Now, too, more seriously, observers with technical backgrounds had begun reporting that the actual work was not going so well as supposed. Completion of the canal according to present plans was highly doubtful, Navy Lieutenant Robert M. G. Brown informed his superiors in Washington. A writer for the American Engineer, after several months on the Isthmus, figured that at the present rate of progress twenty-four years would be needed to finish the canal and charged that the French press was being bribed to withhold the truth. In October 1884 a Captain Bedford Clapperton Pirn, of the British Navy, reported in a confidential memorandum to the American Secretary of the Navy that de Lesseps’ dream of a canal at sea level was plainly impossible. Pirn’s only praise, after an extended tour of the work, was for “the gallant employees who have struggled manfully to carry out the wishes of their chief . . .”
On New Year’s Eve, 1884, the last of Jules Dingler’s family, Madame Dingler, died of yellow fever. It is not known how long her agony lasted, but the morning following her death, though so grief-stricken he could barely speak, Dingler was at his desk at the customary hour. Later, following the funeral, he took all the family’s horses, including his own, up into one of the mountain ravines and shot them.
The toll in human lives was growing ever more ghastly, unlike any-thing anyone had foreseen, except possibly Godin de Lepinay. Eighteen eighty-five was to be the worst year. Probably more people died then than at any other time during the French regime. In the years to follow, the ravages of yellow fever, malaria, typhoid fever, smallpox, pneumonia, dysentery, beriberi, food poisoning, snakebite, sunstroke, were only a shade less appalling. Ordinarily on the Isthmus, yellow fever came and went in cycles of two to three years. Now, unaccountably, it never went away and there was not a thing anyone could do. Malaria, ever present as always, remained the deadliest killer.
New arrivals, unaccustomed to the climate, suffered worst. The files of the Panama Star & Herald carry the obituaries of individual French officials who had been on the Isthmus so brief a time as to be scarcely known. A new French consul, Paul Savalli, died on July 25, 1885, having only arrived at his post. Louis Frachen, a young engineer of the Ecole Centrale who had come to do a special inventory of equipment in use, died miserably of yellow fever on August 10. Two division chiefs named Petit and Sordoiliet, who had sailed from France on the same ship, died of yellow fever on the same day. They had been on the Isthmus two weeks. There were scores of others. Of one dead engineer, Henri Berthaut, the Star & Herald could say only that at age twenty-six he “gave great promise of attaining distinction in his profession.”
Bunau-Varilla estimated that of every one hundred new arrivals at least twenty died, and of those who survived, only about twenty were physically strong enough to do any real work; “and many of that number had lost the best of their intellectual value.” (Whether he was speaking of all new arrivals, black as well as white, is not clear.) Others calculated that of every four people who came out from France at least two, often three, died of fever.
But these were neat mathematical averages, whereas numerous individual experiences recalled later were far more tragic. One French engineer told William Gorgas of sailing to Colón with a party of seventeen young Frenchmen. In a month he was the sole survivor. Of thirty-three Italian workers who arrived in 1885, twenty-seven were dead within three weeks. In October 1886, thirty French engineers arrived at Colón and in less than a month thirteen had died of what de Lesseps once called the “supposed deadliness” of Panama. There were times when the death toll from all causes ran to forty a day.
Bunau-Varilla would write of ships riding at anchor in Colón harbor without a soul on board. Their crews were all dead of yellow fever. Of the initial group of French nuns who had come to serve in the hospital at Ancon–twenty-four Daughters of Charity, wearing the big white, winged coifs that had earned their order the affectionate name “God’s geese”–only two had survived, one of whom, by great fortune, was the head nurse, or Mother Superior, Sister Marie Rouleau. A woman of extraordinary courage and stamina, Marie Joseph Louise Rouleau had entered the order in 1868, when still in her early twenties, at the hospital at Versailles; and in 1877, or several years in advance of the first French engineers, she had been sent to Panama. Throughout the worst of the yellow-fever years, indeed throughout all the French era in Panama, she would remain a leading figure, known to everyone.
A correspondent for the New York Tribune reported that the mortality rate in the hospital wards–roughly 75 percent–was a subject never discussed in the presence of a patient. There were “no long faces” at the Ancon hospital and Sister Marie was “one of those rare women whose personal zeal is contagious.” At the foot of each bed hung a card giving the patient’s name, his job, the nature of his illness. Rarely was the real disease listed if it was known to be fatal. Fievre jaunt was usually put down as gastritis.
So swiftly were patients dying, so desperate was the need for bed space, that in his final minutes of life, a dying man sometimes saw his own coffin brought in. It was even claimed that the bodies placed in the coffins and carried off were not always without life. When one exhausted chief physician on the staff was sent home to France for a rest, he was in such an unsettled mental state that he had to be locked in his cabin.
For the sick who never made it to the hospital–for the vast majority, that is–the end was frequently even more gruesome. The accusation that black workers were sometimes disposed of in the dumping grounds–simply rolled down an embankment, then buried beneath several tons of spoil–appears in several accounts and is undoubtedly based on fact.
The following account by the Tribune man, a guest in a Panama City hotel, is also a reliable one most likely, the buzzard and all:
. . . Sitting on your veranda late at night you see the door of the little adobe house across the way open. The woman of the house, who lodges two or three canal employees, peers cautiously out into the street, re-enters the house, and when she comes out again drags something over the threshold, across the narrow sidewalk, and leaves it lying in the dirty street. When she closes the door again there is no noise but the splash of tide. . . . Soon it grows lighter. A buzzard drops lazily down from the roof of the cathedral and perches on something in the street. The outlines become more distinct. You walk down, drive away the bird who flies sullenly back to his watchtower, and stand looking in the quick dawn of the tropics at what was yesterday a man–a month before a hopeful man, sailing out of Havre. He is dead of yellow fever.
From Colón the Panama Railroad ran a regular funeral train out to Monkey Hill each morning. “Over to Panama,” S. W. Plume would recall in his memorable testimony, “it was the same way–bury, bury, bury, running two, three, and four trains a day with dead Jamaica niggers all the time. I never saw anything like it. It did not matter any difference whether they were black or white, to see the way they died there. They die[d] like animals.”
The rate of sickness throughout the French operations (as opposed to the mortality rate) would be as impossible to determine accurately from surviving records as the mortality rate; but it was extremely large. A conservative estimate made later by American physicians was not less than a third of the total force at any given time. So in a year such as 1884, with more than nineteen thousand at work, probably six thousand were sick.
Company doctors advised staying out of the hot sun and to avoid getting wet, which was about like advising an arctic explorer to avoid the cold. New arrivals were warned against the night air and were told not to eat fruit. A few doctors were frank to say that it did not matter greatly what a person did or ate or drank and that nobody understood the cause of the fevers anyway. With sardonic unanimity it was agreed among physicians and employees alike that the only safe course was to get out, to leave the Isthmus as quickly as possible.
One of the many who did was the painter Paul Gauguin, whose entrance and exit date from a later time, but whose feelings about the experience were no doubt shared by hundreds of other
s. Gauguin came out from France with another young painter, Charles Laval, in 1887. It was Gauguin’s first attempt to escape the atmosphere of Europe. The dream was to buy some land on Taboga and live “on fish and fruit for nothing . . . without anxiety for the day or for the morrow,” as he wrote. But he was broke by the time he reached Colón, and so like countless other drifters who wound up on the Isthmus-tropical tramps, as they were called–he took a job on the canal as a common laborer. (Though the vast majority of the labor force was black, the company would hire anyone who looked the least fit and willing.) The ordeal of swinging a pick all day in such heat was like nothing he had ever experienced. “I have to dig . . . from five-thirty in the morning to six in the evening, under tropical sun and rain,” he wrote to his wife. “At night I am devoured by mosquitoes.” His partner, Laval, had been making money doing portraits of canal officials, but Gauguin would have none of it, since only portraits done “in a special and very bad way” would sell.
Land on Taboga, he discovered, like land anywhere near the canal, was priced far beyond reach. He felt himself weakened–“poisoned”– by the wet heat and he took an ardent dislike to the Panamanians. At one point he was arrested for urinating in public in Panama City. His defense, that the street was nothing but an open sewer anyway, failed to sway the arresting policeman who marched him across town at gunpoint to pay a fine of one piastre (four francs). His one desire thereafter was to earn enough money to leave and in another month he was happily sailing for Martinique.
III
Central to the health problem all along, the French recognized, was their lack of jurisdiction over the two cities through which everything and everyone had to pass and wherein a sizable number of their employees lived and worked. Without jurisdiction, there could be no control over sanitation in either Colón or Panama City, and as things stood, sanitation at even the most primitive level was still virtually nonexistent in both places. Colon–port of entry for all new recruits from France, for the thousands of workers from Jamaica, for all shipments of food from New York, and where everybody took the train to Panama City or to points along the way–grew more vile by the year. Compared to Colón, wrote one French journalist, the ghettos of White Russia, the slums of Toulon or Naples, would appear models of cleanliness. There were still no proper sewers in Colón, no bathrooms. Garbage and dead cats and horses were dumped into the streets and the entire place was overrun with rats of phenomenal size. And since yellow fever was understood to be a filth disease, Colón was looked upon as its prime breeding ground.
Where the French did have control, the contrast was striking. Their town of Christophe-Colomb, side by side with Colón, was neat and clean, as different as if separated by a hundred miles.
Then early in 1885 tragedy struck, taking everyone by surprise and eliminating the sanitation problem at Colón in about the most thorough fashion possible. On March 31, with a strong wind blowing out of the north, the town went up in flames.
The fire was the climax of what was to be called the “Prestan Uprising,” a brief reign of terror that was set off by another bloody affair in Panama City, the work of the former Panamanian president, Rafael Aizpuru. Though the French had been uneasy from the beginning about the incendiary quality of Panamanian politics–it will be recalled that de Lesseps was warned his first day on the Isthmus about Aizpuru –the violence of what happened seems to have caught them completely off guard.
Pedro Prestan was a tiny Haitian mulatto with a deep-seated hatred for foreigners, white men and white North Americans most especially. It was a feeling shared by Aizpuru apparently. Still there appears to have been no direct connection between the two. As with most political upheavals on the Isthmus, the situation had its origins in the politics of distant Bogotá and was somewhat complicated. In essence, here is what happened.
Rafael Nunez, a major political figure for years, a former Liberal turned Conservative, had been elected to the presidency of Colombia and this had touched off insurrections in a number of places, including Cartagena and Buenaventura. Government troops stationed on the Isthmus were rushed off to Cartagena and Buenaventura, leaving at Colón only a token force of a few hundred men. With Panama City thus unguarded, Aizpuru, a Liberal who had been waiting his chance, led his “army” of some 250 men into the city and, after much destruction and loss of life, seized control. The loyal troops at Colón, under an officer named Gonima, then crossed by train to drive Aizpuru out. Aizpuru took refuge in the hills for the time being, but at Colón, with Gonima gone, Prestan went into action.
At this stage Prestan’s band probably did not number more than a dozen barefoot men armed with machetes and perhaps a pistol or two. Yet with the French all about and an American gunboat, Galena, sitting in the harbor, he commandeered the Colón prefecture and arranged substantial “loans” from several Front Street merchants. He moved swiftly, displaying, as most everyone had to concede later, considerable ability as a leader. Nobody did a thing to stop him.
On the morning of March 29 the Pacific Mail steamer Colon arrived from New York with a contraband shipment of arms consigned to “order.” Prestan and his men marched to the Pacific Mail wharf and demanded that the weapons be turned over. When the order was refused by the Pacific Mail superintendent, an American named William Connor, Prestan seized him and five other Americans–the general agent of the steamship line, the American consul, the superintendent of the Panama Railroad, and two officers from the Galena, one of whom was sent out to the ship to tell his commanding officer that no hostages would be released until Prestan got the guns. Should the American commander try to land any men, Prestan said, he would kill the hostages and every other American in Colon.
The ship’s commander, Theodore F. Kane, was in a difficult position. The presence of the Galena in the harbor was a routine matter (as part of the 1846 agreement with Colombia), but he was under instructions not to intercede in local matters without express orders from Washington or in the event that railroad property or services were plainly in jeopardy. Across the Isthmus, in the Bay of Panama, two more American ships stood by, Shenandoah and Wachusett, with similar instructions.
The American consul saw himself in a far more difficult position. Convinced that Prestan meant what he said, he ordered the Pacific Mail agent, a man named Dow, to surrender the arms. Hearing this, Prestan let the men go. Only now, before Prestan knew what was happening, Commander Kane brought the Galena up to the wharf, boarded the Colon, and towed her a safe distance out into the harbor. The incensed Prestan made Connor and Dow prisoners again, which is the way things stood by nightfall.
At first light the next day Kane landed a force of a hundred men. Yet to the aggravation of the French officials and the American rail-road people, all of whom were in a great frenzy over what might happen to their property, he refused to take Prestan or to intervene in any fashion. Prestan’s force by now had increased to several hundred. word of this reached Panama City, and by dark, Gonima’s troops were on their way back by train.
To avoid a pitched battle in Colón, the railroad superintendent, George Burt, required that Gonima disembark with his troops at Monkey Hill. So before dawn the morning of March 31, taking Connor and Dow along as a shield, Prestan marched out to Monkey Hill. A savage battle back and forth across the tracks lasted about an hour, during which the two American hostages managed to fade into the jungle. Then Prestan was on the run. Falling back on Colón, he set fire to the city and in a few hours there was little left but heaps of smoldering ashes. Only the brick offices of the railroad, the steamship offices, the stone church, and a fringe of buildings along the beach were still standing. Eighteen people had been killed. Perhaps eight thousand had been made homeless.
The seesaw effect continued. At the moment Prestan was being routed at Monkey Hill, Aizpuru was again on the rampage in Panama City at a cost of another twenty-five lives. Again triumphant, he declared himself Panama’s supreme authority.
A desperate George Burt called on the Amer
ican naval officers to do something. Aizpuru’s men had been tampering with the railroad’s switches, he said, and they had boarded and robbed a train. Prestan had ripped up track, cut the telegraph lines, derailed an engine. So with this, men were landed from the Shenandoah and the Wachusett and order was quickly restored all along the railroad. On April 10, the Tennessee and the Swatara, under the command of Rear Admiral James Jouett, arrived at Colón with a battalion of Marines.
In Panama City, crowds gathered in Cathedral Plaza to watch the Americans parade about in their smart uniforms, wheeling a Gatling gun this way and that. Only once was there any real excitement. A fight broke out between some of the local citizens; the Gatling was fired across the plaza at an elevation to clear the tops of the buildings and the plaza was emptied in seconds.
Troops were sent across the Isthmus on improvised armored cars, flatcars fitted out with half-inch steel boiler plate and more Gatling guns. Marine guards in white sun helmets were posted at the Barbacoas bridge and at Matachin, but nothing more happened along the line. In Colón fifty-eight people were rounded up by government troops, tried for treason, and shot. Many, it would be said later, had been quite innocent.
In Panama City, Aizpuru claimed to have adequate force to maintain order on his own, but his invitations to the American officers to come to the Governor’s Palace to confer were ignored. He then offered to declare Panama independent if the United States would recognize his government, but this offer too was ignored. “You have no part to perform in the political or social disorder of Colombia,” Admiral Jouett had been explicitly instructed in a telegram from the Navy Department before landing, “and it will be your duty to see that no irritation or unfriendliness shall arise from your presence on the Isthmus.” He was to protect American interests without offense to the sovereign, Colombia.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 348