Panama fever (25 page)

During 1884 there was widespread political instability in the province, exacerbated by high inflation, food shortages, and the general social unrest the canal project was causing. At one point, in October, there were two rival state presidents, each with men under arms in Panama City. The following year, this would lead to fullblown civil war on the Isthmus, with serious consequences. Under such circumstances, the authorities were utterly incapable of policing the volatile streets of either of the main cities. Europeans and Americans increasingly looked to the foreign warships, frequently anchored in the bays of the terminal cities, for their protection. The small police force was ineffective and partisan, preferring to extort money from West Indians on the pretext of fines for vagrancy than solve any crimes. Dingler offered to contribute money to the establishment of a new three-hundred-strong police force, but this foundered on local objections.

There was to be one more personal tragedy for the
Directeur Général.
Around Christmas 1884 Madame Dingler started showing the unmistakable symptoms of the dreaded yellow fever. She died on January 1,1885, completing the total destruction of his family. At last, Dingler's heroic steadfastness was beaten. His wife had frequently gone riding on one of two magnificent horses worth 25,000 francs, which had been a gift from Gadpaille in Jamaica. After her death, the director did not wish to encounter anyone else on the streets of Panama riding these horses, so he ordered the beasts to be killed. The staff refused to carry out the command. Finally they found a poor fellow who was given the role of executioner, but at the last moment his hand trembled and he could not finish the job. For hours the horses were heard, partially disemboweled, screaming in agony. In the end they were shot dead. This execution figures in the accounts of the Company, and is billed as a hole of 33 meters paid at fifty piastres per cubic meter. Dingler was a broken man, deeply pitied by the canal workforce. He stayed on the job for another six months, but his wife's death ended his dynamic leadership of the canal project. He returned to France in June 1885 and, exhausted and heartbroken, was himself dead before the end of the year.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ANNUS HORRIBILIS

At least once a year U.S. naval officers would tour the canal works and then write lengthy and detailed reports back to Congress on the progress, or lack of it, of the French project. Sometimes these reports can read as if the authors had somehow become infected by the enthusiasm of their always generous hosts, or just by the sheer ambition of it all. But for the most part, with a crescendo as the years go past, the reports concluded that the current sea-level plan was running disastrously behind time and over budget. In the United States, de Lesseps's “friends”—many, officially or not, on the payroll of the Company—continued to defend the canal against its attackers. U.S. factories and workshops were kept busy supplying Panama's endless thirst for new and bigger equipment. But many shared the
New York Times’
view that the chance of the project ending in failure was “not unlikely.” In the circumstances, commented the paper with not a little schadenfreude, “we can congratulate ourselves that it is chiefly foreign capital that will be swallowed up by it.”

Occasionally, a different voice was heard. “Americans would much prefer that the American canal should be the work of Americans,” wrote a Commander Gorringe in the
New York Sun.
“Evidently Americans had neither the courage nor the means to undertake it. The Frenchmen had; they have gone quietly to work; they ask us for nothing,” What's more, he continued, all their efforts would assist no country more than the United States, “quite as much as British commerce and the British commercial marine were benefited by their work at Suez.” Not that respect for the French travails should hamper strategic good sense. It did not matter who did the work, he argued, because, “When it is completed, if it becomes necessary or even important to our national welfare and safety that we should control it, there is no doubt that we shall take possession of the canal and the country through which it passes, with as little hesitation and trouble as the British recently took possession of Egypt and the Suez canal.”

The U.S. Navy, deterred from establishing naval bases on the Isthmus, was now sniffing around a bay on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, strategically placed to guard the passageways into the Caribbean basin and a canal wherever it was situated, “which might,” the British foreign secretary was warned by one of his diplomats in December 1884, “be so fortified as to become a second Gibraltar.”

The same month, not coincidentally, saw the climax of the early American efforts to build a canal, for and by themselves, in Nicaragua, which remained their favored location for a waterway. Soon after the decision of the Paris Congress to plump for Panama, Ancieto Menocal, along with Admiral Daniel Ammen, ex-president Ulysses Grant, and others had formed the Maritime Canal Company, to fulfill their vision of the breakthrough happening in Nicaragua, regardless of what the French were doing in Panama. In 1880 Menocal had negotiated a concession from the Nicaraguan government to build his canal. Late the following year, they succeeded in getting a bill introduced in the Senate for political and financial guarantees to be given to the company by the government. The bill was passed around interminable committees, until at last, in mid-1882, it was voted on, narrowly failing to win the necessary two-thirds margin, helped by lobbying from de Lesseps's men in Washington and a feeling, as the
New York Times
put it, that “the time for guarantees and subsidies of bonds has gone by.” The great railway boom had been underwritten by the federal government, but now the power of the railroad barons was a national bugbear. “Let them have protection and charters,” the paper went on, “but let them persuade the capitalists of this country or of the world that they have a good thing and obtain their funds in a legitimate and business-like way. Therein at least they may take a lesson from de Lesseps.”

Ammen was furious that support had been denied, telling the British ambassador that he was going to “abandon it as an enterprise backed by the United States’ Government, and to seek the necessary capital in English and German markets for carrying out the work.” Rather than being an American canal for Americans, it would be neutral and free to all, multilaterally guaranteed.

Blaine's successor as secretary of state, Frederick Frelinghuysen, was disappointed by the failure of the bill, for precisely this reason, muttering darkly to the British ambassador, “there is reason to believe that direct overtures were made to the German Government by parties interested in the Menocal Concession.” But these efforts failed and the concession lapsed.

Frelinghuysen kept up negotiations with the British Foreign Office over altering the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, albeit at a less shrill pitch than that of Blaine. But the Americans had little to offer in return for a move that would clearly benefit the United States at the expense of Britain, and got nowhere. Nevertheless, at the end of 1884 Frelinghuysen started fresh negotiations with Nicaragua for a canal treaty. A deal was signed on December 1. Anticipating ratification, Ancieto Menocal prepared to depart once more for another survey in Nicaragua, this time not as an employee of a private company, but of the secretary of the navy.

On December 10, the president, Chester Arthur, sent the treaty to the Senate with a strong message of recommendation. The work was too important to be left to private capital, he said. The Nicaragua canal would unite the country without recourse to the railway corporations, he went on, and deliver great benefits to U.S. trade and shipping. European grain markets would be brought in reach of the Pacific Coast states, and China would be opened up to East Coast manufacturers, who would now find themselves “midway between Europe and Asia.” By building the canal, he argued, the United States would make itself the center of the world.

As the prospect loomed of two rival canals, the Mexican ambassador in Washington took the opportunity to pitch his homeland to the British ambassador there, Lionel Sackville-West. If the French and Americans were going to have their own canals, he told the ambassador, Britain should also have one, built at Tehuantepec. Sackville-West brushed this suggestion aside, but was keeping a close eye on the Frelinghuysen deal, which was in clear breach of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty.

When it came to the vote, the “much divided” Senate found itself in a quandary, as Sackville-West reported back to London. If it was rejected, it would “be understood by European governments as a practical abandonment of the Isthmian policy, and entail humiliation. On the other hand its ratification would test the position of the British Ministry that the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty is still in force …but is the United States prepared for a controversy which might result in something more serious than diplomatic correspondence?” To overturn an international treaty was a very serious step, as was reflected by concerns in the country and press.

The treaty, which would have seen a U.S. government–funded Nicaragua canal, was rejected, with 32 in favor and 23 against, narrowly missing by five votes the two-thirds majority needed for ratification. Party jealousies contributed to the defeat, but the Senate was also swayed by another argument in favor of delay: the canal would be a liability, fortified or not, until the United States had a competent navy to police the strategically vital waterway. A motion to reconsider the vote was introduced, but the inauguration of Grover Cleveland in March 1885 saw a change in policy and outlook. In his inaugural address Cleveland signaled a return to the traditional aversion to “entangling alliances.” He was also opposed to government involvement in “big business.” Shortly afterward, he withdrew the treaty.

Thus America's canal effort passed back from government to be once again the responsibility of the “folly and gullibility of Capital.” As hopes faded for Nicaragua, attention returned to Panama, where, whatever the setbacks, there were more men and machines at work than ever before. Suspicions of the French were mounting, with many believing that they were on the road to declaring a protectorate over a Panama state grateful to be detached from Colombian rule. In March 1885, the British minister in Bogotá had a conversation with his United States opposite number, who had recently been in Panama, in which the American “described every Canal functionary as, in his opinion, a French Government Agent in disguise.” De Lesseps, he went on, was set on introducing French colonists to Panama, before annexing the whole of the Isthmus.

All the time, the political situation on the Isthmus was worsening. The scene was set for a show of military force by the United States.

he civil war in New Granada in the late 1850s had ended with the triumph of the Liberal faction, and the drawing up, in 1863, of a new constitution that enfranchised the lower classes, reined in the influence of the Church on national affairs, and gave considerable autonomy to provinces within the country, now to be called the United States of Colombia. This decentralization suited Panama, which had always been more racially and ecclesiastically mixed, liberal, and outward looking than distant Bogotá. But after a depression in the 1870s, caused in part by collapsing prices for Colombia's cash crops, there was a conservative backlash in 1884 led by the new President Doctor Rafael Núñez.