The skies, when it was not raining, were nearly always filled with tremendous, towering clouds–magnificent clouds, and especially so in the light of early morning. Then there would be an unmistakable rush of wind in the trees, a noticeable drop in temperature, a quick darkening overhead followed by a sound that someone likened to the “trampling of myriad feet” through leaves. In villages and towns everyone would instinctively dash for cover. From the hills at Culebra the jungle could be seen to vanish before onrushing silver cataracts of rain, and howler monkeys would commence their eerie ruckus.
If one were to wait out the storm beneath a corrugated iron roof, the sound was like that of a locomotive. Often these storms became violent thunderstorms, with lightning “so stunning,” wrote one American, “it just makes a person feel as though he were drunk.” And then, while the trees still tossed and roared, the rain would be over–in an instant. The sun would be out again, fierce as ever. Everything would glisten with rainwater and the air would be filled with the fecund, greenhouse smell of jungle and mud.
By May the canal line had been cleared from Colón to Panama City and Colón had become a beehive of building and of ships unloading. A sawmill went up, along with fifty prefabricated houses that had been shipped from New Orleans. Crates of equipment and vast quantities of material were piling up the length of Front Street.
Great gaps in the jungle were cleared for intermediate towns at Gatun and Emperador. (The one at Gatun was to be called Lesseps City.) There were to be machine shops at Bohío Soldado, labor camps at San Pablo (just beyond Barbacoas) and at Matachín. Barracks for black workers were set on high concrete footings, a precaution against floods and rats. The buildings were large enough for fifty bunks each. Well-seasoned lumber was used, and the design was sensible for the climate, with long verandas and plenty of windows.
The “cottages” for the white technicians were also as comfortable and as well constructed as conditions would allow. They were built near the water, along the eastern shoreline in what was to be a new community called Christophe-Colomb (later renamed Cristobal). They were one-story buildings, all very much alike, white with green shutters, each enclosed by verandas, and generally there was a Yucatán hammock slung at one corner of the front veranda. Everything considered, the location was ideal. At night, with a full moon flooding the white beach and a breeze coming in off* the water, a young newly arrived French engineer might well find Panama all that he had dreamed.
At Panama City, the company bought the Grand Hotel and set up headquarters. From a second-floor office overlooking the plaza, Armand Réclus wrote regularly to Paris, as instructed, to report on local politics, employee morale, his own daily problems. To maintain an adequate labor force seemed nearly impossible. In this first year only about ten out of every one hundred newly arrived laborers remained on the job after six months. But contrary to later accusations, the well-being of the men was regarded as a priority responsibility. “We must make certain that the personnel suffer no privations and that their welfare is looked into,” Charles wrote to Réclus. “You will always find us disposed to approve any measures that you may have to propose in this matter.” The great hope of the de Lesseps’, father and son, was to establish a “Panama family.” “Everything you can do to ensure the well-being of the personnel, including their pleasures, will be immediately approved,” Charles would advise. “Do all you can so that off-duty there are no bosses and employees, but only members of the same family united by sentiment.” And at the bottom, his father added in his own hand, “This is an excellent letter and I am one with it.”
A hospital, to be known as L’HÓpital Notre Dame du Canal, was being planned for a spacious site on Ancon Hill, overlooking the city and bay. The physician in charge, Dr. Louis Companyo, was the former head of the sanitary division of the Suez Canal. There were to be several handsome buildings, with good ventilation and comfortable verandas, set among magnificent gardens. There would be a full-time staff of doctors and nurses, the Filles de la Charité. A smaller hospital would be built on the northern shore at Colón, to take advantage of the sea breezes; and a hotel on the island of Taboga, a rambling, filigreed white ark, was to be converted into a sanitarium for convalescents.
It would be told later how the French had plunged into Panama blithely disregarding the threat of disease, and how hopelessly primitive their medical facilities were. But the intentions expressed repeatedly in personal correspondence between Panama and Paris, the efforts taken in Panama, the money spent by the canal company, all belie this. De Lesseps had once faced a cholera epidemic in Egypt; he had lost a wife and a son to disease; he was no fool, however frequently his public declarations concerning health conditions in Panama would appear to prove otherwise. The facility at Ancon, which was to include some seventy buildings by the time it was finished, would cost $5,600,000, a staggering sum in that day. Another $1,000,000 was spent on the hospital at Colón, nearly $500,000 on the Taboga sanitarium. Dr. Wolfred Nelson, the Canadian physician who had opened an office in Panama the previous year, a man who was to be severely critical of almost everything the French did, wrote, “The canal hospitals on the Panama side are without doubt the finest and most perfect system of hospitals ever made within the tropics.” William Crawford Gorgas, writing some thirty-five years afterward, was to appraise the Ancon complex as “a very much better institution than any in the United States . . . at the same period carried on by a firm or corporation.” The effect of the climate on tools, clothing, everyday personal items, was devastating. Anything made of iron or steel turned bright orange with rust. Books, shoes, belts, knapsacks, instrument cases, machete scabbards, grew mold overnight. Glued furniture fell apart. Clothes seldom ever dried. Men in the field finished a day drenched to the skin from rain and sweat and had to start again the next morning wearing the same clothes, still as wet as the night before. Without laundry facilities, a clean shirt or fresh pair of trousers were luxuries beyond compare.
Panama was “a hell upon earth,” an English traveler on the Panama Railroad once observed; besides, he said, it was “overrun with Yankees.” And for those French officials struggling to establish system and order to their efforts, the Yankees who ran the Panama Railroad were proving to be as large an aggravation as anything they had to face. To judge by the correspondence of Armand Réclus, the railroad people seldom if ever did anything as he wished, and since the railroad was the sole means of transportation and communication, the results were maddening. When nothing moved on the railroad, nothing moved on the Isthmus. If there were delays, if shipments were held up, lost, damaged, the effect was felt all down the line.
Reclus saw more than poor or indifferent management or simple bad luck as the root causes of his troubles. It was all, he believed, part of a diabolic scheme to force de Lesseps to buy the railroad at an inflated price. “I am persuaded that this, in effect, is their plan,” he informed Charles. The Americans were merely following “orders from New York to do everything to create the greatest possible difficulty for us.” The only conceivable solution was the one the railroad company wanted. “It is necessary that we become the absolute masters of the railroad,” and that, he emphasized, could only be done by buying the road outright as quickly as possible.
Trenor Park by now owned even more stock in the line than he had before–and he had raised his price, should the French still be interested. The $200-a-share figure quoted initially had been advanced to $250 a share. Park insisted on full payment in cash.
It was a holdup, a great many people felt, but there was little that could be done about it. He had de Lesseps in a corner. “It is necessary at any price to settle the question of the railroad,” Réclus pleaded again in desperation, “because on its possession or not depends the accomplishment of the canal.”
So in June 1881, after drawn-out negotiations between Paris and New York, the sale was agreed to. The canal company bought some 68,500 of the existing 70,000 shares, which at $250 a share came to more than $17,0
00,000. In addition the company took over a sinking fund amassed by the railroad toward the eventual amortization of its bonded indebtedness of some $6,000,000. So all told the little stretch of track cost over $20,000,000, which was more than equal to a full third of the company’s resources. On a per-share basis the stock actually wound up costing $292 at a time when the true par value was less than $100.
For all that the legal status of the road remained the same. It was still an American company, incorporated under the laws of the state of New York; its franchise from the Colombian government remained unchanged. Trenor Park, who personally cleared approximately $7,000,000 on the transaction, did step down as president of the line. However, the man who replaced him was John G. McCullough, his son-in-law.*
Furthermore, the old Bidlack Treaty, the 1846 treaty between Colombia and the United States, was as much in effect as ever. The railroad’s fundamental right of transit still rested on Article XXXV of the treaty, and to guarantee uninterrupted traffic on the line, as well as Colombian sovereignty on the Isthmus, remained the obligation of the United States. So an American military presence would continue, in the form of gunboats standing off Colón and Panama City.
At a stockholders’ meeting in June, de Lesseps explained the purchase in straightforward, businesslike terms. He asked for approval to borrow the money to pay the bill, plus another 300,000,000 francs, which, with the company’s present capital, would give him, he said, an ample amount to build the canal. The stockholders approved.
Gaston Blanchet, meantime, had led a surveying party far up the Chagres, to begin work on the first serious maps and surveys. They were the advance guard and they made a striking picture–intent, tanned faces under white sun helmets, pistols at the belt. They chewed on Havana cigars as they squinted into the brass eyepieces of surveying instruments. They slapped at the interminable mosquitoes; they picked scorpions the size of a hand from their boots in the morning. They shot alligators, some twenty feet in length, and brought back the stripped pelts of jaguars. And they were extremely good at their work.
Copies of their surveys, compilations of the data accumulating, were sent off to Paris, and as a detailed picture began to materialize in the office on the Rue Caumartin, de Lesseps called in a new superior advisory board, still another technical commission, to give an opinion on all plans. None of these men was to take part in making the plans, or in the preparation or control of contracts; they were merely to give an opinion. And of course the mere fact that they were gathered, that they were known to be sitting as a jury over all technical decisions, had considerable public-relations value.
The important point is that de Lesseps, once again, would get exactly what he wanted; he would follow his own lead and they would nod in agreement and go along with him as willingly as his stockholders had, raising no serious objections about anything, which must be viewed as another testament to his powers of persuasion, rather than any lack of perception on their part. Unmistakably these were men of eminence and ability. At the head of the group was Lefebure de Fourcy, inspector general of Ponts et Chaussées. Jacob Dirks, Daubrée, Voisin Bey, participated again. There were six chief engineers of Ponts et Chaussées. One man was the chief-of-port at Marseilles. Another was an admiral. Yet none was willing, or bold enough perhaps, to challenge de Lesseps’ judgment or to take seriously the inevitable cost of a sea-level canal. Later it would be charged that de Lesseps never listened to his engineers. But in fact it was the other way around; it was they who were listening to him.
“Perhaps no other man ever possessed to such a marvelous extent the power of communicating to other minds the faith and the fervor which animated his own,” a writer for the Illustrated London News once observed.
III
By summer of 1881 there were two hundred French or European technicians and clerical help on the Isthmus and some eight hundred laborers at work–making test borings with great, cumbersome steam drills, building barracks and hospitals, assembling and testing newly arrived equipment.
But by summer it was also apparent that yellow fever had returned to the Isthmus. The wet season was traditionally the time of sickness and this year had been no exception. Several cases were reported in May. Then in the second week of June the first canal employee died of yellow fever, another of those incidental details not featured in the Bulletin.
On July 25 an engineer named Étienne, a graduate of the Polytechnique and one of the ablest of the young technicians, died at Colon–of “brain fever,” supposedly–and was hastily buried at Monkey Hill that same afternoon. On July 28 Henri Bionne died.
Bionne’s death would be attributed in Paris to “complications in the region of the kidneys.” But on the Isthmus the story would be told for as long as the French remained. He had arrived from France to make a personal inspection for de Lesseps, and several of the engineers had arranged a dinner in his honor at the employees’ dining hall at the camp at Gamboa. It was a festive evening apparently. Bionne, the last to arrive, had come into the hall just as everyone was being seated. One of the guests, a Norwegian woman, was exclaiming with great agitation that there were only thirteen at the table. “Be assured, madame, in such a case it is the last to arrive who pays for all,” Bionne said gaily. “He drank to our success on the Isthmus,” one engineer recalled; “we drank to his good luck. . . .” Two weeks later, on his way home to France, Bionne died of what the ship’s doctor designated only as fever, not yellow fever. The body was buried at sea.
“The truth is that the climate . . . like all hot climates, is dangerous for those who underestimate its effects . . . and who fail to observe the principles of hygiene,” explained the Bulletin. Yellow fever was not prevalent in Panama, the paper assured its readers, though “unhappily” a few laborers had been victims of the disease.
The British vice-consul at Panama, young Claude Coventry Mallet, decided out of curiosity to join one of the surveying parties in the upper reaches of the Chagres. The expedition consisted of twenty-two men. Within a few weeks everyone but Mallet and a Russian engineer named Dziembowski was sick, whether of so-called Chagres fever or yellow fever is not clear. The expedition returned, in any event, and of the twenty men who went into the hospital ten died. Mallet and Dziembowski returned to Cathedral Plaza feeling no ill effects, however. Mallet, who told the story later, said they agreed to meet for lunch the following day and that Dziembowski asked for a loan to buy a new suit. When Dziembowski failed to show up for lunch, Mallet went around to the canal offices to ask his whereabouts. The Russian, he was told, had died of yellow fever at three that morning and had been buried at dawn in a new suit of clothes.
There were more deaths as the summer wore on, but in October, speaking before a geographical congress at Vienna, de Lesseps said there were no epidemics at Panama and that the few cases of yellow fever had been “imported from abroad.”
Then, in November, a few days after he had returned from a particularly strenuous exploration of the upper Chagres, Gaston Blanchet died, apparently of malaria. The importance of Henri Bionne to the operation in Paris had been considerable and his death had been a heavy personal blow for Ferdinand de Lesseps, but Blanchet was the driving spirit of the enterprise in the field, and his loss would be felt for a long time.
How many died that first year is uncertain. The official company estimate on record is about sixty. Malaria, which is an entirely different disease from yellow fever, probably accounted for a great many of the fatalities then as later. The fact is that more people would die of malaria at Panama than of yellow fever, notwithstanding the popular impression to the contrary.
Malaria, the most common of tropical diseases and the one endemic disease at Panama, takes many forms and went by many different names on the Isthmus: calentura, miasma, the shakes, the chills, paludisme, ague, pernicious fever, putrid fever, intermittent fever, and, in its most virulent form, Chagres fever. Historically, malaria was the world’s greatest killer and it was confined to no one geographical area. O
nly the year before, there had been a serious epidemic in New England. But in places such as Panama, malaria never went away. The prevailing attitude was that everyone got a dose of it sooner or later. Among the native population, infection usually began in childhood.
The typical malarial attack began with terrible chills, uncontrollable shivering, and chattering teeth, the spell lasting perhaps fifteen minutes, sometimes more. Often the shivering of patients in a malaria ward would be so violent that the room could actually be felt to tremble; a single bed would move on the floor.
The chills would be followed by high fever and a burning thirst. As the fever fell off, the patient would break out in a drenching sweat. For those who survived, the experience was unforgettable. With the passing of the fever, the patient was left feeling totally debilitated, mentally as well as physically. Acute depression usually set in, the “melancholia” that was so well known in Panama.
And the patient could be stricken again. Indeed, it was considered impossible ever to recover fully from malaria so long as one stayed on in such country. But by the same token, a patient could move to some distant, seemingly safe climate and still experience a return siege of malaria, which was perhaps the most insidious characteristic of the disease. John Lloyd Stephens, as noted, was struck down by malaria in the spring of 1852, recovered sufficiently to return to New York, only to die of a recurrence of the disease in October.
There was no such thing as an immunity to malaria. With yellow fever it was different. A person had yellow fever only once. Either he lived or he died. If he lived he would never get it again. Malaria could be a lifelong infirmity, and if the first dose did not kill, the second, third, or fourth could.
Yet in the tropics, malaria was taken as an inevitable fact of life, part of the landscape. Yellow fever, by contrast, came and went in vicious waves, suddenly, mysteriously. In those places where it was most common–Panama, Havana, Veracruz–it was the stranger, the newcomer, who suffered worst, while the native often was untouched. Wherever or whenever it struck, it spread panic of a kind that could all but paralyze a community. It was a far more violent and hideous thing to see; a more gruesome way to die.
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