Panama fever (83 page)

At the end of the construction period, some of the canal workers had made good, some had not. A number did return home, however, with a large enough nest egg to buy some land, or set up a small business, or just to impress their friends. “The returned Panama Canal labourer is an uncommonly vain fellow,” commented one observer in Barbados. “He struts along in all the glory of a gay tweed suit, a cylindrical collar and a flaring necktie.” Like “Colón Man” in Jamaica a generation before, returnees to Barbados brought with them a less subservient attitude and a new cosmopolitanism. They would be at the forefront of the social upheavals of the 1920s and 1930s that eventually led to political decolonization. Also, support for Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association would be strongest among those who had worked in Central America. Garvey had worked as a newspaper editor in Colón during the last years of the construction period, and his approach was characterized by internationalism, accentuating the identity of interests among blacks all over the world in place of narrow national loyalties. He was also a materialist—”Wealth is strength, wealth is power,” he wrote—and saw the Panama money earned by the blacks as a liberating force.

But not everyone returned home with their pockets rattling with coins. Jamaican Z. McKenzie remembered that “the completion of the waterway Brought great Desolation on the WI. [West Indian] employees … The wage during the Canal Construction was so small that we could not put by any Savings in the Bank. Hence the majority of us left empty handed, to live or die.” In fact many were like Albert Bannister, who wrote, “I would be glad to go home but I can't go home empty handed.” Some 45,000 Barbadians went to Panama, and of these only about half returned home at the end of the construction period. Barbados had a population of only 200,000, so the effect on the island was dramatic. For one thing, the planters no longer had the pool of cheap labor that had sustained their inefficient practices. And even more than in Jamaica a generation before, the demographics of the country were radically altered. As late as 1921 there were less than 400 males per 1,000 females on the island.

Of those who did not return, some enlisted in the British or French armies and were shipped to Europe. Others took jobs on the United Fruit or the sugar plantations in Guatemala, Cuba, and South America. A large number also stayed in Panama, of whom about 7,000 were kept on in the employ of the canal, often at lower wages than they had been paid during the construction period. Their treatment by the canal authorities was pretty much consistent with what had gone before, with the Gold/Silver Roll system as firm as ever and strikers or activists ruthlessly deported. If anything, some of them comment, it was worse, as the esprit de corps of the construction period did not last. They were also targeted by nationalist Panamanians, who from the 1930s and 1940s onward tried to purge their country of non-Hispanic elements.

Saddest of all, perhaps, was the treatment of the old-timers who had worked during the construction and then stayed with the canal for the rest of their working lives. Initially, there was no pension at all, then in the 1930s the canal authorities offered the men “disability relief” of one dollar a month per year worked, up to a maximum of $25. Inspectors would come to their houses and if they had possessions of any value, or if another family member worked, this sum was reduced.

One man who had worked for thirty-eight years for the canal, without a single week's holiday and having suffered numerous injuries in the course of his work, was told that he was to be retired and was given fifteen days’ notice to quit his Canal Zone quarters. He eventually found a small apartment in Colón for $25 a month, which was the sum total of his pension. His son described in 1946 how his father was “receiving not enough to live a comfortable life for his remaining days. Broken in body and spirit, he calmly smokes his faithful old pipe waiting for the call of his Maker.”

“Who dug the canal?” asks Jules LeCurrieux. “Who suffered most even until now? Who died most? Who but the West Indian negroes.” LeCurrieux worked from 1906 to 1938, in the course of which he was blinded in one eye while building the relocated railroad. When he was “retired,” he received $17.50 a month, “which was too small to live on.”

Many of the letters to the “Competition for the Best True Stories …” held in 1963, contain pathetic pleas for help with subsistence. A doctor who treated a lot of the old-timers in their last days told how the majority had chronic health problems not caused by the difficult conditions in which they had worked, but, shockingly, from malnutrition.

Most of the West Indians signed off their accounts for the competition with mixed feelings. Unlike the thousands who worked and died on the French canal, at least there was something to show for their efforts. As one digger put it, “I am glad to see that all my sweat, tears, and all those deaths were not in vain.” Having been part of the great achievement of the canal was a source of great pride. “It is a job well done,” wrote one Jamaican, “and a help to mankind.” “I got to be a man,” said another.

Harrigan Austin, who had arrived in 1905 hungry enough to attack bags of sugar on the wharf, wrote about the “untold benefits to the world at large” that the canal brought. “‘Tis reasonable in any big war or any such projects as this, something will happen,” he went on. “Some must suffer for the good and welfare of the others for where there is no Cross there may be no Crown … Thank God, the canal has been finished and has become a blessing to the world at large. A great accomplishment, the work of a Great Nation—May God Bless America.”

George Martin, who looked back fondly on the days when he could afford ham and ice-cream, concluded: “The work of the construction days was a hard and rough struggle, but it was done cheerfully, and faithfully; thus giving the American people their hearts’ desire.”

Other old-timers were less gracious about their treatment. Benjamin Jordan, who back in 1905 had lied about his age to get selected for a Karner contract, testified in 1984 that although he had not let the “discrimination take hold” of him, there were now, at the end of his life, feelings that he could no longer “put in a corner.” “For my years with the Panama Canal,” he said, “there is a feeling that I have not been treated as I should. I still enjoy life, like some of the others who survived. The fact still remains: much blood was spilt, and no one cared about it. But I'm still alive, under God's care and will always remember: the good that you do lives with you.”

NOTES

Abbreviations

FO Public Record Office, Kew, London, Foreign Office Records.

RG Record Group, National Archives, Suitland, Maryland.

MCCZ Manuscript Collection of the Canal Zone Library-Museum, Library of Congress,

Washington, DC.

Preface: The Battle to Build the Canal

xxi    Bahamas-born Albert Peters
Isthmian Historical Society, “Competition for the Best True Stories of Life and Work on the Isthmus of Panama During the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Balboa, 1963, Box 25 MCCZ.

xxi   Alfred Dottin
, in “Competition for the Best True Stories.”

xxi   Constantine Parkinson
Ibid.

xxii   ”Some of the costs of the canal are here”
Franck,
Zone Policeman 88
, p. 85.

xxii   ”some sort of semi-slavery”
Harrigan Austin, in “Competition for the Best True Stories.”

xxii   ”Many times I met death at the door”
J. T Hughes, in “Competition for the Best True Stories.”

xxii   ”We worked in rain, sun, fire”
Prince Green, in “Competition for the Best True Stories.”

xxiii   ”greatest liberty ever taken with nature”
James Bryce, quoted in LaFeber,
The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective
, p. 4.

Chapter One: “The Keys to the Universe”

1   ”Do but open these doors”
National Library of Scotland, Adv MS83.7.3, f 44v.

5    ”shewing them the great maine sea”
Peter Martyr,
De orbe novo.
In Hakluyt,
Collection of the Early Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries
, vol. 5, p. 253.

6    ”If there are mountains there are also hands”
Enrique de Vedia, ed.,
Historiadores primitivos de Indias
, vol. 1, p. 222.

7    ”would open the door to the Portuguese”
Quoted in Anguizola,
Philippe Bunau-Varilla
, pp. 3–4.

8    ”no mountain range at all”
Lionel Wafer, quoted in Duval,
From Cadiz to Cathay
, p. 10.

8    ”talks too much and raises people's expectations”
National Archives of Scotland, GD26/13/43/27.

9    ”Being starved and abandoned by the world”
Letter from Robert Drummond, August 11, 1699, National Library of Scotland: Adv Ms S3.7.3, f.22.

Chapter Two: Rivalry and Stalemate

12    ”I am assured … a canal appeared very practicable”
Jefferson,
Writings
, vol. 1, p. 518.

13    ”The American continents”
Quoted in Siegfreid,
Suez and Panama
, p. 224.

13     “would immortalise a government occupied with the interests of humanity”
Humboldt,
Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain
, p. 77.

13    Goethe, who
Quoted in Collin,
Theodore Roosevelt's Caribbean
, p. 129.

15    ”veritable capital of the world”
Quoted in Siegfreid,
Suez and Panama
, p. 223.

16    ”present a human barrier of such formidable power”
John A. Lloyd, “On the Facilities for a Ship Canal Communication … through the Isthmus of Panama,” Institute of Civil Engineers,
Minutes of Proceedings
, vol. 9, 1850, p. 242.

16    ”superstitious … Billiards, cockpits, gambling and smoking”
Ibid., p. 59.

16    A visitor from Bogotá in the 1830s
Castillero,
Historia de Panama
, p. 87.

17    ”an absurdity”
Quoted in Mack,
The Land Divided
, p. 128.

Chapter Three: Gold Rush

22    ”low, miserable town, of thirty thatched huts”
Hotchkiss,
On the Ebb
, p. 84.

22    22 “The houses are only hovels”
“Across the Isthmus in 1850: The Journey of Daniel A. Horn,” quoted in Perez-Penero,
Before the Five Frontiers
, p. 82.

22    ”Half are full-blooded negroes”
Quoted in Ibid., p. 84.

22    ”one of the filthiest places we ever saw”
Richards, ed.,
California Gold Rush Merchant
, p. 7.

22    ”the birthplace of a malignant fever”
Marryat,
Mountains and Molehills
, pp. 1–3.

22    ”as disconcerting as hell”
John Easter Minter,
The Chagres: River of Westward Passage
, p. 238, quoted in Perez-Penero,
Before the Five Frontiers
, p. 85.

22    23    ”The eye does not become wearied”
Marryat,
Mountains and Molehills
, pp. 1–3.

23    23    Some of the men carried as much as three hundred pounds
J. D. Borthwick,
Three Years in California
, p. 34, quoted in Brands,
The Age of Gold
, p. 81.
23 “so like a nightmare”
Frémont,
A Year of American Travel
, p. 34.

23    ”the main street is composed almost entirely of hotels”
Marryat,
Mountains and Molehills
, p. 5.

24    ”I knew nothing of the great risk in traveling alone”
Julius H. Pratt, “To California by Panama in ‘49,”
Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine
41, no. 6, April 1891, pp. 915–17.

24    ”weak sway of the New Granada Republic”
Seacole,
Wondeful Adventures
, p. xx.

25    ”Terribly bullied”
Ibid., p. xx.

26    ”No imposing ceremony inaugurated”
Otis,
History of the Panama Railroad.

26    ”It was a virgin swamp”
Ibid., p. 26.

27    ”carried his noonday luncheon in his hat”
Otis,
History of the Panama Railroad
, p. 12.

27    27 “wore the pale hue of ghosts.”
Seacole,
Wondeful Adventures
, p. 64.

Chapter Four: “A Natural Culminating Point”

28    ”intended to be, to a certain extent prohibitory”
Otis,
History of the Panama Railroad
, p. 24.

29    ”British consul's precarious corrugated iron dwelling”
Ibid., p. 58.

29    ”I thought I had never seen a more luckless, dreary spot”
Seacole,
Wondeful Adventures
, p. 64.