Wolfred Nelson reported Dingler’s salary to be $50,000, that one French engineer had a pigeon house put up at a cost to the stockholders of $1,500, that another official had a private bathhouse built for $40,000, again at company expense.
The most colorful source for the supposed extravagances perpetrated under Dingler was a little book published by an embittered stockholder named Henri Marechal, who visited the Isthmus the winter of 1884 and who enjoyed spreading nonsense.
In one part of the jungle he had seen men at work building beautiful avenues and ornamental clearings, “a kind of miniature Bois de Boulogne, where the officials entertain at charming picnic parties and make daily pleasure excursions on the company’s horses. . . . Ladies, possibly somewhat too swarthy but not too strictly virtuous, render these jaunts more agreeable and are repaid for their services by being carried on the company’s payrolls as laborers.” He declared that since the dump cars sent from Europe proved to be too high for the average workman to reach, the company, at great expense, had sent a delegation to Mexico to investigate a tribe of giants whose existence had been reported by some practical joker.
The truth was considerably less sensational. The Pullman car, though hardly a necessity, was not the sumptuous affair pictured in later accounts and seems to have been little used. The horses too were seldom used and were soon sold off. The house, though very grand by Panama standards, probably cost about $100,000-not $1,000,000, as later claimed–and because of the tragedies in the Dingler family it was never lived in. Dingler’s salary was $20,000, not $50,000.
That some ladies “not too strictly virtuous” may have been carried on the payroll is certainly possible. Simple mismanagement was conspicuous enough, according to dozens of reports; the company was swindled repeatedly in small ways. One common deception concerned the delivery of coal at Colon. When a coal ship arrived, only part of the cargo would be landed, but vouchers were made for the full amount. The ship then departed, to return again with what supposedly was another load, for which another voucher would be given, the result being that the company paid for the same shipment twice, even three times.
And certainly money was wasted on needless, even foolish material comforts. But for those then struggling against the jungle and the heat, life was never easy and often extremely grim. In retrospect there is even something pathetic about Dingler’s gestures toward a semblance of civilization as he knew it. How grand could one Pullman car have been on a railroad forty-seven and a half miles long?
The intensity of the boredom these men faced after hours, the longing for home, can be imagined. There were no restaurants or cafes of quality, no theaters in the city, no galleries, no libraries, never a concert. A walk on the old seawall, as one of them recalled, was as pleasant as could be expected, “but after one has strolled up and down it every day . . . for several months . . . it ceases to provide more than mild diversion.” Even to sit and read at night could be a misery, since the smallest lamp or candle drew swtarms of insects.
What praise and respect they did get would be a long time coming– from the American engineers who were to follow years later, none of whom ever deprecated the French work, despite all that appeared in the papers, all that had been long since fixed in the public mind. Among critics of the work, as an American naval officer observed, not one in a hundred would have the courage to go out and stay in such a place. The French engineers, he said, were “young, zealous, and energetic . . . and no one can appreciate more than these men the difficulties that lie in their path. Instead of censure and detraction, they deserve the highest praise and respect.”
But the image of vain, spendthrift, immoral officials squandering company funds, heedless of the misery of others, blind to the hand-writing on the wall, was to be too useful an image later, in France no less than in the United States.
II
The task to be faced daily in the field grew ever more horrendous. Presumably the work would go more smoothly with time and experience, but not so. Hard as the engineers pushed, as seasoned as many of them became to the sweltering climate, the incessant rains, the going was always more difficult than before, the technical problems ever larger and more perplexing. Maddeningly, some problems seemed quite insoluble.
The river remained the worst of these. Success, as the best of the French engineers understood perfectly, depended on somehow containing and controlling the Chagres, yet it remained, in Dingler’s phrase, “the great unknown.” The dam he proposed to throw in its path at Gamboa was a reasonable solution, but only in the abstract. No adequate rock formation had been located upon which to found such an enormous structure. Nobody had devised a realistic means for handling the tremendous overflow there would be when the river was in flood. After one storm in May of 1884, the fluviograph at Gamboa had recorded a rise of ten feet in twenty-four hours. On July 18 and 19 of the same year, the river came up fourteen feet.
Visitors were told that plans for the dam were not available as of the moment. One French engineer privately declared that the whole idea was hopeless. As the work went bravely on, as the river responded to the turn of the seasons, as the elder de Lesseps kept insisting in Paris, Micawber-fashion, that something would turn up–his man of genius with the perfect answer–nobody on the Isthmus honestly knew what in the world might be done. So this most vexatious of problems was simply put aside.
More immediate and much more discouraging were the slides in the cut through Culebra, which grew steadily worse the further the excavation progressed. For those in charge, they were the most infuriating part of the entire undertaking. Nearly twenty years later an American named S. W. Plume, an old man by then, would shake his head in dismay as he tried to describe for a Senate committee the troubles the French had encountered at Culebra. He had spent a lifetime building railroads and canals throughout Central and South America, but never had he seen anything like Panama “in the French time.” He had been employed by the Panama Railroad and kept an eye, he said, on just about everything that went on. Once Dingler had asked him to make a personal inspection of the operation at Culebra.
“The whole top of the hill, sir, is covered with boiling springs,” he would recall. “It is composed of a clay that is utterly impossible for a man to throw off his shovel once he gets it on. He had to have a little scraper to shove it off.” Nothing they had tried had kept the hill from sliding. “It won’t stay there . . .”
Why? he was asked.
“The rainy season will saturate the earth and it will slough off.”
“Did it do so while you were there?”
“Yes, we had a cut right alongside of where the canal was going to be built and it sloughed off, not only over the top of our track, but we found it was going to be so expensive to move it that I cut the track away there and laid another one. And a year or so afterwards the same thing took place and I laid another track, and where the present track is there are two underneath.
“. . . when I was there at Culebra that week, my house was up on the hill about four hundred to five hundred feet from the canal and I got up one morning and come out and the land had gone off and left a crack there two to three feet wide, and I did not say anything, but I knew what it was. . . . The whole side of that mountain is going down into that canal. . . . Every rainy season, whenever it rains a little, the earth becomes saturated and it slides right off on this strata of blue clay.”
“It slides on the blue clay?”
“It slides on the blue clay.”
In somewhat more precise terms the Culebra uplands can be described as a disorderly combination of several geological formations, some sedimentary, others volcanic in origin–a generally unstable combination that was bound to mean a great deal of trouble. The oldest of these formations dated from the geological time period known as the Oligocene, making them roughly thirty million years old. Probably the Isthmus had its beginnings in the Oligocene as a string of islands in a shallow sea. A land bridge formed, and in the long geological periods th
at followed, this land bridge sank back below the sea at least four different times. In the late Pleistocene, the epoch of the glaciers-yesterday in geological time–the land was elevated to several hundred feet above its present level, then subsided again to perhaps thirty feet below the present level. The uplifting that followed began within a thousand years of the arrival of the canal builders (as evidenced by freshly raised old sea beaches) and the uplifting was still going on.
The whole history of the ground underfoot, wherever one went on the Isthmus, was of change and instability. Within the forty-plus miles between Colón and Panama City was a total of seventeen different rock formations, six major geologic faults, five major cores of volcanic rock.
A formation at Culebra, one taking its name from the hill itself, was found to consist of beds of soft, dark shales, marls, and carbonaceous clays–the blue clays S. W. Plume remembered–of beds of limestone and sandstone, sandwiched among thin layers of lignite. Such material drilled and blasted readily enough, as the engineers discovered, but then other formations were composed largely of volcanic or igneous rock–of dark, fine-grained basalt, of andesite or diorite or the glassy rhyolite, all rocks much like granite. The great volcanic core of Culebra Hill, for example, was solid basalt.
It was endlessly fascinating terrain to a geologist, but for the engineer it was an unrelieved nightmare. The worst troubles were in what was called the Cucaracha formation, composed chiefly of dark-green and reddish clays, lava mud flows, gravel, some shales. The first of the Cucaracha slides occurred on the eastern side of the Culebra Cut, where the uppermost layers of porous clay, layers overlying relatively impervious rock stratum, were from ten to forty feet thick. In the rainy season these clays became thoroughly saturated, slick and heavy, with a consistency of soap left overnight in water. But the saturation stopped at the underlying rock, and the build-up of water created a slippery zone along the whole plane of contact. If that plane happened to be tilted toward the Cut, then it was merely a matter of time until the clay began to move, by simple force of gravity, down into the Cut. Tremendous masses of the upper stratum would let go with all the effect of an avalanche, carrying with them whole sections of track, steam shovels, anything caught in the way.
In the dry months the sides of the Cut remained reasonably stable. But always with the return of the rains the slides resumed. (And to grasp the magnitude of the problem, one must always keep in mind what those rains meant–thirteen inches in the month of June 1884, for instance, sixteen inches in August, ten inches in September, twenty-two inches in October.)
In an attempt to alleviate the problem, the French dug an extended system of drainage ditches parallel to the Cut to channel the rainwater away from the exposed slopes. But such efforts had little lasting effect. Year after year hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of mud and rock came thundering down into the open Cut, blotting out months of work. Everything that came down had to be laboriously cleared away. Progress slowed, or stopped; contractors’ estimates had to be drastically altered.
Removing the mud and debris was only part of it, for the one sure way to prevent further slides was to keep slicing the sides of the Cut back and back; that is, to stabilize the slopes by making them less steep, flattening them out until they had reached an angle of repose, the point at which the material would remain at rest of its own accord. Yet as far back as they cut the slopes, it was never enough. The amount of digging involved, furthermore, was always greater than one might imagine, for the reason that the canal was being dug through a saddle between steep hills. So as the Cut was made steadily broader at the top, its sides, against the bordering hills, rose steadily higher. Or to express it another way, every foot added to the width of the Cut at the top increased its depth as measured from the brow of the Cut.
This meant that the volume of excavation, the total cube, was being compounded steadily and enormously. The deeper the Cut was dug, the worse the slides were, and so the more the slopes had to be carved back. The more digging done, the more digging there was to do. It was a work of Sisyphus on a scale such as engineers had never before faced.
Simple mathematics made the prospects appear overwhelming. Prior to Dingler’s initial reappraisal of the situation, all estimates on the quantity of excavation to be done were figured on an angle for the sides of the canal of one on one–one meter back for every one meter deep–a slope of 45 degrees in other words. In actual practice it appeared as though the sides would have to be one on four–four back for every one deep. So if Culebra Hill was 339½ feet above sea level and the canal was to be 29½ feet deep, this would give a total depth to the Cut of 369 feet. The breadth of the bottom was to be 72 feet; the breadth at the water line, 90 feet. If from that point upwards, with sides sloped back at one on four, then the final Cut would have to be three-quarters of a mile across
To further complicate matters there remained the very basic problem of what to do with the mountains of rock and earth being excavated, and it was a problem the French failed to solve.
Their method of excavation at Culebra was first to carve off any intervening hilltops along the projected line, then start their giant steam excavators, their steam shovels, and their labor gangs working along in the direction of the line, digging down in a series of stepped terraces, each about sixteen feet wide and sixteen feet deep–the depth to which the excavators could reach. (These machines looked much like a big railroad car with tall smokestacks and long iron ladders that hung down on one side, each ladder supporting an endless chain of dirt buckets. They worked on the same principle as a dredge, but were borne by tracks rather than water.) The spoil was then hauled away by trains of little dump cars (Decauville dump cars with a carrying capacity of 4½ cubic meters) to some convenient adjacent valley, where, from improvised tracks run along the brow of the valley, the spoil was dumped over the side until it built up sufficiently below to create a terrace. The track was then taken up and relaid below. So in time the dumping grounds, like the Culebra Cut, became a vast series of long, horizontal terraces of raw-looking mud.
As solutions went, this system was quick and economical, which was what the contractors wanted. And the contractors, as Bunau-Varilla noted, were “absolute masters when it came to choosing their method of work.”
The trouble was that the plan was fundamentally flawed. The terraced dumps were less stable even than the slopes of the Cut. When the torrential rains struck, whole terraces slipped out of line, track was dislodged, buried. The entire system broke down. Excavation would have to stop until things were back in order and the dirt trains could start running again, as hundreds of men with crowbars and shovels struggled knee-deep in the gummy morass.
Natural watercourses were blocked, water gathered in great pools, acres of new swamplands were formed–all perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
The time lost, the effort wasted, grew to alarming proportions. But for some strange reason the French never figured a better way. It never dawned on them that digging the Cut was more a problem of transportation–of moving the spoil out of the way–than of actual excavation. They never saw that the Panama Railroad was the key, which is especially ironic considering the heavy price that had been paid to get control of the railroad. That de Lesseps had neglected to send to Panama a single specialist in railroads was among his gravest errors.
Predictably, as progress grew more difficult, contractors, and especially the smaller ones, grew obstinate, peevish, or quit outright. Invariably the next contractors to take on the same tasks wanted more advantageous terms. Since few of them could afford the kind of equipment needed, the canal company bought the machines, which were then rented out. And as much machinery as there was, it was never enough or, often, it was not exactly suited for the particular job at hand.
The canal company, in addition to the machines, was also obliged to furnish–that is, to deliver to the Isthmus–the necessary labor and to provide adequate housing. The contractors then had only to pay the men’s wages. Any fai
lure on the part of the canal company to provide either men or machines could give a contractor excuse enough to back out of his contract if it was proving unprofitable, or to hold on to a profitable arrangement irrespective of his failure to perform as agreed. The large Anglo-Dutch Company–its formal name was Cutbill, de Longo, Watson, and Van Hattum–had the Culebra contract and was bound to remove 700,000 cubic meters a month. As yet it had managed to remove 100,000 cubic meters in a month. Still it hung on, subcontracting the most troublesome tasks to more and more small operators. One high hill on the western slope of the saddle soon had so many different contractors laboring away that it became known as Contractors Hill.
Across from this same hill, on the eastern side of the Cut, stood Gold Hill, so named and widely known because supposedly it was one of the canal company’s greatest assets–enough to offset all mounting costs. According to one prospectus issued in Paris, company officials had been informed that “this mountain is full of gold and it is believed that the ore from this place alone will be worth more than will be the total cost of the canal construction.”
By October 1884 there were 19,243 employees at work, of whom 16,249 were blacks. To order and distribute supplies, to keep watch on contractors, to keep the books and see to the needs of this labor force, naturally required a small army of clerks, paymasters, stenographers-six to seven hundred in office help–most of whom were French. And French bureaucracy, it was found, could flourish no less in the jungle than at home. File clerks were given the title of Keeper of the Archives. Among the supplies being landed at Colón were crates weighing hundreds of pounds filled with nothing but pen points. “There is,” wrote Wolfred Nelson, “enough bureaucratic work, and there are enough officers on the Isthmus to furnish at least one dozen first-class republics with officials for all their departments.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 347