David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  The river’s drainage basin, from its headwaters to the Caribbean, was comparatively small–about 1,300 square miles, an area about the size of Rhode Island. Yet except for the dry season, virtually this entire basin was running water. The river originated in the steep jungle uplands miles off to the east, a “quick and bold” wilderness with mountains of two thousand to four thousand feet, where at the time of the Spanish conquest a legendary Indian chief, Chagre, had ruled. Even under average conditions, the runoff from such country was phenomenal. With abnormally heavy rains in the mountains, it was as if a dam had burst. And while the recent flood had been the worst since the railroad began bothering with records, the floods of 1857, 1862, 1865, 1868, 1872, 1873, and 1876 had been nearly as awesome.

  The situation at Barbacoas should have been the clearest possible warning to de Lesseps and the others. The condition of the massive iron bridge was such that no through trains had crossed the Isthmus, no freight had moved between Colón and Panama City, in five weeks. Only by a crude arrangement of planks put across the breaks was it possible for passengers to walk over and transfer to another train. The river’s violence, quite obviously, had been greater even than what A. G. Menocal had described in his speech before the Paris congress.

  Readers of the Bulletin du Canal Interoceanique were to be told nothing of the broken bridge, however. The official account of the tour would contain only passing mention of an unexplained delay at Barbarcoas.

  Most of them crossed single file, slowly, cautiously, amid much good-natured banter, the river sliding by forty feet below. A fuss was made over the safety of the de Lesseps children, who greatly enjoyed every moment of the experience, and then two or three of the Americans, after appraising the problem, decided to risk the crossing another day. Quantities of champagne had been available on the train since leaving Colón and this seems to have had a bearing on their decision.

  On the other side stood a second train and beside it another official delegation, a dozen or so citizens from Panama City, all as formal as pallbearers. Among them were the president-elect of the province, Demaso Cervera, and a former president, Rafael Aizpuru, “a disreputable revolutionist,” de Lesseps was told. Because of the heat, there was just one very short speech; then with several blasts of the whistle the journey resumed.

  The river was on the left now as the train rolled smoothly along through open meadows. “In Suez we had to build everything,” de Lesseps remarked; “here you already have a railroad like this. . . .” The first mountains came into view, small and bright-green and heaped up like the mountains in a child’s drawing. Lunch was served–“with wines, etc., etc., and everything gave entire satisfaction.”

  Within the space of a few miles the railroad crossed the Rio Caimilo Mulato, the Rio Baila Monos, the Rio Culo Seco, the Rio Caribali, all tributaries of the Chagres. (Forty-seven and a half miles of railroad had required 170 bridges and culverts of 15 feet or more, 134 bridges and culverts of less than 15 feet, a statistic that gives some idea of the difficulties there had been in making headway in such half-drowned country.) Past Gorgona Station the train left the river again, taking a shortcut through steep red-clay embankments. Then it swung around a hill to meet the river at Matachin, another cluster of grass huts and the point where Menocal had proposed to build his giant stone viaduct. Again the train stopped, to be instantly surrounded by beaming brown faces.

  Matachin was best known as the place where Chinese workers, hopelessly lost to “melancholia,” had committed suicide en masse. Matar is Spanish for “to kill,” it was explained; chino, the word for “Chinese.” The fact that matachin is also a perfectly good Spanish word meaning “butcher” or “hired assassin,” and that the place had been called that long before the railroad came through, did not seem to matter. Everyone who passed through Matachin heard the story.

  To what extent de Lesseps and Totten discussed such topics, whether Totten was closely questioned on the death toll during construction of the road, or how much, if anything, may have been said about disease or bodies pickled in barrels, how much Totten may have been willing to admit, even to himself at this late date, is not known. The point he does seem to have stressed–the great lesson to be learned from his experience–was that everything, everything, had to be brought to Panama, including the men to do the work. The Panamanians themselves would be of no use. The poor were unused to heavy manual labor and were without ambition; the upper classes regarded physical work as beneath their dignity. There would be no home-grown labor force to count on, no armies of Egyptian fellahin this time. Labor had to be figured like freight, very expensive freight. Then every pick and shovel, every tent, blanket, mattress, every cookstove and locomotive, had to be carried by ship across thousands of miles of ocean. De Lesseps could count on Panama to provide nothing but the place to dig the canal.

  Beyond Matachin the train left the Chagres bottom lands and entered the narrow valley of the Rio Obispo, largest tributary of the Chagres. After Emperador, or Empire, as the Americans called it, came the summit at Culebra (“snake”), or Summit Station. On January 27, 1855, at midnight, in the pitch dark and in pelting rain, the last rail had been laid. Totten himself had driven the last spike with a nine-pound maul.

  Summit was ten and a half miles from Panama City, and on the rest of the ride, descending to the Pacific, the party looked out on scenery reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting, with feathery green conical mountains rising on every side. At one dramatic turn, a cliff of basalt seemed to hang precariously close overhead, the great crystals of the dark rock lying every which way. The route now followed the Rio Grande, “a narrow noisy torrent winding along through dense forests below the track.” Its drainage was south, to the Pacific.

  Paraiso, another native village, was tucked between high hills shaped like inverted teacups. Pedro Miguel and Miraflores followed, then a stretch of spongy lowlands, a brackish swamp with soil the color of coal, then, ahead, the bald top of Ancon Hill, overlooking Panama City. The train covered the last few miles with its whistle screaming, bell clanging. Cathedral towers and red tile roofs were in view ahead on the right, and dead ahead was the Pacific. At once everyone was cheering.

  With all stops en route, the delay at Barbacoas, the trip had lasted six hours. In his letter to the Bulletin, de Lesseps said they did it in three.

  III

  The original city of Panama had been founded in 1519, or just six years after Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific, and by an extraordinarily treacherous individual, Pedro Arias de Avila, usually referred to as Pedrarias, who had been governor of Castilla del Oro, as the Central American isthmus was known, and who, to solidify his power, had Balboa beheaded on a trumped-up charge of treason.

  A Cueva Indian word, Panama means “a place where many fishes are taken.” For the Spanish, Panama became a marshaling point and clearinghouse for the most important crossroad in the New World, the camino real, or royal road, which was nothing more than a narrow, mean mule track cut from Panama to Nombre de Dios, then the one Spanish fort on the Caribbean side. The gold of the Incas, pearls, Bolivian silver–no one knows how many thousands of tons of treasure –went across to Nombre de Dios, to be picked up by Spanish galleons. And though Panama never became especially large–because of disease primarily–or achieved the fabled wealth pictured in some old accounts, its importance was considerable. The stone ruins of the original city, Old Panama, or Panama Viejo, still stood several miles down the bay. The site had been abandoned after the city was sacked and burned by the pirate Morgan in 1671, and the present Panama, a walled city, was begun three years later, at the head of the bay, on a narrow tongue of volcanic rock with water on three sides.

  “Panama is a very miserable old town . . . fast crumbling to pieces,” an American sea captain noted in his journal, at the start of the gold rush, having brought the California, the first of the San Francisco steamers, around the Horn. “The houses are miserable and going to decay and the churches are crumbling. . . .�
� The harbor was also too shallow for a ship of any size. He did, however, find the climate “delightful at evening and in the morning.” Thereafter, for the next several years, the city had been a wide-open booming seaport wherein, as one disapproving traveler commented, “most of the people are deficient in the higher moral attributes.” now the pace was more what it had been centuries before.

  Fire had ravaged the city again and again. As recently as 1878, nearly a third of it had burned to the ground. Streets were narrow, with hardly room for two carriages to pass, and shadowed by overhanging balconies. There was not one proper sewer, little sanitation of any kind. As at Colón, fresh water had to be collected in huge rain barrels that could be seen everywhere, or carried in from the country in jars on mules; and whatever its source, the water never looked particularly clean. Tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, and malaria were all common. A Canadian physician named Wolfred Nelson, who took up residence soon after de Lesseps’ visit, described the city as “simply awful.”

  Still, it was a considerable step up from Colón, and, unlike Colón, almost entirely Spanish in feeling–Spanish architecture, Spanish faces, Spanish traditions. The government of the province was in Panama City; the bishop of Panama resided there. The Star & Herald, in English and Spanish, appeared daily. There was an established society among patrician landowners and professional people whose family names could be found on the rolls of Balboa’s and Cortez’ companies. Panama City was Panama. The humidity was not quite so oppressive as on the Atlantic side; there was less rain. The climate was indeed “delightful at evening and in the morning”–just about ideal in the dry season with the trade winds blowing–and on moonlight nights the view of the bay from the Bovedas, the old Spanish seawall and the city’s “choice promenade,” was one of the loveliest sights anywhere in the American tropics.

  For de Lesseps’ arrival, furthermore, an almost miraculous transformation had been worked. The local populace had been told to clean up the streets, to paint, scrub, or whitewash everything within sight of his path, or face a stiff fine. Such an air of neatness, according to one report, had not prevailed within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. To give the celebrated visitor the right impression, to see that he was properly honored and entertained, the local government had allocated its entire budget for the forthcoming year.

  “The reception of M. de Lesseps at this town was something never to be forgotten,” wrote J. C. Rodrigues in his first dispatch from Panama City.

  It seems that every one of the 14,000 inhabitants was at the railway station, shouting, struggling to get a glimpse of the distinguished guest. I doubt very much whether more than one twentieth of them knew the true importance and meaning of the occasion. But . . . [their] enthusiasm did not know any bounds. We may laugh all we want at their ways of expressing it, but it was a most genuine triumphal entry, this one of M. de Lesseps.

  After the predictable speeches at the depot, a procession of carriages rolled off to Cathedral Plaza, along the Avenida Central, which was lined the whole way by an honor guard of little Colombian soldiers in white trousers, white tunics, and blue caps trimmed with red. The plaza was in the exact center of the city and was dominated by the old brown cathedral with its twin bell towers, the most imposing structure on the Isthmus. De Lesseps and his party were to be quartered in the handsome new Grand Hotel, also on the plaza, and so the entire square, lampposts, every window and doorway, had been hung with French flags–the perfect sign, de Lesseps would tell readers of the Bulletin, of “nos bonnes revanches.”

  There was a state banquet at the hotel that evening, followed by dancing and singing that went on through the rest of the night, spilling out into the plaza, which was lit by hundreds of Japanese lanterns. Almost nobody was able to sleep. But bright and early the following morning, New Year’s Day, de Lesseps was up and dressed in full formal attire, all his medals pinned on, and parading across to the cathedral for the inaugural ceremonies of President Demaso Cervera.

  Then he was off to the harbor, where a steam tug stood by to take perhaps a hundred people and a large supply of champagne and cognac three miles along the bay to the mouth of the Rio Grande, the projected Pacific terminus of the canal. Before leaving Paris, he had promised to strike the first blow for the canal on the first day of the new year.

  Some six hundred people turned up, in addition to de Lesseps, his family, his Technical Commission, the bishop of Panama, and the boat was so late getting under way that they missed the tide and were unable to get anywhere near the appointed spot. “The whole fun seemed to be spoiled,” Rodrigues remembered. De Lesseps, however, was “not a man to change plans.” He climbed onto a wooden seat, as two men held him by each arm, and he called the passengers to attention, which was no easy task since the boat was pitching badly and the champagne and cognac had been distributed freely in the hot sun for nearly two hours. Wherever it was made, the first stroke– “le premier coup de pioche”–would be symbolic only, he said. There was no reason why it could not be done where they were, on the boat. His little daughter, Ferdinande, would deliver the historic blow.

  The child then swung a shiny pickax, brought especially from France for the occasion, into a champagne box filled with sand, after which each of the Technical Commission took a swing (“en signe de I’alliance des tous peuples qui contribuent à Funion des deux oceans, pour le bien de I’humanité”). The bishop, Jose Telesforo Paul, blessed the work and the boat turned back to the city. There were more banquets in the days following, more speeches, toasts, fireworks, a horse race, a bullfight. Between times the French visitors went fishing in the bay or strolled the Bovedas or picked out Panama hats at the “emporium” of Vallarino & Zabieta across from the cathedral.

  The hotel was the center of all activity. “Everybody meets every-body at the Grand Hotel,” wrote Rodrigues. The food was “a la Française” as advertised, and the best to be had in Panama. The salon featured a “FIRST-CLAS SPIANO PLAYER.” Everything was new and clean. Large, airy rooms opened on to interior galleries that looked down on a cool interior court that served as bar and billiard room and was the place where most of Panama’s business was transacted. The billiard tables, the largest the guests had ever seen, were busy at all hours; the bar, in their words, was “one of those vast bars that have such a place in American life.” At a crowded roulette table adjacent to the bar, a croupier called out the winning numbers in Spanish, French, and English.

  Once, for posterity, de Lesseps gathered everybody for a formal portrait. The photograph, though badly faded, has survived. They sit or stand in three rows, some holding their new hats, some with umbrellas, every man in coat and tie in a country where a light shirt can feel heavy. De Lesseps sits in the center of the middle row, in his white suit, looking handsome and a bit distracted. Totten is at his right, the seat of honor; Dirks, at his left, wears thick round spectacles that give him a strange popeyed look. It is not hard to imagine the occasion de Lesseps made of the sitting, the bit of ceremony that must have gone with the placement of each man.

  Wyse, who is on the far right, holding a large umbrella, looks as if he is about to break into a smile or a sneer–it could be either. Gaston Blanchet, the Couvreux, Hersent engineer who stands in the center of the back row, is a tall, good-looking man with a big shock of dark hair. Rodrigues, also in the back row, end man on the right, is full-bearded and dapper and especially uncomfortable-looking in a heavy three-piece suit, complete with wing collar, stickpin, and watch chain.

  Trenor Park is not in the picture, which may or may not say something about de Lesseps’ feelings toward him. Nor is it clear what Park was doing all this time. We know only that he and most of the others who had come down from New York sailed for home shortly after the picture was taken. We have only his parting comments. He still saw no reason, Park said, why a sale of the road could not be arranged once the French company was organized, which was the polite way of saying once de Lesseps had the cash.

  The Techn
ical Commission got down to business officially at the Grand Hotel on the morning of January 6. The first meeting was brief. The canal was to be an open cut, de Lesseps reminded them. “And now, gentlemen,” he said, “you see what you have got to do, go ahead and do it.”

  “From that time,” General Wright would recall, “he left us entirely to ourselves–went out of the room and left us to consult. We were of different nationalities and different ideas as to how the work should be done . . .” Later in the day, de Lesseps, Wright, and Jacob Dirks–all three of them past seventy–took a train back to Matachin, and for an hour or more, under what de Lesseps benignly categorized as a “rather bright” sun, they drifted down the Chagres in a dugout canoe. They saw several drowsy alligators, and Wright, who spoke neither French nor Spanish and so was unable to converse with de Lesseps, decided after looking around that, indeed, “the best type of canal is obviously one at sea level.”

  A ball at the hotel the night of January 15 went on until one in the morning, when there was an enormous banquet, after which the music and dancing resumed until dawn. There was a day’s outing to the island of Taboga, ten miles out in the bay. A French man-of-war, Grandeur, arrived. There was even a wedding one evening at eight at the cathedral, which was described as “gay with the presence of a multitude of the best of our Panama society.” Gaston Blanchet was the groom; the bride was the daughter of the proprietor of the Grand Hotel, a stunning Panamanian girl whom Blanchet had found time to fall in love with during his previous inspection tour. Madame de Lesseps, “with great sweetness and expression,” sang a selection from Gounod.

  If Ferdinand de Lesseps was not having the time of his life all this while, he certainly left everyone with that impression. The Panamanians adored him, for his energy, for his “vivid interest in our rather dull Isthmus life” (as the Star & Herald said), for his beautiful children, his beautiful wife. (“Her form was voluptuous and her raven hair, without luster, contrasted well with the rich pallor of her . . . features,” Tracy Robinson would still be able to recall nearly thirty years later.) “They really believe he is their man,” wrote Rodrigues.