On April 24 Aizpuru met with the American officers at the Central Hotel and surrendered. A few days later more Colombian troops arrived by ship and in another week most of the American forces had been withdrawn from the Isthmus.
Prestan, who had fled into the jungle after firing Colón, was captured and brought back to await trial. The grim job of cleaning up, of tending to the injured and homeless, the whole effort of rebuilding Colón from scratch–a job that would be accomplished with amazing speed–fell largely to the American railroad officials.
The canal company had suffered no physical damage to speak of. Close as it was to Colón, Christophe-Colomb had not been touched. When, during Aizpuru’s brief reign, a mob of looters swept up the road to the Ancon hospital, Sister Marie took a big umbrella, gathered up her skirts, and went out to meet them at the gate to the hospital grounds. “Listen to me, you,” she said. “Someday you will be sick yourselves, and if you trouble us now, do you think we will have you in the hospital? No! Now go!” And back down the road they had gone.
Dingier reported to Paris, “Our works have continued to function in the usual manner.” But the uprising had had its effects on the French enterprise, and some were quite serious. At Culebra, government troops had broken into a company barracks and slaughtered a number of Jamaicans, claiming afterward that the Jamaicans had fired on them first. A savage riot broke out among the black workers, more lives were lost, and hundreds of men walked off the job and took the next boat to Kingston, where the company’s recruitment efforts henceforth would be extremely hampered.
As for the blame for what happened at Colón, the French and the Americans agreed. Commander Kane, it was charged, could have averted the entire tragedy by simply grabbing Prestan the morning he started on his rampage, something the prudent Commander Kane understood he had had no right to do.
Prestan and Aizpuru were dealt with in due course. Wearing a black suit and derby, Prestan was marched to the tracks on Front Street and was hanged before one of the largest crowds ever seen in Colon. Aizpuru was more fortunate. He was taken to Bogotá, tried, fined, and sentenced to ten years in exile.
Politically, things quieted down. The crisis passed, and seemingly without significant aftereffects. But, in fact, the rebellions in Panama and the other provinces marked a critical turning point for Colombia. The long-range repercussions would be considerable. To strengthen his position, President Nunez would proclaim a new constitution, with all real power centered in Bogotá. The nine provinces of Colombia, Panama included, were to be headed hereafter by governors appointed by the federal government–by Bogotá.
Also of importance as time would tell was the presence through all that had happened on the Isthmus of three observant parties whose personal roles had been relatively minor, but who would not forget what they had seen and the lessons to be drawn. Philippe Bunau-Varilla was one. Another was Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero, a physician employed by the railroad. The third was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the Wachusett, who had landed with one of the Marine guards to protect the railroad.
What most impressed Bunau-Varilla and Dr. Amador Guerrero was the degree to which events had been shaped by the mere presence of American naval strength. In back of everyone’s mind throughout had been those ships and the question of what their commanders might or might not do given the state of affairs ashore. And it was only a few months later that Captain Mahan, having been appointed to the faculty of the war College at Newport, Rhode Island, would commence to develop a series of lectures on the influence of sea power.
Things began coming apart now. In the office overlooking the plaza, his last reserves of strength nearly exhausted, Jules Dingler had become so short-tempered and abusive of his staff that several key people, including one division head, resigned. Late in August, close to physical and mental collapse, Dingler himself gave up and sailed for France, a lone and defeated man. He had left all his family buried in Panama. He was never to return again.
His place was filled by Maurice Hutin, the next in line. Hutin too was ill and worn out and in another month he quit. That left Philippe Bunau-Varilla. So, a year after his arrival, at age twenty-seven, Bunau-Varilla found himself acting head of the entire effort. For the next several months, until another director general was recruited, he would seldom have more than two hours’ sleep a night.
He moved into Dingler’s office, determined, as he later said, to be all de Lesseps had been at Suez. “Men’s energies are spontaneously influenced by a chief who is inspired by a sincere faith in the ultimate triumph of a difficult undertaking,” he would lecture later in one of his books. “They take their place in regular order, like particles of iron around the pole of a powerful magnet.” When a new French consul general was ushered into the office to meet him and expressed surprise at finding so young a man in a position of such vast responsibility, Bunau-Varilla suggested that the new consul general learn to judge men according to their ability.
Elsewhere along the line there was widespread bitterness. Failure was in the wind and people were looking for somebody to blame. Lieutenant William Kimball, an officer from the Tennessee who accompanied Bunau-Varilla on a tour of the work, wrote of rampant suspicion of Americans. Bunau-Varilla was unfailing in his courtesies, Kimball noted, but other French officials made little effort to disguise their feelings. American contracts, American machinery, American technicians, were no longer wanted. French mechanics accused their American counterparts of trying to sabotage equipment in order to stop the work so that the United States could take over. Lieutenant Kimball attributed such talk to the depression caused by malaria.
His remarks were contained in a special intelligence report transmitted to the chief of the Bureau of Navigation in Washington. It was an extremely interesting document. He estimated that not more than a tenth of the work had been accomplished, a perfectly accurate estimate as it happens. “Unforeseen and vexatious, as well as stupendous and apparently insuperable, difficulties are constantly occurring.” At Paraiso he saw a slide so large that it came down completely intact, the grass on top undisturbed, and with such force that it carried the entire distance across the Cut.
Hospital facilities, extensive as they were, were not enough. Food prices were high. Workers, black and white, were fearful of more political violence. Black workers were leaving faster than they were being replaced, going home to spend their money “before they are killed by the climate.” But, Kimball emphasized, loss of human life would never be a deterrent in itself. Money was what counted. Human life was “always cheap.”
* Such fears were well founded. Physicians who were at Colón and Panama City during these years would later state that more than 75 percent of all hospital patients had malaria.
7
Downfall
Faithful to my past, when they try to stop me, I go on.
–FERDINAND DE LESSEPS
I
On April 23, 1885, three weeks after news of the Colón fire reached Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps donned the green robe of the Academie Franchise. With all traditional solemnity, in the small ceremonial hall beneath the great dome of the venerable Institute, he achieved the ultimate honor in French life. He belonged now to the forty “Immortals,” the chosen of chosen.
We are told that “such a galaxy of celebrities had rarely gathered” and that de Lesseps spoke with the air of a conquering general. Great works were never easy, he affirmed. Nothing was easy in this world, especially the useful. Skeptics and doomsayers and character assassins were what one had to expect. The world was not without evil. “The Arab proverb says, ‘The dogs bark, the caravan passes.’ I passed on.”
Yet at this crowning moment the dogs had scarcely been heard. While talk of the sums being spent by Jules Dingler was commonplace in financial circles and Henri Marechal’s diatribe had given rise to considerable gossip, no publication of influence within France, no individual of importance, had had a derogatory word to say as yet.
De Lesseps’ own popula
rity seemed as invulnerable as always. Though Panama shares had begun to slip quite noticeably on the Bourse, though the company’s credit was being questioned for the first time, virtually none of the small shareholders were selling out. At the annual stockholders’ meeting in July, he was cheered again and again; and like some figure from Shakespeare, he gave his audience visions of heroic contest waged against an exotic, distant wilderness. They were part of the crusade; they were one with him in this great and good and terribly difficult work. The triumphs of the engineers– their engineers–were real; the task was better than half finished–“the efforts actually put forth May be considered as more than half the total efforts necessary” was his exact claim and a total fiction. (Only about a tenth of the canal had been dug, as the American officer Kimball rightly judged.)
The completion date, he also said, was being deferred somewhat and the original cost estimate of 1,200,000,000 francs, as set by the Paris congress, was being adopted. But such announcements went unchallenged. Nobody questioned or protested anything he said. When a man called for a formal investigation of the company’s management, there was no one in the entire hall who would even second the motion.
Not until later that summer did the talk of failure begin to sound serious. Writing in the Economiste Frangais on August 8, the highly regarded financial editor Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, known to be an old friend of de Lesseps’, warned that unless the canal company was reorganized, “we shall see the most terrible financial disaster of the nineteenth century.” The New York Tribune, among other foreign papers, began calling the canal a “gigantic wild-cat speculation” and lamented that the poor innocent stockholders were unable to go out and see the truth for themselves.
The most blistering attack was a series of articles carried by the London Financial News, a series written by J. C. Rodrigues, the American reporter, who had had a tremendous change of heart since his tour of Panama five years before. Like de Lesseps, Rodrigues had not been back to the Isthmus in all that time. Nor had he bothered to talk to anyone connected with the canal, anyone whatsoever with firsthand knowledge of the situation there or inside the offices on the Rue Caumartin. The articles in fact contained no new information. But By combing through the published observations of other journalists, by looking through what de Lesseps and the French press had been saying from one year to another, by shrewdly noting all that had not been forthcoming from the canal company in the way of solid data on costs and the volume of excavation actually accomplished (rather than what was anticipated), he had come up with a picture of willful deception at every turn. The French newspapers were giving de Lesseps their unstinting support, he charged, because editors and reporters were being bought wholesale. This was perhaps the tenth time the same accusation had appeared in print in the past year, but like others who had made it, Rodrigues had no proof or testimony to back it.
His statistics were taken from the Bulletin, from de Lesseps’ letters to stockholders, from public pronouncements, and the like. It was shown that the projected completion date had been a fantasy from the beginning, as had every projected cost figure. No plan for the Chagres dam existed on paper as yet, after five years. The canal was doomed because the company was going to fail. The enterprise would be defeated in Paris, that is, not on the Isthmus, and it was only a matter of time. “The whole thing is a humbug, and has been so from the start.”
In October, as the articles were being published as a book in the United States, Panama stock hit a new low of 364 francs. Then in the first week of December a raging “norther” swept across the Caribbean and struck Colón, smashing eighteen ships onto the shore and destroying much of the waterfront. Fifty seamen were killed. Tremendous rains fell and the Chagres, rising thirty feet in a few hours, flooded miles of railroad and canal diggings. No trains could get through. To inspect the line after the storm, Philippe Bunau-Varilla had to go most of the way by canoe and wrote afterward of gliding past half-drowned trees the tops of which were black with millions of tarantulas.
The effect of such news on the skeptics at home may be imagined. Yet de Lesseps, sanguine as always, reminded everyone that there had never been a year at Suez without a crisis. The Suez venture had been called all the same names; as had he. The caravan would pass on.
In May he had spoken for the first time of lottery bonds to guarantee the canal. And at the July stockholders’ meeting he had asked for and received a show of approval. Now he talked of little else. Canal bonds would be sold with numbered tickets attached, some of which, the winning tickets, would be worth large cash prizes. In the final year of the Suez Canal, when an issue of conventional bonds failed to provide funds sufficient to finish the work, just such a lottery issue had saved the canal. Moreover, those same bonds were now worth almost twice their original value. To finish “promptly” at Panama, he said, would take another 600,000,000 francs. The only thing needed was government authorization for a lottery issue. So as summer turned to autumn the Chamber of Deputies was swamped with petitions signed by thousands of Panama stockholders–a grand, spontaneous show of faith, said the Nyons banker, Ferdinand Martin, who started the campaign. And to ease any possible apprehensions over the situation on the Isthmus, de Lesseps declared he would go again to look things over.
Impressed by the flood of petitions, the Chamber appointed a committee of deputies to study the lottery proposal and a noted civil engineer, Armand Rousseau, was selected to go to Panama and report back to the committee. Rousseau departed before de Lesseps did. Whether he wished specifically to avoid the old man’s irradiating influence is not clear, but he did sail on the Lafayette at the same time as Charles, who was taking a new director general, thirty-five-year-old Léon Boyer, to relieve Philippe Bunau-Varilla.
Bunau-Varilla, meantime, had decided to resign from the canal Company, but would stay on in Panama, in the employ of a private contractor, as head of the major excavation at Culebra.
When he departed for this, his second, tour of the Isthmus–for his first actual look at the Panama canal–Ferdinand de Lesseps was eighty years old. And in the minds of his thousands of shareholders this was the critical figure in the equation, more important than any stock prices or excavation statistics. It was not a company they believed in, or even a canal through Panama, so much as one exceptional human being. For them he was la grande entreprise. So, baldly put, the question was, How much longer could the mortal hull last and perform?
His large and much publicized retinue included technical advisers, company officials, and special guests (delegates from half a dozen French chambers of commerce, a German engineer, an Italian diplomat, an admiral in the Royal Navy, the Duke of Sutherland), and everyone went at company expense. His wife and children remained in Paris. Interestingly, there was no one along this time from the first expedition. Bionne and Blanchet were dead; he and Wyse had not spoken for years; Jacob Dirks, Colonel Totten, Trenor Park, they too were dead by now.
In the end, when everything was in ruin, few would regard him very kindly for such efforts as this. The dazzling faith would seem almost maniacal and pathetic in hindsight. It would be forgotten how magnificent he was in so many respects. The man of younger days, the Hero of Suez, would be the one eulogized. Yet of all the performances in that long, glittering career, there is nothing quite comparable to the final drive to succeed at Panama. The falling star blazed very bright indeed.
They reached Colón on February 17, only days after Armand Rousseau had completed his studies and departed. The stay on the Isthmus this time lasted just two weeks, and the intentions throughout, in all de Lesseps said and did, were fundamentally the same as six years earlier– to be inspirational, to foster courage, confidence, and to draw attention to himself. In this, once again, he succeeded grandly. In the army of laborers strung out across the Isthmus, he had crowds unlike anything since Egypt. For the thousands at work the mere sight of him was electrifying. “You are for us,” said one engineer in a welcoming speech, “the venerated chief around whom we
rally, ready at all times to sacrifice even our very lives to assure your triumphant success in your present great and glorious work.”
“With hearts and minds like yours,” de Lesseps responded, “everything is possible.”
Again he had chosen the dry season. He would appear, as before, in brilliant sunshine. For one inspection tour he went on horseback. “M. de Lesseps,” reported one member of the party, “always indefatigable, rode at the head of the caravan. I saw him gallop up the hillside at Culebra, amid a roar of approval from blacks and whites, all astounded by so much ardor and youthfulness.” Years afterward young American engineers relaxing in comfortable new clubrooms would listen to old Panama hands tell how he wore a flowing robe of glorious colors, “like an Oriental monarch.”
There were parades and fireworks at Panama City. A triumphal arch in the plaza was emblazoned, “Glory to the Genius of the Nineteenth Century.” Little girls presented bouquets. He made speeches; he drank toasts. He sat through banquets that would have finished off most men his age. He danced all night at a grand ball in his honor.
His accommodations on the Atlantic side were in an imposing frame house facing the water at Christophe-Colomb, built especially for his use and known ever after as de Lesseps’ Palace. In Panama City he stayed at the palace of the bishop, where the guardian at his door was a dog called Bravo, a local phenomenon of unknown breed and origin which had first attached itself to Dingler some years before, then Hutin, then Bunau-Varilla, and most recently to Charles de Lesseps. Through long, stifling mornings, as noisy crowds filled the plaza, he conferred with his engineers in the canal offices. He toured the hospital, machine shops, labor camps. Bunau-Varilla set off a tremendous charge of dynamite for his benefit, then made a little ceremonial presentation of one small bit of the rock–a “thousandth part of onemillionth of the little mountain which he had seen raised in the air . . .” De Lesseps, with somewhat less ceremony, would later give it to the Académie des Sciences.
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