James A. Williams, a Jamaican, was taken ill in 1910, when still in his teens. He was then working in a kitchen at one of the labor camps. His own account, written fifty years later, is among the most vivid in the canal archives. It is given here just as he wrote it:
One morning the Doctor making his usual visit to the kitchen some one reported to him that I am having fever. The Doctor immediately advanced to me and felt my pulse, I could remember he said to me “you are going to be sick boy,” go right over to the “Sick Camp” and tell the Clerk to write you up to the Hospital, right away. He further asked me, Are you a God fearing man? I replied yes. He said to me you are going to die. It was near time for the midday train and the Doctor ran over to the Sick Camp and assisted to write up the necessary papers and I was placed on the train to the Ancon hospital. Dr. Beard was the name of the Doctor in that section.
I was placed on a bed on the train to the hospital all the way and when the train arrived in the Panama Station, there were many horse drawn ambulances awaiting to receive the patients to the hospital. We then arrived in the big Ward 30 to be lined up and a very pleasant American nurse was right on the job and started to feel the pulses and assigned each patient to the different bed. As I noticed when she came to me and took my hand, she appeared to be frightened and she called the Orderly and said to him do not put this patient under the shower, give him a bed bath. I wondered to myself as to what is this bed bath. Because I had never been in an Hospital before. However, I was escorted to the Ward by the Orderly Mr. St. Hill and he turned me over to Mr. Norman Piercy right from My home in Partland, Jamaica, W.I. but we at that time did not recognize each other. St. Hill said to Piercy, Give this patient a bed bath. While I kept wondering in my mind what do they mean by this bedbath when I saw this Mr. Piercy placed a heavy waterproof Blanket in the bed and two buckets full of heavy crushed ice and several buckets of water and not even the courtesy as to consult me but stripped me naked and threw me in that cold deadly water. To be truthful, I thought I could not any longer live. However, he gave me a thorough bathing and took me out and dried me with a towel and placed me in a white clean bed. I felt cool for a moment but still fretting over the Iced bath as I had never heard or seen anything of that kind before. . ..
The next shock I had while I felt a little thirsty and when I saw some one coming with a wine glass of water I felt glad as I thought it was some cool water which I felt so much the need and the kindly Nurse handed it to me and said drink it. So thirsty for a drink of water, I hurried and as it reached my lips it was down my stomach. I tell you, I had never before tasted anything so terribly bitter. I always hearing about Quinine but I thought it was something tasty and nice. And every two hours I was dosed with that bitter liquid night and day and instead of getting rid of the fever it was growing worse.
Then the next thing that happened. I was placed in front of the Nurse’s desk and a basin with clean water was placed on the stand beside me, I then thought it was water placed there for me to drink. As I felt thirsty at the time I used My hand and took three hand full three times and swallow and when I heard the Nurse called to me and asked what, that you do drink it? I could not answer her but I saw when she picked up the Telephone I really did not know what happened until I discovered about five Doctors over me and find myself throwing up. And a few hours after I was settled I noticed they drew some blood from my arm. I then noticed from that time there no more of that bitter liquid. The hole night I was not bothered with that stuff.
The next morning two men came with a Stretcher and lifted me from the bed and placed me on the Stretcher and carried me off out of the Ward. I thought they were going to bury me as I was actually given over as dead. However, I was taken to Ward 24 . . . that was the place where typhoid patients were being treated. They found out that the fever I had was typhoid and not malaria.
What I can truthfull say Those American Nurses My own dear mother could not be more kind and tender to me. They did everything lies humanly even to let me take a little nourishment so to keep life in my body. I should right here tell of the incident with the water I drank from the basin on the stand beside my bed. It was poisoned water to kill flies that buzzed around when I thought it was placed there for me to drink as I had never before entered a hospital.
I could never, never in life forget the tender kindness those American Nurses administered to me especially in that Ward 24. I had no desire for nourishment of any kind, my life was ebbing out. But how they plead with me to take some nourishment. Not only that, but they closely watched the colored Orderlies how they handle the patients.
One night, the Nurse on duty came to me, she said to me now, bed 6, if you don’t take some nourishment you would never get well and the tone she spoke to me with her hand on my head I forced to swallow a little milk and from that I continued to take little by little and a few days past and she came on duty the night and took my temperature she said to me you are getting better “bed 6.” I began to feel a desire for the milk now, very fast. Then they started to give eggnog twice a day also real American Whiskey every day. I was not allowed to raise my head from the pillow even though I am feeling well. I began to feel real hungry but only liquid diet was give me for over three weeks after the fever left me. One mid day at breakfast I was given a toasted Potato. Oh. how I enjoyed it. Even that did not satisfied my starving apetite. I was therefore convinced by the Nurses and Doctors such starvation was for my good. One morning in the month of May Dr. Connor the Night Doctor came in, that Ward were then run by himself and Dr. Bates. Dr. Connor came to my bed side with the Nurse and took up my Chart, asked me how you feeling James? I replied, ok. doctor. He asked me you hungry? I replied yes doctor. He turned and ordered her to give me light diet and pair of Pajamas.
The morning in question when I was given the Pajamas and was told to get out of bed and tried to walk, every step that tried I had to be supported. That morning I was given a bowl of porridge, two eggs, nice bread and butter, a lovely slice of melon. But they never ceased to give the Whiskey and Eggnog during the days, and a week later I was given “Full Diet.” I was then feeling happy and good as when at meal time when we are told that what ever we like having that’s no on the table just call.
I was discharged in May and the treatment had me so fat and robus that when I went home to San Pablo Aunt surprise to see how good I was looking.
I took sick in April and was in the Hospital until May 1910.*
Had the black labor force been housed in screened quarters comparable to those provided the white employees, in areas where the sanitary officers exercised control, malaria might possibly have been eradicated, as had yellow fever. As it was, the total loss from disease in the ten years it took to build the canal was less than five thousand people. But Gorgas later declared that if conditions had remained as they had been during the French era, the death toll would have been upward of seventy-eight thousand (figured on a death rate of Two hundred out of every one thousand employees). That a man such as James Williams, or the many thousands of others who took sick, survived at all was regarded, by black laborers as much as by anyone, as a miracle of medical progress.
In his ten days of dining at the Tivoli Hotel, Charles Francis Adams had seen exactly three houseflies; it was indeed a wondrous age. The correspondent for The Outlook, after a stiff climb in the hills behind Paraíso, was shown a galvanized ash can full of oil placed On a plank over a little stream, so that oil dripped slowly, constantly, onto the water as it flowed toward the canal line. So simple a solution to so large a problem, he wrote, was not the least of the “marvels” of Panama.
There seemed to be but one aspect of progress on the Isthmus over which one might reasonably express some skepticism or concern. Relations between the canal builders and the local populace, uneasy from the beginning, had deteriorated markedly. “In temperament and tradition we are miles away from the Panamanians,” noted The Outlook correspondent. “. . . The age-old hostility to the ‘Gringo’ is deep-root
ed. Differences in language, customs and religious practices keep the breach wide.”
To the average American, Panama was a land of dark, ignorant, undersized people who very obviously disliked him. (“It is hard to like people who have evidently made up their mind to dislike you.”) It was said that the whole country had a “chronic case of sulks.” The Panamanian–any Panamanian, regardless of position or social status–was a “Spiggotty” or “Spig,” terms supposedly derived in earlier years from the erroneous claim of Panama City hackmen that they could “speaks-da-English.”
It was thought that the Panamanian showed too little gratitude for all that was being done for him. When Robert Wood declared in a speech years afterward that the United States had created all the wealth in Panama, he was expressing the profound conviction of virtually every American who worked on the canal.
The Panamanian, not surprisingly, resented the Gringo’s power, his deprecation of the Panamanian way of life. The Americans were loud, arrogant, impolite, they drank too much. The canal that was to have brought such untold prosperity to everyone appeared to be doing no such thing. Commissaries within the Zone had deprived local merchants of a long-anticipated bonanza; and the Panamanian populace, unable to shop there themselves, resented that goods in such abundance and at such very low prices should be the exclusive privilege of the well-paid canal workers. Even Gorgas’ efforts were a source of resentment.
They hate us because we cleaned their towns and are keeping them clean [one writer surmised], not perhaps because they actually prefer the old filth and fatalities, but because their correction implies that they were not altogether perfect before we came. For the strongest quality of the Panamanian is his pride, and it is precisely that sentiment which we North Americans have either wantonly or necessarily outraged.
Seeing the poverty of those native Panamanians who lived in the old Chagres villages within the Zone, many Americans knew the feelings expressed by Rose van Hardeveld:
The poor we had literally all around us. I think each one of us found our wash women or fruit vendors always some one or two that were more wretchedly miserable than the others, and that seemed to cry personally for help, to us who had so much where they had nothing.
Much neglect and needless cruelty came to our notice every day. It seemed not so much to proceed from wishing to be cruel or neglectful as from the fact that they knew nothing better. . ..
All of our women felt deeply sorry for the sad-eyed children passing by every day, and yet there was little that we could do that would be of any lasting benefit.
If we gave them clothing it would only tend to make them dissatisfied with what they had, and money would usually go for rum or lottery tickets. We came to feel that charity was really not much good as just charity.
One American who had tried very hard to do something had been quickly removed. Rufus Lane, a former seaman from Massachusetts, had arrived looking for a position during the Stevens regime. He had no technical skills, but he had a letter of introduction from Henry Cabot Lodge and he spoke fluent Spanish, so it was decided to put him in charge of “Canal Zone municipalities in the jungle,” a wholly meaningless position but one that he took quite seriously. The “jungle Panamanians”–Indians, West Indians–soon began doing as he instructed. “They cleared the jungle around their huts,” the diplomat William Sands reported. “They joined their settlements by hard little foottrails . . . they learned how to dispose of disease-fostering refuse and how to set up simple first aid and sanitation centers. They held town meetings on the primitive New England plan . . . Lane’s job seemed to me one of the finest things Americans were doing in Panama.” But Lane and his work were abolished by a visiting congressional committee, one member of which told Sands, “These people are of no more use than mosquitoes and buzzards; they ought all to be exterminated together.”
With the advance of the waters of Gatun Lake, as thousands of villagers were dispossessed of their land and homes and were moved to new sites on higher ground, very few of them felt that they were given fair compensation and bitterly resented the arbitrary fashion in which their new locations were decided for them. “The Americans took awful advantage of the poor people, because they had no one to speak for them,” one woman would remark sadly, more than sixty years later, remembering the home her family had been forced to abandon.
Of the officers in charge of the work, only Gorgas seemed to know how not to alienate the Panamanians. Few officials spoke Spanish or made an effort to learn. Goethals spoke none at all. (“Oh, I suppose he knew how to say no,” recalled one American disapprovingly.) During his first year on the job, Goethals had written to one of his sons that a state dinner given by President and Señora Amador was “the most trying function that I have had anything to do with.” He had been placed between Señora Amador and Señora Obaldía, neither of whom spoke English.
Amador had died in 1909, not long after being succeeded in office by Jose de Obaldía. What Goethals thought of Obaldía is not known, but he had long before depicted Amador as “no great shakes,” and when Obaldía, after taking office, privately revealed some inside facts about the Amador regime, it was as if all the worst American beliefs regarding the high tone of Panamanian politics and politicians had been confirmed. What truth there was to the information is impossible to know; more important was the fact that the American officials believed every word of it.
The charge was that $200,000 to $300,000 had disappeared from the Panamanian treasury, the discovery having been made only when Obaldía took office. Goethals appears to have learned of it first on October 8, 1908, in a confidential letter from Admiral Rousseau written when Goethals was away from the Isthmus on official business. “It is said Amador gets half the loot himself,” Rousseau reported. “Not only that Amador charged up to the Panamanian Government all sorts of private entertainment, presents, etc. given President and Mrs. Roosevelt, Secretary Taft, Secretary and Mrs. Root, and also Miss Roosevelt’s wedding present. The pieces charged up are 5 to 10 times actual expenditures. Obaldía and his party are ‘mad’ all the way through and threaten to publish far and wide just what Amador has done.” But as Rousseau further explained it had been agreed to keep the story “bottled up,” out of respect to Roosevelt and his family.
Nor was any official alarm expressed over the larger animosities between the two peoples. If such feelings prevailed, the consensus seemed to be, they had always prevailed, from the time the first wave of gold prospectors came ashore in 1849. And doubtless there was no quick or ready solution.
To the average American at work on the canal, the aggrieved pride or “smoldering wrath” of the Panamanian (to use the words of one reporter) was of only marginal concern. There would be time enough later to resolve such difficulties. For now the work was going too well, morale was too high, the end was much too plainly in view to think much about anything else.
* The diplomat William Sands, who spent much of his time settling American-Panamanian differences, wrote that the Panamanian police had “various . . . disconcerting habits, such as carving an American or hammering him unconscious before they arrested him.” When fights broke out in a Coco Grove brothel on a night in July 1912, the Panamanian police moved in, shot and killed three unarmed Marines, then rounded up a number of others, who were put in jail, to be beaten and tortured. That Goethals and the American minister refused to order American troops into the city was, according to one journalist present, the cause of “almost universal regret within the American Zone.”
* The trip to Germany was to visit the new locks on the Kiel Canal. He went in the spring of 1912 and at one point was entertained by the Kaiser, whom he described as “Roosevelt toned down.”
* Afterward James Williams worked in one of the machine shops at Gorgona, then as a telephone operator on the railroad. At the time the canal was finished he was a sales clerk at the Corozal commissary. He retired from canal service in 1949.
*$$$ This account is Mrs. Gaillard’s own, as rela
ted by her son to the author. Marie Gorgas, who considered the scene the key to Goethals’ character and who, of course, was not present, gave a rather more colorful version:
One beautiful moonlight night Goethals was walking on a little hill, overlooking the cut, with one of the best-known ladies of the Zone. His companion was much affected by the splendor of the tropical scene.
“Yes, it’s a beautiful spot,” the Colonel replied to her exclamations, “and I love it! But I love it for other reasons than its beauty or the things I get from it. Above all, I love it for the power.”
He was silent for a moment and then went on:
“I remember once visiting a monastery of Jesuit Fathers. I saw the wretched cells they lived in, the little rude cots they slept in, the rough tables at which they had their meals. And then I remembered the vast power that the men who lived like that had once exercised. It was worth living simply in order to have that.”
In his enthusiasm he raised his hand.
“That’s the only thing in life worth having. Wealth–salaries–these are nothing. It’s power, power, power!” incidence of malaria continued to decline during this same trial period, Goethals felt that he had proved his case and refused to turn the work back to Gorgas.
* The issue had caused a brief sensation at home with the appearance of an article in The Independent magazine (March 22, 1906) titled “Our Mismanagement at Panama.” The author was Poultney Bigelow, son of John Bigelow, who had spent a few days in Colón and who wrote, “Prostitutes are not needed on the Isthmus– and if they were there is no call to send for them at the expense of the taxpayer.” The charge was shown to be based wholly on hearsay, as was virtually all of the article. But to quell the outcry numbers of black women were asked to swear before a duly appointed I.C.C. official that they were leading a moral life and that they were in Panama of their own free choice; and these affidavits were sent on to the appropriate congressional committee.
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