Panama fever (30 page)

What he meant, though felt it was outside his remit to say, was that the sea-level plan was unworkable and had to be altered before it was too late. But, in combination with Rousseau's lofty ambiguity, others were now spelling it out. Jacquet, another government engineer who had accompanied de Lesseps to Panama, reported to the Cabinet that the sea-level plan was categorically impossible. It seemed likely that the bill would never make it to the Chamber unless this issue was resolved. On the Isthmus, too, in spite of continuing strong excavation figures for the early months of the year, Bunau-Varilla and others were exploring alternative visions to de Lesseps's “Ocean Bosporus.” Léon Boyer, the new
Directeur Général
, took only a month to make up his mind that a canal
à niveau
was simply unachievable with the money and time at his disposal. Now, he urged de Lesseps, only the rapid adoption of a lock-canal plan could save the project.

ut de Lesseps was not to be moved. He reluctantly agreed to certain time- or money-saving modifications but on the key issue—the conversion to a lock canal—he refused to comply with the wishes of the government inspectors and the urgent appeals of his own senior engineers on the spot. The promise of an open, sea-level waterway, and its superior operating profits, had been the whole reason for choosing Panama in the first place. De Lesseps had from the very start nailed his colors to the mast by so energetically selling to the French public the simplicity and beauty of the idea of a canal
à niveau.
It would have been an embarrassing reversal if he gave in to the pressure.

By an unhappy coincidence, fever at a crucial moment robbed de Lesseps of two experts who might have changed his mind. In May, Boyer was suddenly prostrate, then dead. It was, the British consul reported, a particularly severe case of yellow fever. Bunau-Varilla, too, had “been awakened suddenly” one morning soon after the end of de Lesseps's visit, by “a violent vibration of my bed which I thought was a seismic movement.” It was “the shakes,” followed by a dose of fever, and before the end of April he had been invalided back to France. But even if the pair had been fit, it is uncertain whether de Lesseps would have listened to them. He didn't work by committee. At Suez, everyone had told him he was heading for ruin, but he had confounded his critics by never giving up. Panama, he now at last admitted, had proved many times more difficult than Suez. Yet to show weakness, he calculated, would surely be fatal to confidence.

The first reaction of the French Cabinet to the Rousseau report was to seek to delay making a decision. Then, to everyone's surprise, Minister of Works Charles Baïhaut drafted a bill in favor of the application and presented it to the Chamber. The Chamber appointed a committee, which heard from Rousseau, de Lesseps, and others. But still, as time ticked away for the effort on the Isthmus, nobody wanted to make a decision. On July 8, the committee adjourned for the summer undecided. In the meantime, they asked, could they have a look at the Company's books and contracts?

De Lesseps was incensed. He simply could not wait that long for new money, nor risk the final verdict going against him. And to open up the books would be a clear admission of guilt. It was unthinkable. The following day he withdrew the application, telling shareholders, “They are trying to shelve me—I refuse to be shelved … I work on, but not alone, assuredly, but with 350,000 Frenchmen sharing my patriotic confidence.”

The last chance to save the French canal had slipped away, through a combination of the dithering of the politicians and de Lesseps's stubborn refusal to give up the sacred sea-level plan. Meanwhile on the Isthmus, of the sixty handpicked engineers Boyer had brought with him, nearly all were sick, demoralized, or dead. Since the advent of the rainy season, more than 80 percent of the chief officials of the Company were out through sickness. Of thirty Italians who had arrived together twelve months earlier, only five now survived.

S. W. Plume was an American railway man, a veteran of South American projects. In 1886, after two years on the Isthmus, he was in charge of a gang of about a hundred workers, replacing rotten ties on the railroad. “Every month or two I would lose a man, perhaps two men,” he told a U.S. Senate committee some years later. “I will explain it to you. If a man gets wet there with the rain he is sure to be sick the next morning… I never saw such a climate in all my life, and I have worked in the rice fields of South Carolina, and gracious only knows that is bad enough.”

The streets now saw a constant stream of funeral processions, and trains ran all the time to the cemetery at Monkey Hill. “When I first went there,” said Plume, “we used to run one train—perhaps it would be a car or two boxcars—in the morning out of Colón, to Monkey Hill.” But by 1886, it was “bury, bury, bury, running two, three, and four trains a day with dead Jamaican niggers all the time. I never saw anything like it. It did not make any difference whether they were black or white. They died like animals.” In response, wrote the “occasional correspondent” of the
New York Tribune
, the Company's senior employees showed “insane recklessness” and took up a “habit of life …such as would result in wide-spread disease in any hot climate, even the most salubrious.” The drinking of alcohol would start at breakfast and would continue all day. In the evening, when it was too hot to read or play cards, it would be more of the same.

n spite of all this, the Company kept up a monthly excavation rate of a million cubic meters through mid-1886, according to Bunau-Varilla, who returned, after convalescence and now immune to yellow fever, late in the year. In the circumstances this was impressive, but anyone who wanted to could see that this was still not nearly enough to complete a sea-level canal within reasonable time. In the Culebra Cut, which had to be dug in places to a depth of over 300 feet, only an average of 12 feet had been removed, a paltry rate of just three feet a year. The Anglo-Dutch Company had been taken on in December 1884 and contracted to remove from Culebra 12 million cubic meters in four years, but after eighteen months had managed less than 1 million. As Bunau-Varilla wrote, they had proved to be “a dismal failure.” “During the dry season,” he explained, “the works seemed to justify the best hopes. As soon as the first rains began, the dumps began to slide, the tracks were cut, and general subsiding of the ground inside the cut paralysed any movement of trains, and often overthrew the excavating machines.”

They were dismissed and a new contract was awarded to Artigue et Sonderegger. The new contractor's guiding light was Bunau-Varilla, whose brother was also high up in the same company. The new contract was part of a wider reorganization. One outcome of de Lesseps's visit was that in mid-1886 the job of digging the canal was given to six large firms rather than the host of small contractors. This certainly helped reduce the suffocating bureaucracy of the Company and avoid the confusion and waste symptomatic of the “small contractors” period. But it was expensive. Numerous firms had to be paid off, and the new work was inevitably contracted at a higher rate. Huerne, Slaven was kept on, with an even better deal. Artigue et Sonderegger's remuneration was so lavish that it led to the resignation of the Company's secretary in Paris.

There, the Company directors still hoped that the French government would rescue the project. After all, wasn't Charles Baïhaut, the minister for works, telling anyone who would listen that he believed in the canal, whatever the Rousseau report had said? In the meantime, the Company directors issued more bonds with some success, but at a ruinously high interest rate.

t last de Lesseps began to give way. In January 1887, he ordered his technical advisory committee in Paris to meet to consider the possibility of a lock canal. But he remained insistent on the original vision of an open waterway, demanding that all projects that construed permanent locks be excluded. Again, there was a delay. A subcommission was appointed which did not report until the autumn. The result was indecision on the Isthmus, as the latest U.S. Navy inspector, Lieutenant Charles Rogers, reported after his visit in March 1887. The progress of the previous year had, he said, been “creditable,” virtually meeting Ferdinand de Lesseps's target of 12 million cubic meters. But he was doubtful whether the rate of excavation could be doubled in 1887, as planned. Moreover, he calculated that the Company had only enough money to continue for another three and a half months.