Panama fever (24 page)

The correspondence of the British consulate also draws a picture of illness growing into unmanageable proportions. The staff themselves were forever sickening and pleading to be allowed to leave the Isthmus to recover in Jamaica or back in England. Consul Edward March was invalided home in April 1882 after just a month in Panama, and six weeks later his replacement, Courtenay Bennett, reported that he had malaria, or “miasmic affections” as his doctor described it. By June the following year his replacement was also ill and had to leave the Isthmus. The melancholy pattern, which was shared by all the other European consulships, was repeated for the rest of the 1880s, which meant that the young Claude Mallet was acting consul for much of the decade.

Mallet reports a huge increase in the consul's workload as a result of having to sort out and return the effects of dead Jamaican laborers. He was also called on to help those abandoned by their employers, sometimes collecting sick men from the streets and conveying them to the hospital. Often Mallet would have to pay for the care out of his own pocket and take his chances that a tightfisted Foreign Office would refund the expense.

At the beginning of 1884 it was hoped that the advent of the dry season would again reduce the cases of fever, but it was clear that Panama was now in the grip of a major epidemic. Carelessly discarded spoil from the works had blocked watercourses and created permanent stagnant pools—ideal mosquito breeding grounds—all over the Isthmus. On January 21 the
Directeur Général
Jules Dingler's daughter Louise, a pretty, dark-haired girl of about eighteen, died, in miserable agony, of yellow fever. The family was beyond grief. “My poor husband is in a despair that is painful to see.” Madame Dingler wrote to Charles de Lesseps in Paris. “My first desire was to flee as fast as possible and carry far from this murderous country those who are left to me. But my husband is a man of duty and tries to make me understand that his honour is to the trust you have placed in him and that he cannot fail in his task without failing himself. Our dear daughter was our pride and joy.” The day after her death Dingler was back at work at the usual time.

It did not stop there. A month later Dingler's young son, Jules, sickened with the same disease and died three days later. The
Star and Herald
reflected the horror and grief of the whole community: “Mr. Dingler was but 20 years of age, the picture of physical health and strength… Sympathy is weak, and words are powerless in such a cruel blow, to convey to the grief stricken parents the sense of loss and sorrow which these sad events have occasioned in the minds and hearts of all.” Soon after, Louise Dingler's young fiancé, who had come with the family from France, contracted the disease and also died.

The high-profile deaths in early 1884 caused a panic akin to that following the deaths of Etienne and Bionne back in 1881. Some three hundred French engineers applied to return home, and were refused. Nonetheless, men deserted from all parts of the line. For others, however, the specter of death served to raise their work to higher, sublime levels of heroism. They were sacrificing themselves, one young engineer wrote, “as surely as those who fought at Lodi or Marengo laid down their lives for France.” Although the teachers in the engineering schools in France were now quietly trying to deter their pupils from serving in Panama, idealistic young Frenchmen continued to journey to the Isthmus. One such was twenty-five-year-old Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who arrived that year and would become a key figure in the history of the canal. He had met Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1880 and ever since had been in the grip of the Great Idea of the canal. He was the apogee of graduates from the elite Ecole Polytechnique, France's top engineering college, where military uniforms were worn and the motto was
La Patrie, les sciences, et la gloire.
For Bunau-Varilla, the canal was “the greatest conception the world has ever seen of the French genius.” “The constant dangers” of yellow fever, he wrote in his autobiography, “exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love for the great task undertaken. To its irradiating influence was joined the heroic joy of self-sacrifice for the greatness of France.”

s Dingler pushed ahead with the work during the rest of 1884, achieving, in the circumstances, great progress, the death toll kept rising. In July, an outbreak of dysentery struck in Panama and Colón, filling the hospitals, while in the flood plains of the valleys, ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes, six out of seven Europeans working there during mid-1884 had contracted malaria or yellow fever. By the late summer of that year work was almost impossible in these sectors. One engineer told an American doctor that he had come over with a party of seventeen young French engineers. In a month all but one had died of yellow fever. At any one time, more than a third of the laborers were sick, making a mockery of Dingler's strenuous efforts to increase the workforce.

In October 1884 a floating hospital was set up in Colón Harbor to deal with the overflow from the hospital, where the nurses, the sisters under Marie Roulon, were also dropping like flies. By the end of the year all but three of the original twenty-four nurses were dead, and the annual figure for mortalities in the hospitals alone had tripled from the year before to nearly twelve hundred. If Gorgas's estimate of the true level of fatalities is to be believed, this meant that more than ten people were dying every single day.

Many on the Isthmus put these deaths from yellow fever down to the “abominable neglect of all sanitary measures” in the terminal cities. Where the French had jurisdiction, such as in Cristóbal, the new town built on reclaimed land to the side of Manzanillo Island, or in the settlements along the line, it was another story, but in Panama City and Colón the French were powerless. According to Charles Wilson, in Colón, “There was green water, and all kinds of rubbish and rotting things in the center of the streets.” Certainly the lack of sewers and clean water would have contributed to the problems with dysentery, but, of course, they had nothing to do with yellow fever.

Others still subscribed to Dingler's original theory that “only the drunk and the dissipated die of Yellow Fever.” The
Star and Herald
put the yellow fever deaths in Colón down to the “host of idle loafers, who infect the town and load the air with their obscene and vulgar epithets at every hour of the day.” In April 1883 Wolfred Nelson was taken ill, but recovered, he said, “thanks to abstemious habits.” “Woe to the feeble person who doesn't know how to quench his thirst!” wrote a senior French engineer. “He falls into drunkenness, and soon, aged, faded, with haggard eyes, shrunken, face drawn, yellow-skinned, he drags his broken spirit along in a body lacking in all vigour. And certainly he deserves it. It is fair that this shameful vice should be severely punished by nature.”

There was certainly no shortage of “vice” in the terminal cities and along the canal line. In Panama, there were numerous bars, “designed for nothing but hasty drinking,” according to a French engineer, “…horrible dens that look and smell like the filthiest grog shops.” Colón, which retained its frontier town atmosphere, and where the bars would always stay open later than in Panama City, was the worst, “a veritable sink of iniquity,” according to an American visitor. The single main street, running along the waterfront, he reported, “was composed almost entirely of places for gambling, drinking and accompanying vices … and these diversions were in full progress day and night with such abandon as to make the town uninhabitable for decent persons.” Claude Mallet described the town as “the hardest drinking and the most immoral place I have ever known.”

According to Tracy Robinson it was the fault of the “spirit of venality and corruption [that] pervaded almost the entire French Company,” which “spread beyond the service itself, to debauch (there is no other word for it) the whole Isthmian community.” Wolfred Nelson blamed the myth that any human being in hot climates requires alcohol. “Another point in this connection,” he continued. “There is a general belief held by many intelligent people that a residence within hot countries has a marked tendency to increase the sexual instincts. Such is not the case. The real explanation is this. The majority are away from the refining influences of early culture and home life—generally they are single men,—in a warm climate where all the conditions are supposed to produce general relaxation. There is a little society open to such men. If they become ‘one of the boys,’—and the vast majority do, that is the end of it, and generally of them too, for this means late hours, gambling and other distractions, largely
pour passer le temps.
Such men readily become victims to disease.”

Doubtless, huge quantities of wine, champagne, and
anisado
were consumed during the French years. On one road in Colón where bars and prostitutes vied for trade, so many bottles were thrown out into the street that in time they formed a solid surface beneath the mud and when pavement-laying crews arrived years later there was no need for them to put down a gravel base. Supplies were imported from France and sold at wholesale prices to Company employees, who would then sell them on to their friends. Claude Mallet reported that he “could get claret for 6d a bottle …wines were so cheap that there was a habit of starting the day with a pint of champagne frappé ‘to kill the microbes.’” There was, of course, a sensible reason for this, as Mallet explains: “No one dared drink the water that was sold in small measures from barrels.” In addition, as Nelson says, there were few other ways
pour passer le temps.

In mid-1883 de Lesseps announced that he had ordered the opening of “assembly rooms, provided with books, periodicals, and various indoor games” where employees could gather, but there is no evidence that this actually happened. Instead, in Panama City, employees had a choice between the “horrible” local establishments or the Grand Hotel. A young French engineer described the scene there: “A great enormous hall with a stone floor was the bar-room.” In the center were two huge billiard tables and beyond them a vast bar. “In front of these rows of bottles with many coloured labels, most of the commercial business of Panama is transacted;—standing and imbibing cocktails,—always the eternal cocktail!” Across the hall was a little room crowded with people, “where roulette was going on.” After each throw the croupier “announced the number in three languages: ‘Treinta y seis, colorado! Thirty-six red! Trente-six, rouge!’ Oh, this roulette, how much it has cost all grades of canal employees!”

“It was useless,” he went on, “to look for other pleasures. They were nowhere to be found. In this town there was neither theatre, concert nor cafe, nothing but the hall of the Grand Hotel, to which one must always return.”

Furthermore, as one French visitor explained, “passions run high owing to the constant proximity of death.” Another wrote that “the Sword of Damocles hangs over everyone.” The threat of fever, he said, explained the fever of gambling that gripped the Isthmus. “In this country,” wrote Henri Cermoise, “death and
la fête
are perpetually hand in hand. Yellow fever threatens always and one is so unsure of tomorrow that one throws oneself into pleasures.”

The fast, frontier-town lifestyle contributed to a general lawlessness on the Isthmus. In addition, the money being poured into the great ditch had attracted to Panama numerous “foreign men of dubious reputation,” in effect desperate and vicious characters from all over Central America. The
Star and Herald
from this time is full of accounts of robberies and murders. In May 1883, for example, a man was stabbed to death during an argument, “which as usual was occasioned by the vile rum which is sold so freely at all points on the line … Human life,” the paper concluded, “is held at too cheap a rate on the Isthmus.” The situation worsened as the West Indians started arming themselves with revolvers to defend against machete attacks from their Colombian enemies. As always, Colón fared the worst, where the people were “an agglomeration of all nations, and tribes and tongues, drawn from all lands and swayed by a thousand sentiments and impulses.” During the rainy season, when the work on the canal fell off, there were hundreds of unemployed in the town as the steamers continued to arrive from Kingston, and “Fighting, drunkenness and the like are of everyday occurrences.” Charles Wilson was living in Colón's Washington Hotel. “There were all kinds of people living in the town, and some of the worst kinds,” he wrote. “When you took a trip into it at night it was a question whether you would come out alive or dead.”