Panama fever (23 page)

For all Dingler's efforts at improving efficiency, the Company was hemorrhaging money through a combination of mismanagement, extravagance, and corruption. More than a hundred racehorses were imported from Europe and lavishly stabled at the Company's expense. There was also widespread pilfering. Inspectors sent to check on the contractors’ excavation quantities were often bribed. One estimate was that the Company lost some 10 percent of the work it paid for. The worst offenders were the Huerne, Slaven men, who were even accused of dredging soil from one side of their barges, for which they were paid, and then simply dumping it back into the water on the other side. The workers, also, became adept at exploiting the Company. “There was no system or organisation,” reported a Nicaragua-born canal workman. “A man can work on five different jobs a day, and when the week ended you collect for all five jobs. Their timekeeping system was poor.” The local Panamanians were also making a lot of money out of the Company, charging exorbitant rates for land the French needed, or bringing endless expensive legal cases against them. Like Reclus, Jules Dingler and his wife had to entertain a constant stream of visitors from Europe, Colombia, and the United States during the dry season, and, in urgent need of an adequate house in which to entertain them, found no one willing to build something for less than $100,000. There was similar mass collusion over food supplies. Traders would board incoming ships carrying provisions, buy the entire cargo, and then fix the price of the goods on the Panama market.

As well as administrative difficulties, engineering problems were now beginning to pile up. In
la grande tranchée
, the rainy season brought continual landslides, which buried rails and machinery under thousands of cubic meters of sticky mud. The contractors in this section had to keep cutting the slopes back to flatten them, creating seemingly endless amounts of extra work. By the end of 1884 it had been decided that the gradient would have to be as gentle as one in four. This would have made the trench, had it been dug to sea level as planned, as much as three-quarters of a mile across in several places.

The spoil was removed in small dump cars to a convenient nearby valley, where a track would be laid on the brow of the hill. The cars were then tipped or laboriously emptied by hand, with the dirt thrown over the side. When a terrace had been formed, new track was laid on it and the process repeated. But the dump areas also became unstable, with terraces slipping away, destroying track and trains and leading to the whole system breaking down and the excavators lying idle.

“The rainy season, at last set in, is making up for lost time by pouring down oceans of water all over the Isthmus,” the
Star and Herald
reported at the end of May 1883. “The effect on new embankments, fills &c, made by the Canal Company during the dry season, is not pleasant to contemplate. The work of months disappears in a day.” Almost exactly a year later, it was the same story: “The heavy downpours of late are making short work of earth cuttings … A few hours of tropical rain caused the mighty Chagres to rise three feet. When it subsided the cut was found to be filled to within three feet of the top. The work of many days costing a great deal of money has disappeared as if by magic… This Chagres question is a mighty one.”

As had been anticipated back at the 1879 Congress in Paris, the problem of the Chagres was indeed among the most formidable faced by the French engineers. Dingler, in his grand plan, had stuck with the suggestion that to stop the river flooding the canal, a huge earthen dam should be constructed at Gamboa, with another smaller dam twenty-five kilometers upriver. But this filled no one with confidence. There was no adequate rock formation at this site upon which to found such an enormous structure, and few believed that it would hold the pressure of the river at its most swollen. In addition, the basin behind the dam, in which it was hoped up to 6,000 cubic meters of water would be held, had still not been adequately surveyed.

It was planned that the remaining flow of the river would be drained by a series of diversions running parallel to the line of the canal. But as the canal ran along the lowest points of the river valleys, the surface water of these diversions would be about 70 feet above that of the canal proper, requiring very strong guard banks. In effect, as a critic of the French plan pointed out, “the water will have to be hung up on the sides of the mountains.” And just one of these channels would have to be thirteen miles long, with similar dimensions to the main canal. It was as if the canal had to be constructed two or three times. In all, every time the French engineers turned around, the task ahead seemed to have grown exponentially.

In all great construction projects the greatest cause of delay and financial loss—and the reason that considerable slack is worked into budgets—is generally termed “unforeseen ground conditions.” Panama had these in spades. “Fresh engineering difficulties present themselves,” wrote a British visitor in late 1883, “and the magnitude of the work to be accomplished seems to increase.” It became clearer and clearer that, right from the start, de Lesseps had totally underestimated the task he was setting for his engineers. And as the problems mounted, in order to maintain the confidence of investors and sell new bond issues, de Lesseps kept up a stream of promises and impossibly high targets. In June 1882 he had told the Company's annual general meeting that 5 million cubic meters would be excavated from Culebra in the next twelve months; the figure achieved in that period was only 660,000. The following year he reaffirmed his promise that the canal would open in 1888, and predicted a monthly excavation figure overall of 2 million cubic meters. But the workforce on the Isthmus was not exceeding a quarter of that. The more expectations were raised, the further de Lesseps had to fall. “A day of reckoning is coming,” wrote the
Montreal Gazette
in August 1884.

Although the press in France remained onside, elsewhere criticism of the project, and of the exaggerated reports of the
Bulletin
, was mounting. In August 1884, the American
Engineer
magazine printed the report of a correspondent who had spent two months on the Isthmus, who estimated that the Company would need another twenty-four years and hundreds of millions of dollars more to finish the canal at the current rate of excavation, an analysis with which several U.S. naval officers, sent to investigate progress, concurred. It was also now openly stated in Britain and the United States that the French press had been bribed to hide the truth from domestic investors.

In August 1884, the
Montreal Gazette's
correspondent, back in Panama after having visited the works six months earlier, reported that “little substantial progress has been made … valuable plant remains unhoused, including locomotives, boilers &c.” The fault, as far as he was concerned, was with misplaced priorities: “Time that might be used in building proper sheds is frittered away embellishing banks near houses, setting out tropical trees and plants to make the landscape attractive.
C'est magnifique
,” he concluded,
“mais ce n'est pas le canal
.” In November the
New York Herald
, usually a fair judge of the project, accurately predicted, “It is probable the present company will go into bankruptcy or liquidation within three years and the enterprise be taken up and completed by a new company or a government.”

On the Isthmus itself it was felt that real progress was being made, but the huge expenditure of capital had not gone unnoticed. Among many of the canal employees an air of heroic unreality had descended, as if infected by de Lesseps's fantastical pronouncements from Paris. One of the American “inspectors” remarked on the “tendency on the part of the canal officers to exaggerate everything that had been done by the company.” Others, though, testified that several of the Company's managers were privately saying that the project was catastrophically behind schedule. In July 1884, twenty-four-year-old acting consul Claude Mallet reported back to London, “It is generally believed here that the present Company can never finish the work, as the cost so far has greatly exceeded expectations.” For him, such a project could never be completed by private capital. Only a government could carry through such a task. The
Star and Herald
agreed, in the same month goading the U.S. government to take on the job: “It would be a pity,” it wrote, “that a work such as this should be left partially completed as a monument of the folly and gullibility of Capital.” A government had to step in, and “it would be well for Americans to remember that the government of France would have the most powerful motives to undertake it. There would be the natural desire to prevent the loss of French Capital, and the price of control and influence abroad is not a forgotten sentiment in France.”

A British observer, Admiral Bedford Pim, blamed the weaknesses of the original Wyse-Reclus surveys for the problems, and dismissed the sea-level plan as impossible. His only praise, after an extensive tour of the work, was for “the gallant employees who have struggled manfully to carry out the wishes of their chief.” The
New York Herald
, reporting the pessimistic analysis of the latest U.S. naval investigation, commented, “Under such circumstances, there is something amounting to heroism in the persistence of the French Company at Panama.”

he French engineers and their workers were now facing more than just financial or engineering difficulties. Their very lives were at stake. In 1882, 126 people had died in the hospitals, mainly from yellow fever or malaria. The following year, as the workforce tripled, so did the number of deaths, to over 400.

But the official tally did not tell the whole story. Many died before they reached the hospital. According to a lurid account by a
New York Tribune
correspondent, a number of workers ended up in unmarked graves. “Death becomes a grim joke, burial a travesty,” he reported. “An unconsidered laborer is buried under a hundred feet of earth— and very simply; rolled down an embankment, and twenty carloads of earth rolled after him.” Although the Company itself covered hospital expenses for its employees, the vast majority were on the payroll of contractors, who were charged a dollar a day for the care of their workers in the hospital. It was alleged that some simply dismissed their men at the first sign of sickness rather than foot the bill. In addition, the hospitals themselves were feared and shunned, and with good reason. If you did not have malaria or yellow fever when you went in, you were likely to have it soon afterward. In the absence of knowledge of the transmission of these diseases by mosquito there were no efforts to isolate known fever victims or to keep the insects from the wards. Furthermore, to protect the hospitals’ much-admired gardens from leaf-eating ants, waterways had been constructed around the flowerbeds. Inside the hospital itself, water pans were placed under bedposts to keep off ants and other crawling pests. Both insect-fighting methods provided excellent and convenient breeding sites for mosquitoes carrying yellow fever or malaria. Doctor William Gorgas, who led the medical effort on the Isthmus during the American construction period, later wrote, “Probably if the French had been trying to propagate Yellow Fever, they could not have provided conditions better adapted to the purpose.”

Gorgas reckoned that for every death in one of the hospitals, two occurred outside, which would put the 1883 toll at nearer 1,300 than 419. This is conjecture, of course, and should be treated with caution. Nevertheless, there is fairly overwhelming anecdotal evidence to back up this claim. Charles Wilson, a half-Scottish, half-French sailor, was twenty-one when he arrived on the Isthmus in 1882 and started work for the Panama Railroad. Wilson was what was known as a “tropical tramp.” He was born on board a ship and never belonged in any place except where there was money to be made. He found that working on the Isthmus earned him far more than the $20 a month he had been getting as a sailor. But there were, he said, “thousands dying with yellow fever, malaria, and all kinds of diseases …everywhere, in the streets and under houses.” “As for the men,” reported the
Montreal Gazette
, “they die on the line and are buried, and no attention is paid to the matter. Two American carpenters are in an unnamed grave near Emperador …” Wolfred Nelson, the Canadian doctor, remembered an endless procession of funeral trains, reckoning that during the wet seasons of 1882 and 1883 “burials averaged from thirty to forty per day, and that for weeks together.”