Panama fever (78 page)

Another protestor, Henry W Scott, proved more of a handful. In early January 1910, he complained that he had been denied a foreman position in the Pacific Division because, he was told, “he was colored and not eligible for employment on the Gold Roll.” Utterly fed up, he now wanted a job in Panama City, where the “prejudice feeling” did not exist “as on the Canal Zone.” “My father having performed distinguished service in the Civil War. And on behalf of the twelve million American colored people and taxpayers, I most respectfully make application for one of the above places,” he ended. But he had also been in touch with his senator back in the States, Wesley L. Jones, who, it turned out, had fought with his father in the Civil War. Jones wrote to Goethals, “Mr. Scott is part colored but I understand he is a young man of splendid ability.”

Goethals had to tread carefully. Not only was the racial segregation of the Zone legally dubious, but also the Republican Party had sold itself as the defender of the blacks. He wrote back to the senator on January 24, 1910: “The fact of his being an American citizen does not entitle him to employment on the gold roll, as employment on the gold and silver rolls, respectively, depends entirely upon the class of work our employees do and not upon their nationality or color.”

Cases like this highlight the confusions, contradictions, and hypocrisy of the Gold/Silver distinction. Happily for the authorities, the number of these awkward American blacks continued to dwindle. In July 1912 there were only sixty-nine at work for the ICC. The following year, only fifteen remained and this threat to the “logic” of the system was almost gone.

ater generations of Panamanian Antilleans, when looking at the actions of the American blacks or the Spaniards, would accuse their West Indian “silvermen” fathers and grandfathers of passivity during the construction period in the face of poor working conditions and the discriminatory policies of the canal authorities. Certainly, there would be no organized West Indian labor resistance until well after the canal was finished and the workforce much depleted. But many factors weighed against concerted labor action during the construction period. For one thing, there was still a surplus of labor on the islands. At the end of 1907 over two thousand men were actually laid off at the completion of the building work, and by the end of 1909 Karner could pack up his recruiting operation in Barbados as labor needs were more than being met by independent emigration. The result was a pool of some five thousand unemployed and usually desperate West Indians living in Colón or elsewhere from which the ICC could draw as and when it liked. As the
Star and Herald
noted, every man had “the knowledge that there are ten hungry applicants for each vacancy who will like the conditions well enough.” Furthermore, there was little tradition of organized labor in the islands, and the West Indian community was, for now, divided by loyalty to individual islands.

The West Indians were also kept in line by the vigorous and often violent efforts of the Zone police to punish even the mildest infringement. If this was not enough to curtail organized action, there was the daily struggle to make ends meet when often three-quarters of a wage would have to be spent on rent. There was also the exhausting fight against malaria, pneumonia, other diseases, and the effects of accidents. The West Indian accounts nearly all tell of at least one stay in the hospital, often many more. By 1914, Gorgas's sanitation squads had drained more than a hundred square miles of swamp through the building of nearly two thousand miles of ditches and drains. But although infection and mortality rates kept on falling, malaria and its recurring symptoms of agonizing fever and shaking, followed by mind-numbing lethargy, would continue to affect many of the inhabitants of the Zone. In 1914, nearly half the workforce, over 24,000 people, were admitted to the hospital at some time during the year for a variety of illnesses or accidents.

The two simplest explanations for the lack of West Indian protest or action against the ICC's regime were provided by a resident of Colón, Mr. Foster Burns, who in 2004 was 104 years old. First, he said plainly, the men wanted and needed the money. However it looks now, work on the canal was the best get-rich (or at least stop-being-hungry) scheme on offer. Second, the men were so busy working that they had no time or energy left for anything else. This certainly rings true. Although most American employees—with the exception of a few foremen and doctors—were limited to an eight-hour day by a law of Congress, Stevens had secured a special clause exempting “alien” labor on the canal from this stipulation, so the West Indians worked ten hours a day for six days a week. And this was before overtime (often compulsory and unpaid) and the journey to and from work.

The actual labor was usually backbreaking, and frequently carried out, of course, in very difficult conditions. There were few cushy jobs available to the black workers. Albert Peters tells of how being assigned to a dredge involved having to continually dive into the muddy, slimy water to free the suction pump. In the burning heat or ankle-deep mud of “Hell's Gorge,” thousands carried heavy and dangerous dynamite boxes, manned the largest and most violent drills ever seen, and stoked suffocating, red-hot steam furnaces on shovels or locomotives. And from 1909 onward, an increasing proportion of the laborers were working on the giant locks—the “concrete cathedrals”—being built at either end of the central “bridge of water.” Here the work was, if anything, even more dangerous and unpleasant than in the Cut.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“LORD HOW PIERCING!”

It had been the “monstrous experiment” of the plan for the Gatún Dam that had attracted most criticism in the United States. In fact, there was nothing unprecedented about the dam apart from its scale. More justified were worries about its siting—over two deep geological gorges filled with dubious alluvial material. The plan was to block the Chagres valley at Gatún with an enormous, essentially earth structure one and a half miles long. The height was adjusted in the course of the building, but ended up being 115 feet above sea level, 30 feet above the planned level of the lake at 85 feet above sea level. At its top it was to be 100 feet wide, then 500 feet at the lake's surface and almost half a mile wide at the bottom. Between the two gorges across the dam site was a hill of solid rock, which would serve to anchor the structure and to provide the site for the spillway, through which the waters of the Chagres would be funneled and thence flow to the sea at San Lorenzo. Consisting of a convex wall 800 feet long and nearly 100 feet high, the spillway was to be the new jailer of the formidable Chagres River. For the planned locks to work properly, it was important that the level of the new river should not deviate from its 85-foot level by more than 2 feet. Within the wall of the spillway were a series of openings with massive steel gates. When all the gates were lifted, the spillway could cope with a discharge of 182,000 feet per second, judged to be the worst that the Chagres could throw at it. Next to the spillway a hydroelectric station was planned, to generate enough electrical current from the falling water to supply all the canal's energy needs. The triple-tiered double locks would be built at the dam's eastern end.

The dam itself was well suited to the height and length requirements of the chosen site, but more important it was to be constructed largely of the materials excavated from elsewhere along the canal line. A dam in concrete would have been equally feasible, but a great deal more expensive. Earth dams are not complex structures and are sometimes also referred to as gravity dams, because that is exactly how they perform; the resultant lake is held back purely by the huge mass of the dam and thus the friction at the base between the dam structure and the existing ground on which it is founded. The principle of earth dams is based on the fact that most clays are impervious. To construct such a dam, one builds in layers. First, outer walls of hard rock are laid down on both the upstream and downstream faces. This is to hold the earth and clay filler in the construction phase, but also to protect against scour in the permanent case (from the lake on the upstream face and storm water on the downstream). The next layer inside both faces is then normally constructed of soil and smaller rocks/stones, and then the central core is composed exclusively of appropriate clay. The clay can either be placed “dry” and compacted using rollers, or liquefied and pumped in. As the slurry drains and dries it will harden and become impervious.

At first all went well. To prevent organic matter forming a potentially porous layer under the dam, the six-hundred-acre site had to be meticulously cleared of its rich cover of tropical jungle. This task was completed by the end of 1907, and the dam site was barren. It reminded one visitor of the scene of a battle in some unimaginable war to come: “an ugly denuded waste of land … stubble was everywhere, and standing out like pockmarks were hundreds of black ash heaps where the greenery had been burned. Across this soggy wasteland … a dredge in the Chagres sucked mud from one place and vomited it into another; and dynamite crews sent up enormous geysers of rock and water. Men in gangs of forty to a hundred swarmed about the valley, all in the blue shirts and khaki trousers of the Zone Commissary, while the air was filled with the babel of more than twenty languages.” As well as the dam site, it was necessary to clear all the large trees from the future route of the shipping lane through Lake Gatún. Barbadian Edgar Simmons described this process: up to fifteen holes were cut in the trunks of the trees, which were then stuffed with explosives: “Three sticks of dynamite, with a cap and coil, about 18 inches long, and covered with mud. So all are set for evening,” he wrote. “After the 5:15 passenger train pass for Panama, we start lighting. Some of us has up to 65 or 72 holes to light… Nine of us start out, each one with two sticks of fire in our hand, running and lighting, at the same time trying to clear ourselves before the first set begin bursting on us. Then it's like Hell… it was something to watch seeing the pieces of trees flying in the air.”

In 1907 the Chagres flowed through four routes to the sea: its old riverbed, the French canal, and the two diversion channels the French had built either side of their waterway. All four flowed through the site of the new dam. The Western Diversion was the lowest and this was widened and deepened, while the other three channels were dammed without any complications. The plan was to start work on the eastern end of the dam and the spillway, and then close the West Diversion when it was time for the river to be diverted through the spillway.