Jungle of Stone

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by William Carlsen


  He was anxious about Stephens’s health and tried to convince him to leave Panama for California, at least to join him and his nephew, Pratt Stephens, for a visit. Pratt had arrived earlier that year and wrote to his uncle from San Francisco: “Catherwood is on his way to this country and intends to induce you if possible to accompany him. I want you to become acquainted with this perfectly original place.”24 Catherwood went further, urging Stephens to consider a political career in California. “What a pity that you have not turned your steps to California and been a candidate for U.S. Senate,” he wrote. “Even now it is not too late and you would have an excellent chance of success. A new man and a man of note would carry all before him. What say you?”25

  Across the continent in New York, politics was the last thing on Stephens’s mind, and his lack of response to Catherwood’s letters was, as his friend suspected, more likely due to his crushing workload than anything else. Moreover, in early 1851, when Catherwood was grumbling about his long silence, Stephens was in Panama again, deeply enmeshed in the seemingly endless difficulties that were delaying the railroad’s construction.

  On his arrival he found a grim situation. The work crews were mired in what was said to be the worst swampland in Central America. Totten and Baldwin had waded with their men up to their chests through the swamps and succeeded in clearing and building their way off Manzanillo Island and onto the mainland. What they thought was the hardest part was only the beginning. The two men, who suffered alternating bouts of dysentery and malaria, now faced virgin tropical forest and mile after mile of quicksand, muck, and swamp in some places so deep that when they dumped in tons of rock and earth to support the railbed, they had difficulty reaching the bottom.26 To move forward at all, they had to build a framework of pilings over the swamps to support the rails, and backfill or “crib in” the beds later. Meanwhile, the workmen were dying by the dozens, if not the hundreds.

  “The climate stood like a dragon in the way,” wrote Tracy Robinson, a company man who arrived in Panama several years after the road was completed. “To this day it seems astonishing that any soul survived to tell the tale.”27 Much of the work through the swamps was performed by natives brought in from the districts around Cartagena. They, along with several hundred blacks recruited from Jamaica, were considered by Totten the best and hardiest of the workers because they were accustomed to the climate. They were soon joined by Irishmen from New Orleans, and later directly from Ireland. Carpenters, mechanics, and assistant engineers poured in from the United States. By early 1851, when Stephens arrived, nearly a thousand men had joined the workforce, some putting up housing, hospitals, and stations on patches of high ground located at intervals nearly twenty miles inland along the survey line. But most were stuck laying the railbeds through the intervening swamps, where sometimes the work, especially in a section called the “Black Swamp,” came to a frequent halt because of illness and death.

  “The white men withered as cut plants in the sun,” wrote Robinson, who had read firsthand reports. At times more than half the workforce was sick and unable to work. Of one group of forty-five carpenters, Totten recalled, after two months “only three or four of them were at work, or able to work. They were laid up with fever and ague.” Those judged by the doctors unable to resume work, he wrote, were sent home by every steamer. One early group of workers agreed to work for one hundred days. But, according to Totten, only ninety out of the original three hundred completed their contract. In addition, hundreds of other men simply put up their tools and melted into the endless stream of humanity flowing across the isthmus for California.28

  It was a life-and-death struggle, a war complete with battlefield commanders, casualties, and deserters; in the end, it was not clear how many lost their lives building the railroad.29 The company never kept accurate records, which may have been deliberate. It publicly downplayed the accidents and illnesses—the malaria, dengue, typhoid fevers, dysentery, hepatitis, and cholera.30 Many reports of the fatalities were gross exaggerations, such as the celebrated rumor that there was a dead man for every railroad tie laid across the isthmus, which would have placed the number of deaths at more than ten times the number of men who actually worked on the railroad. But the men were clearly dying at an intolerable rate, even for the times. Totten, the railroad’s chief engineer and later its superintendent, conceded that between 800 and 1,200 men lost their lives out of the more than 6,000 who worked the line during the five years it took to complete.31 Other accounts stated that as many as 40 percent died. And these counts did not include the additional hundreds who became too sick to work and went home to early deaths, their health destroyed by the tropical diseases.

  Stephens’s cottage overlooking the Chagres River. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1859)

  When Stephens arrived, the fatalities were only beginning, and he, too, was quickly sick again, probably with malaria and its all-too-familiar fevers and chills. Learning of his illness, a friend wrote in March pressing him not to stay on the isthmus during the coming rainy season: “Health is beyond price, recollect, and despite your mental energy, you have had a warning not to trifle with it.”32 Aspinwall also had gotten word. “Now for heaven’s sake,” he wrote him in April, “remember your promise—my dear fellow—not to remain on the isthmus at any exposure to yourself. I cannot tell you how I am concerned lest that spirit of yours should carry you beyond the bounds of prudence and I would give anything now to have you quietly at home again. I hope you will without fail return on the [steamship] Georgia.”33

  Stephens ignored them. He remained in Panama until July, well into the rainy season.34 The agonizingly slow pace of the project only drove him deeper into work. It was growing depressingly possible that the primeval, unyielding Panamanian jungle might swallow the railroad whole and Stephens with it, just as nature had devoured the great cities of the Maya. Every timetable they set had to be revised, all their plans constantly recalculated and adjusted. And after long and hard lobbying, he failed to convince enough officials from Granada to grant the company title to the whole of Manzanillo Island, which he insisted was essential to create a port city for the railroad.

  In addition, as company president, he knew money was running out, as the railroad was approaching the end of its shareholders’ initial investments. Moreover, the prospects for raising new funds were diminishing with every report reaching New York of the deaths and sicknesses, the intolerable swamps and working conditions, and the company’s inability to keep men under contract. Skeptical investors claimed the railroad would never be completed. And hanging over the company like Damocles’ sword was the growing success of a transport company crossing Nicaragua set up by Cornelius Vanderbilt, the famously ruthless “Commodore,” who was also eager to cash in on the gold rush. He had already put several steamers on the San Juan River, which flowed from Lake Nicaragua to the Caribbean. From the lake west it was only a short distance overland to the Pacific, a route Stephens knew well from his explorations there ten years earlier for a possible canal.

  Finally, in July, Stephens returned to New York, where the original projectors of the railroad were focusing all their energies on raising new money. To buy more time, bonds were floated. Stephens kept his head down, suppressed his doubts, and pushed on with his work. He returned to the isthmus four months later, in November 1851. “It was a most fortunate circumstance that I came down as I did,” he wrote his father in January. “The work had run down to its lowest point, and never looked darker. But the whole aspect is now changed. We are now in the last swamp, a terrible place it is for working in, but have dry weather and a good force, and two weeks will carry us safe over.”35

  Totten and Baldwin had refused to give in and pushed the road to the village of Gatun on the Chagres River, seven miles inland from Manzanillo. The entire enterprise, however, still faced the abyss of financial collapse.

  Then the gods showed mercy: the very natural forces that had bedeviled the project unexpectedly turned in their f
avor. In early December foul weather forced several steamships to abandon the dangerous mouth of the Chagres River and seek shelter in Navy Bay. There hundreds of passengers swarmed onto Manzanillo Island and insisted they would pay almost any price for transportation to Gatun. “We offered to fit up our gravel cars for the conveyance of the passengers,” wrote Totten, “which was gladly accepted: and thus, seated on rough boards or on their trunks, in the gravel cars, twelve hundred as jolly passengers as ever traveled, inaugurated the opening of the first seven miles of the Panama Railroad.”36

  At Gatun the passengers transferred to the native dugouts to continue the rest of their passage up the Chagres. Within weeks, virtually every arriving steamship had switched from the Chagres to Navy Bay, where a ride on the railroad cut two days from the trip over the isthmus. The decision by Stephens and Totten to take on the passengers, even at the risk of further construction delays, brought in a large transfusion of cash that helped save the railroad. Over the succeeding months, hundreds more workmen were recruited and the construction increased rapidly as the railbeds rose out of the swamps onto higher, firmer ground. Nearly twelve hundred men were working at points along the line in early 1852, which allowed Stephens to predict they would reach and cross the Chagres at the village of Barbacoa—halfway across the isthmus—by the end of the year. When word of the new developments reached New York, investors were again clamoring to climb aboard.

  On February 22, 1852, matters had improved enough that the company held a ceremony to lay a cornerstone for Manzanillo’s first brick building. Located next to the railroad’s docks, the large structure would become the company’s future offices. Nearby, an untidy slapdash town was quickly rising out of the old mangrove swamp as hotel owners and storekeepers rushed to transfer their businesses from Chagres. Every day more of the island was filled in and streets laid out. Stephens arranged transport of fresh water by aqueduct from a river located miles away. And he was finally on the verge of convincing New Granada to grant the company full title to the island. The time had come to give the place a name.

  Port of Aspinwall. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1859)

  Present for the cornerstone dedication was Granada’s new ambassador to the United States, Victoriano de Diego Paredes. In a short speech he proposed the new city be named Aspinwall, in honor of the company’s leading founder.37 The recommendation was immediately taken up by George Law, one of the railroad company’s wealthiest directors, who had just arrived to inspect the road. Then Stephens, speaking briefly as company president, formally adopted the name (years later the Colombian government would change it to Colón, for Christopher Columbus), and three cheers went up from the crowd of spectators.38 As the applause faded, it would have appeared to anyone lingering on the scene that it was John L. Stephens, famous chronicler of the ancient Maya civilization, who was, in fact, lord of one of the monumental undertakings of his age.

  The Stephens Tree, under which he was reportedly found unconscious. (Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1859)

  What happened next is unclear. According to a popular account, Stephens was found a month later in the jungle near Lion Hill, lying unconscious along the railroad tracks under a giant ceiba that came to be known later as the Stephens Tree. He was reportedly carried in a coma aboard a steamer leaving for New York.39 Certainly Stephens had fallen ill repeatedly in Panama.40 And he did return to New York in April 1852.41 But this account is possibly apocryphal. He was described by his friend, the Reverend Francis L. Hawks, as in “good if not better health than usual” when he arrived home.42

  Ten years had passed since he stepped off the Anna Louisa with Catherwood and Cabot on their return from Yucatán, and he had spent almost half of the last four years of his life in the jungles of Panama. There was little question his accumulated travels had affected his health. At the age of forty-six he himself wondered aloud at times whether he would live to see completion of the railroad he was so determined to build. “I have had a hard siege,” he conceded in a final letter to his father not long before he left Panama.43

  On arrival in New York, he checked into the Delmonico Hotel, located just steps from the railroad’s offices at 78 Broadway.44 Aspinwall wrote to Stephens in March that the company’s directors were anxiously awaiting his return to consult on the building of the long bridge that was to span the Chagres River at Barbacoa. The enterprise had turned the corner. The road now extended over half its planned route, spanning the worst, most tortuous part of the isthmus. The company was now planning to hand off the remaining construction to associates of George Law who had signed a contract to construct the Barbacoa bridge and lay the rails over the summit and the final distance to Panama City. “I think I see daylight,” Stephens had written his father from Panama.45

  In May, nearly three hundred people crowded into a banquet hall at Astor House for a dinner honoring George Law. His share of the Panama route, his mail steamship line between New York, Charleston, Havana, Chagres, and now the port of Aspinwall, had won great popular acclaim and a good deal of commerce for the merchants of the city. During the banquet, there was much praise for the Panama Railroad Company, on whose board Law sat as a prominent director. When Law rose finally to speak, he turned to Stephens, who was sitting nearby on the dais, and he raised his glass in a toast: “It is this gentleman who has been connected for a long time conveying passengers from here to California. It is he, I repeat, that commenced this enterprise. Everyone knows that work, and you all know John L. Stephens, president of the Panama Railroad.” The crowd erupted in cheers.

  Then Stephens rose and disavowed any claim to being the originator of the railroad. It was to William Aspinwall that honor was due, he said, setting off another round of cheers. He admitted, however, that after conducting the original survey of the isthmus several years earlier, he thought how impossible it would be that “the whistle of a locomotive would ever be heard in that country.” He then turned and toasted Law for carrying forth the remainder of the railroad work, added toasts to the rival ventures crossing at Nicaragua and Tehuantepec, Mexico, and in a final rousing lift of his glass, exclaimed: “Success to the great American enterprise which is to connect the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.”46

  26

  Together Again

  A year earlier, a rich vein of gold-bearing quartz had been discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in a place called Grass Valley.1 Word of the discovery traveled 125 miles to San Francisco and set off a new, small-scale gold rush. Hundreds of gold seekers stormed the district, and among them was Frederick Catherwood.2 He had once more decided to reinvent himself, this time as a mining engineer. In spite of his remarks to Stephens about avoiding the mines, the possibility of making a small fortune had simply proved too powerful.

  Arriving in Grass Valley at the same time in April 1851 was an artist and writer named Alonzo Delano, who with a partner had purchased a claim on one of the hills in the valley. While working his dig, he befriended Catherwood, who by then had become part owner of a mine on nearby Gold Hill. Delano would go on to publish a number of sketches of characters he encountered during the gold rush. His brief depiction of Catherwood, written in a letter to a friend in August 1851, remains one of the only portraitures of Catherwood in existence. But much like Catherwood’s earlier “self-portrait” in the ruins of Tulum, Delano’s description leaves us again with blurred edges and Catherwood’s mystique largely intact:

  Notwithstanding the horde of villains who throng in our midst, the high character of the miners and operatives for intelligence and various acquirements still deservedly continue. Among them I have for a neighbor and friend, Mr. Frederick M. Catherwood, celebrated the world over as an artist and traveler. You would little dream that modest, quiet man, standing by that puffing, stamping, noisy crushing mill, without a particle of ostentation in his manner, dressed in a plain, coarse, drab corduroy dreadnought coat and pants, with high coarse leather boots reaching above his knees, his head covered with a
broadbrim California hat and his somewhat prominent nose bridging a pair of spectacles, was the artist who illustrated the admirable works of Stephens’s Petraea and Yucatán, with drawings taken on the spot. It is even he, and if you would make him blush, [ . . . ] speak to him of his works. He has too much modesty to intrude himself on your notice, but if you will draw him out you will find him a gentleman as well as an artist, and he is the president of his company and one of the proprietors of the mill.3

  The Gold Hill Quartz Mining Company was a success, clearing between $800 and $1,000 a day during one early period, and Catherwood seemed finally to have achieved the financial security he had long sought.4 He wrote Stephens that he remained cautious, however, and had invested no more than $5,000 of his capital in the operation.5 His engineering skills were undoubtedly called on in the design of the millwork needed to separate the veins of gold embedded in the quartz. Steam engines drove the stamping machines that crushed the ore. The noisy steam age had come to the quiet Sierra foothills.

  “Unfortunately California does not improve on acquaintance,” he wrote Stephens. “I do not mean the country which is well enough but the state of society. To young men who are fond of certain kinds of excitement it may have its attractions, but to a sober plodding old fellow like myself it is peculiarly distasteful and nothing but direct money gain makes it bearable.”6

  In January 1852, when Gold Hill declared a 10 percent dividend, Catherwood was back with his children in London, where he had taken samples of Gold Hill’s quartz to drum up new investors in the company. We have no date for his departure from California but it is probable that he left sometime in the fall of 1851. On his return to England he landed in Acapulco, then crossed through Mexico and not Panama.

 

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