Panama fever (55 page)

The fumigation squad visited Claude Mallet's house on July 27, 1904. His rooms were swept clean and his yard cleared of anything that might hold water. His tanks were covered with wire netting and taps installed, and he was shown how to pour oil on the surface of the water. He was pleased with the result, writing to his wife that he was now able to read “without having to wipe the mosquitoes off every second,” and pronounced himself “a convert to the mosquito theory.” But he also reported the more than slightly haphazard way in which the house was fumigated—windows and doors were left open—and
that Aêdes aegypti
larvae were still found in his water tanks on another inspection a week later.

Gorgas had taken on a huge task. Unlike in Havana, in Panama mosquitoes bred all year round. The first inspection showed
Aëdes aegyfitilarvae
“existed at practically every house in town.” There was no running water, and, with ice expensive, locals cooled water by keeping a supply indoors in earthenware vessels, called
tinajas.
“In these,” reported Joseph Le Prince, “larvae thrived in great numbers.” Gorgas simply did not have sufficient men and materials to carry out the job as thoroughly as required.

Some Panama City residents like Mallet welcomed the chance to have their homes cleaned out at the expense of the U.S. government. The British consul even tried to get the gang to paint his house while they were about it. But the measure was not compulsory. At the beginning of July a fine of five dollars was introduced for anyone who bred larvae in their house, but there were hardly any prosecutions, and usually tenants simply emptied water vessels at the back door while the inspector was entering at the front. Alternatively, the offending containers were hidden away. As most Panamanians were immune to yellow fever, they felt little compulsion to assist in the eradication program, and many did not believe it was possible anyway. “To attempt it is a dream, an illusion, perhaps simply a case of American boasting,” wrote the local Liberal newspaper, the
Diaro de Panama.
It was very different from Havana, where Gorgas's squads had had a sympathetic governor and martial law to back them up.

Not that the Americans, who were most at risk, were much more helpful. Visits to Panama City were strongly discouraged, but this was widely ignored, particularly after the banning of gambling in the Zone in August 1904 and the subsequent steep reduction in liquor licenses. Most of the United States personnel on the ground shared the Commission's skepticism about the mosquito theory. A particular concern of the Sanitary Department was the Administration Building, where some three hundred nonimmunes, mostly young Americans, were working. Screen doors were left propped open, and many rooms were unscreened altogether. But when Joseph Le Prince pointed this out to Wallace's nephew O. M. Johnson, the young supervising architect, and alerted him to the fact that the bowls of water used to dampen the architects’ copying brushes were ideal places for mosquitoes to breed in, he was laughed at. “Le Prince,” Johnson said, “you're off on the upper story!”

“But suppose,” the inspector argued, “we have twenty deaths here. Who'll be responsible?”

The architect laughed. “I'll stand the responsibility,” he said.

The yellow fever onslaught, as predicted by Gorgas, began at the end of the year. In November an unemployed Italian laborer was brought into the San Tomás hospital in Panama City with a serious case of the disease. He survived, but then news came that two other Italians, members of an opera troupe that had been touring the line of the works, had died from yellow fever on the boat home. The following month Gorgas was forced to suspend his fumigation program in Panama City due to lack of supplies, and six new cases emerged, several from the areas left untreated. “Some yellow fever cases exist in the San Tomas hospital and the Yankees are much scared,” wrote Mallet to his wife. Indeed, with the first yellow fever death in December, the Americans were getting jittery. In August, U.S. minister John Barrett had been making plans to bring his mother to live with him in Panama. But on December 20 he wrote to her that he had changed his mind: “If you should be unwell here or if anything should happen to you I could never forgive myself for bringing you to Panama.” Wallace tried to calm the workforce by ostentatiously riding around town in the company of his wife, newly arrived from the United States. But his efforts were undermined when it became known that the couple, fearing the worst, had imported two smart metal coffins. The sense of impending doom deepened with the appearance in mid-January of six cases on the U.S. cruiser the
Boston
, anchored in Panama Bay. An inspection “revealed a dishpan of water standing outside the cook's headquarters. The thing was so thick with mosquito larvae that it was practically a purée.” On January 16 the recently arrived young wife of Wallace's secretary John Seager died after a short and very sharp attack of the disease. She had only been married for two months and her death caused deep shock to the expatriate community. Governor Davis called it “the saddest incident in the history of the American colony … I attended the funeral this afternoon in the chapel of the Hospital, and as I looked at young Seager overcome with grief at the loss of his wife, I had great difficulty in restraining sympathetic tears. Nearly all the eyes in the room were moist… Naturally this death among those that are so well known has almost caused a panic in the ranks of the American employees of the Canal Commission.” There were further high-profile deaths, and by the end of January, after nearly twenty cases had been identified that month, it was clear that an epidemic was under way. “How glad I am that I did not bring you down to Panama,” Barrett wrote to his mother on January 30. “With malaria and yellow fever rife … not knowing who will be the next victim. I am glad that you are safe in ‘God's Country’… About the only subject of conversation here in Panama is yellow fever.”

Everyone had seen the cemetery on the hill outside Colón, “one of the saddest graveyards in the world, acres of little white crosses falling over and rotting under the jungle of tropical growth.” Now the shadow of Monkey Hill, where the dead from the French period lay buried, “darkened the whole Isthmus.” “The rush to get away,” wrote Gorgas's wife, Marie, now with him in Panama, “quickly assumed the proportions of a panic. The canal force—labourers, engineers and office men alike—seemed possessed of one single view: ‘Let's get out of this hell hole,’… and men arriving one day would take their departure the next, frequently on the same boat.” Inevitably the news of the exodus reached the United States, where a newspaper dubbed Panama “the place where the ‘ghost walks’… it seems that almost everybody is at a standstill down at Panama save the paymaster.” The
Panama Star and Herald
concurred: “Unless something is done and done quickly,” the paper wrote in late February, “all hopes of building a canal across the Isthmus of Panama may be set aside.”

t Ancón hospital cleaning and painting of the wards had, according to Eugenie Hibbard, “advanced quite rapidly.” The water guards around the bed legs were removed, and the grounds cleared, revealing the statues of saints scattered around the garden, previously hidden by dense undergrowth. The French nurses were shipped out as well. For all their compassion they were untrained and hindered in their effectiveness by the vows they had taken. Even if instructed not to feed men awaiting surgery, they would ignore the order as it went against their vow to give food to the sick. The nuns also had little time for the mosquito theory. American nurses would put mosquito nets in place around the beds at night, only to find in the morning that they had been tied back by the nuns with bows of brightly colored ribbon.

The hospital staff was suffering from the same frustrations as the rest of the sanitary department. The nurses complained about the poor salaries and lack of quarters. Jessie Murdoch was still having to sleep wrapped in citronella-soaked blankets to deter the mosquitoes. According to Hibbard, “In the early days the securing of absolutely necessary articles was difficult and tedious.” As everywhere on the Isthmus, she was forced to “make the best use of the materials left by the French.”

The beginning of the year saw a “steadily increasing number of patients.” The epidemic had spread from Panama City to Colón and along the line of the works. Soon two wards and several private rooms were given over to yellow fever patients. Each had a wire cage built around his or her bed to prevent them from infecting mosquitoes, and the wards themselves were protected by three screened doors, with pyrethrum powder burning continually between them and a guard outside to see that they were kept closed. With a tripling of yellow fever cases from December to January, “death seemed to dominate the situation,” Jessie Murdoch remembered, “almost causing panic … [yet] no one showed the white feather but all stood faithfully to their tasks.”

Then the epidemic stuttered: there were fewer cases in March than in February, and for the first two weeks of April there were none at all. On April 18 Gorgas wrote, for a piece to be published by
Harper's Magazine
, “I personally believe that we have seen the last case of yellow fever in Panama.”

The following day, Gorgas was summoned to the bedside of O. M. Johnson, the architect who had laughed at the warnings of sanitary inspector Joseph Le Prince. The symptoms—the headaches, back pain, terrible thirst, and then the
vomito negro
—were unmistakable. Gorgas personally supervised his care, but there was little he could do apart from make the patient as comfortable as possible. In the meantime, there was a stream of new yellow fever cases in the Administration Building. As Gorgas had feared, the disease had struck at the heart of the American project. In ten days, twenty-one cases were carried out of the U.S. canal headquarters. Johnson died on April 25 and was buried in one of the Wallaces’ metal coffins. It was, wrote Governor Davis, like “the ending of many a bright young man I have seen on the battlefield.”

But few of the Americans shared the martial, patriotic determination of the young French engineers twenty years earlier. “Everybody here seems to be sitting on a tack,” one engineer wrote home. When yet another case was announced in the Administration Building, a young stenographer “rose from his chair and shrieked, ‘I want you to understand now that if Tabor dies, I'm going home.’” Many were already on their way as “yellow fever … completely filled the atmosphere.” Panama City was abandoned as white Commission staff were moved out to Ancón Hill, but in less than two weeks two hundred resigned. One returning nurse told the
New York Tribune
that, bafflingly, yellow fever was even killing “well set-up, clean boys with good principles.” “We were taxed to the utmost in the effort to care for the sick and keep hope and encouragement alive,” writes Frank Maltby, who was still laboring away dredging the ends of the canal. It didn't help that Chief Engineer Wallace was off the Isthmus in Washington, pressing his case to be given more control over the project.

“Many resigned,” read that year's ICC annual report, “while those who remained became possessed with a feeling of lethargy or fatalism.” In all, some five hundred U.S. employees fled the Isthmus during April, May, and June 1905, about three-quarters of the white workforce after what was, in historical terms, a fairly mild flare-up of yellow fever. Amid the chaos came a reluctant reappraisal of the French effort, as, in the early summer of 1905, the work came to a virtual halt.