So when he and Stephens, the expert on Central America, sat down to talk, it was about how visibly enticing the narrow Isthmus of Panama looked. The United States was now a continental empire with its annexation of California, Oregon, and half the western territories, and had emerged as the dominant force in the Americas. But it had also become a broad, sprawling nation with two distant coasts to connect. France and England had both shown strong interest in the isthmus. For Stephens, however, just as he had felt about the Maya antiquities, Panama must be kept within the compass of United States’ control. Was it feasible, however, for a few New Yorkers with only private capital behind them to break through a narrow strip of land that had foiled plotters and dreamers for hundreds of years?
In January 1848, he arrived on the isthmus to find out. He was accompanied by an engineer named James Baldwin, hired to help him assess whether a railroad could be built coast to coast. It must have been an odd moment. Here was John L. Stephens, famously identified with unearthing the rain forest antiquities of Central America, returned to the jungle to plot a course for modern steam engines to divide and conquer the unforgiving wilds of the Isthmus of Panama.
Landing at the mouth of the Chagres River, the two men found out quickly what they were up against. The Caribbean side of the isthmus was a solid wall of jungle and mangrove swamps, not much different from the coast of Guatemala as Stephens and Catherwood had approached it nine years earlier. The only crossing to the Pacific was by canoe up the winding Chagres as far as the rapids in the middle of the country. Several nights had to be spent in huts or camped on the river’s banks amid crocodiles, screeching macaws, snakes, and the unsettling basso roars of howler monkeys. As familiar as it was to Stephens, it remained unnerving. Leaving the river at the central villages of Gorgona or Cruces, the only way over the continental divide to the Pacific was on one of two ancient, rarely used trails, both in serious disrepair. Panama’s long spine of mountains, the Sierra de Veraguas, formed a low saddle at this point. Travelers descended the final twenty miles to Panama City over painfully rugged terrain either on foot or mule.
The entire journey, though only some fifty miles, took days, even a week or more, depending on the season. During the rainy months, May through November, the Chagres was a plunging torrent filled with fallen trees, snags, and debris, while the trails to the Pacific became virtually impassable with mud. During the dry season, the twisting river ran so low through parts of the jungle that only shallow-draft canoes, or bungos, could clear the obstructions to make any headway upstream. And regardless of the season, clouds of mosquitoes swarmed out of the swamps carrying malaria and dengue fever. The route was so miserable and deadly that the year Stephens visited, fewer than four hundred people passed over it from the Caribbean to the Pacific.10 Most people preferred taking their chances sailing south around the tip of South America despite the fact that it added months to the journey and posed its own serious dangers.
Even though they crossed the isthmus during the dry season—the healthy season—Baldwin got sick, probably with malaria. Stephens wrote his father that he himself had never felt healthier but was disheartened by the conditions they had found. “The country is very rough and broken and the survey much more difficult and will occupy more time than I expected.”11 Yet he forced himself to remain upbeat. “I think this is to be a point in the movements of the world and a great thoroughfare for travel. From this point there are to be great transactions with the whole coast of the Pacific up and down.”
At some point the two men reached a “Eureka!” moment. Baldwin had recovered and found a pass through the continental divide that measured only three hundred feet above sea level. They realized then that with proper grading a rail bed could be laid across that would allow locomotives to pass ocean to ocean.12
When Stephens returned to New York in June, Aspinwall was ecstatic at the news. He had meanwhile acquired a third partner for the possible railroad venture—Henry Chauncey, one of the investors in the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. The fifty-three-year-old businessman was an obvious fit. Descended from an old New England family (his grandfather has been an early president of Harvard College), Chauncey was a partner through marriage in a commercial firm with interests on the Pacific coast of South America. Years earlier he moved with his wife and children to Peru and Chile, where he spent ten years in business, accumulating a small fortune.13 With his connections between New York and South America, he brought to the partnership firsthand knowledge of trade in the region.
Meanwhile, during Stephens’s and Baldwin’s absence, the first Pacific Mail steamer, the SS California, was launched in New York. After sea trials it left for Cape Horn and the Pacific coast, followed not long after by the company’s two other new ships, the Panama and Oregon. When the California left New York in October, it carried very few passengers.14 It would be the last time any vessel departed for the Pacific coast empty.
In December 1848, President James Polk reported in his annual address to Congress that gold had been discovered California. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in [California] are of such an extraordinary character,” the usually understated Polk explained, “as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service who have visited the mineral district.”15
Founders of the Panama Railroad: Aspinwall (TOP); Stephens (BOTTOM LEFT), and Chauncey (BOTTOM RIGHT).
The news sent an electric jolt through America. Even before the president’s words had time to settle in, a public display in the War Office in Washington of a small chest of gold brought back from California stoked gold mania to a fever pitch.16 Advertisements for transport around the Horn or across Panama to the gold fields filled every newspaper—and the now-legendary mad dash for California was on.17
Aspinwall’s gamble on his Pacific Mail Steamship line was about to pay off beyond anyone’s imagining.18 Yet no one quite grasped the full dimensions of what was happening. Stephens and his two partners had spent the last half of 1848 working out a careful plan for their railroad. They had arrived in Washington, hats in hand, to seek a large government subsidy almost simultaneously with Polk’s message to Congress. Despite the news from California they kept on lobbying, and even met with Polk personally. They were invited to dinner at the White House with the president, members of his cabinet, and a dozen senators and congressmen. However, Polk made no mention of the railroad in his December 14 diary entry, noting only that the dinner was attended by Aspinwall and “Stevens—of New York, the later the traveler.”19
Over the next weeks, the partnership asked for five millions dollars over twenty years—after their railroad was operational—in exchange for free transportation across the isthmus for U.S. mail, government agents, and military troops, equipment, and munitions.20 It was a preposterous sum of money, given the situation in California and the great profits that the railroad was certain to derive from it. Yet Congress almost went along. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri supported the idea (with a reduced subsidy), noting the three men had the capital, experience, and motivation to complete the project. “One of them, Mr. Stephens,” he said, “is known throughout the reading world for his travels in a part of South America lying near the country over which this road is to run.”21
In the end, President Polk would have none of it. After some in his cabinet urged him to support the enterprise, Polk wrote in a diary entry dated January 30, 1849: “I cut them off and said no such power existed in the Constitution. I stated that I considered the proposition of that bill as little better than a proposition to plunder the treasury. . . . If it passed, I told the cabinet I would veto it.”22
The gold discovery, however, had already altered the calculus. On December 28, 1848, with passage of the legislation still pending, the three partners signed a formal agreement in Washington with New Granada (today Colombia, which at the time included Panama) giving them the exclusive right for forty-nine years to construct and operate the rail
road across Panama.23 Despite its favorable terms—Granada was to get a mere 3 percent of the net profit from the railroad’s operations—the contract also carried serious risks. It depended entirely on Stephens’s and Baldwin’s initial assessment of the isthmus. On the basis of their survey, the partners put up $120,000 as security, which would be lost if the railroad was not completed within six years following ratification of the concession by New Granada’s congress. Outwardly at least, the partners appeared confident they could pull it off. But Stephens, having seen the isthmus firsthand, must have swallowed hard and summoned every drop of his deep-rooted optimism before he signed.
Four months later the Panama Railroad Company was incorporated by the New York legislature.24 The company’s stock prospectus was wildly optimistic. As a result of the gold rush, it declared that “already the Isthmus of Panama has undergone a change extraordinary and almost unprecedented in the history of the world. It is no extravagance to suppose, that the whole country is, at no distant day, to be occupied by a thriving population, and that large cities, destined to hold a conspicuous and important place in the commerce of the world, are to rise up suddenly on either sea.” The prospectus contained glowing reports from surveyors the partnership sent down in early 1849 to lay down the line of the railroad’s crossing. The rainy season was portrayed as a minor problem. The famous unhealthiness of Panama’s climate and swamps was downplayed. “That fevers do prevail is not to be denied,” wrote Dr. Halsted, who had been sent to care for the surveyors during their work. “But they are not by any means as difficult to cure as those so common in our northern cities.” And even swamp-filled Manzanillo Island, projected as the railroad’s Caribbean terminus, which would later give the railroad builders unthinkable nightmares, was described in rosy terms as “beautifully situated . . . luxuriant with trees and shrubbery. The land is about ten or fifteen feet above high water mark, generally level, and well-watered with springs”—almost none of which later proved true.25
The plan was to raise an initial amount of $1 million at $100 per share. When the subscription list was opened on June 28, 1849, the entire allotment was taken by 3 P.M. A substantial amount of stock was transferred to Aspinwall, Stephens, Chauncey, and their original backers in exchange for signing over to the company their concession from the Republic of New Granada.26 On July 2 the company directors met for the first time in New York and a prominent insurance executive named Thomas W. Ludlow was elected president. John L. Stephens was named vice president.27 The future glittered like a pot of gold. Two days later, the past showed up as Stephens’s door.
Earlier that year, in May, after working steadily for more than two years in British Guyana, Catherwood lost his position as chief engineer of the Demerara Railway Company. His contract was terminated in a cost-saving move by the company; other disputes with the railroad’s local committee probably played a role as well.28 Only one segment of rails along the Guyana coast had been finished and the project was well behind schedule. The year before there had been a ceremonial event to allow several railcars of dignitaries to run down a completed section. The inspection tour ended when a cow jumped onto the track, derailing the locomotive and causing the deaths of two passengers, including a Georgetown municipal officer.29
The disaster was only one problem that had plagued the railroad after Catherwood returned as chief engineer in March 1847. Recruiting labor proved difficult and there were numerous stoppages for lack of capital. Disputes with the landowners over the cost of acquiring sections of their property for the road also slowed the project. And even though Catherwood was able to open a large section of rails for traffic in November 1848, tensions escalated until finally in May the work was handed over to an assistant engineer willing to work for less pay.
Two months later Catherwood arrived in Philadelphia by way of the Turks Islands in the Caribbean.30 A few days afterward he was in New York celebrating the Fourth of July with Stephens.31 Neither man has left an account of the reunion but after so many years apart it must have been an especially warm one. It must also have felt like a homecoming since the Stephens clan had always been a second family to Catherwood. The last certain date he had been in New York was six years earlier, in July 1843, when the subscription effort for his folio had foundered. He may have come back to the city after the folio’s 1844 publication in London and also visited Stephens in 1846 on his first return from Guyana to England, although we have no records confirming those trips.
During their years apart there was no hint of a break in their friendship or any falling-out between them. After Stephens rejected the idea of going to Peru, it appears that events had simply taken them on different paths. It is very likely they kept corresponding during this period, given what we have of their later letters, but such correspondence has been either lost or destroyed. Catherwood’s departure for England in 1843 was clearly motivated by a desire to publish a work of his own and no doubt to reunite with his children and family. But it may also have been prompted by a need to disengage from Stephens, who had been the dominant force in their travels and publications. Now, in New York once again, he was at loose ends. He spent most of July there. Certainly the old traveling partners had a great deal to talk about, their conversations undoubtedly filled with railroads. Stephens likely described his time in Panama, and Catherwood his experiences—and frustrations—building South America’s first railroad, which like Panama was located a notch above the equator and not very far to the east of the isthmus. Coincidentally, but perhaps irresistibly, both men had been drawn into tropical jungles once again.
In August, Catherwood was back with his family in Charles Square. He made the trip home aboard Ocean Steam Navigation’s SS Washington, the same steamer that had carried Stephens two years earlier to Bremen. Possibly Stephens had wrangled a good stateroom for him because Catherwood commented on how pleasant the passage had been in a letter to Stephens dated August 18, 1849.32 “My children are well,” he continued. “My boy who is as tall as myself and a good scholar and arithmetician I intend to bring up as an engineer.” But his plans were still uncertain, he said. For the moment he was handling some business for a wealthy New Jersey shipbuilder and railway executive he met on the Washington. He wrote that he was also in touch briefly with Aspinwall, who was then in London looking for shareholders to place $250,000 in Panama Railroad stock. Catherwood implied that he was considering a job with the railroad and wanted to discuss the matter further with Aspinwall. “The cholera may have driven him from London,” he added. “No word from him.”
When he wrote Stephens again in October, he still had not heard from Aspinwall, and the letter reflected a growing sense of frustration. He noted that due to mismanagement, the Demerara Railway had not laid a single rail in the months since his departure. “The company still owes me about a thousand pounds and I tremble for it,” he explained. “And I consider myself very lucky in having safely put by as much as I have.” He mentioned that he had sent a proposal to the Harper brothers offering to open a branch of their publishing house in London with one of the Harpers’ sons, but he was not optimistic about the prospect. Then he asked Stephens outright if there was any chance of an appointment as “Surveyors of the Lands” for the Panama Railroad. “It is absolutely necessary that I should be doing something and my children are growing up around me.”33
In most of his letters to Stephens (we have none of Stephens’s replies), Catherwood made a reference to antiquities and Central America—like an aging athlete dwelling on earlier days of glory. He appeared unable to let go of their shared exploits and what had been one of the most extraordinary times in his life. At one point Stephens agreed to buy a set of very large Central American lithographs Catherwood had printed, possibly to help him out financially. Catherwood noted that there were seventeen in all and he would send them to Stephens for only the cost for their printing and framing, minus the ten British pounds that he owed him. “They occupy a good deal of space,” he explained, referring to their lar
ge size. “To display them to advantage the room ought not to be less than 26 to 30 feet long and 16 to 18 feet wide and of good height.” He had also been approached by a bookseller, he said, to put out a small volume on Central America, by which he assumed the seller meant a cheap two-shilling version of Stephens’s book. “I informed him that I did not know how to write a book and further that I could not attempt anything of the kind without your sanction and approbation.” He said he was more inclined to put out another version of his own book. “I find there is some demand for my work on Central America and having the plates still by me, I am thinking of publishing a cheaper edition at half the price of the former.”34 But it was clear with each letter that he was running out of money and angling more and more for railroad work with Stephens in Panama rather than betting on dubious publishing schemes.
Aspinwall, meanwhile, was having some success in placing the company’s stock in England. The powerful London banking firm of Baring Brothers & Company was willing to buy in if the British government agreed to join the United States in guaranteeing the neutrality of the isthmus. Aspinwall wrote Stephens in early October urging him to go to Washington to press President Zachary Taylor’s administration to support the move.
In the same letter, he said that Catherwood had approached him for work and he asked Stephens for his opinion.35 The company had already settled on two contractors to build the railroad, so it was unclear what role Catherwood could take on. “Catherwood is anxious to go to the isthmus, especially in your company,” Aspinwall wrote. “And he would go with you on very reasonable terms. This he desired of me to understand particularly.” A short time later, Catherwood wrote Stephens saying that he understood the company was not in a position to pay high salaries. His annual expenses, he explained, were between $1,500 and $2,000 and for the moment “I am obliged to travel on my capital, which of course is anything but desirable.”36
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