Panama fever (59 page)

he West Indian workers, hampered by disease and malnutrition, were criticized by the American canal authorities as weak and idle. Official ICC reports wrote of their lack of vitality and frail “disposition to labor.” “The West Indian's every movement is slow and bungling,” wrote one American journalist, echoing the prevailing sentiment. “Every small object a subject for debate; anything at all a sufficient excuse for all hands to stop work.” But, as the writer went on, there was a “certain and unjustified cruelty” in forcing “poor half-fed fellows” to work eight to ten hours in such heat. “Until you have tried to do a good fifteen minutes’ work with a pick and shovel during the rainy season … you can have no idea of the exhaustion that tropical heat brings even to the laborer who is used to it.”

Stevens declared that the value of the West Indians as laborers was low under any conditions, but admitted, “They were not getting proper food in sufficient and regular amounts to give them strength for continuous work.” The situation was improved a little with the gradual opening up of ICC-run “commissary” stores along the line, where, using coupons issued against pay, employees could buy food imported from the United States at “cost price,” or at any rate cheaper than prevailing locally. There was much praise in some quarters for the fact that the Commission, through bulk buying, could ship goods two thousand miles and still sell them at prices comparable to those in New York City. This may have been a great boon for the well-paid white workers, but the wages of the West Indians, although generous by Barbados or Jamaica standards, would not have gone far in the United States. It did not help either that cooking was forbidden in the workers’ barracks.

Construction had been ongoing on several hotels, where the white employees were served meals. Soon after taking over, Stevens decided to offer the West Indians cooked food as well in a bid to improve their productivity. Originally the entire catering operation was farmed out to a private company, but when the contractor calculated that he needed to charge $30 a month per white employee and $12 a month for a laborer, the Commission decided to set up and run the operation themselves.

While more “hotels” were built for the American workforce, for the blacks there were “messes,” kitchens established near the work sites. No tables or chairs were provided in these, so the diners were forced to squat or stand with their food. By February 1906, there were over fifty in operation, feeding 7,000 to 8,000 workers a day. Breakfast invariably consisted of coffee, bread, and porridge; lunch was usually bread, beans, and rice; supper was more bread with potatoes, soup, coffee, and perhaps some meat.

But if malnutrition declined, grumbling continued. The food served seems to have been indescribably awful. One sympathetic American called it “the leavings from the hotels … [which] are not fit to eat before they are leavings.” Barbadian John Butcher, who otherwise generally speaks well of his treatment on the Isthmus, described the rice he was given as “hard enough to shoot deers.” When they had meat, “many men spent an hour trying to chew or eventually threw [it] away because it was too hard.” Harrigan Austin remembered the food as “poorly prepared, almost raw.” But anyone who protested was arrested for bad behavior by the policemen sent to keep order in the kitchens at mealtimes.

In order to maximize the efficiency of their workers, the Commission sought to take more and more control over the lives of the West Indians. When he arrived at Colón at the beginning of 1906, Jules LeCurrieux was, at sixteen, even younger than Harrigan Austin. Although born in French Guiana, LeCurrieux's family had emigrated to Barbados, so he came under a Karner contract from Bridgetown. Straight off the steamer, the men were piled into railway freight trains for distribution along the line. “To our surprise,” wrote LeCurrieux, “we were unloaded off the train as animals and not men, and almost under strict guard to camps.”

These “camps” might have been of tents, like Harrigan Austin's, or simply boxcars from the railways, but LeCurrieux was deposited in one of the newly assembled workers’ barracks. This consisted of a separate toilet and a hut of about fifty by thirty feet. Into this space were crowded seventy-two men. No furniture, sheets, or pillows were provided. Jamaican journalist Henry de Lisser visited one of the barracks later that same year: “Inside the houses themselves you find groups of men seated round a box and playing cards; you find some listening to one of their number playing softly on a flute; you find others in bed,” he wrote. “These beds are canvas cots fixed onto iron standees which can open and shut as required. Each standee is about seven feet high, and has three cots hung on either side of it, each cot being six-and-a-half feet long by two-and-a-half feet wide … when they were all occupied the room cannot be the most pleasant place in the world to sleep in.” According to the “Jamaican carpenter,” “There is no privacy or quiet in the bachelor buildings … Some of the men are noisy at night and have no sense of decency …”

“We were taken to a kitchen,” continued Jules LeCurrieux, “and each of us were given 1 plate, 1 cup, 1 spoon, and a meal, then those utensils were ours—the price to be taken out of our first pay.” That same afternoon LeCurrieux was put to work with a gang in the Cut. His job was to drill twenty-foot-deep holes at the top of Gold Hill to be stuffed with dynamite to “tear the old hill down.”

When work finished for the day LeCurrieux was given a thirty-cent ticket, the value of which was taken from his pay. This entitled him to three meals and accommodation in the barracks. After two weeks he got his first wages, which he used to buy a pillow and blanket “and a few cakes of soap to wash our dishes and clothes.” “The discipline maintained in the labour camps is severe,” reported Mallet back to London. LeCurrieux remembers that at 9:00 p.m. an old piece of rail was knocked with a metal bar, signaling “go to bed, no sound.” At 5 :
00
a.m., they were awakened by more loud knocking, and after a hurried breakfast they were on a labor train by six. To keep the men at work, they were denied food or shelter if they could not produce the ticket that said they had labored that day. “This rule worked well and tended to drive out the undesirable class,” reported Stevens. No one was allowed in the barracks during working hours—you had to be on the job or in a hospital. Those who broke this rule were arrested and fined three days’ wages.

Furthermore, about once a week there were spot checks on those sleeping in the barracks, as the
Colón Independent
complained: “At midnight when everyone is asleep, suddenly the cry of ‘tickets’ is heard. The laborer, frightened out of his sleep, very often cannot remember at the moment what he has done with his ticket, and is hustled off to prison.” “This system has been adopted to keep loafers out of the camps,” continued the paper, “but it would be better to allow a few loafers to get in than that so many innocent men should suffer. The system is a rotten one and must be changed.”

grew careless last week,” wrote Jan van Hardeveld to his wife, Rose, in August 1905. “Before I realised it I was one sick hombre— stomach out of order and my blood full of malaria bugs.” There was better news—he had met a fellow Dutchman, Jan Milliery, who had been in South Africa during the Boer War and had subsequently worked as a track foreman. Milliery was experienced in life in the tropics and was a good cook. The two men were rooming together and had become firm friends.

Against the advice of her family, Rose had decided to take herself and her daughters out to Panama to join her husband. In the meantime, while they waited for quarters to become available, she had been reading up about the history of the canal dream, and the more she learned, the more she began to share her husband's enthusiasm. In his letters, Jan was frank about the difficulties—there had been little headway with the “real work,” the men were “dissatisfied,” the labor problems were “acute.” The resignation of Wallace had thrown everybody. But Jan had clearly not lost his faith: “The slowness of the work would be discouraging,” he wrote home in September, “if I were not certain that our Government can and will accomplish whatever it sets out to do. You know what I always say—in America, anything is possible …” In the same letter he told Rose that the quartermaster had at last assigned him married quarters. Two weeks later the family were on their way to Panama.

The voyage for Rose was accompanied by a mixture of seasickness, “deep foreboding,” and great excitement—at seeing Jan again and at the prospect of joining the canal effort. Everyone saved their best outfits for the landing at Colón. Jan was waiting for them and climbed aboard the ship to gather his family into his arms. “The children were shy,” remembered Rose. “They scarcely knew him at first. He was so very thin and burned to a deep brown.”

To the new arrivals Colón was as shocking and overwhelming as ever. The waving, feathery palm trees were as beautiful as Rose had imagined they would be, and the flowers “larger and brighter” than anything she had seen before. But the horses that drew the carriage to the railway station were “unbelievably mangy-looking,” there was a “foul smell” cloaking everything, and “naked brown children” playing on islands in a sea of rubbish, sewage, and greenish, filthy water. Once on the train Jan confessed that their intended house was not yet ready and they would be camping out for a few days in another one nearby.

Leaving the train at Las Cascadas, Rose found herself in the “blackest, darkest place I had ever been in. Not one flicker of light shone anywhere. We stumbled over a number of wet, slippery tracks and walked along a board walk until we reached the steps of the house,” obviously long unoccupied. Inside, furniture had been thrust through the door and left, and a large number of bats were living in the rafters. They had clearly been in residence for some years: “a penetrating stench, so vile it was almost unbearable” hit them as soon as they went inside. Black lizards with bright yellow heads scurried for cover. The first priority was to get the children to sleep. Jan and Rose assembled two beds, and covered them with a mosquito net as the house was unscreened. “By the time I had undressed Janey and Sister,” wrote Rose, “they were both sobbing forlornly.”

The next morning, as Jan ran for the labor train to take him to his post in the Cut building track for the excavators and spoil trains, Rose set about finding something to give the children to eat. Venturing out of the house, she was confronted with the sprawl of “dingy, nondescript houses” that constituted Las Cascadas, and was instantly “hot and uncomfortable … as though I was being smothered between wet, evil-smelling sponges.” She identified a shop run by a “bald-pated Chinese,” but he seemed to have little to sell except tinned butter, plantain, yams, and soggy, stale English biscuits. At a nearby meat stall, Rose turned away in disgust at the flyblown ribbons of beef. They ended up having fruit for breakfast, bought from a West Indian woman hawking from house to house a tray of oranges and bananas she carried on her head.

At lunchtime, Rose's husband returned accompanied by his Dutch friend Jan, who had been renamed “Jantje”—”Little Jan”—to avoid confusion. Rose learned that as Jantje was not an American citizen he had to find his own living quarters, and was still trying to find something suitable after three months on the Isthmus. His plan was to bring his new wife and their son, born the previous November, out to live with him in Panama, and he had already started the process of getting U.S. citizenship.