Panama fever (53 page)

hose first Karner recruits arriving right at the beginning of 1905 joined a canal project mired in confusion and disillusionment. In Panama City, the job of installing running water and sewers was supposed to have been completed by January 1905, but was still months away Much important equipment had not arrived. The Americans tried to make do with reconditioned French tools and “scrap.” The building department was having the same difficulties. When materials were reluctantly supplied, they were often held up by the inadequate facilities at Colón for unloading, storage, and distribution. Building and dock workers were in short supply as the majority were taken up with “actual canal work.”

What this meant was “making the dirt fly” in the Culebra Cut. This is what journalists from the United States came to see, and they wanted to report back that the canal was being dug. But the effort from an engineering point of view was an almost total waste of time. In August, by which time three old French excavators had been chugging away for about a month, Gold Hill began to slide into the trench below it, and work was suspended for four weeks. In November the first American-built excavator arrived. This was a ninety-five-ton Bucyrus steam shovel, which could scoop up nearly 5 cubic meters of spoil at a time. Wallace was off the Isthmus, so it was William Karner as acting chief engineer who ordered the new shovel into action in the Cut. “Ambitious to ‘make the dirt fly,’” wrote Karner, “I came near to a mortifying and embarrassing failure, for the night after starting the shovel at work there was a slide in the cut which nearly buried the shovel from sight.” The Bucyrus shovel, three times as powerful as any equivalent used by the French, would become the workhorse of the canal, but it was an inauspicious start.

Bucyrus steam shovel

The following month there were six of the old French ladder excavators at work together with an increasing number of resurrected Belgian locomotives and French dump cars. But for all the sound and fury, an engineer reported, “the impression made on the soil in comparison with the entire mass of earth to be handled” was mere “hen scratches.” On wet days, the locomotives could pull only four cars at a time, and there were frequent derailments, blamed on the “long and rigid wheel base of the French and Belgian engines,” as well as the “poorly ballasted,” largely improvised, tracks. As there were also inadequate traction and dumping facilities, the excavators were often idle for lack of spoil cars.

The results of the test borings along the line had also provided disappointment. At Bohío, where the Walker Commission had planned a dam for the lock-canal option, drilling teams had discovered a deep geological gorge, the original bed of the Chagres River. Thus the bedrock on which the dam would have to be anchored was a seemingly unworkable 168 feet below sea level. Above the bedrock was a porous mixture of gravel and other alluvial detritus. Wallace concluded that “there is little probability of finding a satisfactory location for a high dam in this vicinity.” There were borings also at Gatún, which had been suggested as a possible site for a dam in spite of the great width of the valley at this point. But here there were two underground gorges even deeper than at Bohío. The Americans drilled to 200 feet below sea level and still did not reach bedrock. “As 200 feet was considered in excess of the practicable depth at which it was advisable to construct a foundation for a dam,” Wallace reported, “it was not considered necessary to go deeper.” For him, the test results precluded “the economical or safe construction of a dam in [the] general vicinity” of Gatún. Ominously, other scattered borings along the canal line offered only geological confusion: “Practically no regular stratification exists,” Wallace reported.

In the absence of an obvious site for a dam along the line of the canal on the Atlantic side, Wallace reported that he favored the adoption of a sea-level canal plan. This was, he wrote, “self-evidently” “the most desirable in economy of maintenance, operation, time of passage through it, and simplicity of design, plan and execution … the deterrent factors being time and cost.” But more than anything he wanted a decision, to “remove the principal elements of uncertainty now existing in regard to the project as a whole.”

Hampered by more than just uncertainty, the effort was on the brink of petering out, strangled by red tape, bickering, and incompetence. Wallace had underestimated the Isthmus. Under pressure to “make the dirt fly,” he neglected proper preparatory work. He also failed to provide leadership. His idea of management was to delegate. When he employed Frank Maltby, he told him: “I want you to build up an organization so complete and efficient that you won't have to do anything but sit on the veranda and smoke good cigars.” Wallace himself was hardly ever seen out on the line; he rarely left his office, and every small suggestion from one of his subordinates would be demanded in writing. Soon his desk was as covered in chaotic mounds of paper as that of Admiral Walker in Washington.

With no improvement in sight in the grim living conditions, discontent was spreading all along the line of the canal. Then at the end of 1904 it got dramatically worse: yellow fever broke out on the Isthmus.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

YELLOW JACK

The American doctors and sanitary inspectors had arrived in Panama full of confidence. They might have felt underappreciated by the engineers among the first arrivals, but they were sure they had the knowledge and experience to rid the Isthmus of disease-carrying mosquitoes. Before departing for the tropics Gorgas and Le Prince had met a senior U.S. entomologist, who had asked them to send back samples of Panamanian mosquitoes. “I will have to do it soon, Doctor,” Le Prince had exclaimed, “for in a year or so there will be no mosquitoes there!”

Gorgas had been to Paris to study the medical records of the French companies. He knew the story of the Dingler family, of the massive losses and demoralization from disease during the 1880s. But he was not downhearted, as he was aware that the Americans had a crucial advantage over de Lesseps's men. For between the time of the French on the Isthmus and the start of the American canal effort, a massive advance had occurred in the control of malaria, and, even more so, yellow fever: the miracle of Havana.

As in the fields of technology and engineering, the twenty years after the beginning of the French canal saw astounding advances in medical science. In 1880 the germ theory of disease—pioneered by Pasteur, Koch, and Lister—was still the subject of debate in the medical profession and derision by the public. But by 1900 a revolution had occurred. The new world discovered under the microscope had ushered in fresh understanding of diseases that had baffled man for centuries. For the U.S. effort in Panama no advance was more important than the understanding of the mosquito transmission of malaria and yellow fever.

The entire idea of an insect vector was quite new. In 1878 a Scottish doctor, Patrick Manson, working in southern China, had discovered that mosquitoes carried the developmental stage of a parasitic worm that caused elephantiasis. It was the first proof that a bloodsucking insect could harbor, and presumably transmit, organisms of human disease. Then in 1881, in Havana, the Western Hemisphere's “yellow jack” capital, an article was published in a medical journal that not only identified the mosquito as the yellow fever's carrier, but also the particular species,
Aïdes aegypti.
Its author was French-Scottish doctor Carlos Finlay, who had worked in Cuba for twenty years. He had studied the literature of yellow fever epidemics and had noted that they all mentioned the unusually high prevalence of mosquitoes. He then identified the particular species by analyzing the factors the sites of the epidemics had in common—temperature, elevation above sea level—and matching them to a mosquito that thrived only in these conditions.

But the theory—with hindsight a stroke of genius—was either ignored or ridiculed. The problem was not just resistance to a new idea; Finlay himself carried out numerous experiments the results of which seemed to disprove his own theory. Countless times he attempted to infect a patient using a mosquito that had bitten someone with yellow fever, but no one ever got ill as a result. Finlay, soon disparagingly known as “the Mosquito Man,” was written off as a crank.

More than fifteen years later, by which time the Isthmian mosquito had seen off de Lesseps and his French canal dream, an obscure English army physician, Ronald Ross, stationed at a remote field hospital in India, worked out the life cycle of the malaria parasite. In the summer of 1897 he dissected an
Anopheles
mosquito that was known to have bitten a malaria sufferer. Under a microscope he found in the insect's stomach the same circular cells identified as the malaria parasite
Plasmodium falciparum
by a French doctor Alphonse Laveran, in Algeria in 1880. The following year Ross located the mosquito's salivary gland and found the parasite there, confirming that the insect vector passed the disease on with a subsequent bite. Thus to control the disease, which at the time took a million lives a year in India, it was necessary to prevent mosquitoes biting an infected patient as well as keeping them away from healthy humans.

In the same year, 1898, Henry Rose Carter, a maritime doctor with experience of yellow fever quarantines, made an observation that offered to come to the rescue of old Dr. Finlay's theory. While working in a small Mississippi town during an outbreak of yellow fever, he noticed a strange pattern: there was usually a period of twelve days to three weeks between the appearance of the first case of yellow fever in a community, and subsequent cases apparently derived from it. This led him to carry out case studies on dwellings where a patient had become infected. By carefully noting visitors to the house, he established that those who came in the first two weeks were fine, but thereafter, and even when the original patient was removed, there was a risk of infection. Not only did this point to an insect vector, but it also established that the virus needed a period of “extrinsic incubation” inside the mosquito before it became dangerous. This neatly explained the failure of Finlay's experiments.

After the end of fighting in Cuba in August 1898, some fifty thousand U.S. military remained on the island for “pacification.” Their continued losses from disease highlighted the fact that yellow fever probably presented the single greatest threat to U.S. expansion in the tropics. For almost everyone there was little doubt as to what was to blame—the filthy streets of Havana. In January 1899, William Crawford Gorgas, who had worked in a yellow fever camp during the war, was charged with cleaning up the city.