNDS
The beauty of the grounds is due to early French planning]
[Illustration: A SUNKEN RAILROAD
Nine feet below the boat is the roadbed of the old Panama railroad]
Disease on the Isthmus coöperated with distrust in Paris to bring about
failure. The French in 1880 knew nothing of the modern scientific
systems for checking yellow-fever contagion and the spread of malaria.
The part mosquitoes play as carriers of disease germs was not dreamed
of. Beyond building excellent hospitals for the sick, some of which we
still use, and dosing both sick and well liberally with quinine, they
had no plan of campaign against “Yellow Jack.” As a result, death
stalked grimly among them, and the stories written of his ravages are
ghastly. On the south side of Ancon Hill, where the quarry has gashed
the hillside, stood, until recently, a large frame house, built for
Jules Dingler, first director-general of canal work. It cost $150,000,
though perhaps worth a third of that sum, and was called “La Folie
Dingler.” But it was a rather tragic folly for poor Dingler, for before
he had fairly moved into it his wife, son and daughter died of yellow
fever and he returned to Paris to die too of a broken heart. His house,
in which he anticipated such happiness, became a smallpox hospital, and
was finally sold for $25 with the stipulation that the purchaser remove
it.
[Illustration: A ZONE WORKING VILLAGE
The low houses were built by the French: all screening added by
Americans]
A dinner was given M. Henri Boinne, secretary-general of the company.
Some one remarked that there were thirteen at the table, whereupon the
guest of honor remarked gaily that as he was the last to come he would
have to pay for all. In two weeks he was dead--yellow fever. Others at
the dinner followed him. Of the members of one surveying party on the
upper waters of the Chagres--a region I myself visited without a
suggestion of ill effects--every one, twenty-two in all, were prostrated
by disease and ten died. Bunau-Varilla, whose name is closely linked
with the canal, says: “Out of every one hundred individuals arriving on
the Isthmus, I can say without exaggeration that only twenty have been
able to remain at their posts at the working stations, and even in that
number many who were able to present an appearance of health had lost
much of their courage.”
Col. Gorgas tells of a party of eighteen young Frenchmen who came to the
Isthmus, all but one of whom died within a month. The Mother Superior of
the nursing sisters in the French hospital at Ancon lost by fever
twenty-one out of twenty-four sisters who had accompanied her to the
Isthmus.
How great was the total loss of French lives can only be guessed. The
hospital records show that at Ancon, 1041 patients died of yellow fever.
Col. Gorgas figures that as many died outside the hospital. All the
French records are more or less incomplete and their authenticity
doubtful because apprehension for the tender hopes and fears of the
shareholders led to the suppression of unpleasant facts. The customary
guess is that two out of every three Frenchmen who went to the Isthmus
died there. Col. Gorgas, who at one time figures the total loss during
the French régime at 16,500, recently raised his estimate to 22,000,
these figures of course including negro workmen. Little or no effort
was made to induce sanitary living, as under the Americans, and so
ignorant were the French--as indeed all physicians were at that time--of
the causes of the spread of yellow fever, that they set the legs of the
hospital beds in shallow pans of water to keep the ants from creeping to
the beds. The ants were stopped, but the water bred hosts of wrigglers
from which came the deadly _stegomyia_ mosquito, which carries the
yellow-fever poison from the patient to the well person. Had the
hospital been designed to spread instead of to cure disease its managers
could not have planned better.
[Illustration: NEGRO QUARTERS, FRENCH TOWN OF EMPIRE
Paving and sanitary arrangements due to American régime]
It is a curious fact that, in a situation in which the toll of death is
heaviest, man is apt to be most reckless and riotous in his pleasures.
The old drinking song of the English guardsmen beleaguered during the
Indian mutiny voices the almost universal desire of strong men to flaunt
a gay defiance in the face of death:
“Stand! Stand to your glasses steady,
’Tis all we have left to prize,
One cup to the dead already,
Hurrah, for the next that dies”.
Wine, wassail and, I fear, women were much in evidence during the hectic
period of the French activities. The people of the two Isthmian towns
still speak of it as the _temps de luxe_. Dismal thrift was banished and
extravagance was the rule. Salaries were prodigious. Some high officials
were paid from $50,000 to $100,000 a year with houses, carriages,
traveling expenses and uncounted incidentals. Expenditures for
residences were lavish, and the nature of the structures still standing
shows that graft was the chief factor in the cost. The director-general
had a $40,000 bath-house, and a private railway car costing
$42,000--which is curiously enough almost exactly $1000 for each mile of
the railroad it traversed. The hospital buildings at Colon cost
$1,400,000 and one has but to look at them today to wonder how even the
$400,000 was spent.
The big graft that finally was one of the prime factors in wrecking the
company was in Paris, but enough went on in Colon and Panama to make
those two towns as full of easy money as a mining camp after a big
strike. The pleasures of such a society are not refined. Gambling and
drinking were the less serious vices. A French commentator of the time
remarks, “Most of the commercial business of Panama is transacted
standing and imbibing cocktails--always the eternal cocktail! Afterward,
if the consumer had the time and money to lose, he had only to cross the
hall to find himself in a little room, crowded with people where
roulette was going on. Oh this roulette, how much it has cost all grades
of canal employees! Its proprietor must make vast profits. Admission is
absolutely free; whoever wishes may join in the play. A democratic mob
pushes and crowds around the table. One is elbowed at the same time by a
negro, almost in rags, anxiously thrusting forward his ten sous, and by
a portly merchant with his pockets stuffed with piasters and bank
notes”.
These towns, which bought and consumed French champagnes and other wines
by the shipload, could not afford to build a water system. Water was
peddled in the streets by men carrying great jars, or conducting carts
with tanks. There were millions for roulette, poker and the lottery, but
nothing for sewers or pavements and during the wet season the people,
natives and French both, waded ankle deep in filth which would have
driven a blooded Berkshire hog from his sty. When from these man-created
conditions of drink and dirt, disease was bred and men died like the
vermin among which they lived, they blamed the climate, or the Chagres
River.
Amidst it all the work went on. So much stress has been laid upon the
riot in the towns that one forgets the patient digging out on the hills
and in the jungle. In 1912 the Secretary of the United States Canal
Commission estimated the amount of excavation done by the French, useful
to our canal, at 29,709,000 cubic yards worth $25,389,000. That by no
means represented all their work, for our shift in the line of the canal
made much of their excavation valueless. Between Gold Hill and
Contractor’s Hill in the Culebra Cut, where our struggle with the
obstinate resistance of nature has been fiercest, the French cut down
161 feet, all of it serviceable to us. Their surveys and plats are
invaluable, and their machinery, which tourists seeing some pieces
abandoned to the jungle condemn in the lump, has been of substantial
value to us both for use and for sale.
[Illustration: FILTH THAT WOULD DRIVE A BERKSHIRE FROM HIS STY
A typical scene in the negro quarters of Colon during the period of
French activity in Panama]
But under the conditions as they found them, the French could never have
completed the canal. Only a government could be equal to that task.
President Roosevelt found to his own satisfaction at least that neither
private contract nor civilian management was adequate. Most
emphatically, if the desire for profit was to be the sole animating
force the canal could never be built at all. When the discovery that
the canal enterprise would never be a “big bonanza” dawned on the French
stockholders distrust was rapidly succeeded by panic. Vainly did De
Lesseps repeat his favorite formula, “The canal will be built.” Vainly
did the officers of the company pay tribute to the blackmailers that
sprung up on every side--journalists, politicians, discharged employees,
every man who knew a weak point in the company’s armor. Reorganizations,
new stock issues, changes of plan, appeals for government aid, bond
issues, followed one after another. The sea-level canal was abandoned
and a lock canal substituted. After repeated petitions the French
Chamber of Deputies, salved with some of the spoil, authorized an issue
of lottery bonds and bankruptcy was temporarily averted. A new company
was formed but the work languished, just enough in fact being done to
keep the concession alive. After efforts to enlist the coöperation of
the United States, the company in despair offered to sell out altogether
to that government, and after that proffer the center of interest was
transferred from Paris to Washington.
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood and Underwood_
CANAL VALLEY NEAR PEDRO MIGUEL
Through the line of hills in the background extends the deepest part of
the Culebra Cut]
The French had spent in all about $260,000,000 and sacrificed about 2000
French lives before they drew the fires from their dredges, left their
steam shovels in the jungle and turned the task over to the great
American Republic.