Panama fever (18 page)

Addressing the question of the railroad, Reclus reported that his “personal relations with [the manager] M. Woods continue to be most cordial but that doesn't prevent frequent unpleasant incidents from happening.” It was essential, Reclus wrote, that the Company purchase the railroad as soon as possible. He even suggested that the railroad bosses were being deliberately obstructive in order to hold the Company for ransom and secure the best price for their business.

In fact, negotiations had been going on for some months. Trenor Park, the boss and majority shareholder in the Panama Railroad, was now holding out for $250 a share in cash. The value of the railroad had been falling steadily since the opening of the transcontinental U.S. railroad in 1869, and the real share price was nearer $50. It was a “hold-up,” and there was nothing the French company could do about it. In the end, to cover all expenses and the railway's own sinking fund, de Lesseps parted with just short of $20 million, nearly half his start-up capital. It was a severe early blow to the finances of the new Company. One-fifth of the balance was to be paid every year with 6 percent interest due on the rest. The Panama Railroad retained possession and management of the property until the whole amount was paid, and a majority of the seats on the board of directors, who still sat in New York. In spite of the buyout, then, the railroad would remain American for now.

Park, who retired from the board but put his son-in-law in charge instead, cleared $7 million on the deal. However, interestingly, he retained a strong interest in the project, and according to his daughter never doubted that the de Lesseps venture would succeed. He visited the Isthmus several times before his untimely death in December the following year, on board a steamer from New York to Colón.

As well as tourists and grateful railroad shareholders, the United States government also maintained a keen interest in the canal, and kept up serious efforts to take further control of the Isthmus. In turn, the various European diplomats in Washington, Paris, Panama, and Bogotá kept an eye on what the Americans—and one another—were up to in the region. The previous year, President Hayes, to give body to his aim of “a canal under American control,” had sent U.S. naval vessels to investigate sites for coaling and naval stations on either side of the Isthmus, near the future canal termini. The move angered the British, who saw it as incompatible with the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, and was blocked by Bogotá after a furious popular anti-American reaction in Colombia. Nevertheless, the controversy carried into the next year, with Congress, in March 1881, voting $200,000 specifically for the establishment of permanent military bases near the canal.

In the meantime, the U.S. envoy to Colombia, Ernst Dichman, did everything in his power to persuade the Bogotá government that their country was “menaced by a grave danger.” “Turning away from the United States which had been her firm friend, ally, and protector,” he said, “Colombia recklessly and ungratefully concludes with an adventurous Frenchman, a contract for the opening of a Canal.” Dichman pressed for an updating of the 1846 Bidlack Treaty that would allow the United States to establish a permanent garrison in Panama, while Secretary of State Evarts demanded that the United States be given the right to veto any Canal concessions, future, present, or past.

Seeing “all alliances with the United States as an exemplification of the fable of the wolf and the lamb,” Colombia started sounding out European capitals over a multilateral guarantee of the waterway and considered denouncing the 1846 treaty. For the aggressive and anti-British new U.S. secretary of state James Blaine (later to be nicknamed “Jingo Jim” by the press), this was totally unacceptable. In June 1881 he wrote to the British foreign minister, Earl Granville, citing the Monroe Doctrine and condemning the plans, which he said came close to “an alliance against the United States.”

Blaine's domestic audience was delighted, and in Congress there was a growing determination to act unilaterally on the canal question. The Clayton-Bulwer agreement that forbade such a move was debated in the House and referred to as “a singular and ill-omened treaty,” which should be abrogated.

None of this went unremarked upon in London when it came to reply to Blaine's June letter. For a long time, there was a haughty silence. Blaine was an upstart troublemaker, it was felt—he had already waded into disputes with Britain over other matters. In the meantime, Granville confidentially sounded out the European capitals about this possible international guarantee that had so annoyed Blaine.

One by one, the replies came in from Britain's European ambassadors. Every power was in favor, in principle, but no one wanted to make the first move. France was keen to provide support for beleaguered Colombia, but could not be at the forefront as it was a French company at work on the Isthmus. In September, Britain's Madrid representative reported that Spain “would be glad to see England and France take joint measures to check the pretensions of the United States’ Government with regard to the interoceanic canal, but that Spain hesitated to place herself
‘en premiere ligne’
in opposition to the United States, in view of the consequences which might ensue in the island of Cuba, where a fresh insurrection could easily be fomented by American influence.” In Germany, Bismarck, who still held German ambitions in check, declared himself neutral in the matter, and said that it was a question for the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty between the United States and Britain.

In November a reply eventually made its way to Washington from the British Foreign Office, taking issue with details of Blaine's pronouncements and slapping down the pretension of the Monroe Doctrine. By now, Blaine, encouraged by favorable press support at home, had written to the British again on the subject, this time asking that the clause in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty that forbade the fortification of the Canal be revoked. Because the United States had no navy to speak of, he argued, the only way that their vital strategic interests could be protected was through the establishment of permanent military power on the Isthmus itself. Otherwise, the primacy of the Royal Navy would make British control of the waterway a done deed. Privately, Blaine made a contingency plan to build a railway through Central America to Panama to “enable the United States to keep military possession of the canal in the event of a war with Great Britain.”

But for now, Britain was not prepared to be bullied by a power with huge potential, granted, but no real international strength. Granville replied that it would be “manifestly unjust” for the Americans to request abrogation. Soon after, as the new president, Chester Arthur, took control, Blaine was out of office and out of favor. This coincided with a popular feeling that unilaterally breaking a treaty with Britain would have been unwise. “Did Blaine want war?” asked the newspapers, mirroring the sudden popular recoil from pushing the mighty European powers too far. “Mr. Blaine had overshot the mark and misjudged public sentiment,” decided the
New York Herald
, only days after backing his aggressive approach.

If the Americans remained stalemated by the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, they were still responsible under the original 1846 Bidlack Treaty to keep the transit passage on the railroad open, and more often than not, there would be United States Navy gunboats standing off Panama City and Colón. By now, Colón was unrecognizable from six months earlier. There had been an explosion of wooden huts and shanties out into the swamp around Manzanillo as the town's population doubled. In the harbor there was a constant coming and going of steamers, and on the reclaimed land to the south of the island was a grid of warehouses, offices, and residences, many in a grand style.

Inland, Blanchet and his men pressed on. By the middle of 1881, there were some two hundred technicians and about eight hundred laborers, and the number was increasing. The engineers were from not only France but also Germany, Britain, Switzerland, Russia, Poland, and Italy. Many of the mechanics were American, who came along with equipment purchased in the United States. The workers were not only Colombians, but also Cubans, Venezuelans, and West Indians.

In Gamboa, Cermoise's camp was transformed by the influx of a considerable number of new personnel and a batch of prefabricated buildings from the United States. “Everyone had his own room!” he exclaims. Now in charge was a distinguished French engineer called Carré, who brought with him an expert Belgian cook and much improved provisions. There were even regular deliveries of ice. Because of the importance of dealing with the problem of the Chagres, the Gamboa camp was now a key site on the Isthmus.

By the middle of September, Cermoise's surveying work was completed. While Carré remained behind to start mapping the giant area to be flooded by the dam, Cermoise was given a new job in Panama City. His friend Montcenaux was sent to Gatún, the most notoriously sickly area of the Isthmus. After nearly seven months in the bush, Cermoise writes, “We said goodbye with a certain sadness to this corner of the world where we had more than once shivered with fever, but also where we had passed many good days, busy with cheerful work in the company of devoted friends.” His new task was to work on the detailed maps and charts being prepared from the reports now flooding in from all along the line. As well as measuring levels, the engineers were sinking five great wells to test the ground along the summit of the Continental Divide. The greatest was some 150 feet, three times deeper than any well drilled during de Lesseps's visit early in the year, but still less than half the planned depth of excavation. The findings encouraged the canal planners—there seemed to be a lot less hard granitelike rock than had been factored into their costs. Before, drills had hit solid rock in several places, sometimes at 20 feet or less, and stopped. Now, with improved drill bits, the rock was passed through and in some cases found to be only 2 feet thick, an “angular boulder of dolerite.” Below, there was “brown clay and pulverized rocks, seamed with diverse colors.”

In fact, the ground was nothing like anything the majority of the geologists had ever seen before, bearing no resemblance whatever to the terrain in Europe mined and dug by many of those present. The unique geological history of the Isthmus, with the land bridge sinking below sea level and then rising again in a series of cycles and a long record of ancient volcanic activity, had created bewilderingly complex strata, including layers, at various angles, of breccia, limestone, coral, carb, sand, gravel, volcanic lava, and clay. In the forty-odd miles from Colón to Panama City there are six major faults, five substantial volcanic cores, and seventeen fundamentally different types of rock. Every well told a different story. But the engineers focused on the positive: at least it was not all solid rock. In fact, the surveys had said it all: dig here, and you do not know what you are going to find. As it turned out, it would have been easier had it been solid rock.

Blanchet himself turned his attention to the rivers, establishing observation posts on the Chagres, Trinidad, Obispo, and the Río Grande; these were equipped with fluviographs, which confirmed the challenge that the rainy season would bring to the successful construction and running of the canal, with rivers rising 20 feet in as many hours and their rate of discharge increasing overnight from 3,000 to over 60,000 cubic feet per second.

By October 1881, much of what de Lesseps had outlined back in March had been achieved. That month the
Bulletin
published details of the “second campaign” for the next twelve months, which included settling the question of the dam for the Chagres, the digging of a waterway between Colón and Gatún, and the removal of five million cubic meters of spoil from Culebra, the point of maximum elevation. In addition, all the necessary machinery was to have been ordered.

But not all was going according to plan. Engineers had been experimenting with different excavating machinery and had found that the plant that had built the Suez Canal was proving too light for the heavy clay of the Chagres valley. Even more worrying was the question of labor. Only one in ten newly arrived laborers had remained on the job for more than six months. There were two thousand men at work at the end of the year, but de Lesseps had promised there would be ten thousand. Worst and most ominous of all, though, it was becoming obvious that the Isthmus was nothing like the healthy place that de Lesseps and Abel Couvreux had promised.

s early as March 1881, only two months after the arrival of the first French engineers on the Isthmus, the
Panama Star and Herald
‘reported that “Mr. de Lesseps contemplates making up what is short in the labor supply on the Isthmus and the neighbouring coast states of Colombia, with laborers from the West Indies. Barbados and Jamaica are spoken of as the principal source of supply.”