Farnham Bishop

“ Some day humanity may become sufficiently civilized to establish universal peace. But until then, we must not forget that Panama has always been seized and held by the strong hand. The Isthmus to-day is a thousand times richer and more tempting a prize than it was in the time of Drake or Morgan, and though piracy has gone out of fashion, war has not. When we can turn the regular army into a police force, sell the navy for old iron, and take the big guns from Sandy Hook and the Golden Gate, we can leave the Panama Canal to be protected by the Zone Police,—but not before then. ”

“ He goes to the spot, sees what is needed, gives a plain, direct order, and gets results instead of excuses. Every morning in the week he goes out on the line, not as his French predecessor did, in a private car drawn by a locomotive, but in a swift automobile mounted on flanged wheels, that looks like a taxicab disguised as a switch-engine. This motor-car is painted the regulation light yellow of Panama Railroad passenger-coaches, and you can scare a shirker out of a wet-season's growth by yelling, "Here comes the Yellow Peril!" ”

“ He watches and cares for his men as a trainer cares for his athletes, he has coached and drilled them till the forty thousand move together with the smooth team-play of a champion team; and he has breathed into the whole great organization the fighting spirit of its captain. He has proved himself a born fighter and leader of men, not by the number of lives he has taken—for he has never been to war—but by the battles he has won against the desert and the jungle. ”

“ Though the soil is not rich, the heat and moisture cause plants to grow with incredible speed and rankness. Fence-posts sprout and become young trees. The stone-ballasted roadbed of the Panama Railroad has to be sprayed twice a month with crude oil to keep down the weeds. On either side of the track for the greater part of the way across the Isthmus stretches unbroken jungle, rising like a wall at the edge of the cuttings, or lying like a great, green sea below the embankments. It is a thoroughly satisfactory jungle, every bit as good as the pictures in the school geographies. ”

“ Moreover, if yellow fever or any other dangerous disease were ever again allowed to break out there, after Panama has become one of the great highways of the world, the Canal might easily prove as great a curse to humanity as it promises to be a blessing, for then ships would carry the sickness all too swiftly to all parts of the earth. Few physicians have ever had laid upon them a heavier burden or a more sacred trust than that of the chief sanitary officer of the Canal Zone, and all the world knows how well General Gorgas has discharged it. ”

“ Everywhere trim little concrete lighthouses, looking strange enough in the jungle, are being built, or, rather, cast in one piece, on wooded hilltops that will soon be islands.
Already the yellow water is rapidly backing up, as the dam and the spillway gates are being raised. You can mark the spread of the lake by the gray of the dying, drowned-out trees against the green of the living jungle. Only in the channel and the anchorage basin has Gatun Lake been cleared of timber, and the greater part of it will be a mass of stumps and snags. ”

“ When the Spaniards tried to drive them away by killing off the wild cattle, these fierce cowboys of the sea began to hunt the Spaniards. Paddling up astern of a becalmed galleon in their dug-out canoes, the bucaneers would put an ounce ball from one of their long, heavy muskets into every head that showed at a port-hole or over the rail; then, wedging the rudder fast, they would swarm on board with knife and cutlass. Soon they were capturing Spanish ships of war and cities, and they helped the British government under Cromwell turn the island of Jamaica from a Spanish into an English colony. ”

“ How it must have wrung the cruel old miser's heart to see the ship loads of silver and gold that came up from the mines of Peru, to be carried across the Isthmus on the way to Spain. For it was this treasure-trade with Peru that made the wealth and glory of Old Panama. ”

“ Most important of all, the Indians there used no poisoned arrows.
At once Enciso and Balboa, with a hundred men-at-arms, crossed to the western shore, where five hundred warriors were drawn up to meet them. Kneeling devoutly on the beach, the Spaniards vowed that if victorious they would dedicate both the spoils and their first settlement to the shrine, much reverenced in Seville, of Santa Maria de la Antigua. Then, rising, they rushed like starving wolves on the Indians. There was no poison in their arrows, and those that were not cut down in the first charge fled at once. ”

“ On the side of Ancon Hill, a small volcano, extinct since prehistoric times, between the port of Balboa and the city of Panama, is the American settlement of Ancon. It is a very beautiful town, that has no named or numbered streets, but is like a garden laid out in terraces with pretty little houses here and there, and a big red-tiled administration building for the Governor, and the Canal Commissioners. Here, too, is the Ancon Hospital, built by the French, and a large hotel, called the Tivoli, that is run by the United States Government through the War Department. ”

“ The cargoes of all these barges are snatched up by giant unloader-cranes and put into storehouses, out of which, like chicks from a brooder, run intelligent little electric cars that need no motormen, but climb of themselves up into the top story of the dusty mixing-house. Here, eight huge rotary mixers churn the three elements, cement, sand, and stone, into concrete, and drop it wetly into great skips or buckets, two of which sit on each car of a somewhat larger-sized system of electric trains, whose tracks run along one side of the lock-pits. ”

“ He was more than seventy years old, and though he knew very little about technical engineering, his success at Suez and the praise of flatterers made him believe that he was the greatest engineer in the world. As he had dominated the Congress, so he ruled the Canal Company, absolutely and blindly. Ignoring the great differences between the level, rainless sands of one isthmus, and the rocky hills and flooded jungles of the other, de Lesseps declared that "the Panama Canal will be more easily begun, finished, and maintained than the Suez Canal." ”

“ Most formidable of all will be the gigantic sixteen-inch gun, now at Sandy Hook, that can throw a shell, capable of sinking the stoutest dreadnaught, for more than twenty miles. Without these forts to keep them at a respectful distance, a few blockading vessels would have our fleet at their mercy as it came down the narrow channel in single column, or they might bombard the locks at Miraflores or Gatun. ”

“ From the great storehouse at Mount Hope, every morning a long train of refrigerator-cars crosses the Isthmus, and brings fresh supplies to the hotels and local commissaries in all the camps and towns. A bachelor, quartered in a hotel, comes down from his comfortably furnished room that costs him nothing, to a meal that costs him thirty cents, and which he would be lucky to get in New York for less than a dollar. ”

“ To make it worse, many houses were set on fire by revengeful negro and Indian slaves. By the time Morgan's men had stormed the batteries that defended the bridges, a strong sea breeze was sweeping the flames through the town. Both the bucaneers and the citizens tried to stop the fire, blowing up some of the houses in its path and tearing down others, but by the next morning, Old Panama was a heap of ashes. ”

“ The Panama Canal will bring our Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and the whole Mississippi Valley much nearer China, Australia, and New Zealand, all hungry for American steel and coal and manufactured goods. Then there is the trade with South America, which proved so much more valuable than that of the west coast of North America, in the early days of the Panama Railroad. But though the South Americans like our reapers and binders and other machinery, and are beginning to wear our ready-made clothes and shoes, they do not like our stupid, bad-mannered ways of doing business with them. ”

“ But not many weeks later, one of these same men in lace and satin staggered through the streets of Antigua, begging in vain for a morsel of food, and finally dropped dead in the sight of all. There was not enough food for such a multitude, and besides, the newcomers died by hundreds of the fevers. This is probably why Pedrarias did not at once put Balboa to death, under the pretext of what he had done to Nicuesa and Enciso. For although he was bitterly jealous of Balboa's success, Pedrarias realized that the other's men were seasoned veterans, and his own were sickly recruits. ”

“ Then they move up the great steam-shovels to dig out the shattered rock with their sharp-toothed steel "dippers" that can pick up five cubic yards or eight tons, at a time. Think how bulky a ton of coal looks in the cellar, and then imagine eight times that much being lifted in the air, swung across a railroad track, and dropped on a flat-car, as easily as a grocer's clerk would scoop up a pound of sugar and pour it into a paper bag. ”

“ But Pedrarias lived long enough to do more evil than any other man who ever came to the New World, before or since.
The news of Balboa's first successes brought in recruits, who were particularly attracted by the tale of a river so full of gold that the Indians strained it out with nets. Fully fifteen hundred crowded into the ships, instead of the twelve hundred sought for. Light wooden shields and quilted cotton jackets took the place of the steel armor that must have killed more men with sunstroke than it saved from the Indians' arrows. ”

“ Space was cleared for the erection of a storehouse, but so unhealthy was the low, swampy coral island, awash at high tide, and breeding swarms of malaria-spreading mosquitos, that the force were obliged to live on the two-hundred ton brig that had brought them and their supplies from New York. When Colonel Totten and Mr. Stephens, who had been made president of the company, arrived with more laborers from Cartagena, the little brig became uncomfortably overcrowded, and was replaced with the hull of a condemned steamer, the Telegraph, brought round from the mouth of the Chagres. ”

“ Sooner or later, there will be another "gold-rush"; a stampede of white men across this last frontier, outrages, treachery, and massacres on both sides, which the feeble Republic of Panama will be powerless to prevent, and which may force the armed intervention of the United States. Let us hope this may never come to pass. But it is not easy to keep white men on one side of a border, when there is gold on the other. As they were before Columbus came, so the Darien Indians are to-day, within fifty miles of where we are living in electric-lighted houses, and building the Panama Canal. ”

“ As the Panamanians were not strong enough to win independence, nor the Bogotá government to keep good order, every revolution either degenerated into brigandage, or was stopped by American intervention. For the burden of this disorder fell not so heavily on the habitants of a region where there are no industries, and a poor man can gather a week's food in half an hour's walk through the jungle, as on the foreign merchants and traders, particularly the American-owned Panama Railroad. ”

“ Trains of dump cars stood rusting on sidings, or lay tumbled in heaps at the bottom of embankments. In one place, over fifty vine-covered locomotives can be counted at the edge of the jungle, from which the Americans dug out miles of narrow-gage track, cars, engines, and even a whole lost town. ”

“ Instead of running north and south, as you would naturally suppose, the Isthmus runs almost due east and west. That is because South America lies much farther to the east than most of us realize; so much so, that if an airship were to fly far enough in a bee line from New York to the south, it would find itself over the Pacific, off the coast of Peru. At Panama, the Pacific, instead of being west of the Atlantic, is southeast of it. That is why the Spaniards, coming overland to this new ocean from the one they had left on the north, called it the "South Sea." ”

“ But when a strong fleet from Cartagena attacked the town there were very few healthy men left in it, and the colonists were glad to accept the generous terms offered and leave the country. So weak were most of them that the Spaniards had to help them hoist their sails.
So ended the attempt to plant a colony in Darien. It failed for two reasons: the lack of a leader among the Scotch, and the short-sighted jealousy of the English. It was no love of Spain, who had ceased to be her ally, but selfish fear for her own trade, that set England's face against the struggling Scotch colony. ”

“ Here the rich citizens of Panama City spend the dry season, in primitive shacks, all doors and no windows, that an American dry-goods clerk would turn up his nose at for a week-end camp. But even the poorest of them has plenty of grounds round it and a more or less elaborate gateway, and if you do not go near enough to notice the sickly chickens peeking round the touring-car in the drive, and the fat women in loose wrappers shading themselves on the veranda, the effect is not so bad. ”

“ HOW COLUMBUS SOUGHT FOR THE STRAIT
IF you go to Panama by ship from one of our Atlantic ports, the first land you will see is Watling's Island, or San Salvador, where Columbus caught his first glimpse of the New World in 1492. We know that this is one of the Bahamas, but Columbus died in the belief that it was an island off the coast of Asia. For though he rightly supposed the world to be round so that by sailing long enough to the west you could reach the east, neither he nor any one else in Europe at the time realized how long a voyage that would be. ”