Panama fever (49 page)

The new governor of the Zone, Major General Davis, arrived to stay on May 17. A man of few words or courtesies, he soon found that what could be got away with in Cuba or the Philippines would not do in Panama. Davis threw himself into the work, issuing orders and rushing about, but failed to call on President Amador for several days and even refused to attend the many ceremonies inevitably arranged in his honor by the Panamanians. Complaints reached Washington and eventually Davis was ordered to change his attitude. There was further bad feeling as the marking out of the new U.S. Canal Zone boundaries was begun and the reality of the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty sunk in. “They have taken all the meat and left the bone,” one “disgusted” Panamanian complained to the British consul.

“The canal employees are coming,” Mallet wrote to his wife on June 2. “The Isthmus is swarming with Yankees already,” he reported a week later. “From ocean to ocean you see them everywhere and American flags hoisted on all sides.” Most excitement was attached to the arrival—at the end of the month—of Wallace and Gorgas to take up permanent residence. “The medical board declares that not one mosquito shall survive,” wrote Mallet. “Panama without mosquitoes? What a blessing…”

n June 21 the steamer the
allianca
sailed from New York. As well as Wallace and Gorgas, on board was William Karner, a colleague of Wallace from Chicago who had been appointed assistant engineer; two other senior sanitary officers; a new head nurse, Eugenie Hibbard, with two other nurses; and about a dozen clerks and sanitary inspectors. Karner, who would later play a crucial role as the chief recruiter of labor for the canal, had taken the job out of loyalty to his old boss, in spite of the fact, he wrote, that the “proposition [of the job] and a residence in Panama was not very alluring to me.” Eugenie Hibbard, a Canadian, had made her name in hospital and training-school administration. Forty-eight in 1904, she had served in Cuba— and survived an attack of yellow fever. In spite of her great experience of difficult postings, Hibbard reports that she was quite daunted by the prospect of Panama. Her friends had asked her why she would want to go to “such a God forsaken place where the French have so finally failed!” “We felt,” she wrote of herself and two fellow nurses, Miss Markham and Miss McGowan, “that we were going to a country of swamp and jungle, filled with crawling and flying death, where any white woman was sure of destruction.”

After a rough and uncomfortable voyage, the
Allianca
arrived at Colón on the morning of June 28. “The rainy season had just commenced,” William Karner remembered, “and a shower that morning had left the streets of Colón and Cristóbal in thick, impassable mud. It was not a pleasant introduction to a strange country and city, both of which we knew had a bad reputation as to health and sanitation.” The party was met by Governor Davis and piled onto a train to Panama City.

The outskirts of Colón made their customary shocking impression on the new arrivals. The conditions, Hibbard remembered, “beggar description, the houses being huts of wood built on piles 2 or 3 feet above the most filthy water, foul smelling and covered with green slime filled with most objectionable refuse … Leaving Colón behind,” she continued, “we saw for quite a distance alongside the Canal long neglected and broken and abandoned machinery, with here and there many graves surrounded by small railings (wooden) and marked with a rough white wooden cross impressed one forcibly of what had taken place. Soon we began to climb the mountains and the remarkable beauty of the country, the hills and foliage thrust itself upon us. I had never seen such luxuriant growth of trees and shrubs … flowering plants and many beautiful orchids growing at random.”

The transit completed, the nurses were conveyed to the French-built hospital at Ancón. Once the pride of the tropics, the grounds had reverted to jungle, and the buildings were in a woeful state of decay and dilapidation. The nurses were shown to their quarters, “a strange and unattractive abode,” said Hibbard, “the first night passed in these quarters was sufficient to have broken down the courage that has brought us here. The following day, I asked the Commanding Officer for something to guard ourselves with and he gave me a pistol (a Colt revolver) too heavy for me to handle in one hand. I placed it on a chair at my bedside at night and looked lovingly upon it as a possible protector.”

The wards, in which about thirty patients, mostly incurables, were being cared for by the French Sisters of Charity, were filthy by Eugenie Hibbard's standards. The task of cleaning them up, and clearing out the ancient, bug-infested horsehair mattresses, fell to the nurses. “There was, I realized, a stupendous piece of work before us,” Hib-bard wrote, “and so it proved to be.”

The day after the arrival of the
Allianca
, Joseph Le Prince, one of Gorgas's sanitary inspectors, carried out a check on potential mosquito breeding sites near the Ancón wards. The bottom of the hill, he discovered, was continually soggy, and adjacent pasture had hoof-prints full of water. Nearby drainage ditches were choked with weeds, which retarded the water flow and provided the environment mosquitoes needed to lay their eggs. In fact, he concluded, “A more prolific source would be hard to imagine.” The result was that the hospital was swarming. “The
Anopheles
[malaria-carrying mosquitoes] were so numerous,” wrote Le Prince, “that night work had to be done in relays; one set of men using fans to protect those working.” No fewer than fifty-four
Anopheles
were noted on the upper panel of a single screen door. Furthermore, the patients in the wards were located according to nationality rather than the nature of their illness. “Had it been intended,” said Le Prince, “to spread yellow fever and malaria with the greatest rapidity among the patients as soon as they arrived, no better plan could have been adopted.” Within just weeks, all but a couple of the small hospital staff had come down with malaria, Gorgas included.

he engineers among the first arrivals would find a similarly melancholy scene. According to Wallace, there was “only jungle and chaos from one end of the Isthmus to the other.” Panama was a gigantic scrap heap. All along the line of the old French canal, abandoned excavators and dredges, some of huge size, slumped lopsidedly, half submerged in swamp or stream. Over everything the voracious returning jungle had draped a thick web of vines. Discarded locomotives and spoil cars were piled in huge mounds of rust and twisted metal. Materials lay scattered everywhere, as if abandoned by a hastily retreating army. The buildings, which at one time had housed more than twenty thousand canal workers, had been reclaimed by termites, rot, or vegetation. Inside one building, where the rafters had decayed and the roof had collapsed, Joseph Le Prince found several trees growing with trunks more than ten inches in diameter. In one place, an entire village had been completely buried by the returning jungle.

Although the wreckage of the French effort scattered everywhere had an unnerving effect on the first American canal builders, once they started to go systematically through their inheritance, the picture brightened considerably. Many of the two thousand buildings would be repairable. Six working machine shops provided a nucleus for later expansion. The French had left their successors maps and surveys, “excellently recorded [which] proved to be of great use.” According to Wallace, there was a significant amount of materials and supplies safely stored in warehouses and unissued, which were in “a fairly good condition, and were systematically stored, arranged, tabulated and properly cared for.” Vital spare parts and machine tools had been liberally coated in grease against the corroding warmth and damp of the climate. “Splendid workmanship was shown on these machines,” one American engineer conceded, “and good material was used in their construction.” Although, “obsolete,” he went on, “they were good appliances of their date.”

On second glance, the actual digging achieved was impressive also. As well as an eleven-mile passage from Colón to Bohío, there were vast excavations where Eiffel's locks were to have gone. On the Pacific side a passage had been dredged from La Boca to deep water, and “considerable work had been done on the channel from La Boca to Miraflores.” In addition, over thirty miles of diversion channels had been created for the Chagres River. There had clearly been a lot of very hard work. After everything they had heard, most new arrivals were surprised by the “magnificance of the French failure.” The Europeans had achieved, it was apparent, “vastly more than the popular impression.” How much of this immense excavation— nearly 50 million cubic meters (73 million cubic yards)—would be useful would, of course, only be determined when a definite plan for the American canal emerged.

Wallace himself wrote that his approach to deciding the type of canal that should be built was determined by the “great amount of work already performed by the old and new Panama Canal companies” as well as “the tentative plans developed by the former Isthmian Canal Commission.” The Walker Commission of 1899–1901 had been heavily influenced by the French New Company plan put together in 1898 to increase the saleability of the canal concern. The French proposal had allowed for a dam and locks at Bohío, some fifteen miles upriver from where the Chagres meets the Atlantic. This, it was planned, would create an artificial lake at 68 feet above sea level. With a surface area of just over 13,500 acres (5,500 hectares), this would stretch for thirteen miles through the Culebra Cut, at the Pacific end of which would be built at Pedro Miguel further dams and locks to return shipping to sea level. The lake would provide water for the locks and also, it was hoped, absorb the seasonal floods of the Chagres. Alternatively, a further raised section could be created through the Continental Divide at 96 feet above sea level between Obispo and Paraíso. Clearly the thinking of the French was in part shaped by the sacrifices made in the 1880s. Both of these options had the merit of avoiding “the loss of any work already performed.” The idea of a plan that would render much of the French digging superfluous, as eventually adopted, was, for now, too ghastly to contemplate.

Although the Walker Commission had dispensed with the high-level option—feeding the top level of the canal from the upper Chagres would have been too difficult—they had remained wedded to the idea of the main dam at Bohío, albeit with a lake of the higher elevation of 85 feet above sea level. This is what the influential engineer Morison had argued for and defended at the Senate hearings before the Spooner debate. But the Spooner Act had not specified the type of canal except that it should “afford convenient passage for vessels of the largest tonnage and greatest draft now in use, and such as may be reasonably anticipated” and should use “as far as practicable the work heretofore done by the New Panama Canal Company, of France, and its predecessor company.” Indeed, during the “Battle of the Routes” in the Senate, one of Mark Hanna's arguments in favor of Panama had been that only there was a sea-level canal possible. In fact, de Lesseps's dream of an “Ocean Bosporus” still held a great appeal, even after the disasters of the 1880s.