Panama fever (65 page)

s the painstaking work to prepare the “canal-digging machine” continued, the leadership of the project sought to take control in other ways as well, to create the best, the most efficient environment for the enormous task undertaken. Stevens's argument with West Indian workers was not just that they were slow and incompetent but also that they were part of a “prevailing clannishness” that needed to be broken up. In fact, the black workers—usually lumped together as “Jamaicans”—were far from being the homogeneous body that Stevens feared, consisting instead of a great variety of nationalities and cultures. And even among the British West Indians, as opposed to those from French-, Dutch-, or Spanish-speaking areas, there was little fellow feeling among the nationals from the various islands; instead there was competitiveness and distrust. One of the complaints of the “Jamaican Carpenter” about the ICC barracks was the mixing they had to put up with: “There is no sense in putting so many different races together—Jamaicans and Bims [Barbadians] and Martiniques in the same room. It is not right.”

But to the American leadership they were all just a collective black mass, and one, furthermore, that felt itself indispensable to the canal effort. According to Stevens, “some sort of hazy idea had gotten into their heads” that they “controlled the labor market.” To put them in their place (as well as to find better-working men), Stevens decided to carry through his idea, mooted at the end of 1905, to bring in “laborers of other races and different characteristics.” In February 1906, nearly three hundred Galicians and other Spaniards were shipped to Panama from Cuba, where they had been working on railway construction. Thus they brought the track-laying skills that were vital for Stevens's transport revolution on the Isthmus. The chief engineer monitored the new men carefully, deciding that “one of them will do and is doing, as much work as three of our West Indian negro laborers.” So, although Karner was to keep his work going in Barbados as well as in other islands, in mid-1906 the ICC set up recruiting agencies in Madrid and Rome and started importing European laborers. Spaniards were the first preference, but Stevens had decided that he wanted at least “three separate nationalities of laborers … so that none of them will get the idea that they are the sole source of supply on earth.”

Over the next two years, some 12,000 Europeans were brought in on ICC contracts: 8,200 from Spain, 2,000 from Italy (largely from impoverished Sicily and Sardinia), and 1,100 from Greece, where another agency was set up in 1907. Typically, the men were contracted for three-year tours. Unlike the West Indians, the Europeans were expected to pay their own passage. The fare—a whopping $45—was deducted from their pay and there was no guaranteed repatriation. However, they were offered twenty cents an hour, as opposed to the ten-cent rate of the Karner contract. The reasoning went that it was worth paying twice as much for workers who were three times more productive.

For some in Madrid it was an illustration of how far the nation's fortunes had fallen that Spanish men were to return as lowly workers to a country once the crossroads of their great empire. The indignity was almost too much to bear: “If America needed common laborers, let her seek [them] among her own people,” wrote one national newspaper. “The American is too proud to work with his hands! He must work with his head, and Spain must be her hands! Spain refuses to be the hands of an American head!”

Nonetheless, there were plenty of takers for the chance of leaving Spain behind. The country had seen some of the worst anarchist violence in Europe, and with industry and agriculture depressed, there were widespread unemployment and hardship, made worse by a string of influenza epidemics. There had been large-scale recent emigration from Spain to Cuba and elsewhere, and now, the stories went, the best money to be made was in Panama. Antonio Sanchez was different from the typical emigrant in that at thirty-five he was older than most, and had once been reasonably well off. He still owned a fruit and olive farm at Valero de la Sierra, in the province of Salamanca, but prices had fallen too low to make the business viable. When disease and famine carried away his wife and two daughters, Sanchez decided to leave his surviving nine-year-old son behind with grandparents and take his chances in Panama, where, he had heard, “everything was gold and all things were as sweet as honey.” “Everybody in his area was so scared of disease,” Sanchez's stepson explained. “His farm was worthless; he just had to try his luck somewhere else. He had to leave.” With about a dozen friends from Salamanca, Sanchez sailed from the port of Vigo; he would never return to Spain nor see his son again.

Sanchez's first impression of Panama was that he had exchanged one site of
“peste”
for another. “It was not a livable place,” he explained to his stepson years later. But the Americans, determined to avoid the problems they had suffered with the West Indians, had pulled out all the stops for the new arrivals. Relatively comfortable barracks had been built of similar size to the West Indians’ but housing only twenty-five people each, rather than seventy-two. Castilian Spanish were carefully kept separate from Galicians as, Sanchez explained, “they hated each other.” Special kitchens were constructed for them. Unlike the West Indians, the Europeans got chairs and tables. Most important, every effort had been made to provide familiar food such as potatoes and spicy Spanish sausage. They were even given wine at lunch in the European manner.

For now, all this looked justified, as the Americans assessed their new workers. “Not only are they more than twice as efficient as the negroes, but they cope better with the climate,” gushed the 1906 ICC annual report. “The Spaniard is certainly the more intelligent and better worker,” wrote a visiting journalist. Furthermore, the influx seemed to have fulfilled its other purpose as well: “It did exactly what was expected in changing the self-confidence of the negroes,” Stevens later wrote. “From an amusing but embarrassing attitude of self-complacency, they soon exhibited the aspect of men who were afraid of losing their jobs, and their value increased accordingly.”

According to Antonio Sanchez there was mutual respect and affection between the Americans and the Europeans during the construction period. Relations with the blacks, however, were strained from the outset. “The Europeans hated them,” Sanchez remembered. It was partly the language problem: “Every time one of them said something the other would take it as an insult, and vice versa. There were a lot of fights. With fists, shovels …” Stevens's plan to divide and rule the workforce seems to have succeeded.

n May 1906, an American journalist, told of the decision to recruit Europeans based on the success of the first shipment from Cuba in early February, went to investigate these paragons of efficiency himself. Assigned to track work in the Cut, the Spaniards had been quartered nearby in unscreened barracks close to marshland. “Toward the end of the first fortnight, they began to fall ill,” the journalist discovered. After four weeks, 165 of the 270 had been hospitalized, over 60 percent, “practically all with malaria.”

During the headline-grabbing yellow fever epidemic of May to August 1905, 48 people had died of the disease. But during the same period twice as many had died of malaria, 49 from pneumonia, 57 from chronic diarrhea, and 46 from dysentery. The mortality rate for the year, not including accidents, was 24.3 per thousand. In 1906, this number would jump to 39.29, the highest level of the U.S. construction era. This is nothing like the 70-per-thousand rate suffered by the French during their annus horribilis of 1885, but it is still higher than anything under the New Company in the 1890s.

The dry start to the year gave no indication of what was to come. But with the onset of the rains in mid-May, and the transformation once again of the Isthmus into, as Mary Chatfield wrote to a friend, “driving rain and muddy, muddy, much muddy, mud,” both malaria and pneumonia struck hard. In June, of the three hundred marines deployed near Panama City for the Panamanian election, more than half came down with malaria. By the end of the month, Ancón hospital was admitting seventy-five people a day with the disease. “This rainy season has been a heavy trial on the canal builders, the railroad and the sanitarians,” read a dispatch from Panama to the
New York Daily Herald.
“There has been a riot of malaria, all departments being hampered by having so many men in the hospital.” In July, the black workers suddenly started dying from pneumonia at a rate of eighty a month. By November, there had been nearly four hundred fatalities from the disease, along with two hundred from malaria.

But the number of deaths from malaria does not tell the whole story. Although debilitating, the disease was rarely fatal, at least on its first attack, but in 1906 the cases that came to the attention of the medical system numbered nearly twenty-two thousand. Joseph Le Prince estimated that an astonishing 80 percent of the overall workforce was hospitalized at some point during the one year for malaria alone. The fallout rate of the Spanish pioneers from Cuba was not so bad after all.

This sort of rate of attrition meant that life in the field, out on the mosquito-ridden works, was a desperate, bewildering struggle. “You turn up to work in the morning with a gang about 125 men and by Eleven clock you will find about 40 men all the others fall down with malaria,” remembered West Indian Rufus Forde. “They spin all around like a top before they fall and that get you so frighten that at some times you don't come back after dinner.” Benjamin Jordan, the Barbadian who had lied about his age to get selected for an ICC contract, contracted malaria within weeks of arriving on the Isthmus. “I can't describe them,” he says of the mosquitoes. “I hear ‘woo’ and they are into you.” Malaria, he says, “took me at night… in the morning when I woke I couldn't get out of bed. But I did manage it, I got out, and my neighbour advised me to go to hospital. When I was discharged was deaf as bat… Malaria and the mosquito brother were top.”

A number of the West Indian accounts are full of praise for the hospital care they received once they had, almost inevitably, come down with one of the prevalent diseases. Jamaican James Williams, in his early teens, worked in a kitchen at San Pablo, on the banks of the Chagres River, “where mosquitoes were frequent, especially at nights. Consequently I began to get fever.” The following day a doctor was visiting and someone told him that Williams was ill. “The doctor immediately advanced to me and felt my pulse. I could remember he said to me ‘You are going to be sick, boy, go up to the hospital right a way.’ He further asked me, ‘Are you a God fearing man?’ I replied, ‘Yes,’” recalled Williams. “He said to me ‘You are going to die.’”