Willis J. Abbot

“ Under the red lights at midnight Panama shows its worst. Men of varied voyages, familiar with the slums of Singapore and the purlieus of Paris declare that this little city of a hybrid civilization outdoes them in all that makes up the fevered life of the underworld. Scarcely a minute’s walk away is the American town, quiet and restful under the tropic moon, its winding streets well guarded by the Zone police, its houses wrapped in vines and fragrant with flowers all dark in the hours of repose. ”

“ Unlike the Pacific, too, the tide is inconsiderable. At Panama it rises and falls from seventeen to twenty feet, and, retiring, leaves long expanses of unsightly mud flats, but the Caribbean always plays its part in the landscape well. Unhappily this picturesque street—called Roosevelt Avenue—is about to lose its beauty, for its water front is to be taken for the great new docks, and already at some points one sees the yellow stacks of ocean liners mingling with the fronded tops of the palms. ”

“ In Panama everybody joins in the sport. The line of carriages around the park in the Plaza Centrale, thence by the Avenida to the Plaza Santa Ana and back is unbroken. The confetti falls like a January snow and the streets are ankle deep. Everyone is in mask and you can never tell whether the languishing eyes peering out upon you are set in a face of pearl or of ebony. The noise of innumerable horns and rattles rises to Heaven and reverberates in the narrow streets, while the bells jangle out of tune, as is their custom. ”

“ So with the Panama Canal approaching completion we can see that its effects are to be manifold—domestic as well as foreign, moral as well as material, political as well as economic. If it be properly conducted in its completed state, managed and directed upon the broad principle that, though paid for wholly by the United States, it is to exist for the general good of all mankind, it should be, in the ages to come, the greatest glory attached to the American flag. In abolishing human slavery we only followed last in the train of all civilized nations. ”

“ But in the congested tangle of concrete houses between the hospitals and the cemetery madness and mirth reign, brains reel with the fumes of the strange drinks of the tropics, and life is worth a passing pleasure—nothing more. Men of many lands have cursed the Chagres fever and the jungle’s ills, but the pest place of Panama has been subjected to no purging process with all the efforts of the United States to banish evil from the Isthmus. ”

“ You will get some faint idea of the toll of life taken in this conflict if from Cristobal you will drive out to the picturesque cemetery at Mount Hope and look upon the almost interminable vista of little white headstones. Each marks the last resting place of some poor fellow fallen in the war with fever, malaria and all of tropic nature’s fierce and fatal allies against all conquering man. That war is never ended. The English and the Spaniards have laid down their arms. Cimmaroon and conquistadore, pirate and buccaneer no longer steal stealthily along the narrow jungle trails. ”

“ Nothing at home is free—coal, light, rent, and medical service least of all. Where Jack used to be lordly, he must be parsimonious; where he once bought untaxed in the markets of the world, he must buy in the most expensive of all market places, the United States. He absolutely cannot maintain at home the standard of life he adopted here, and the change with the endless little economies and pettinesses it entails gets on the nerves of both husband and wife. To start life thriftily and learn to be free-handed as prosperity increases is the natural line of development and does not mar happiness. ”

“ Here then the Canal ends. Begun in the ooze of Colon it is finished in the basaltic rock of Balboa. To carry it through its fifty miles the greatest forces of nature have been utilized when possible; fought and overcome when not. It has enlisted genius, devotion and sacrifice, and has inflicted sickness, wounds and death. We can figure the work in millions of dollars, or of cubic yards, but to estimate the cost in life and health from the time the French began until the day the Americans ended is a task for the future historian, not the present-day chronicler. ”

“ At Gatun, the canal which has been carried through the artificial lake made by damming the Chagres River, turns sharply away from that water course on the way to the new port of Balboa. The six or eight miles of the tropical river which we are to traverse have been untouched by the activities of the canal builders. The sluggish stream flows between walls of dense green jungle, as silent as though behind their barrier only a mile or two away there were not men by the thousands making great flights of aquatic steps to lift the world’s ocean carriers over the hills. ”

“ Here the precipitous sides of the Canal have vanished, and the walls of the lock have in fact to be built up above the adjacent land. This is the end of the Central Division—the end of the Culebra Cut. The 8.8 miles we have left behind us have been the scene, perhaps, of the most wonderful exercise of human ingenuity, skill and determination ever manifested in any equal space in the world—and I won’t even except Wall Street, where ingenuity and skill in cutting things down are matter of daily observation. But nowhere else has man locked with nature in so desperate a combat. ”

“ Orchids in more delicate shades, orchids that would set Fifth Avenue agog, are here to be had for a few blows of a machete. It is a riot and a revel of color—as gay as the decorations of some ancient arena before the gladiatorial combats began. For life here is a steady battle too, a struggle between man and the jungle and woe to the man who invades the enemy’s country alone or strays far from the trail, shadowy and indistinct as that may be.
“A man ought to be able to live quite a while lost in the jungle,” said a distinguished magazine writer who was with me on the upper Chagres once. ”

“ The human cockfight brings loud applause which attains its apogee when some spectator at the critical moment with a shrill cock-a-doodle-doo displays an egg. A ship in the tropics is the truest of playgrounds. We are beginning to feel the content of just living which characterizes the native of the tropics. Indeed when the deck is cleared and waxed, and the weather cloths and colored lights brought forth for the ball, most of the men who left New York full of energy find themselves too languid to participate. ”

“ The school system of Panama must be regarded merely as a nucleus from which a larger organism may grow. Yet when one recalls the state of society which has resulted from revolutions in other Central American states, one is impelled to a certain admiration for the promptitude with which the men who erected the Republic of Panama gave thought to the educational needs of people. They were suddenly put in authority over an infant state which had no debt, but, on the contrary, possessed a capital of $10,000,000 equivalent to about $30 for every man, woman and child of its population. ”

“ The railroad then crossed upon this dyke to the western side of the Canal and passed through several construction towns and villages, abandoned later when the Canal was filled and the railroad moved to the other side. Tourists with an eye for the spectacular used to stand on this dyke and speculate upon the thrilling sight when a huge blast of dynamite should rend the barrier, and in a mighty wave the waters of Gatun Lake should rush down the broad channel betwixt the eternal hills to make at last the long desired waterway from Orient to Occident. ”

“ He heard the strident clink, clink of the drills eating their way into the rock; the shrill whistles of the locomotives giving warning of some small blast, for the great charges [211] were set off out of working hours when the Cut was empty; the constant and uninterrupted rumble that told of the dirt trains ever plying over the crowded tracks; the heavy crash that accompanied the dumping of a six-ton boulder onto a flat car; the clanking of chains and the creaking of machinery as the arms of the steam shovels swung around looking for another load; the cries of men, and the booming of blasts. ”

“ All the other activities of life are conducted in the open—cooking, eating, sewing, gossiping. A yard is the most social place imaginable, and the system not only contributes to health by keeping people in the open air, adds to the gayety of life by grouping so many black families in one corral, reduces the high cost of living as our model tenements never can hope to, but makes one black landlord independent, for the possession of a yard with its rooms all rented leaves nothing needed for enjoyment except a phonograph and an ample supply of the rum for which the island is famous. ”

“ For an American not too much spoiled with foreign travel the city of Panama is a most entertaining stopping place for a week or more. In what its charm consists it is hard to say. Foreign it is, of course, a complete change from anything within the borders, or for that matter close to the bounds of the United States. But it is not so thorough a specimen of Latin-American city building as Cartagena, its neighbor. Its architecture is admittedly commonplace, the Cathedral itself being interesting mainly because of its antiquity—and it would be modern in old Spain. ”

“ As you make your way through the jungle you will now and again come upon miniature roads, only about four inches wide it is true, but vastly smoother and better cleaned of vegetation than the paths which the Panamanians dignify with the name of roads. Along these highways trudges an endless army of ants, those going homeward bearing burdens of leaves which, when buried in their subterranean homes, produce fungi on which the insects live. Out on the savanna you will occasionally find a curious mound of hard dirt, sometimes standing taller than a man and rising abruptly from the plain. ”

“ For even the dulling mists of the interposing centuries, even our feeling that the Spaniards suffered only the anguish and the torments which they had themselves meted out to the real owners of the lands they had seized upon, cannot wholly blunt the sense of pity for the women and children, for the husbands and fathers in the city which fell under Morgan’s blight. It would be no easy task to gather in the worst purlieus of any American city today a band so wholly lost to shame, to pity and to God as the ruffians who followed Morgan. ”

“ Back and forth through narrow gates, in and out of vaulted chambers, down dark passages behind twenty-foot walls you wander, with but little idea of the topography of the place until you come to a little watch tower jutting out at one corner of the wall. Here the land falls away sharply a hundred feet or more to the sea and you understand why the buccaneers were forced to attack from the landward side, though as you were scaling that toilsome slope you wondered that any race of humans ever dared attack it at all. ”

“ How swiftly and efficiently American manufacturers and jobbers will seize upon the new conditions and avail themselves of this opening of new fields is yet to be determined. The enemies of a protective tariff are not the only ones who hold that it has had the [391] result of dulling the keen spirit of adventurous enterprise for which our people were once noted. The absolute possession of a home market ever growing in size and into which no foreigner could enter with any hope of successful competition has naturally engaged at home the attention of our captains of industry. ”

“ Some of the folks along the Zone look on a brief space spent in the hospital as a pleasant interlude in an otherwise monotonous life. As they have thirty days’ sick leave with pay every year they are quite prone to turn to the pleasant slopes of Ancon Hill, with a week at the charming sanitarium on Taboga Island as a fitting close—a sort of café parfait to top off the feast. Surgery even seems to have lost its terrors there. “Why, they even bring their friends to be operated on”, said one of the surgeons laughingly when talking of the popularity of the hospital among the Zone dwellers. ”

“ To my mind the United Fruit Company, next to the Panama Canal, is the great phenomenon of the Caribbean world today. Some day some one with knowledge will write a book about it as men have written the history of the British East India Company, or the Worshipful Company of Hudson Bay Adventurers, for this distinctly American enterprise has accomplished a creative work so wonderful and so romantic as to entitle it to equal literary consideration. ”

“ Pioneers, pirates, prospectors and poets have vied with each other in applying the vocabulary of contumely and abuse to it, and the practitioners of medicine have attached its name to a peculiarly depressing and virulent type of tropical fever. But the humble native loves it dearly and his homes, either villages of from ten to forty family huts, or mere isolated cabins cling to its shores all the way from Fort Lorenzo to the head waters far beyond the boundary of the Canal Zone. The native too has something of an eye for the picturesque. ”

“ But the inconsistencies of the United States are trivial in comparison with those of other nations, and while the whole world is armed—nominally for defense, but in a way to encourage aggressions—it is wise that the United States put bolts on its front gate. And that in effect is what forts and coast defenses are. They are not aggressive, and cannot be a menace to any one—either to a foreign land, as a great navy might conceivably be, or to our people, as a great standing army might prove. ”

“ But perhaps they don’t often yearn for liberty. A wire fence cuts off the woman’s section of the jail and the several native women I observed flirting assiduously with desperate male malefactors from whom they were separated only by this fence, seemed content with their lot, and evidently helped to cultivate like resignation in the breasts of their dark adorers. A white-clad guard, machete at side and heavy pistol at belt, walks among them jingling a heavy bunch of keys authoritatively but offering no interruption to their tender interludes. ”