Panama fever (50 page)

The upshot was that Wallace and the ICC members went to Panama with the most basic specifications of the canal—lock or sea-level—undecided. Nothing could be ruled out, and therefore there was much work to be done investigating all the possible options.

When the New Company was handed over to the Americans on May 4, they took over a skeleton workforce of about five hundred men, most of whom were employed in the Culebra Cut, where two French ladder excavators were carrying out intermittent work. Others were maintaining such machinery as had been stored away. At the beginning of June, five different U.S.-led parties were established and set to work: one to survey Colón Harbor; another to start planning waterworks for Panama City. The three other parties were instructed to carry out the deeper borings demanded by the ICC to test for the suitability of various sites for dams and started work at Gatún, Bohío, and Gamboa. Although Gatún had not been mentioned by Walker as a possible dam site, there had been several recent papers published in U.S. engineering journals that had suggested it. The Gamboa group was also charged with mapping the routes of spillways to carry the floodwaters of the Chagres away from the line of the canal, as would be required for a sea-level canal. In July a base camp was established at Bas Obispo and the twelve Americans, accompanied by two dozen locals recruited to do the machete work, started to search for a route to link the upper Chagres with a small river that flowed from the heights of the Continental Divide into the Pacific.

Effectively, they were recrossing the ground covered by Henri Cermoise back in 1881–82, and the same conditions prevailed. But the laboriously cut
tranches
had long disappeared. “It was not possible to advance a foot without hacking one's way through a tangle of creepers,” an engineer wrote of the expedition. “Lizards and gaudy snakes crawled and scuttled everywhere… insect pests were superabundant.” At the end of each day a space was cleared in the jungle and a makeshift shelter was improvised using poles with canvas or palm fronds for a roof. Nighttime was a torment of itching and scratching at the festering sores caused by ticks, “red-bugs,” “jiggers,” and other parasitic insects that specialized in laying eggs under the skin of their victims. Supplies were carried by canoe upriver to the surveyors, but once in a while a monkey was cooked and eaten.

As fieldwork continued, three of the old French excavators were overhauled and set to work in the Culebra Cut, both to provide visible proof that they were “making the dirt fly” and also to provide data on the effectiveness and unit costs of different types of machine.

At the ocean termini of the line, a new divisional head engineer, Frank Maltby, had started work on dredging the harbors. Maltby was originally from Pittsburgh, but had worked for three years as head of dredging operations on the Mississippi. He got the job through a friend of his on the Commission. He had never been to sea before and was sick for the entire seven-day voyage to Colón. He found the town “indescribably filthy” but was given lodging in the old “De Lesseps Palace,” an imposing residence built at Cristóbal for
Le Grand Français's
1886 visit. Within two days he was hospitalized for a week with diarrhea, but once at work he quickly demonstrated that whatever its outward appearance, much of the supposedly “obsolete” French plant was eminently usable, even machines that had spent the last fifteen years semi- or entirely submerged underwater. “As the use of cheap steel had not become the practice at the time of their creation,” explained one U.S. engineer, “they were built of a superior class of iron—a much better metal to withstand the ravages of time and sea water.” Within a couple of months Maltby had six of the old Scottish-built ladder dredges back working, crewed in the main, as during the French years, by Greeks. The locomotives that lay abandoned all around were also found to be “built like a watch in workmanship, of splendid material,” and were similarly pressed back into service.

But there were also numerous frustrations. Soon after his arrival, Maltby tried to organize the building of a short length of railway track. For some reason there seemed to be plenty of ties lying around. Rails could be picked up from abandoned track, and spikes could be pulled out of rotten ties. But as there was no spike maul to be had, his men had to bang in the spikes with axes.

In fact, it was just as well that so much equipment was suitable to put back to work, as precious little was arriving from the United States. In Washington the Isthmian Canal Commission was from the outset in a state of paranoid ineptitude. The sensational events of the “Panama Affair” in France in 1890–92 had been watched around the world. So, however unfairly, the French had left behind in Panama, along with everything else, the taint of waste, extravagance, and corruption. The instinct of the U.S. Commission, therefore, was to query and triple-check every requisition. “When this whole thing is finished,” Commission chairman Walker announced, “I intend that those fellows on the hill shall not find that a single dollar has been misspent.” As well as critics in Congress, Walker was acutely aware that the anti-canal or anti-Roosevelt press was waiting to pounce on any example of “waste” in the French style. Therefore, everything had to be cleared by all seven members of the Commission, each of whom felt personally responsible that no “graft” would be tolerated on their watch.

The result was chaos and deadlock. A system of purchases was created that required a nightmare of forms in triplicate. The work on the Panama sewers was hampered by the fact that it took the filling in of six vouchers for the hire of a single horse and cart. That meant that the engineer in charge had to spend his Saturday night filling in no fewer than 1,200 such forms. There was a further, more serious setback to this work when it emerged that the pipes for the job had been sent in the wrong order. Then it was discovered that some vital equipment had been sent, for economy's sake, by sailing schooner and would not arrive for months. When Wallace cabled Washington to protest the lack of equipment coming through, he was sharply reprimanded by one of the commissioners that sending cables cost money.

Among an ever-thickening blizzard of paper, orders became duplicated or lost. Alternatively they were pared down or simply filed away. When Walker left his job the following year, over 160 requisitions were found stuffed into drawers in his desk, some many months old. Those on the Isthmus responded by attempting to predict their needs far into the future or simply bumped up their orders, expecting them to be adjusted downward. On one occasion, Wallace's chief architect, his twenty-nine-year-old nephew O. M. Johnson, calculated that he would eventually require 15,000 doors, for which he needed 15,000 pairs of hinges. He might have expected to receive a fraction of that, but somewhere in the paper storm in the Washington office the order took on monstrous proportions and, soon after, 240,000 perfectly made hinges turned up at Colón.

The architect's office was one of the many bottlenecks in the initial organization. There was a great deal of work involved in repairing the French quarters, let alone designing and building new accommodations. But it was a chicken-and-egg situation. As Wallace complained, “Suitable quarters and accommodations could not be provided without organization, supervision, plans and material, which of course, rendered a large force necessary almost at the commencement of the work, which had to be provided with suitable quarters and accommodation.”

Demand for labor was acute while the need for quarters massively outstripped the available supply. Cities of tents were created on the slopes of Ancón Hill and elsewhere, but these were soon full as the workforce expanded to thirty-five hundred by November 1904. To “make the dirt fly,” the Washington office was sending hundreds of men to the Isthmus every week, “before there was any way to care for them properly, or any tools or material to work with,” as Frank Maltby complained.

Soon after her husband's departure for the canal project, Rose van Hardeveld received her first letter from Jan, who had given up his post on the Union Pacific Railroad to accept a job with the Commission and thus become part of Teddy Roosevelt's “great march of progress.” Having sailed from San Deigo, van Hardeveld arrived at Panama City and made his way to Culebra. “A heavy suitcase in each hand, no light anywhere, the sweat rolling down my face, I stumbled along the wet slippery track, which I had been told to follow until I found a place to turn off,” he wrote. “I could sense that the water was on both sides. If my foot slipped from the ties, it landed in soft mud. In the deep darkness I seemed to have walked miles, and I never dreamed there could be such unearthly noises as came to my ears from all around. Thick croaking, hoarse bellowing, and strange squeaks and whines leaped at me from the blackness. I have learned since that these swamp noises are made by lizards, frogs and alligators, but to me they sounded like the howling of demons. Well, I decided that turning back looked almost as hard as going on, so here I am.” As she read the letter, remembered Rose, “tears stood in my eyes… My Jan was not a man to contemplate turning back from any goal he had elected to pursue—unless obstacles loomed virtually insurmountable.”

His accommodation turned out to be “a big bare lumber barn, not quite so well constructed as the horse stables on the ranches at home,” divided into cubicles just big enough for two men to share. A week later another letter arrived. “The food is awful,” Jan wrote, “and cooked in such a way that no civilized white man can stand it for more than a week or two … Almost all the food is fried. They feed us fried green bananas, boiled rice, and foul-smelling salt fish. It rains so much that honest to goodness my hat is getting mouldy on my head… I haven't had on a pair of dry shoes in weeks.” In the next letter, he reported that disease was rife. Rose's parents started raising objections to her plan for the rest of the family to join Jan in Panama.

There are numerous such examples of the shock and instant demoralization experienced by new arrivals during this early period. Some, however, greeted these challenges with a cheerful determination resonant of the early French period. Jessie Murdoch landed at Colón along with a party of other young nurses in mid-1904 feeling, she admitted, a mixture of “apprehension,” “homesickness,” and “dread of what the future might hold.” Colón was alarming with its “narrow, dirty, half deserted streets, with the native element running about half clothed,” and at Ancón Hospital, in spite of the warm welcome from Eugenie Hibbard, she was dismayed by the “old rusted iron French beds, with mildewed mattresses.” On her first night she ventured outside, only to be “eaten alive” by mosquitoes. Retreating to bed, “Each had a candle, but it was soon found that it was not wise to keep these burning, as they attracted moths and all sorts of flying insects.” “Yet in spite of these many difficulties,” she would write later, “we were not disheartened, but thoroughly enjoyed the novel experiences.” “We found upon our arrival here,” wrote young engineer James Williams, “the wreck of the French companies, a foreign language, strange people, poor food, no ice, no lights, no drinking water, no amusements, or decent living quarters …” But more important for Williams was the “thrill and the knowledge that we were working for Uncle Sam, accomplishing something that the eyes of the world were focused upon and something that every citizen of the United States [was] interested in.”

Others employed in the United States by the Washington office were less impressed with the patently yawning chasm between what they found and what they had been led to expect. “We were supposed to have furniture issued to us, my allotment being nominally six chairs, a bed, three tables, washstand and tin pitcher, and a clothes rack,” explained John Meehan, who arrived in early December 1904. “What we really got was a cot, and a dynamite box.” Meehan, like van Hardeveld, was living in Culebra, which consisted of several laborers’ bunkhouses and a smattering of cantinas and “chino shops,” which sold canned food at high prices. Everyone lived on tins of sardines and soggy crackers. The only two-story building was a “hotel” run by “Cuban Mary,” a “disorderly place, very dirty, crude in every way.” There was one muddy main street; “chickens walked about inside the stores and native shacks, a few pigs and a million goats wandered about the streets.” Reading in the evening was impossible, Meehan complained, because of the “army of bugs.” The only thing to do was to go to bed or to one of the bars.

Meehan would remain on the project for many years. Others took one look around and simply headed back home again. Charles L. Carroll, a graduate from Pittsburgh, arrived in Panama in August 1904. A month later he wrote to his mother: “I am thoroughly sick of this country and everything to do with the canal… Everyone is afflicted with running sores. We are compelled to sleep in an old shed, six to a room …The meals would sicken a dog …Tell the boys at home to stay there, even if they get no more than a dollar a day.” Weeks later Carroll left the Isthmus for good.

In October 1904, the Italian minister in Panama reported back to his government on the dismal start to the U.S. canal effort: “The managers are said to be dishonest and incompetent,” he wrote. “There have been many errors and much wastage and pilfering of money. The workers of all nationalities are treated inhumanely. As a consequence of all this, most people look back on the French administration, with all its defects, as more capable, more honest and more just towards the workers.”