The mortality rate among those who contracted the disease could vary enormously, from 12 or 15 percent to as much as 70 percent. Generally speaking, however, a yellow-fever patient in Panama in the 1880’s had a less than fifty-fifty chance of survival. As with malaria, the patient was seized first by fits of shivering, high fever, and insatiable thirst. But there were savage headaches as well, and severe pains in the back and the legs. The patient would become desperately restless. Then, in another day or so, the trouble would appear to subside and the patient would begin to turn yellow, noticeably in the face and in the eyes.
In the terminal stages the patient would spit up mouthfuls of dark blood–the infamous, terrifying vómito negro, black vomit. The end usually came swiftly after that. The body temperature would drop, the pulse fade. The flesh would become cold to the touch–“almost as cold as stone and [the patient] continues in that state with a composed sedate mind.” Then, as a rule, in about eight to ten hours, the patient would die. And so great was the terror the disease generated that its victims were buried with all possible speed.
Blacks and nonwhites were somewhat less susceptible to malaria than were whites. But while it was commonly believed among whites, and repeatedly published on supposed scientific authority, that all blacks were naturally immune to yellow fever, they were not. Panama, famous as “the white man’s graveyard,” was in fact deadly territory for any nonimmune of any race or color. Many blacks, lifelong residents of Caribbean islands or coastlands, had an immunity resulting from previous mild cases of the disease, usually during childhood. Modern medical research also indicates that the common tropical disease known as dengue, or “breakbone fever,” can also have the resulting effects of an immunity to yellow fever. But no human being ever achieved an immunity to malaria; there was no such thing as a natural immunity to yellow fever, and if many blacks had been made immune to yellow fever before reaching Panama, there were vastly more blacks at work than whites, so the number of nonimmune blacks on the Isthmus was always quite large. Black laborers died of both malaria and yellow fever and no less miserably than the whites.
Yellow fever–yellow jack, fievre jaune, fiebre amarilla, the “American plague”–had been a terror of seamen for centuries. A single case on board ship could mean death for the entire crew. The legendary Flying Dutchman was founded on the story of a ship condemned to haunt the seas after yellow fever broke out on board and no country would permit the ship in its harbors. The Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793 had been as savage as an attack of bubonic plague and doomed the supremacy of Philadelphia among the cities of North America. Recently, in 1878, in Memphis, Tennessee, more than five thousand people had died of yellow fever and the estimated financial loss, due to the entire cessation of commerce, was upward of $100,-000,000.
Historically, the disease had played a critical role in Central America and the Caribbean since the first known outbreak in Barbados in 1647, and ironically, the French had already seen one New World dream fail disastrously, in good part because of the disease. Napoleon, with plans for an American empire of his own, had sent a military expedition of twenty-five thousand men under his brother-in-law General Leclerc to Haiti in 1801 to put down the black insurrection led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. With that accomplished, the French army was to have occupied New Orleans and Louisiana. But yellow fever cut through the veteran troops like no enemy imaginable; thousands died, including Leclerc, and this was a major contributing factor in the ultimate triumph of the black patriots. Haiti achieved independence, and Napoleon, thoroughly disenchanted with his American venture, decided to sell all of the Louisiana Territory to the United States.
There was still no known remedy or palliative for yellow fever. The medical profession stood helpless. For malaria, however, there was quinine, the bitter, colorless powder made from the bark of the cinchona tree, a palliative the Indians of Peru had known for centuries. Quinine was distributed freely among the French in Panama and was taken regularly in preventive doses, usually at meals and mixed with wine to kill the dreadful taste. Nobody knew why quinine worked, but it did. The one big problem with it was that a heavy dose could cause vomiting and headaches, or, worse, a horrendous ringing in the ears that rendered the patient deaf.
The word “malaria” was from the Italian mal’aria (“bad air”), and it had been widely agreed long since that bad air, “noxious effluvium”– poisonous marsh gas in particular–was the cause. The French for malaria, paludisme, was even more specific, being derived from a word meaning “marsh fever.” This miasma theory, as it was called, had been undisputed for centuries and seemed perfectly logical since the disease prevailed in hot, low-lying country where the humidity was high, the growth and decomposition of vegetation extremely rapid.
Yellow fever also was believed to be airborne, but filth was supposedly its source–sewage, the putrefying carcasses of dead animals, all the distasteful human and animal waste to be found in the streets of Colón or Panama City. The greatest source of contamination supposedly was the patient himself, and to touch his clothing, his soiled bedding, anything he had come in contact with, meant almost certain death–hence the mortal fear of the body after death and the quickest possible burial.
The night air was thought to be especially dangerous in any area infected by fever of any kind. It had been observed also that the wind had an effect. People spoke of yellow-fever winds, for example. At Panama City, south winds, those blowing in from the marshy lowlands near Panama Viejo, were regarded as especially deadly.
There was, however, another theory–even as early as 1881.
Dr. Josiah Clark Nott was a general practitioner in Mobile, Alabama, and it is one of those extraordinary coincidences of history that he happened to be the doctor who, in 1854, attended Amelia Gayle Gorgas at the birth of her son, William Crawford. In 1848 Dr. Nott published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal in which he made the fantastic claim that malaria and yellow fever were undoubtedly conveyed by insects and possibly by the mosquito. His mention of the mosquito was only in passing. His main point was that the spread of the disease could not be explained by any laws governing vapors or gases. But in 1854 a “traveling naturalist” for the Paris Museum, Lewis Beauperthuy, then in Venezuela, concluded that malaria and yellow fever “are produced by a venomous fluid injected under the skin by mosquitoes like poison injected by snakes.” Swamps and marshes spread sickness, he said, not by the vapors they exuded, but because mosquitoes bred there. In Washington, a Dr. Albert Freeman Africanus King, a professor of obstetrics, had arrived at the same conclusion.
King was a well-known figure. On the night of Lincoln’s assassination, he had been in Ford’s Theater and was the first physician to reach the dying President. His mosquito theory was not to be formally presented until 1882, however, and when he suggested how malaria might be eradicated from the capital, many people, understandably, took the whole thing as a jest. The way to do it, he wrote, was to encircle the city with a wire screen as high as the Washington Monument. Still, well before the French engineers arrived at Panama, King had worked out the means for reducing the spread of the fever–by window screens, the drainage of swamps and pools, and the destruction of the insects by special traps.
Others as well had all but hit on the solution. Amazingly, buried in the reports of the Nicaragua Expedition of 1872–1873 and the Panama Expedition of 1875 are two small notations by John Bransford, a Navy doctor who accompanied both expeditions. He had observed that the mosquito netting provided by the Navy afforded notable protection against fever or miasma of all kinds–“by straining the air of germs and moisture.”
In 1880, the very year de Lesseps launched his Compagnie Universelle, a French doctor on the staff of a military hospital in Algeria, Dr. Alphonse Laveran, discovered the presence of tiny crescent-shaped bodies wriggling in a blood sample taken from a malaria patient. Incalculably minute, they were detectable only under the strongest microscope, but he had little doubt that th
ey were living organisms and it dawned on him that here was the cause of malaria. He described his discoveries in a letter to the Academie de Medecine in Paris and published a small monograph.
Laveran’s claims were not accepted, however, any more than were the theories of Nott or King. The miasma theory had been fixed in people’s minds for generations. In addition, there now appeared a rival claim that seemed to support the miasma theory with scientific fact. Two doctors working in Rome, a German named Klebs and an Italian, Tommasi-Crudeli, had isolated a bacteria from the soil of a malarious region that when injected into a rabbit produced a malaria-like fever. The phenomenal discoveries of Pasteur and Koch had educated everyone to the role of bacteria, that whole other world beneath the micro-scope, and so it was widely accepted that a bacterium– bacillus malariae –was the long-sought cause of malaria. (Ronald Ross was at this time in his early twenties and newly enlisted in the Indian Medical Service, having barely passed the entrance examination. An indifferent student, a physician because it had been his father’s ambition for him, he was as yet mainly interested in music and poetry.)
But in 1881, the year the ill-fated Gaston Blanchet began chopping his path across Panama, the mosquito theory was voiced once more, and with greater conviction than ever, by a Havana physician.
Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay was the son of a Scottish father and a French mother. He had been educated in France and at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, and having practiced medicine in Havana for twenty-odd years, he had concluded that yellow fever was not only transmitted by the mosquito but by a specific mosquito–a silvery, comparatively noiseless household variety, Stegomyia fasciata (later to be called Aedes aegypti). Out of some eight hundred known varieties, he had picked this one as the carrier of the disease.
Finlay was an ingratiating hawk-nosed individual who looked out on the world through gold-rimmed spectacles and spoke with a lisp, the result of a childhood case of chorea. He was a linguist, an amateur historian, and he was a tireless worker. But he had failed to produce any proof of his theory–he was not very good at research–and his professional peers in Havana gave no encouragement. He applied innumerable mosquitoes that had bitten yellow-fever patients to healthy persons, yet no case of yellow fever ever resulted. Thus it was his own work that appeared to bring the most discredit to his theory.
Like Nott, Beauperthuy, and King, Finlay had the right idea about mosquitoes, and with astonishing precision he had singled out the right variety. Gorgas was to call it a splendid example of medical clairvoyance, “a beautiful manifestation of scientific imagination.” However, it made little difference. Finlay was utterly ignored. At the Ancon hospital, Dr. Girerd, chief surgeon of the canal company and a “profound microscopist,” set up a system of experiments whereby he examined the blood of new workers upon their arrival, then again in another month or so, when, invariably, he found the supposed malarial bacillus.
And all the while, in the lovely gardens surrounding the hospital, thousands of ring-shaped pottery dishes filled with water to protect plants and flowers from ants provided perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. Even in the sick wards themselves the legs of the beds were placed in shallow basins of water, again to keep the ants away, and there were no screens in any of the windows or doors. Patients, furthermore, were placed in the wards according to nationality, rather than by disease, with the result that every ward had its malaria and yellow-fever cases. As Dr. Gorgas was to write, had the French been consciously trying to propagate malaria and yellow fever, they could not have provided conditions better suited for the purpose.
But if malaria and yellow fever were airborne, if plague could come or go with the wind, if the slimy pools and swamps along the railroad and the suffocating back streets of Colón and Panama City were the sources of deadly night airs and miserable death, it was also “known” that not everyone was in equal jeopardy. Fever struck according to a discernible pattern. Some people stood a better chance of surviving than did others, as countless examples attested. Simply stated, the odds on one’s survival were in direct proportion to one’s moral fortitude. The clean, blameless life was the long life in the tropics. Confidence, courage, belief in one’s destiny, a “disdain of peril,” as Philippe Bunau-Varilla would say, also mattered enormously. Debauchery, sins of the flesh, moral or physical cowardice, were sure paths to ruin.
There were some, to be sure, who held that a dose of whiskey or rum was as dependable a palliative as quinine. (Bourbon and mustard seed was a popular “infallible specific” for yellow fever.) But few old-timers on the Isthmus subscribed to such theories. “Many foreigners have fallen victims to fear rather than fever,” Tracy Robinson wrote, “while many others have wrought their own destruction by drink, which . . . has killed, directly and indirectly, more than the entire list of diseases put together . . .” (Robinson had arrived at this conclusion, he said, after trying both abstinence and “moderate indulgence.”) Dr. Nelson was “firmly of the opinion that the people who best resist such climates and make the best fight against disease, are the total abstainers.”
Like numbers of North Americans on the Isthmus, Robinson and Nelson had a low regard for the manner in which the French were conducting themselves off-hours. Nelson, from the suffering and death he was to witness professionally, would develop an abiding hatred of Ferdinand de Lesseps–“The Great Undertaker,” he would call him. But many of the French engineers were the most puritanical of all in their views, and nearly everyone was profoundly shaken whenever the death of some notably upright person seemed to make a mockery of such views. “Certainly his moral character was above reproach,” wrote one bewildered, grieving French engineer of another who had died of yellow fever the first year.
In the United States especially, the death toll among the French would be attributed largely to moral decadence. One of the American railroad contractors, for example, would tell a congressional committee of seeing with his own eyes piles of discarded wine bottles in Colón that were as high or higher than a two-story house. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, a prim New York newspaperman who was to spend a decade in Panama, wrote that the French years had been a “genuine bacchanalian orgy.” Colón was a “veritable sink of iniquity. . . . Champagne, especially, was comparatively so low in price that it ‘flowed like water,’ and . . . the consequences were as deplorable as they were inevitable.” Bishop was to be Theodore Roosevelt’s official biographer, and his views on the French in Panama, expressed in one of the popular early books about the canal, would have a broad and lasting effect.
The most frequently quoted summation was by James Anthony Froude, the reigning English historian and biographer of the day, who declared that “in all the world there is not, perhaps, now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disease, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering.” According to Froude the place was overrun with cardsharpers and “doubtful ladies.” “Everything which imagination can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into that locality. . . .” Froude, however, was speaking only from what he had been told during a visit to Jamaica. He had been urged to go on to Panama, he wrote, to see for himself, “but my curiosity was less strong than my disgust.”
For all the underlying self-righteousness of such (for then) lurid descriptions, they were probably justified. We have no eyewitness account of what went on; no private diaries of professional gamblers or confessions of “doubtful ladies” have come to light. But the general tone can be imagined. Tracy Robinson, who must have seen a good deal of life during his years on the Isthmus, was appalled by the spectacle. “Vice flourished,” he wrote. “Gambling of every kind, and every other form of wickedness were common day and night.” Issues of the Star & Herald are filled with reports of barroom brawls and riots. In the first year alone there were half a dozen murders among the canal workers. At Gatun, for example, the night of May 25
, 1881, a Dutch employee went wild and stabbed two men to death in their sleep, then vanished into the jungle.
As to the consumption of wine there is little doubt. It was phenomenal–and for understandable reasons. The French were accustomed to wine with meals and wine happened also to be a great deal safer to drink than the local water, as even Joseph Bucklin Bishop conceded. The bottle dumps at Colón were every bit as high as a house. The foul alley behind Front Street was actually paved with wine bottles turned bottom-side up and became famous as “Bottle Alley.” Nearly a hundred years later construction workers and amateur archaeologists would be turning up French wine bottles.
Gambling was widespread, and prostitution appears to have flourished from the start. The three most thriving industries were gambling houses, brothels, and coffin manufacturing. To signal the arrival of new “ladies of leisure” on the Isthmus, a code announcement was flashed along the railroad’s telegraph line: “langoustes arrivees” (“lobsters arrived”). And the women, like the labor force and the technicians, came from every part of the world. If there was one obvious characteristic of the so-called French years that would be misunderstood in time to come, it was this cosmopolitan quality of society at every level.
By the end of 1881 there were two thousand men at work, including the technical staff and office help. Any thought of reliance on local labor had been put aside. Some of the laborers were from Colombia, some from Venezuela and Cuba. The vast majority, however, were English-speaking blacks from the West Indies–from Jamaica mostly. Subsequently some five hundred black Americans would come down from New Orleans and other Gulf ports of the United States. So among the actual laborers the language was English, not French.
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