Before he was finished, Dingler would sign up nearly thirty contractors, but the most impressive show was put on by Huerne, Slaven & Company, later known as the American Contracting and Dredging Company. The firm’s association with the canal predated Dingler, but it was in April 1883, about the time he was getting things in rein, that the monstrous Slaven dredges arrived.
Prosper Huerne, one of the partners, was a San Francisco architect who had contracted to build some of the French work camps and supervised repairs on the Grand Hotel. Slaven was the galvanizing force in the organization and a fascinating sample of the sort of individual such an undertaking could attract. Actually there were two Slavens, Moses and his brother, H. B. (Henry Bartholomew). They were Canadians who had settled in San Francisco, where H. B. established a drugstore. Moses, we are told, was a “mechanical engineer,” which could have meant any number of things. But H. B., the druggist, was the one in charge, and it was he who carried on at Panama, gathering in a fortune, after Moses died.
Neither of the Slavens nor Prosper Huerne knew the first thing about building a canal, and they never let that bother them. Hearing of the enormous contracts being let out by the French “and determined to have a finger in the canal pie,” H. B. had sent off bids for several miles of excavation and the bids were accepted. He found a financial backer in New York, a banker named Eugene Kelly, who had never met H. B. and knew nothing about him until H. B. walked into his office. Kelly put up $200,000.
The famous Slaven dredges were built and launched at Philadelphia, and getting them to Colón was a harrowing experience. Each machine resembled an immense wooden tank, square at both ends, about 120 feet long and 30 feet wide. At sea they had all the sailing qualities of a medium-sized barn. So long as the weather was calm, there was relatively little trouble, but towing one in a gale became a nightmare, especially for the men stationed on the dredge itself.
The first of the machines to arrive had been tied up at Colón only a week when it burned to the water’s edge, leaving nothing but a blackened hulk. After it were to come the Comte de Lesseps, the Prosper Huerne, the Nathan Appleton, the Jules Dingler, and miraculously none was lost en route. Once fitted out, with their booms and chains and iron buckets, they might have been fantastic war machines. Each dredge was powered by several steam engines, the largest to turn the great wheels by which an endless chain of iron buckets was kept in motion. The buckets, with a capacity of one cubic meter, ran to the top of a wooden tower, like a moving flight of stairs. At the top a blast of water washed the earth out through pipes, or “chutes,” four feet in diameter, that extended, like great dangling arms, 180 feet on both sides, or far enough to be clear of the working site.
The smaller engines were used to run the powerful force pump that sent the blast of water to the top of the tower, or to move the huge dredge forward, or to swing it from side to side, or to hoist or lower huge legs, or spuds, “by means of which she walked step by step into the material to be excavated.”
“The towers were from fifty to seventy feet high,” Tracy Robinson would recall, “and I often climbed one and another, and stood fascinated and thrilled upon the summit, watching what seemed more like some intelligent antediluvian monster revived.”
The Americans who ran the dredges–Crawford Douglas, Nathan Crowell, Captains Ward, Morton, Bardwell–were tough, independent men who lived on board, where they hung out their wash. A few had brought their wives with them, even children; a few had brought women who were merely listed as wives. Once everything was in order, smoke poured from stacks like those at a factory. The noisy bucket chains ran day and night.
For the new arrivals at Colón, the Slaven operation was the first and most impressive visible sign of actual canal construction, something Ferdinand de Lesseps had “very dextrously” considered (in the view of a correspondent for The Times of London). The gigantic American contrivances churning away at the front door, so to speak, were bound to have a favorable effect. De Lesseps had an abiding faith in machines and spoke often of how Alexandre Lavalley’s dredges had revolutionized the work at Suez. He had every confidence that at Panama still more extraordinary machines would work an even more astonishing success.
The wonderful thing was that the American dredges did make progress, and rapidly, starting inland from the mud flats of Limon Bay. Later, farther inland, difficulties would increase, the pace would slow as the ground became less easy to work, and of necessity the price would rise. All told the Slaven firm would be paid more than $14,000,-000 for its efforts. What its profits were remained a secret, since the company’s books were kept in New York. Long afterward, a French investigating committee would conclude that the firm cleared $7,000,-000. In any event, H. B. was never to return to his drugstore.
The Atlantic end was the easiest part of the work, and the progress there in the mud flats would have been the most conspicuous whichever firm had been fortunate enough to get that assignment. Still the Slaven firm alone, out of the two hundred-odd contractors that were ultimately involved, completed its allotted task on schedule and would account for as much of the total excavation as the five other largest contractors combined. Among the more curious facts about the French canal at Panama is that about a third of it was dug by Americans.
Excavation continued along the entire line, the work organized in three divisions: Limon Bay and the lower reaches of the Chagres rep-resented the first division; the second took in the upper Chagres and the hills between Matachin and Culebra; the third ran from Culebra to the approaches to the Bay of Panama. At the head of each division was a French engineer and there were a dozen or more contractors at work under any one of these men. In the lower Chagres and in the channel on the Pacific side the work was done almost entirely by dredges. In the first division, for example, a Dutch firm, Artigue et Sonderegger, had twenty dredges at work. These too were ladder dredges, Belgian-made and not so large or powerful as the Slaven machines, but more efficient and extremely well built. The dredges used off Panama City were a self-propelling marine type, constructed like a ship. They had been built in Scotland and came out to the Isthmus under their own steam.
In the uplands the work was done by steam shovel, pick and shovel, and wheelbarrow. It was there the army of black workers were concentrated, where in these first years, progress was made largely by hand, as at Suez. Wages were regarded as extremely good, about $1 to $1.50 a day, more money than most of the men had ever dreamed of making. Each worker was required to do a specific amount in a day– so many buckets of earth–but he could work at his own speed and do more if he wished, his pay being computed by the bucket.
Lieutenant Raymond Rodgers, an officer from an American gunboat stationed offshore, made a tour of the work in 1883 and described the canal as “fairly begun.” He had watched the dredges in action; he had been to the top of the fluviograph at Gamboa, a picturesque, brightly painted tower where watch was kept of the temperamental Chagres and where, on a small platform enclosed by a fancy gingerbread railing, he had been able to look out over the treetops as his French hosts expounded on their plans. At Matachin he watched a force of men drill and blast through solid rock. He was astonished by the “immense amount of machinery and material now on hand” and by the courtesy he was shown. A special train was put at his disposal. He was given maps, statistics. At Culebra a barefoot gang of workers stopped long enough to pose beside the most conspicuous piece of American equipment in view, an Osgood & McNaughton steam shovel made at Albany, New York. But seen from a nearby hilltop where Lieutenant Rodgers climbed for a panoramic view, the same machine was a mere toy, the line of excavation nearly lost in the tossing green hills.
Visitors were told that the rate of progress would soon exceed 1,000,000 cubic meters a month, then 2,000,000 cubic meters. In fact, the present rate was considerably less than 200,000 cubic meters– 146,000 in May, 156,000 in June. There was, moreover, one irrefutable cloud in the sky.
According to the company’s records 125 employees di
ed in 1882, more than twice the number given for the first year. In 1883 there were 420 recorded deaths, or almost eight times the number given the first year. Yet such figures can be taken as only suggestive. Patients in the company hospitals were charged $1 a day, nearly a day’s wages. While the company covered this expense for its own employees, all but a fraction of the labor force worked for the contractors, not the company. Aware of what hospital expenses could amount to, familiar with the mortality rate inside the wards, the contractors were reluctant to finance such care and would even discharge a man at the first sign of illness to avoid the responsibility. Among the workers themselves the hospitals were regarded with abject horror, the common belief being that if a patient did not have malaria or yellow fever when he entered, he would very shortly. A hospital permit was considered little better than a ticket to the graveyard.*
So for all these reasons the majority of the sick never went near a hospital, and consequently, the majority of deaths never appeared in the record books. Dr. Gorgas would calculate that for every recorded death in the French hospitals there were at least two more outside that were not counted. In other words, the given casualty figures have to be multiplied by three: the toll in 1883 was closer to 1,300 than to 420.
It was the suffering and death of individuals, rather than aggregate numbers, that most affected those around them.
In the fall of 1883, when Dingler returned to the Isthmus after reviewing his plans with de Lesseps, he brought his family–Madame Dingler, a son, a daughter, and the daughter’s fiance. This, stressed the Bulletin, was the best possible proof of the director general’s perfect confidence in Panama. They moved into a large, comfortable house on the Avenida Central, just off Cathedral Plaza, the Casa Dingler, as it would be known henceforth, which was supposed to serve temporarily until the more elaborate quarters were built. They were a family of avid equestrians and Dingler, who enjoyed a little show, had arranged that each be provided with magnificent mounts brought over from France. (The diminutive ponies used locally would never have satisfied any self-respecting European horseman.) It was the dry season and there were family excursions into the hills, accompanied by servants with enormous picnic hampers. One old photograph shows his daughter, a pretty, dark-haired girl who appears to be about eighteen, sitting sidesaddle in full skirt and a little Panama hat.
But in January the daughter contracted yellow fever and died within a few days. Dingler was overcome with grief. “My poor husband is in a despair which is painful to see,” his wife wrote to Charles de Lesseps. “My first desire was to flee as fast as possible and carry far from this murderous country those who are left to me. But my husband is a man of duty and tries to make me understand that his honor is to the trust you have placed in him and that he cannot fail in his task without failing himself. Our dear daughter was our pride and joy.”
The death of the young woman had a profound effect on everyone, canal officials, workers, the local citizenry. Bishop Paul presided over the funeral in the crowded cathedral, and with the cathedral’s great discordant bells tolling, Dingler and the fiance rode at the head of a long procession to the cemetery.
A month later Dingler’s son, age twenty-one, showed signs of the dreaded disease. In three days he too was dead. Some weeks after, it was Dingler who wrote to Charles:
I cannot thank you enough for your kind and affectionate letter. Mme. Dingler who [knows] that she is for me the only source of affection in this world, controls herself with courage, but she is deeply shaken. . . . We attach ourselves to life in making the canal our only occupation; I say “we” because Mme. Dingler accompanies me in all my excursions and follows with interest the progress of the work.
Presently the fiance died, also of yellow fever. By summer, forty-eight officers of the canal company had died of yellow fever alone, and according to one American naval officer, laborers were dying at a rate of about two hundred a month.
Still the work went ahead. Travelers crossing by train were amazed by the spectacle. It was true, they wrote; a canal really was being built at Panama. Buildings were going up almost everywhere one looked. Hundreds of acres of jungle were being chopped back to make room for more. Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment was being unloaded at Colon. More and more young French recruits were arriving, more engineers, more doctors, nurses, more boats from Jamaica, their decks solid with black men. By May upwards of nineteen thousand people were at work and the payroll was running to 200,000 francs ($40,000) a day.
In Paris the fearful death toll was no longer secret, despite the uniform silence of the press on the matter. Too many parents had been informed of the death of their sons. Among professional engineers the tragedies of the Dingler family were taken especially to heart. Older faculty members at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees were now privately advising graduates not to go to Panama, saying it would be suicidal. Still there was never a shortage of able volunteers. Indeed, the young men who came over the sea to Colón were the pick of the best-trained technicians. For them the canal was a stirring opportunity, a “Cause”–grand in scale, glorious in concept, French– and they sailed as if to battle, as they themselves said repeatedly. They were warriors bearing the banner of France. Discomforts, dangers, the likelihood of a miserable death on the wrong side of the world, these, wrote Philippe Bunau-Varilla, only “exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love for the great task undertaken. To its irradiating influence was joined the heroic joy of self-sacrifice for the greatness of France.”
Philippe Bunau-Varilla merits a great deal of attention. Everything considered, he is one of the most fascinating figures in the entire Panama story, as important and controversial as Ferdinand de Lesseps, as time would tell. And it is fair to say, as his admirers have, that without him there would have been no canal at Panama. Because he survived the so-called French years and wrote extensively, drawing on his experiences, he also provided the fullest account we have of the French effort seen from the point of view of the elite young French technician, the man upon whom, presumably, the fate of the enterprise, not to mention the national honor, rested. And though his declarations of faith in the task, his ardor for the historic civilizing mission of France, would seem foolishly high-blown in another later age, more like lines from a melodrama of his time, they appear to have been both sincere and representative.
In his last year at the Polytechnique the young man had sat spellbound in the front row when de Lesseps, newly returned from his triumphant Panama tour, came to lecture on the great task ahead. In 1884, having finished at the Ecole des Ponts et Chausees, and having served briefly in North Africa, he sailed for Colón on the Washington (sister ship of the Lafayette) at the same time Jules and Madame Dingler were returning from a home leave.
He was a small man. He stood only five feet four, which was shorter even than Dingler, and probably weighed no more than 130 pounds. However, he had a square, high brow, a good chin, extremely pale blue eyes, a luxuriant dark-red mustache, and his posture was always perfect. He was, as well, proud, ambitious, phenomenally energetic, blatantly self-confident, and, for all that, quite likable, in an eager and direct way. His age was twenty-six, a fact even the mustache failed to camouflage.
When he became a celebrity in the United States years later, it would be said that he was from a prominent, wealthy Paris family. But according to his registration records at the Ecole Polytechnique he was the son of Pamela Caroline Bunau and of a pere inconnu, unknown father, which can only mean that he was an illegitimate child. He was registered, moreover, as plain Philippe Jean Bunau. His mother, the records show, was the widow of someone named Varilla, but apparently Philippe was born well after Varilla’s death, or at least long enough so that she was obliged to give her son her maiden name. The widow Varilla is also recorded as rentiere, meaning she had some kind of in-come or pension of her own. However, it could not have amounted to very much, since Philippe is listed as a scholarship student. In addition, he is registered as a Protest
ant and by the time he finished the Poly-technique he had added Varilla to his own name.
No sooner had he reached the Isthmus than he was made a division engineer in charge of operations at Culebra and the Pacific end, which immediately set him off as somebody to watch. (Dingier appears to have been as impressed by him on the voyage out as was he by Dingler.) The advance thereafter was to be remarkable. Why in the name of God would he want to go to Panama? the old librarian at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees had asked in Paris. “As an officer runs to it when he hastens to the battlefield,” Bunau-Varilla answered, “and not as the coward who flees from the sorrows of life.” Once there, seeing one compatriot die after another, he would exhort the living that they were soldiers under fire who think only of the victory to be won. Disdain of peril was the surest safeguard. There was nothing good men and true could not accomplish when committed to a Noble Task. He saw them all as figures in a romance, embarked on what he was to call The Great Adventure of Panama. They were more themselves, better men, in this wild field of combat.
For Bunau-Varilla, for all the younger engineers, Dingler remained an inspirational figure. Dingler was “bold, loyal, scientific, and stimulating.” Dingler bore his suffering with grave dignity and courage. Dingler was determined to succeed. The exorbitant salary he was supposedly receiving, the various trappings of position he fancied, seem never to have offended the sensibilities of any of them.
Liveried servants were in attendance at the offices on Cathedral Plaza. Elaborate stables had been built. Horses and expensive carriages had been imported from New York for staff use. The stablemaster was a full-fledged baron. For inspection tours back and forth on the railroad there was a special Pullman car that supposedly cost $42,000. And on Ancon Hill stood the famous private villa, nearly completed, an imposing structure with mansard roofs and spacious verandas.
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