A Family of Islands

by Alec Waugh

  When he took his seat as chairman of the congress, Lesseps had no intention of joining the enterprise. He was close upon seventy-five. His life had been a succession of postings here and there. He wanted to settle down with his family in the provinces, but the pressure of opinion was too strong, and he was an adventurer at heart. When his son Charles opposed the plan, he shrugged.’If one asks a general who has just won a first victory whether he wishes to win a second, would he refuse?’

  It is hard not to detect a parallel here between Lesseps and Drake. Both believed in the eternal quality of youth. They could not believe they had grown old. The dreams of both were broken in the fever-strewn jungles of the isthmus.

  For Lesseps the next years were his most dramatic and most glamorous. He was the figurehead, the defender of his country’s honour. Hugo urged him to astonish the world with the great deeds that can be won without a war. He set about raising, personally, the funds which the enterprise required. He refused at first to rely on the government and on professional financiers. He would appeal direct to the small investor. Those who had made Suez should make Panama. He estimated the final cost at a thousand million francs. He asked for four hundred million, but received only thirty million, and the moneys had to be returned to the subscribers. He was forced to turn to the professional financiers, and turning, took his first false step. The racketeers sharpened their knives. Not four hundred, but six hundred million francs were asked for, and an appeal was launched, with the backing not only of the press but of every bank in France. Within three days, twelve hundred million francs had been subscribed. Champagne flowed in abundance and everybody took his cut. Lesseps himself was so delighted with the result that he pledged himself to visit Panama, and in order to disprove the rumour that the climate was fatal to the white man he arranged to take out with him his wife and three of his children. His paper, The Bulletin, was established as the propaganda mouthpiece of the company.

  Lesseps was received at the isthmus even more jubilantly than he had been in Paris on his return from Suez. Troops were reviewed, windows decorated, the sky was bright with fireworks. On the first of January 1880, the first blow of the pickaxe was struck by his seven-year-old daughter, Ferdinande, and a bishop blessed the spot where the canal would emerge into the Pacific.

  Lesseps foresaw no dangers. If there were such large crowds to welcome him, the climate must be innocuous. Fevers were caused by decay and its effluvia. A proper regard for hygiene should protect the workers during the seven months’ rainy season. It was not till the end of the century that medical science was able to recognize and combat the malevolence of the mosquito – Aedes Aegypti.

  From the isthmus he sailed northward to the United States. He was welcomed and he was honoured, but the financiers held back. They felt that if there was to be a canal it should be theirs. They had no intention of advancing funds to assist foreigners on a project that should have been their own. President Hayes said in a message to Congress, ‘The policy of this country is to advocate a canal under American control.’ But Lesseps, who was perhaps unused to diplomatic formulas, referred in The Bulletin to ‘the enthusiastic and unanimous adherence to our cause’. He appeared to think that the President’s message ‘had assured the security of the canal’.

  He returned to Europe in the highest spirits. He was honoured everywhere he went, in England, Belgium, Holland, but he received no funds. He did not, however, let this worry him. He was sustained by the euphoria of senility. His propaganda value was immense. Vast sums of money were changing hands, and whenever this happened, a ten or fifteen per cent, commission slid into receptive pockets, while the claims of publicity demanded that this journalist and that minister should receive his douceur. Yet all the time work was actually proceeding. The contractors were urgently prosecuting their immense task of recruiting personnel, assembling the varied types of machinery that were required, and taking what seemed the appropriate precautions for the health and comfort of the staff.

  For the West Indians, the enterprise was an unbelievable bonanza. A large proportion of the labour force was recruited in Jamaica. They could hardly credit their good fortune. Half a century ago their parents and grandparents had been slaves. Now they were heading for an El Dorado richer than that which had inflamed the imagination of their captors. ‘The lure of easy money,’ so J. A. Froude was to write eight years later, ‘is drawing thousands of West Indians to the isthmus.’ The inter-island boat on which he travelled was full of them. They went out on a year’s contract. A number of them did not survive that year, but the survivors went home with the store of dollars that would buy them a few acres of land and the chance of a secure old age, ‘if,’ Froude adds, ‘there is such a thing as a provident West Indian.’

  It was for the West Indians the most exhilarating event in their manacled history. In retrospect it is easy to dismiss the whole thing as a racket; a number of worthless men made money shoddily, the Bourse was manipulated, stocks were sent down by a false report that the USA were invoking the Monroe Doctrine, then they were sent up by a misrepresentation of the President’s message to Congress, but work was being done, on the spot, by honest men. R. Coureau wrote in his life of Lesseps published in Paris in 1932, ‘The hospital has been sited in the healthiest place of the locality. . . . It consists of five separate buildings, lightly constructed in wood, between which air and sunlight can play without restriction. Excellent water is laid on in abundance. The hospital has its own farm, abattoir and ice house. Every night the soil is removed and taken down to the sea. The wards are so large and well ventilated, even those occupied by Negro patients suffering from fever, that the most sensitive olfactory nerves cannot perceive the slightest odour. There are private rooms for the company’s employees, and you would not find more comfortable accommodation in the most expensive nursing home. There are five experienced and devoted medical officers. The administration and nursing is in the hands of thirty sisters.’

  But in spite of these precautions, the white assistants were no more immune against yellow fever than Leclerc’s troops had been in St Domingue or Dundas’ in Guadeloupe. No one realized that it was by mosquitoes that the fever was spread. The windows were uncovered; there were no mosquito screens; the feet of the beds were stood in water to keep off ants, thus providing breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

  When fever first appeared in 1882, the West Indians managed with a loss of only ten per cent. They possessed a partial immunity to yellow fever, though not to malaria, and the company in Paris was confident. But the contractors were not. Their best men died; an earthquake was followed by a tidal wave; their machinery was clogged, their rail tracks fouled. They decided to pull out, and no large firm was prepared to act as a successor. But even now Lesseps was not deterred. He remembered how at Suez he had disagreed with the experts, and been proved right. He trusted himself and decided that the company should buy out the contractors’ equipment and that he should handle the business himself, not through Paris but through a director in Panama. Financially and administratively this was to prove a disastrous decision.

  In the meantime, it was not only West Indian labourers who were flocking to the isthmus in search of spoil. The air was heavy with every type of human vulture; there was gambling, drinking, drabbing; pimps announced their special merchandise with the code designation Langoustes arrivées. The whole thing was very like a war, with the embusqués flourishing at the base, while the troops shivered in the trenches.

  Yet just as in wartime everything seems flourishing at the base and at G.H.Q., with medalled staff officers in polished boots supping in elegant restaurants, and the four-star generals seated in high honour, so did the administrators flourish in the Paris headquarters of the company. Never had Lesseps enjoyed more renown. In April 1883 he was elected to the Academy, and Ernest Renan said of him, ‘The word religion is not too strong to express the enthusiasm which you engendered. Your work was a kind of gospel of redemption, of grace and pardon. ... I suppose that, aft
er Lamartine, you are in our century the man most beloved, around whose head have formed the greatest number of legends and of dreams. . . . The nation which knows how to love and to admire is not near death. To those who contend that within the breast of this people nothing beats any more, that they no longer know how to worship, that the experience of so many failures, so many deceptions, has extinguished in them all confidence in what is good and great, to them we will cite you.

  Yet at the very moment that Renan was delivering this oration, the financial situation in the isthmus had become so serious that Lesseps had been forced to ask the government for permission to offer lottery bonds, a request that the government had declined to grant till a fresh survey of the area had been made by a government mission.

  The head of the mission had the good sense to delay his departure until the dry season; it became harder to maintain the appearance of success, and yet it was maintained; the government mission reported favourably upon the work in progress. In 1886 Lesseps revisited the isthmus. His staff still had faith in him. He was cheered like a general on the eve of battle. Legend states that he travelled in a flowing robe of gorgeous colours like an Oriental monarch. On his return to France he wrote in The Bulletin, ‘From the first of April 1885 to the 31st of May 1886, when there were fourteen thousand people employed at various points along the route of the canal, there were only 735 deaths, that is to say a mortality of 5¼%. Such a figure is not greater than the mortality usual in public works, and definitely lower than that of the navy over the whole of our colonies, which is 7%.’

  The shareholders read this report with relief and satisfaction, but even as they were reading it, the rains were falling on the isthmus, mosquitoes were breeding in the stretches of stagnant water that the excavations had created, and once again a plague of yellow fever struck. Its venom was particularly felt by the white workers. In October 1886 the Washington disembarked thirty engineers. Within a month thirteen of them were dead. The director of works brought out his wife and children. His wife and the two children died. Twenty-four helpers accompanied the mother superior of the Sisters of Ancona. Twenty-one of them died. The British consul at Panama made a trip into the upper valley with an engineer and a group of twenty-two men. The men were left at the installations. Twenty of them caught the fever and half of them died. The consul invited the engineer to lunch with him next day. He awaited his guest in vain. The engineer was already dead. The plague was so fierce that an enterprising man of business was advertising in the local press that he could supply coffins of any size, with a price range of six to one hundred piastres. The Negroes were, however, for the most part immune to yellow fever, and the work continued. It was on the Negroes, mainly from Jamaica, that the company had to rely. The Indians were poor workers, and the Chinese set up as shopkeepers, market gardeners and laundrymen.

  The government committee refused to authorize the issue of lottery bonds until more convincing documents were produced, but Lesseps was undaunted. He flung back his challenge. ‘Six deputies have by their attitude prevented me from going forward, from marching with you to the conquest by France of the Isthmus of Panama. We shall pass over the obstacle. Together we shall go on to this second victory. We shall issue the necessary 600 million. . . . The dogs bark, the caravan passes.’

  But the country had ceased to share his faith. The mercurial French temperament had swung from one extreme to another. The issue failed, and again the applicants had their subscriptions returned. In the assembly, a deputy spoke of the enterprise as a national humiliation. The committee met again; this time the voting went the other way; in the meantime, presumably, one of the deputies had been bribed, and the issue of lottery bonds was legalized, to the amount of seven hundred and twenty millions. The Crédit Lyonnais stipulated, however, that the whole of the sum must be subscribed at once. This was very far from being what the company wanted. They only needed enough money to meet current expenses. Lesseps was still convinced that the work could be accomplished, as indeed technically it could. He refused to take account of the fever. The company tried to persuade the Crédit Lyonnais to change its mind, but the bankers refused. Reluctantly the company gave way. The issue was announced. But Lesseps had many enemies. He was distrusted by the left and by the right, and at this crucial moment his adversaries had recourse to an act of treachery for which history provides few parallels. On the morning that the subscription lists were opened, every town in France received a telegram announcing Lesseps’ death. Not unnaturally, the issue failed completely.

  Lesseps was hopeful still, but the world at large was well aware that failure was imminent. The steamer on which Froude sailed for Jamaica was bound for Panama. He was urged to continue his trip in her to see ‘the greatest undertaking of our age’. But he declined. He dreaded what he would find there; a damp tropical jungle swarming with mosquitoes, snakes, alligators, scorpions, centipedes . . . ‘half buried in mud the scattered wrecks of costly machinery consumed by rust, sent out under lavish orders and found unfit for the work for which it was intended’. He anticipated that he would also find the unburied skeletons of the human machinery that had broken down there; while the port itself would be cluttered with ‘the speculators, cardsharpers, hallkeepers and the doubtful ladies who carried their charms to this delightful market’.

  The company still hoped that bankruptcy could be delayed. But Paris was being torn by one of its periodic political crises. Gambetta was getting old; the big bankers were not going to risk their capital to succour a man who had despised them. The directors of the company had no alternative to resignation, and Lesseps sent the final telegram to Panama ordering the work to cease.

  The court proceedings that were eventually set in motion make sorry reading. It became abundantly clear that the company had largely failed through the rapacity and dubious dealing of Frenchmen in high office. Deputies had been bribed, journalists had been bribed. Even men such as Georges Clemenceau had to face uncomfortable interrogation. Scapegoats had to be found. The builder of the Eiffel Tower was arrested, so was Lesseps’ son, so would Lesseps himself have been, had his health permitted it. There were two trials, one before a court of appeal for fraud, one before a jury for corruption; Parliament also called a committee of inquiry. It was the kind of scandal that is a speciality of French public life. The opposition was resolved to discredit the government that had encouraged Lesseps, to bring down the government by its exposure of corruption. Scapegoats were required. Eiffel and Charles Lesseps both got prison sentences, young Lesseps maintaining his dignity under relentless cross-examination. When it was shown that the company had paid money to a certain minister, the President asserted that that constituted corruption. Lesseps replied that it was extortion. ‘Where was the violence?’ the President demanded. Lesseps answered with a smile, ‘Is violence necessary when a minister of state makes demands in such conditions?’

  The scandal was out of all proportion to the crimes committed, but that is the usual consequence when a democracy feels it has been fooled. Three thousand miles away, the Jamaicans settled down to the cultivation of their gardens. For them it had been a great adventure.

  13 Froudacity

  JA. Froude, when he watched the last Jamaican adventurers hurrying to the isthmus, was obtaining the material for a book which he published under the title The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses. It was to prove as unpopular among his expatriate compatriots as Trollope’s had done. A phrase was coined out of the novelist’s visit – ‘to go a-Trolloping’, which meant to hurry from one station to another, delivering snap verdicts on the way. Froude also enriched the local language with the noun ‘Froudacity’, whose meaning is self-evident. Froude’s book is out of print and it would not pay a publisher to reprint it, but it is essential reading for any student of the area.

  Froude left England late in December 1887 and was home by April. He went from island to island, pausing at some for a few hours, spending a couple of weeks in others, concentrating on B
arbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Dominica, Cuba, very much as the modern tourist does. He was then over sixty; he was the most prominent English historian of his day. He was a man of prominence and influence.

  A conservative in politics, he made the trip with a definite objective – to study existing conditions in the British West Indian colonies. He went there with an open mind, as far as any mind can be called open that is defended by rigid principles. He was an imperialist. He believed that the strong should rule the weak with firm paternal solicitude, arguing that certain races were incapable of self-government and that it was Britain’s and Europe’s destiny to administer the countries of such races. He included under this heading not only Africans and Asians but the Irish. The prospect of home rule for Ireland filled him with alarm. He disapproved of democracy, and distrusted oratory which could sway the ignorant masses as Kleon the tanner’s had in Athens. A new creed has risen, he said, which ‘has its priests and its prophets, its formulae and its articles of belief.

  ‘Whoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Radical faith.

  ‘And the Radical faith is this: all men are equal and the voice of one is as the voice of another.