Our visit to Panama was most successful as well as most interesting. We
were there three days and we worked from morning till night. The second
day I was up at a quarter to six and got to bed at a quarter of twelve,
and I do not believe that in the intervening time, save when I was
dressing, there were ten consecutive minutes when I was not busily at
work in some shape or form. For two days there were uninterrupted tropic
rains without a glimpse of the sun, and the Chagres River rose in a
flood, higher than any for fifteen years; so that we saw the climate at
its worst. It was just what I desired to do.
It certainly adds to one's pleasure to have read history and to
appreciate the picturesque. When on Wednesday we approached the coast,
and the jungle-covered mountains looked clearer and clearer until we
could see the surf beating on the shores, while there was hardly a sign
of human habitation, I kept thinking of the four centuries of wild and
bloody romance, mixed with abject squalor and suffering, which had made
up the history of the Isthmus until three years ago. I could see Balboa
crossing at Darien, and the wars between the Spaniards and the Indians,
and the settlement and the building up of the quaint walled Spanish
towns; and the trade, across the seas by galleon, and over land by
pack-train and river canoe, in gold and silver, in precious stones; and
then the advent of the buccaneers, and of the English seamen, of
Drake and Frobisher and Morgan, and many, many others, and the wild
destruction they wrought. Then I thought of the rebellion against the
Spanish dominion, and the uninterrupted and bloody wars that followed,
the last occurring when I became President; wars, the victorious heroes
of which have their pictures frescoed on the quaint rooms of the palace
at Panama city, and in similar palaces in all capitals of these strange,
turbulent little half-caste civilizations. Meanwhile the Panama railroad
had been built by Americans over a half century ago, with appalling loss
of life, so that it is said, of course with exaggeration, that every
sleeper laid represented the death of a man. Then the French canal
company started work, and for two or three years did a good deal, until
it became evident that the task far exceeded its powers; and then
to miscalculation and inefficiency was added the hideous greed of
adventurers, trying each to save something from the general wreck, and
the company closed with infamy and scandal.
Now we have taken hold of the job. We have difficulties with our own
people, of course. I haven't a doubt that it will take a little longer
and cost a little more than men now appreciate, but I believe that
the work is being done with a very high degree both of efficiency
and honesty; and I am immensely struck by the character of American
employees who are engaged, not merely in superintending the work, but in
doing all the jobs that need skill and intelligence. The steam shovels,
the dirt trains, the machine shops, and the like, are all filled with
American engineers, conductors, machinists, boiler-makers, carpenters.
From the top to the bottom these men are so hardy, so efficient, so
energetic, that it is a real pleasure to look at them. Stevens, the head
engineer, is a big fellow, a man of daring and good sense, and burly
power. All of these men are quite as formidable, and would, if it were
necessary, do quite as much in battle as the crews of Drake and
Morgan; but as it is, they are doing a work of infinitely more lasting
consequence. Nothing whatever remains to show what Drake and Morgan
did. They produced no real effect down here, but Stevens and his men are
changing the face of the continent, are doing the greatest engineering
feat of the ages, and the effect of their work will be felt while our
civilization lasts. I went over everything that I could possibly go
over in the time at my disposal. I examined the quarters of married and
single men, white men and negroes. I went over the ground of the Gatun
and La Boca dams; went through Panama and Colon, and spent a day in
the Culebra cut, where the great work is being done. There the huge
steam-shovels are hard at it; scooping huge masses of rock and gravel
and dirt previously loosened by the drillers and dynamite blasters,
loading it on trains which take it away to some dump, either in the
jungle or where the dams are to be built. They are eating steadily into
the mountain, cutting it down and down. Little tracks are laid on
the side-hills, rocks blasted out, and the great ninety-five ton
steam-shovels work up like mountain howitzers until they come to where
they can with advantage begin their work of eating into and destroying
the mountainside. With intense energy men and machines do their task,
the white men supervising matters and handling the machines, while the
tens of thousands of black men do the rough manual labor where it is
not worth while to have machines do it. It is an epic feat, and one of
immense significance.
The deluge of rain meant that many of the villages were knee-deep in
water, while the flooded rivers tore through the tropic forests. It is a
real tropic forest, palms and bananas, breadfruit trees, bamboos, lofty
ceibas, and gorgeous butterflies and brilliant colored birds fluttering
among the orchids. There are beautiful flowers, too.
All my old enthusiasm for natural history seemed to revive, and I would
have given a good deal to have stayed and tried to collect specimens. It
would be a good hunting country too; deer, and now and then jaguars and
tapir, and great birds that they call wild turkeys; there are alligators
in the rivers. One of the trained nurses from a hospital went to bathe
in a pool last August and an alligator grabbed him by the legs and was
making off with him, but was fortunately scared away, leaving the man
badly injured.
I tramped everywhere through the mud. Mother did not do the roughest
work, and had time to see more of the really picturesque and beautiful
side of the life, and really enjoyed herself.
P. S. The Gatun dam will make a lake miles long, and the railroad now
goes on what will be the bottom of this lake, and it was curious to
think that in a few years great ships would be floating in water 100
feet above where we were.