Besides, how one responded to Panama depended often on the season of the year and one’s own particular make-up. Many were thrilled by the lush, primeval spectacle of the jungle–“overwhelmed with the thought that all these wonders have been from the beginning,” as one man wrote. For wives and parents left behind they described as best they could those moments when magnificent multicolored birds burst into the sky; the swarms of blue butterflies–“like blossoms blown away”; the brilliant green mountains, mountains to put Vermont to shame said a young man from Bennington who was having a splendid time traveling up the Chagres. “The weather was warm but we had a roof to our boat . . . and what was of more consequence still we had on board a box of claret wine, a bacon, bread, and a piece of ICE!”*
The little railroad was begun in 1850, with the idea that it could be finished in two years. It was finished five years later, and at a cost of $8,000,000, six times beyond anyone’s estimate. For a generation of Americans there was something especially appealing about the picture of this line across Panama, of a steam locomotive highballing through the jungle, pulling a train of bright passenger cars, a steam whistle scattering monkeys to the treetops–“ocean to ocean” in something over three hours. It was also the world’s first transcontinental rail-road–one track, five-foot (or broad) gauge, exactly forty-seven and one-half miles long–and the most expensive line on earth on a dollarper-mile basis, expensive to build and expensive to travel. A one-way ticket was $25 in gold.
To its owners the railroad was the tiny but critical land link in the first all-steam overseas system to span the new continental United States. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company, with offices in New York, had been established just before the news of California gold reached the East, or when such an idea had looked dangerously, if not insanely, speculative. The ships operated to and from Panama on both oceans, providing regular passenger service and mail delivery to California. (A generous subsidy from the federal government to carry the mail had made it considerably less speculative.) William Henry Aspin-wall, a wealthy New York merchant, was the founder and guiding spirit of the steamship line, and in the railroad venture he was joined by a banker named Henry Chauncey and by John Lloyd Stephens, who, in the time since his Nicaragua travels, had concluded that Panama was where the future lay. Stephens was the first president of the Panama Railroad Company and its driving force until his death at age forty-six. He was the one member of the threesome to stay with the actual construction effort in the jungle, and the result was an attack of fever, a recurrence of which was fatal in the fall of 1852.
Having, as it did, a monopoly on the Panama transit, the railroad was a bonanza. Profits in the first six years after it was finished were in excess of $7,000,000. Dividends were 15 percent on the average and went as high as 44 percent. Once, standing at $295 a share, Panama Railroad was the highest-priced stock listed on the New York Exchange.
So dazzling a demonstration of the cash value of an ocean connection at Panama, even one so paltry as a little one-track railroad, was bound to draw attention. Matthew Fontaine Maury, the pioneer oceanographer, had told a Senate committee as early as 1849 that a Panama railroad would lead directly to a Panama canal “by showing to the world how immense this business is,” but nobody had been prepared for success on such a scale. The volume of human traffic alone–upward of 400,000 people between 1856 and 1866–gave Panama a kind of most-beaten-path status unmatched by any of the other canal routes talked of.
Surveys for the railroad had also produced two pertinent pieces of information. The engineers had discovered a gap in the mountains twelve miles from Panama City, at a point called Culebra, where the elevation above sea level was only 275 feet. This was 200 feet less than what had been considered the lowest gap. Then, toward the close of their work, they had determined once and for all that there was no difference between the levels of the two oceans. The level of the Pacific was not twenty feet higher than that of the Atlantic, as had been the accepted view for centuries. Sea level was sea level, the same on both sides. The difference was in the size of their tides.
(The tides on the Pacific are tremendous, eighteen to twenty feet, while on the Caribbean there is little or no tide, barely more than a foot. When Balboa stood at last on the Pacific shore, he had seen no rush of lordly breakers, but an ugly brown mud flat reaching away for a mile and more, because he had arrived when the tide was out.)
Yet, ironically, it was the experience of the railroad builders that argued most forcibly for some different path, almost any other location, for the canal. If humane considerations were to be entered in the balance, then Panama was the worst possible place to send men to build anything.
Panama had been known as a pesthole since the earliest Spanish settlement. But the horror stories to come out of Panama as the railroad was being pushed ahead mile by mile quite surpassed anything. The cost paid in human life for the minuscule bit of track was of the kind people associated with dark, barbaric times, before the age of steam and iron and the upward march of Progress. The common story, the one repeated up and down the California gold fields, the one carried home on the New York steamer, the claim that turns up time and again in the dim pages of old letters, is that there was a dead man for every railroad tie between Colón and Panama City. In some versions it was a dead Irishman; in others, a dead Chinese. The story was nonsense–there were some seventy-four thousand ties along the Panama line–but that had not kept it from spreading, and from what many thousands of people had seen with their own eyes, it seemed believable enough.
How many did actually die is not known. The company kept no systematic records, no body count, except for its white workers, who represented only a fraction of the total force employed over the five years of construction. (In 1853, for example, of some 1,590 men on the payroll, 1,200 were black.) However, the company’s repeated assertion that in fact fewer than a thousand had died was patently absurd. A more reasonable estimate is six thousand, but it could very well have been twice that. No one will ever know, and the statistic is not so important as the ways in which they died–of cholera, dysentery, fever, smallpox, all the scourges against which there was no known protection or any known cure.
Laborers had been brought in by the boatload from every part of the world. White men, mostly Irish “navvies” who had built canals and railroads across England, “withered as cut plants in the sun.” But of a thousand Chinese coolies, hundreds fell no less rapidly or died any less miserably of disease, and scores of Chinese workers were so stricken by “melancholia,” an aftereffect of malaria, that they had committed suicide by hanging, drowning, or impaling themselves on sharpened bamboo poles.
Simply disposing of dead bodies had been a problem the first year, before the line reached beyond the swamps and a regular cemetery could be established on high ground. And so many of those who died were without identity, other than a first name, without known address or next of kin, that a rather ghoulish but thriving trade developed in the shipping of cadavers, pickled in large barrels, to medical schools and hospitals all over the world. For years the Panama Railroad Company was a steady supplier of such merchandise, and the proceeds were enough to pay for the company’s own small hospital at Colón.
A reporter who visited this hospital in 1855, the year the railroad was finished, wrote of seeing “the melancholy rows” of sick and dying men, then of being escorted by the head physician to an adjoining piazza, “where, in conscious pride, he displayed to me his collection of well-picked skeletons and bones, bleaching and drying in the hot sun.” It was the physician’s intention, for the purposes of science, to assemble a complete “museum” representing all the racial types to be found among the railroad dead.
The worst year had been 1852, the year of Stephens’ death, When cholera swept across the Isthmus, starting at Colón with the arrival of a steamer from New Orleans. Of the American technicians then employed–some fifty engineers, surveyors, draftsmen–all but two died. When a large military detac
hment, several hundred men of the American Fourth Infantry and their dependents, made the crossing in July en route to garrison duty in California, the tragic consequence was 150 dead–men, women, and children. “The horrors of the road in the rainy season are beyond description,” wrote the young officer in charge, Captain Ulysses S. Grant, whose memory of the experience was to be no less vivid years later when he sat in the White House.
Nicaragua was different.
The United States and Great Britain had come close to war over Nicaragua, in fact, at the beginning of the gold rush, so seriously was Nicaragua’s importance as a canal site regarded on both sides of the Atlantic. The Caribbean entrance to a Nicaragua canal would be San Juan del Norte, at the mouth of the San Juan River, and a British gunboat had seized San Juan del Norte in 1848 and renamed it Grey-town. A crisis was averted by a treaty specifically binding the United States and Great Britain to joint control of any canal at Nicaragua, or, by implication, any canal anywhere in Central America. This was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850–after John Clayton, the American Secretary of State, and Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, the special British envoy involved–and it seemed a very good thing in Washington, in that it blocked a foothold for the British Empire in Central America and precluded any chance of a wholly British-owned and -operated canal in the Western Hemisphere. So important a document signed by the two powers had also put the Nicaragua canal in a class by itself.
Nicaragua and Tehuantepec both competed with Panama for the California trade, and though the Tehuantepec transit never really amounted to much, the one at Nicaragua did and far more so than is generally appreciated. In 1853, for example, traffic in both directions across Panama was in the neighborhood of twenty-seven thousand people; that same year probably twenty thousand others took the Nicaragua route, going from ocean to ocean on an improvised hop-skip-and-jump system of shallow-draft steamers on the San Juan, large lake steamers, and sky-blue stagecoaches between the lake and the Pacific. The actual overland crossing at Panama was shorter and faster, but Nicaragua, being closer to the United States, was the shorter, faster route over all– five hundred miles shorter and two days faster. A through ticket by way of Nicaragua also cost less and, perhaps as important as everything else, Nicaragua was not known as a deathtrap.
The Nicaragua system was the creation of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who became seriously enough interested in a Nicaragua canal to hire Orville Childs, a highly qualified engineer, to survey the narrow neck of land between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific. And in 1851 Orville Childs had the good fortune to hike into a pass that was only 153 feet above sea level. He had found a place, in other words, that was a full 122 feet lower than the summit of the Panama Railroad, and by 1870 no lower point had been discovered anywhere else.
The impetus to resolve the canal question grew steadily as the steam engine transformed ocean travel on a global scale. In 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry with his “black ships” had forced Japan to open her ports to Western commerce. Seven years later the first Japanese delegation to the United States, eighteen lords wearing the swords and robes of samurai, passed through Panama on its way to Washington.
A Wall Street man named Frederick Kelley calculated that a canal through Central America could mean an annual saving to American trade as a whole of no less than $36,000,000–in reduced insurance, interest on cargoes, wear and tear on ships, wages, provisions, crews– and a total saving of all maritime nations of $48,000,000. This alone, he asserted, would be enough, irrespective of tolls, to pay for the entire canal in a few years, even if it were to cost as much as $100,000,000, a possibility almost no one foresaw.
Darien had been tried several times again since Lieutenant Strain’s tragedy, as had the Atrato headwaters, all without luck. Small French exploring parties had begun turning up in both areas in the 1860’s, and Frederick Kelley, who became the most ingenuous canal booster of the day, expended a fortune backing several disappointing expeditions, including one in search of Humboldt’s “Lost Canal of the Raspadura.” The leader of that particular Kelley venture was a hard-bitten old jungle hand, John C. Trautwine, who had worked on the Panama Railroad surveys. There was no lost canal, he reported, at the conclusion of a search across hundreds of miles of Atrato wilderness. Perhaps a Spanish priest had induced his flock to make a “canoe slide,” but it was never anything more than that. “I have crossed it [the Isthmus] both at the site of the Panama Railroad and at three other points more to the south,” Trautwine wrote in a prominent scientific journal. “From all I could see, combined with all I have read on the subject, I cannot entertain the slightest hope that a ship canal will ever be found practicable across any part of it.”
But whose word was to be trusted? which data were reliable? The information available had been gathered in such extremely different fashions by such a disparate assortment of individuals, even the best of whom found it impossible to remain objective about his own piece of work. The more difficult it was to obtain the data, the higher their cost in physical hardship, time, or one’s own cash, the harder it was to appraise them dispassionately. The conditions under which the field work had to be conducted were not only difficult in the extreme, but even the best-intentioned, most experienced men could be gravely misled if they allowed themselves to be influenced by the “feel” of the terrain, as nearly all of them had at one time or another.
The French explorers and engineers had little faith in American surveys; the Americans had still less regard for any data attributed to a French source. The only surveys of consequence were that of the Panama Railroad and the Nicaragua survey by Childs. Only one of these had been made with a canal in mind and it was really far from adequate. The organized approach Humboldt insisted on had never once been tried, for all the talk and energies expended. Nor, it must be added, had any serious body or institution–American, European, scientific, military–addressed itself to the critical question of the kind of canal to be built; whether in the interests of commerce and of future generations, it ought to be a canal cut through at sea level, such as the Suez Canal, or whether one that would lift ships up and over the land barrier with a system of locks.
III
Late in the afternoon of February 21, 1870, having made a stop at Colón to pick up a Colombian commissioner, Senor Don Bias Arosemena, who was to accompany the expedition, as well as a force of macheteros, the steam sloop Nipsic arrived at Caledonia Bay. The weather was delightful. The dry season at Darien is the time when trade winds blow fresh from the north and a heavy blue sea breaks all along the coast. Little rain falls, except in the mountains. Temperatures range in the low eighties; the sky is spotlessly clear day and night.
The line of march was to be over the abrupt green mountains that rise only a few miles in from shore. Selfridge would head for the Caledonia gap, which, from the bay, appears lower than it is and might well be taken even by an experienced observer as the perfect place for a canal. It was what had attracted Dr. Edward Cullen originally. Selfridge issued strict orders concerning the Indians. Their property was to be “perfectly respected,” no villages were to be entered without their consent. Any “outrage of their women” would be answered with the most severe punishment.
Operations commenced February 22, the morning after arrival. Self-ridge met on the beach with the chief of the Caledonia tribe. “When you give an order to one of your young men, do you expect him to obey?” Selfridge asked. “I am sent here by my great chief,” he continued, “with orders to pass through the country and I must obey. I shall cross to the Pacific, peaceably if possible, but if not I have ample force at my command.” The Indian said the white men could go at will but he professed no knowledge of the interior. Like the other Indians to be seen on the beach, he was quite small in stature, but muscular and quick, with bright, intelligent eyes. “I was not able to discover their ancient form of worship,” Selfridge wrote. “They believe in evil spirits, and . . . they believe that God made the country as it is, and that He would be angry with them and
kill them if they assisted in any work constructed by white men.”
Four days later, leaving a small party behind to organize a telegraph station and an astronomical observatory, Selfridge and a force of about eighty men, including Marines and macheteros, started inland to make a reconnaissance. In a week they were back, dirty, exhausted, and full of stories. They had found the Sucubti River, which flows to the Pacific, the river Strain should have followed. Once they had reached the mountains it had rained nearly the whole time, and in some places the trail had run along ridges only a few feet wide, with great gorges dropping off on both sides (“in the depths of which was heard the roaring of wild animals”). Some of the older men, veterans of the Civil War, said they had never experienced anything to equal the march. But they had crossed the divide.
On March 8, a full-scale surveying party got under way, stringing a telegraph wire as it went in order to report its progress back to the base camp. Two weeks later, on March 22, the chief telegrapher with the party, W. H. Clarke, sent the following message:
I am at the front. We are progressing finely through the worst country I ever saw, on our way to the Pacific; impossible to write; everybody is well and in good spirits.
On March 30 came another message from Chief Telegrapher Clarke, this one to Commander Lull and the crew of the Guard.
The entire column of the Surveying and Telegraphic Corps unite in sending you and all friends on board, a greeting from the summit of the dividing ridge. Looking to the westward we see the long-looked-for slope of the Pacific stretching far away, seemingly all an impenetrable forest; to the northeast Caledonia Bay and the Guard is plainly visible; immediately around me I see Lieutenant Schulze, Mr. J. A. Sullivan, Ensigns Collins and Eaton of the Guard, Messrs. H. L. Merinden, J. P. Carson, T. H. O’Sullivan and Calvin McDowell, and as I telegraph this message they are singing “Jordan is a hard road to travel.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 332