A prospectus was prepared for the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique de Panama and de Lesseps was off on a whirlwind tour of the provinces to drum up 400,000,000 francs, twice what he had raised to launch the Suez venture. His support, he said, would come as it had before, from small investors, people from every walk of life. His self-confidence had never been greater. He would go to Panama, he said, to make a personal evaluation. He would tour the United States to explain his mission to the people of that great land. “M. de Lesseps is convinced that it [the canal] is the right thing,” wrote the Paris correspondent of The New York Times, “and . . . the simple fact of his connection with it will secure that Archimedean lever of the nineteenth century, money . . .”
But it was not to be that simple. Times had changed since the Suez company had been organized. The powers of the financial world and of the press had advanced considerably and the new venture had already become the target of a calculated attack. Influential French bankers wished to demonstrate the indispensable nature of their services at such times, then to step in and take control of subsequent stock subscriptions, once de Lesseps’ initial subscription failed, as they assured everyone it would. Influential publishers expected to be paid for their editorial backing.
Rumors were started in the Bourse that de Lesseps was in his dotage and ought not to be trusted with other people’s money. It was claimed that at the first blow of a French pickax at Panama, the American fleet would arrive and massacre the workers. Credit Maritime said the canal would cost so much that it would never pay a dividend. Another financial paper called the scheme a swindle and warned readers not to risk their savings in it.
The result was the failure of the stock issue, a failure so resounding that almost any man other than de Lesseps would have abandoned the whole plan there and then and spared himself any further humiliation.
Of 800,000 shares offered, a trifling 60,000-less than 10 percent-were purchased. Yet “the wonderful old man” appeared undaunted. It was obvious what had to be done, he said privately. The bankers would be invited to participate. “The financial organs were hostile,” he explained, “because they had not been paid.”
Those who had subscribed to the stock got their money back along with a new circular promising another issue the moment things were straightened out. Meantime, the firm of Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie, one of his Suez contractors, was sending its best man to appraise the Panama route from end to end. “I have never feared obstacles and delays. Experience has proved to me that those who are too quick to believe have no deep roots.”
On September 1 appeared the first issue of the Bulletin du Canal Interoceanique, an eight-page newspaper published for propaganda purposes that was to appear regularly thereafter twice monthly, its contents comprised largely of selected articles reprinted from French newspapers and magazines. (A similar journal, underwritten by Mohammed Said, had been published all through the Suez years.) The pledge to go to Panama was renewed. He would be accompanied by a party of internationally famous engineers–his own New International Technical Commission–who would be responsible for the final survey required by Colombia according to the Wyse Concession. To demonstrate that there was nothing to fear from the climate, he would also take several of his family.
When the representative of Couvreux, Hersent, an engineer named Gaston Blanchet, returned from Panama with a favorable report, de Lesseps announced that a crew of sappers would go next to make test borings along the projected canal line. That was in November. in December, with a large entourage, he boarded the Lafayette at Saint-Nazaire, leaving his affairs in the hands of Charles. Included were his wife, Two young sons and a daughter–Mathieu, ten; Ismael, nine; Ferdinande, seven–a governess, Henri Bionne, Lieutenant Réclus, Gaston Blanchet, Abel Couvreux fils (the son of de Lesseps’ old friend), the Dutch engineer Jacob Dirks, and about a dozen others. Expenses for the trip were to be met by Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie.
The crossing appears to have been pleasant and without incident, other than an angry scene in front of everyone in the ship’s salon between de Lesseps and Lieutenant Wyse, who had not been asked to make the voyage but had booked his own passage at his own expense. For the rest of the trip Wyse remained “apart and taciturn,” while de Lesseps seems to have been quite literally the life of the party.
It was a voyage of approximately 4,595 miles, a great circle route, plotted, when weather permitted, by the brightest stars in the heavens, by Capella, the double star; by Altair and Vega; and afterward by Rigil Kent and Acrux, new stars in a new southern sky. The ship, a handsome, black two-masted steam sailer, made about eight to ten knots, and her progress into lower latitudes was marked by the steady decline toward the horizon of Polaris, the North Star, the great constant at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. And low on the opposite horizon, meantime, off the port bow, rose the Southern Cross.
II
The Lafayette steamed into Limon Bay under a scorching sun, and with all passengers crowding her rail, on the afternoon of December 30, 1879, at the start of Panama’s dry season. On the Pacific Mail wharf a little brass band was playing mightily.
The welcoming ceremonies were held in the ship’s salon, moments after she tied up. It was proclaimed an occasion second only to the arrival of Columbus in Limon Bay. Señor J. A. Cespedes, chairman of an extremely sober-looking reception committee, made the first and longest of several speeches. De Lesseps, when it was his turn, responded in perfect Spanish, “very pleasantly, wearing the diplomatic smile for which he was noted,” in the words of the one American present, a Panama Railroad official named Tracy Robinson. “When he spoke, the hearer would not fail to be convinced that whatever he said was true, or at all events that he believed it to be true.”
After dark the town blazed with Japanese lanterns, and when the final burst of a fireworks display fell into the bay, de Lesseps came down the gangplank. Accompanied by a few friends and a small, noisy crowd–mostly ragged black children–he walked a while along Front Street, Colon’s sole thoroughfare.
The following morning he was up in time to see the tropical dawn that comes all at once. With Madame de Lesseps he set off on an “inspection tour,” their children, thrilled to be on solid ground again, racing ahead, climbing posts and stanchions, and astonishing the local citizenry, who, because of the long hair and velvet clothes, thought all three were girls. De Lesseps, fresh in a white linen suit, talked incessantly, concluding one remark after another with the assertion, “The canal will be made.” The upper Chagres would be turned into the Pacific, thus ending floods in the lower valley. “The canal will be made.” At the great cut at the summit, the work of many thousands of men would be handled by modern explosives. “The canal will be made.” He was overjoyed by the morning air. Colón was a delightful place. “The canal will be made.”
Yet it is hard to conceive of his being anything but terribly disappointed by Colón. Seen from a distance, from an inbound ship, the town appeared to float on the bay as if by magic. White walls and red roofs stood out against blue water and flaming green foothills. But close up, it was a squalid shantytown set on stilts, paint peeling. There was a stone church that the railroad’s guidebook made much of but that would have been of little interest anywhere else. A variety of saloons and stores lined the east side of Front Street, facing the harbor. There were an icehouse, a railroad office, a large stone freight depot, two or three seedy hotels, and the “tolerable” Washington House, a galleried white-frame affair, which, like virtually everything else in sight, belonged to the railroad company. The railroad itself ran down the middle of Front Street, and in a park, or what passed for a park, in front of the Washington House, stood an ugly red-granite monument to the railroad’s founders, Aspinwall, Chauncey, and Stephens. In a nearby railroad yard there was also a bronze statue of Columbus, an Indian maiden at his side, which had been a gift from the Empress Eugenie years before. But that was the sum total of Colón’s landmarks.
The
town had been built by the railroad on Manzanillo Island, a coral flat, no more than a mile by three-quarters of a mile in area, at the entrance to Limon Bay; and so there was open salt water on all but its southern side, where a narrow channel, the Folks River, divided it from the mainland. John Lloyd Stephens had christened the town Aspinwall, but the Colombians had insisted on calling it Colón, for Columbus, and so a silly dispute had been dragging on ever since. To most of the older Americans it was still Aspinwall.
Streets, barely above tide level, were unpaved and strewn from end to end with garbage, bits of broken furniture, dead animals. (One French visitor would write of walking ankle-deep in “les immondices imaginables”) Enormous dark buzzards circled interminably overhead, and the human populace, most of which was black–Jamaicans, by and large, who had been brought in to build the railroad–lived in appalling squalor. Disease and poverty, hopeless, bedrock poverty as bad as any to be seen in the Caribbean, seemed to hang in the air of back streets, heavy as the atmosphere.
The entire town reeked of putrefaction. There was nothing to do. It was as if a western mining camp had been slapped together willy-nilly in the middle of an equatorial swamp, then left to molder and die. Once, at the height of the gold rush, there had been a kind of redeeming zest to the place, and old-timers talked of such celebrated establishments of the day as the Maison du Vieux Carre, which specialized in French girls. Now travelers disembarking to take the train dreaded spending an hour more than necessary.
There was, however, one quite pleasant section of the town, at the northern end of the island, near a tremendous iron lighthouse that could be seen from ten miles at sea. There the houses faced onto a white coral beach. Neat and freshly painted, with green lawns and surrounding palms, they were the quarters reserved for the white Americans who ran the railroad, and it was to one of them, the home of Tracy Robinson, that de Lesseps and his family were conducted, to judge for themselves the supposed privation of life in the American tropics. Robinson, a personable and intelligent man, had spent twenty years in Panama. He was fascinated by the country, liked the people and the life, and he was certain, as he told de Lesseps, that the great future of mankind was in the tropics.
About ten o’clock the Pacific Mail steamer Colon docked beside the Lafayette, bringing Trenor W. Park and a party of gentlemen from New York who were to join the tour. By 11:30, the introductions completed, baggage ashore, everyone climbed aboard a train standing on Front Street, its bright-yellow coaches bedecked with French and Colombian flags.
The new arrivals included several stockholders in the railroad, who by their own admission had come more for pleasure than business; a reporter from the New York World; a rotund and overbearing former Union Army engineer named W. W. Wright; and Colonel George M. Totten, one of the original builders of the Panama Railroad. Wright and Totten had agreed to serve on de Lesseps’ Technical Commission. Wright, however, was a man of no particular reputation. It was Totten who got de Lesseps’ attention. Totten had been in charge of the railroad all through the years of construction. He had weathered the heat, the bugs, the mud, political uprisings, stockholders’ inspection tours, floods, fever, even a siege of yellow fever that brought him so near to death that his companions had his coffin ready and waiting. Now he was a leathery, white-bearded old figure with steel-rimmed spectacles. It is said also that he had a nice sense of humor, but a search of available sources reveals no evidence of it.
The brass band was pumping away again as the train rolled down Front Street, bell clanging, a cheering crowd chasing alongside in the brilliant sunshine. Then, after affording a brief open view of the glittering bay, the tracks turned into the jungle.
Of several surviving accounts of the tour, the most detailed is that by the World reporter, J. C. Rodrigues, who was as fascinated by the “lively Frenchmen” and their leader as the group was by the passing scenery.
M. de Lesseps himself rode most of the way on the platform of the car on the rear of the small train. For half an hour that I was at his side I could witness the deep interest which he took in the luxuriant nature, which was to him so extremely novel. . . . Inside the car, however, there reigned more than tropical–simply torrid–enthusiasm. A yellow butterfly would cause a commotion in these excitable people. But you do not imagine what an event the first approach to the Chagres River was. The car was pandemonium. The train had to be stopped and the Chagres– the enemy–had to be inspected.
The point where they first saw the river was Gatun, a native village seven miles from Colón, at the confluence of the Rio Gatun, the place Godin de Lepinay had picked for his great Chagres dam. Before that, just out of Colón, they had passed Mount Hope, or Monkey Hill, as it was better known, a low rise on the left where during construction days the railroad had buried its dead. Then for the next several miles they had crossed a broad mangrove swamp on tracks only inches above the water. Between the swamp and Gatun, the growth of vegetation was as exuberant as any on earth. Giant cedro trees towered a hundred feet or more in the air, their smooth gray trunks like pillars of concrete. Trailing vines, blossoming creepers, scarlet hibiscus, orchids, crimson passionflowers, parasitic plants of every imaginable variety, hung wherever one looked. Bamboo crowded the tracks in clumps the size of a house. It was as if the train were running along the bottom of a narrow green canyon that went winding on and on with only a thin trace of bright sky to be seen straight up, in the gap between the crowns of the trees. Every so often there would be a sudden break–a patch of banana trees, a canebrake–but as quickly it would be gone again. So relentlessly did the jungle try to recover what it had lost to the railroad, the passengers were informed, that parts of the line had to be cleared several times a year.
At Gatun the entire population had gathered for the occasion, several hundred brown, square-faced, friendly-looking people, men in white linen and straw hats, women in loose-fitting muslin in a variety of sun-faded colors, children mostly naked, everyone smiling and waving. On the left side of the train was Gatun station, a two-story white-frame building with green shutters and picket fence that might have been transplanted directly from Massachusetts. On the other side of the train was the river, “now very low, running sluggishly,” as Rodrigues noted. The actual village was across the river. About fifty grass huts were scattered within a great bend in the river and in the forefront of a sun-flooded green savanna that reached to a range of darker-green hills, two, three miles in the distance.
Most of the passengers got out for a look, and the overwhelming green of the landscape, the intensity and infinite variety of green under a cobalt-blue sky, caught them unaware. Like so many before, they had come to Panama with little thought of being stirred by landscapes. That the place could be so breathtakingly beautiful struck them as a singular revelation. “La plus belle region du monde” de Lesseps exclaimed in a letter to Charles.
At Gatun the flags that hung over some of the train windows were taken away to give a better outlook. They were running along the valley of the Chagres now, where the river came down in big, wide loops, brown and unhurried–now that the dry season had returned– through intermittent patches of deep shadow and sharp, white sunlight. The river was on their right; their general direction was south and slightly east. They were still barely above sea level, climbing only very gradually, going “up” the valley (that is, against the current of the river) but “down” the map, as several of them needed to have explained.
They crossed miles of swamp, including the infamous Black Swamp, which supposedly was bottomless. It was not–Totten and his engineers had found bottom at 185 feet–yet the roadbed kept sinking there and had to be built up year after year. “Everything kept going down and down,” an old-time employee would tell a Senate committee in Washington years later, “and they kept filling in and filling in.”
There were more white station houses, all quite similar, neat, almost prissy, but often with names very much in keeping with the surroundings–Tiger Hill, Lion Hill, Ahorca
Lagarto (which means “hanging lizard”). There was a glimpse of the Chagres again at Bohio Soldado (“place where a soldier lives”) and at Frijoles (“beans”). Then, twenty-three miles from Colón, or just about halfway to Panama City, the train stopped and everyone was asked to get out. They had arrived at Barbacoas, an Indian word meaning “bridge,” the point where the railroad crossed the Chagres. Only, at the moment, the bridge at Barbacoas was out of service.
The river here was swift and rocky, about three hundred feet wide and contained between high embankments. The bridge, a heavy wrought-iron structure set on stone piers, was more than six hundred feet in length and built forty feet above the river, or what had been presumed to be safely above the flood line. But in November, just weeks earlier, a violent “norther” had struck, bringing three days of torrential rain and the worst flood on record. In three days the Chagres had risen forty-six feet. Thirty miles of track had been under water and the bridge had been wrenched apart or out of line in several places. As future hydrographic studies would show, the discharge of the Chagres in the vicinity was normally less than 1,000 cubic feet per second in the dry season. In the rainy season, under normal conditions, the discharge would be ten times that–or more–with fluviograph readings of 10,000 to 13,000 cubic feet per second. But in the November flood, according to later studies based on the railroad’s records, the flow of the river must have been nearly 80,000 cubic feet per second.
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