had been taken the several thousand prisoners were informed that if they
wanted to retain their lives and regain their liberty they must pay
ransom, fixed in amount according to the standing in the community and
the wealth of the captive. Of course the community was gone and the
buccaneers had taken all of the wealth, but the luckless prisoner was
expected to pay nevertheless and a surprising number of them did so.
With all these expedients for the extraction of wealth from a subjugated
town, the buccaneers were fain to be satisfied, and, weak from wounds
and revelry, according to Esquemeling:

[Illustration: A STREET IN CRUCES]

“On the 24th of February, of the year 1761, Captain Morgan departed from
the city of Panama, or rather from the place where the city of Panama
did stand. Of the spoils whereof he carried with him one hundred and
seventy-five beasts of carriage, laden with silver, gold and other
precious things, besides 600 prisoners more or less, between women,
children and slaves.”

[Illustration: BREAKING WAVES AT OLD PANAMA]

[Illustration: OLD BELL AT REMEDIOS, 1682]

So they plodded back to San Lorenzo whence they had started on their
piratical expedition. It affords a striking illustration of the strictly
business methods of these pirates that before reaching the castle Morgan
ordered a halt, and had every man searched for valuables, submitting
himself to the inquisition. So thorough was the search that even the
guns were shaken, upside down, lest precious stones might be concealed
in their barrels. However the buccaneers came to jeer at Morgan’s
apparent fairness in being searched with the rest, and putting his
personal pilferings into the common lot as a piece of duplicity. For the
loot of the Panama expedition has been reckoned at several millions of
dollars, and indeed a town of that size, famous for wealth and at a
period when the amassing of gold and jewels was a passion, should
certainly have produced that much. But when it came to the vital
operation of dividing the spoils the ordinary fighting men found that
for their four months’ campaign, they received about $100 apiece. “Which
small sum,” says the literary apothecary Esquemeling, who was “buncoed”
with the rest, “they thought too little reward for so much labor and
such huge and manifest dangers they had so often exposed their lives
unto. But Captain Morgan was deaf to all these and many other complaints
of this kind, having designed in his mind to cheat them of as much as he
could.”

Henry Morgan was indeed a practical pirate, who, had he but lived four
hundred years later, could have made vastly more money out of a town of
30,000 people by the mild devices of franchises and bonds, than he did
out of Panama with murder, the rack, robbery and rapine for his methods.
After setting the example of loyally putting his all into the common
store, he assumed the duty of dividing that store. This accomplished to
his liking, and knowing that idleness breeds discontent, and that
discontent is always hurtful to capital, he set his men to work pulling
the Castle of San Lorenzo to pieces. While they were thus engaged, one
dark night with favoring winds he hove anchor and with four ships,
filled with his English favorites, and laden with the lion’s share of
the booty, he sailed away from Chagres and from buccaneering forever. He
left behind all the French, Dutch and mongrel pirates--those ancient and
experienced ones. He left them some of the poorer ships--much as an
efficient gang of street railway looters leave some rusty rails and
decrepit cars to a town they have looted--but saw to it that none was
left that could possibly catch up with his fleet.

So the deserted buccaneers first fought awhile among themselves, then
dispersed. Some in an amateurish way sacked the town of Keys in Cuba.
Others went to Campeche and Honduras. Esquemeling with a small band went
up to Bocadel Toro, now the Panama headquarters of the United Fruit
Company, whence he made his way back to Europe. There he wrote his
“History of the Buccaneers,” which became one of the world’s “best
sellers,” and in which he gave his Captain Morgan “the worst of it”--a
species of satisfaction which is often the only recourse of the literary
man who gets tangled up with Big Business.

[Illustration: THE BEETLING CLIFFS OF THE UPPER CHAGRES]

As for Captain Morgan, he was made much of at Jamaica, where the crown’s
share of the proceeds of his piracy was cheerfully accepted by the
governor. But in England there was some embarrassment, for there was no
war with Spain and the complete destruction of a Spanish city by a force
bearing British flags was at least embarrassing. So by way of showing
its repentance and good intent the government announced its purpose to
suppress buccaneering and all piracy, and to that end created Henry
Morgan a baronet and put the commission in his hands--much as we have
been accustomed to put politicians on our civil service commissions, and
protected manufacturers on our tariff boards. So as _Sir_ Henry Morgan
this most wholesale robber and murderer Central America ever knew ended
his days in high respectability.

[Illustration: THE ROOTS REACH DOWN SEEKING FOR SOIL]

While the ruins of Old Panama compare but unfavorably with those of
Porto Bello or San Lorenzo, their proximity to the city of Panama make
them a favorite point of interest for tourists. Half a day is ample to
give to the drive out and back and to the inspection of the ruins
themselves. The extended area over which they are scattered testifies to
the size of the obliterated city, while the wide spaces, destitute of
any sign of occupation, which intervene between the remaining relics,
shows clearly that the greater part of the town must have been built of
perishable materials easily swept away at the time of the fire, or
slowly disintegrating during the flood of years that have since rolled
by. The tower of the Cathedral of St. Augustine alone among the relics
still remaining affords any suggestion of grandeur or even of
architectural dignity.

To reach the ruins you take a horse, a carriage or an automobile for a
ride of about five miles over an excellent road laid and maintained by
the Republic of Panama. If you go by horseback the old trail which the
pirates used is still traceable and at low tide one can ride along the
beach. For the majority the drive along the road, which should be taken
in the early morning, is the simpler way, though there was promise in
1913 that within a few months a trolley line would still further
simplify the trip.

From Balboa, the Pacific opening of the Panama Canal, and the newest of
the world’s great ports, to the ruins of Old Panama, founded in 1609 and
obliterated by pirates in 1671, by trolley in two hours! Was ever the
past more audaciously linked to the present? Were ever exhibits of the
peaceful commerce of today and the bloody raids of ancient times placed
in such dramatic juxtaposition?

The road to Old Panama runs through a peaceful grazing country, with a
very few plantations. One or two country residences of prosperous
Panamanians appear standing well back from the road, but signs of life
and of industry are few. The country lies high, is open and free from
jungle and in almost any North American state, lying thus close to a
town of 40,000 people and adjacent to a district in which the United
States is spending some millions of dollars a month, would be platted in
additions for miles around, and dotted with the signs of real estate
dealers. But the Panamanian mind is not speculative, or at any rate
soars little above the weekly lottery ticket. So all Uncle Samuel’s
disbursements in the Zone have thus far produced nothing remotely
resembling a real estate boom.

However as we turn off from the main road toward the sea and the square
broken tower of the old cathedral, or Church of St. Augustine, with the
ferns springing from the jagged top, and vines twisting out through the
dumbly staring windows, real estate and “booms” seem singularly ignoble
topics in the presence of this mute spectator of the agonies of a
martyred people. 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. What they
did to the people on whom their hands reeking with blood were laid must
be left to the imagination. The only contemporary record of the sack was
written by one of their own number to whom apparently such scenes had
become commonplace, for while his gorge rises at the contemplation of
his own hard fortune in being robbed and deserted by his chief, he
recounts the torture of men and the violation of women in a
matter-of-fact way as though all in the day’s work.

[Illustration: BLUFF NEAR TORO POINT

Photographing this scene is now prohibited as a United States fort is to
be erected here]

Driving on we come to the arched bridge which formed the main entrance
to the town in the day of its downfall. Sturdy it is still, though the
public road no longer passes over it, defying the assaults of time and
the more disintegrating inroads of the tropical plants which insinuate
themselves into every crevice, prying the stone apart with tender
fingers ever hardening. At once the bridge, none too wide for three to
cross abreast, awakens wonder that no Horatius was in all the Spanish
armies to keep the bridge as did he of ancient Rome. But after all the
rivulet which today makes its sluggish way under the arch is no Tiber to
hold the invading army at bay. Perhaps it was bigger in Morgan’s time;
today it would be easily forded, almost leapt. At any rate no
“Dauntless Three” like those Macaulay sung were there to stay the
onrolling tide of foemen.

[Illustration: “WHETHER THE TREE OR THE WALL IS STOUTER IS A PROBLEM”]

Hardly have we passed the bridge than a massive vine-embedded ruin on
the left of the road stands mute evidence that the Spaniards had forts,
if they had but possessed the courage to defend them. This is the Casa
Reale, or government house. Its walls of rubble masonry are full two
feet thick and have the appearance of having been pierced for musketry.
If the buccaneers had any artillery at all, which is doubtful, it was
hardly heavy enough to have had any effect against such a wall. Secure
within the Casa Reale such a handful of men as held the Alamo against
the Mexicans could have resisted Morgan’s men indefinitely. But the
spirit was lacking. The stout walls of the Casa Reale stand now as
evidences of the character of the defenses the people of Panama had if
they but had the pluck to use them.

Continuing toward the sea the visitor next comes upon the ruins of the
Cathedral, which are in so shattered a state as to justify the belief
that either the invaders or the Spaniards themselves employed gunpowder
to wreck so massive an edifice. The flames and the work of the
vegetation could hardly have accomplished such complete destruction. The
tower alone retains definite form, rising about fifty feet from a dense
jungle, and lined within with vines and clinging trees that use the
ancient walls as a support and hasten their disintegration in so doing.
It is difficult even to trace the lines of the great church, so
thoroughly have its walls been demolished. Some of the massive arches
still stand all pendulous with vines.

At the water’s edge one still finds steps leading down into the sea, and
the remains of the old paved road to which at high tide the boats could
come with their cargoes of fish and country produce. If one happens to
visit the spot at low tide the view looking seaward is as ugly as could
well be imagined. The hard sand beach extends only to high water mark.
Beyond that for more than a mile seaward extends a dismal range of black
mud of about the consistency of putty. Near the shore it is seen to be
full of round holes from which crawl unsightly worms and small crabs. E.
C. Stedman puts its unsightly appearance in two lines:

  “The tide still ebbs a league from quay,
   The buzzards scour the empty bay.”

Along the strand still stand fragments of the old seawall, and at a
considerable distance from the Cathedral ruins you come upon another
large building of which little more than the lower walls and the
subterranean vaults still have form and coherence. The dungeon into
which visitors usually make their way is peculiarly dark, damp and
dismal, and the general air of ghoulishness is mightily enhanced by the
myriads of bats that hang from the ceiling and whirl and whiz away when
intruders light matches to study the moldering masonry. A most
interesting feature of this crypt is the great roots of the trees and
shrubs that sprung from seeds that had fallen into some crevice and
found there soil enough to germinate, but not sufficient to support life
as the plant grew larger. The roots twist and creep along the walls,
reaching out for earth below as unerringly as a giant boa creeps
sinuously through the jungle.

CHAPTER VI

REVOLUTIONS AND THE FRENCH REGIME

The history of the Isthmus from the fall of Old Panama to the time when
the government of the United States, without any particular pomp or
ceremony, took up the picks and shovels the French had laid down and
went to work on the Canal, may be passed over here in the lightest and
sketchiest way. It is of Panama of the Present, rather than Panama of
the Past, that I have to tell even though that past be full of
picturesque and racy incident. Curious enough is the way in which
through all those centuries of lawless no-government, Spanish
mis-government, and local self-government, tempered by annual
revolutions, there appears always the idea that some day there will be a
waterway across the neck of the continent. It was almost as hard for the
early Spaniards to abandon the idea that such a natural waterway existed
as it has been in later years to make the trans-continental railroads
understand that the American people intended to create such a strait.

The search for the natural waterway had hardly been abandoned when
discussion arose as to the practicability of creating an artificial one.
In its earlier days this project encountered not only the physical
obstacles which we had to overcome, but others springing from the rather
exaggerated piety of the time. Yet it was a chaplain to Cortez who first
suggested a canal to Philip II of Spain in words that have a good
twentieth-century ring to them, though their form be archaic: “It is
true,” he wrote, “that mountains obstruct these passes, but if there be
mountains there are also hands.” That is the spirit in which Uncle Sam
approached the Big Job. But when the sturdy chaplain’s appeal came to
King Philip he referred it to the priests of his council, who ruled it
out upon the scriptural injunction, “What God hath joined together let
no man put asunder,” and they were backed up by a learned prelate on the
Isthmus, Fray Josef de Acosta, who averred, “No human power will suffice
to demolish the most strong and impenetrable mountains, and solid rocks
which God has placed between the two seas, and which sustain the fury of
the two oceans. And when it would be to men possible it would in my
opinion be very proper to fear the chastisement of heaven for wishing to
correct the works which the Creator with greatest deliberation and
foresight ordained in the creation of this universe.”

[Illustration: SAN PABLO LOCK IN FRENCH DAYS]

Doubtless the Fray de Acosta was the more orthodox, but we like better
the spirit of the cleric who held the somewhat difficult post of
spiritual adviser to Cortez. His belief that “if there are mountains
there are also hands” is good doctrine, and we can believe that the good
father would have liked to have seen some of Col. Goethals’ steam
shovels biting into those mountains at five cubic yards a bite.

It seems strange that the four canal routes over the respective merits
of which the Senate of the United States was engaged in seemingly
interminable wrangle only a few years ago--Nicaragua, Darien, Panama and
Tehuantepec--should have been suggested by Cortez in the sixteenth
century. Nearly 250 years before the birth of the republic destined to
dig the canal this stout explorer from old Spain laid an unerring finger
upon the only routes which it could follow. Doubtless it was as well
that no effort was made at the time, yet it would be unwise for us with
smug twentieth-century self-sufficiency to assert that no other age than
ours could have put the project through. Perhaps the labor and skill
that raised the mighty city of Palmyra, or built the massive aqueducts
that in ruins still span the Roman Campagna, or carved the Colossi of
the Egyptian desert, might have been equal to the Panama problem.

In 1814 the Spanish cortes ordered surveys made for a canal, but nothing
came of it, and the great project lay quiescent as long as Spain’s power
in the Isthmus remained unshaken. More by the indifference of other
nations than by any right of their own, the Spanish had assumed
sovereignty over all of South and Central America. That they held the
country by virtue of a papal bull--such as that may be--and by right of
conquest is undeniable. But men begun to say that the Pope had given
Spain something he never owned, while so far as conquest was concerned
Morgan had taken from the Spanish all they ever won by force of arms on
the Isthmus. He did not hold what he had taken because he was a pirate
not a pioneer.

[Illustration: PART OF THE SEA WALL AT PANAMA]

The only serious effort to colonize in the Panama region by any people,
save Spaniards, was the founding of a colony of Scotch Presbyterians,
headed by one William Patterson, who had occupied a Scotch pulpit.
Beside theology he must have known something of finance, for he
organized, and was one of the first directors of, the Bank of England.
His colonization project in Panama was broadly conceived, but badly
executed. Taking the rich East India Company for a model he secured a
franchise from Scotland, granting him a monopoly of Scottish trade in
the Indies in return for an annual tribute of one hogshead of tobacco.
Capitalizing his company for $600,000, he backed the shares with his
reputation as a founder of the bank and saw the capital over-subscribed
in London. But the success woke up his rivals. They worked on the King,
persuaded him to denounce the action taken in Scotland and pushed a law
through the English Parliament outlawing the Scotch company in England.
In every country the people interested in the established companies
fought the interloper who was trying to break into their profitable
demesne. But the Scotch stuck to their guns. They rallied at first about
Patterson as in later years the French flocked to the support of De
Lesseps. Ships were built in Amsterdam, pistols were bought by
wholesale, brandy and bibles were both gathered in large quantities, and
in 1768 volunteers were called for to join the expedition. Every settler
was promised fifty acres of agricultural land and one fifty-foot town
lot.

[Illustration: THE PELICANS IN THE BAY OF PANAMA]

Politics had bothered Patterson at the outset by arraying the English
against the Scotch. Now religion added to the dissension. The church and
the kirk factions--or the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians--fell
afoul of each other. The kirk carried the executive council and
Patterson, the only man who knew anything about the expedition, was
permitted to accompany it only as an ordinary settler. Graft stepped in
and though the colonists paid for six months’ provisions they discovered
when far out at sea that they had but enough for two. Moreover nobody on
the ships knew where they were going to settle, for they sailed under
sealed orders. When these were opened and the tidings spread that Panama
and not the East Indies was the destination, there was renewed distrust
and disaffection.

[Illustration: ROAD FROM PANAMA TO LA BOCA]

The story of this luckless enterprise is short and dismal. On the voyage
out forty-four of the adventurers died, and after landing the deaths
continued with melancholy regularity. They were spared trouble with the
Indians who, on learning that they were no friends to the Spaniards,
welcomed them warmly, and urged them to join in driving the Spaniards
from the land. But illness held the 900 colonists gripped, and malaria,
the ruling pest of those tropical shores, is not wont to stimulate a
militant spirit. They had settled on the Atlantic coast in the Darien
region, as far from the rich traffic of the East Indies as though they
were in their old Caledonian homes. Curiously enough they made no effort
to get across to the Pacific, whence only could trade be conducted, but
perhaps that was as well, for the Spaniards though much broken by the
recent invasion of the buccaneers would have resisted such an advance to
their utmost.

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT. 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT

OLD FRENCH CANAL AT MOUNT HOPE

Our engineers abandoned the French canal except as a docking place for
vessels and a waterway for carrying material to the foot of Gatun
locks.]

So the unhappy colonists of New Caledonia found themselves on a
miasmatic bit of land, remote from anything like civilization, with no
sign of trade to engage their activities, an avowed enemy at their back
and surrounded by Indians, the price of whose friendship was a
declaration of war upon the Spaniards. To make matters worse, the
King issued a proclamation prohibiting all governors of English colonies
in the West Indies from giving them aid or comfort, denouncing them as
outlaws.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

THE CITY PARK OF COLON]

Disheartened, the first colony broke up and sailed away, just when the
Company was dispatching two more ships from Scotland. The fugitives
sailed for New York, and on one of their ships carrying 250 men, 150 are
said to have died before reaching that port. As for the new colonists,
they reached the deserted fort of St. Andrew, and saw the mute evidences
of death and despair. From the Indians they learned the details of the
story, and a great majority voted to sail away without further delay.
Twelve however elected to stop, and being landed with a generous supply
of provisions, kept foothold in the colony until the third expedition
arrived. This consisted of four ships, which had left the Clyde with
about 1300 colonists. About 160 however died on the way out, and the
survivors were mightily distressed when instead of finding a thriving
colony of a thousand or more awaiting them, they discovered only twelve
Scotchmen living miserably in huts with the Indians.

The imaginative prospectus writer seems to have been no less active and
engaging at that time than in these days of mining promotions, and many
of the new colonists had come in the expectation of finding a land
watered by springs, the waters of which were “as soft as milk and very
nourishing,” a land wherein people lived 150 years, and to die at 125
was to be cut off in the flower of one’s youth. What they found was
twelve haggard Scotchmen in a primeval forest, ill-fed, unclothed,
dependent largely on the charity of the Indians, and who, so far from
looking confidently forward to an hundred more years of life cried
dolorously to the newcomers, “Take us hence or we perish.”

The new colonists, however, had pluck. Stifling their disappointment,
they disembarked and settled down to make the colony a success.
According to the records they had brought five forces for disintegration
and failure along with them--namely four ministers and a most prodigious
lot of brandy. The ancient chroniclers do not say upon which of these
rests the most blame for the disasters that followed. The ministers
straightway set up to be rulers of the colony. When stockades should be
a-building all were engaged in erecting houses for them. As but two
could preach in the space of one Sunday, they designated two holy days
weekly whereon they preached such resounding sermons that “the regular
service frequently lasted twelve hours without any interruption.” Nor
would they do other work than sermonizing. As for the brandy, all the
records of the colony agree that much too much of it and of the curious
native drinks was used by all, and that the ministers themselves were
wont to reinvigorate themselves after their pulpit exertions by mighty
potations.

[Illustration: CHILDREN IN A NATIVE HUT]

Yet the colony was not wholly without a certain sturdy self reliance.
Seeing it persist despite all obstacles, the Spaniards dispatched a
force of soldiers from Panama to destroy it. Campbell waylaid them in
the jungle and overthrew them. Then the King of Spain became alarmed and
sent eight Spanish men-of-war to make an end of these interlopers--the
King of England and Scotland coldly leaving them to their fate. But they
fought so bravely that in the end the Spanish, though their fleet had
been reënforced by three ships, were obliged to grant them capitulation
with the honors of war, and they “marched out with their colors flying
and drums beating, together with arms and ammunition, and with all their
goods.”

[Illustration: THE WATER FRONT OF PANAMA]

So ended the effort to make of Darien an outpost of Scotland. In the
effort 2000 lives and over £200,000 had been lost. Macaulay explains it
by saying, “It was folly to suppose that men born and bred within ten
degrees of the Arctic circle would enjoy excellent health within ten
degrees of the equator.” But Lord Macaulay forgot to reckon on the
hostility of the East India Company, whose monopoly was threatened, the
plenteousness of the brandy and the zeal of the four ministers.

[Illustration: THE WATER GATE OF PANAMA]

After the expulsion of the Scotch, the domination of the Isthmus by the
Spaniards was never again seriously menaced by any foreign power. All
the vast South and Central American domain was lost to Spain, not by the
attacks of her European neighbors, but by the revolt of their people
against a government which was at one time inefficient and tyrannical.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic upheaval in Europe found their
echo in South America, where one after another the various states threw
off the Spanish yoke. But Panama, then known as Terra Firma, was slow to
join in the revolutionary activities of her neighbors. It is true that
in 1812 the revolutionists became so active in Bogotá, the capital of
the province, that the seat of government was temporarily removed to
Panama City. But the country as a whole was sluggish.

Four classes of citizens, European Spaniards, their sons, born on the
Isthmus, and called creoles, the Indians and the negroes, made up the
population and were too diverse by birth and nature to unite for any
patriotic purpose. Accordingly through the period of breaking shackles,
which made Bolivar famous the world over and created the great group of
republics in South America, the state of which the Isthmus was a part
remained quiescent. In 1814 revolutionists vainly tried to take Porto
Bello, but that famous fortress which never resisted a foreign foe
successfully, beat off the patriots. Panama was at this time in high
favor at Madrid because of its loyalty and the Cortes passed resolutions
for the building of a canal, but went no further. But all the time the
revolutionary leaven was working beneath the surface. In 1821 a field
marshal from Spain, charged with the task of crushing out the revolution
in Colombia and Ecuador, stripped Porto Bello, San Lorenzo and Panama of
the greater part of their garrisons and took them to Guayaquil. By
bribes and promises the local patriots persuaded the few soldiers
remaining to desert and, with no possibility of resistance, the
independence of Panama from Spain was declared. Early in 1822 Panama
became the Department of the Isthmus in the Republic of Colombia.

It would be idle to describe, even to enumerate, all the revolutions
which have disquieted the Isthmus since it first joined Colombia in
repudiating the Spanish rule. They have been as thick as insects in the
jungle. No physical, social or commercial ties bound Panama to Colombia
at any time during their long association. A mountain range divided the
two countries and between the cities of Panama and Bogotá there was no
communication by land. In foreign commerce the province of Panama
exceeded the parent state, while the possession of the shortest route
across the Isthmus was an asset of which both Bogotáns and Panamanians
keenly realized the value.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

ENTRANCE TO MT. HOPE CEMETERY]

Revolutions were annual occurrences, sometimes hard fought, for the
people of Panama have plenty of courage in the field; sometimes ended
with the first battle. The name of the parent state has been sometimes
Colombia, sometimes New Granada; Panama has at times been independent,
at others a state of the Federation of New Granada; at one time briefly
allied with Ecuador and Venezuela. In 1846 the volume of North American
travel across the Isthmus became so great that the United States
entered into a treaty with New Granada in which we guaranteed to keep
the Isthmus open for transit. That and the building, by American capital
of the Panama Railroad, made us a directly interested party in all
subsequent revolutions. Of these there were plenty. President Theodore
Roosevelt, defending in 1903 the diplomatic methods by which he “took”
Panama, enumerated no fewer than fifty-three revolutions in the
fifty-seven years that had elapsed since the signing of the treaty. He
summed up the situation thus:

“The above is only a partial list of the revolutions, rebellions,
insurrections, riots, and other outbreaks that have occurred during the
period in question; yet they number fifty-three for the last fifty-seven
years. It will be noted that one of them lasted nearly three years
before it was quelled; another for nearly a year. In short, the
experience of nearly half a century has shown Colombia to be utterly
incapable of keeping order on the Isthmus. Only the active interference
of the United States has enabled her to preserve so much as a semblance
of sovereignty. Had it not been for the exercise by the United States of
the police power in her interest, her connection with the Isthmus would
have been severed long ago.”

[Illustration: CATHEDRAL PLAZA, PANAMA

The building in the center was by turns the French and the American
Administration Building]

We are apt to think of these revolutions as mere riots, uprisings
somewhat after the sort of Falstaff’s seven men in buckram, and savoring
much of the opera bouffe. Such, to a great extent they were, and
curiously enough none of them, except for its outcome, was less serious
or dignified than the final one which won for Panama its freedom from
Colombia, and for the United States the ten miles’ strip across the
ocean called the Canal Zone. That was perhaps the only revolution in
history by which was created a new and sovereign-state, and the issue of
which was finally determined by the inability of a commanding general
to pay the fares for his troops over forty-eight miles of railroad. Of
that, however, more hereafter.

[Illustration: AVENIDA CENTRALE

The building with the rounded corner balcony is the American Consulate]

Of course, during all the revolutions and counter revolutions the idea
of the canal had steadily grown. England at one time took a mild
interest in it and sent one Horatio Nelson to look over the land. The
young naval officer’s health failed him and he returned to become in
later years the hero of Trafalgar and the Nile. Later, the great German
scientist, Baron von Humboldt, in the course of a famous voyage to South
America, spent some time on the Isthmus, and wrote much of its natural
features, enumerating nine routes for a canal including of course the
one finally adopted. Louis Napoleon, though never on the Isthmus,
dreamed out the possibilities of a canal when he was a prisoner in the
fortress of Ham. Had he succeeded in maintaining Maximilian on the
throne of Mexico he might have made the Isthmian history very different.
Among our own people, De Witt Clinton, builder of the Erie Canal, and
Henry Clay, were the first to plan for an American canal across the
Isthmus, but without taking practical steps to accomplish it.

Canal schemes, however, were almost as numerous as revolutions in the
years preceding 1903. Darien, Panama, Tehuantepec, Nicaragua have all
been considered at various times, and the last named for some time was a
very close second to Panama in favor. There is reason to believe that
the government of the United States deliberately “nursed” the Nicaragua
project in order to exact better terms from Colombia, which held the
Panama route at an exorbitant figure.

[Illustration: ANCON HILL AT SUNSET]

The honor of actually inaugurating the canal work must ever belong to
the French, as the honor of completing it will accrue to us. It is not
the first time either that the French and the Americans worked together
to accomplish something on this continent. Yorktown and Panama ought to
be regarded as chapters of the story of a long partnership. In 1876
Ferdinand de Lesseps, with the glory of having dug the Suez Canal still
untarnished, became interested in the Panama situation as the result of
representations made by a French engineer, Napoleon B. Wyse. Lieut. Wyse
had made a survey of the Isthmus and, in connection with Gen. Stephen
Turr, a Hungarian, had secured a concession from Colombia to run
ninety-nine years after the completion of the canal, with a payment to
Colombia of $250,000 annually after the seventy-fifth year had expired.
This franchise was transferable by sale to any other private company but
could not be sold to a government--a proviso which later complicated
greatly the negotiations with the United States.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

ABANDONED FRENCH MACHINERY ON THE CANAL]

De Lesseps was instantly interested. The honors which had been heaped
upon him as the result of his successful operation at Suez were very
grateful to him. The French temperament is particularly avid of praise
and public honor. Moreover, he sincerely believed in the practicability
of the plan and, neither at the outset or later, did any one fully
enlighten him as to the prodigious obstacles to be encountered. Lieut.
Wyse had interested a group of financiers who scented in the scheme a
chance for great profits, and to their project the name of De Lesseps
was all important. For advertising purposes it had the value of that of
Roosevelt today. To launch the project successfully money was needed,
and this they found. Some sort of professional approval, in addition to
the De Lesseps name, was desirable and this they provided by calling
together an International Scientific Congress at Paris to discuss the
great undertaking. One hundred and sixty-four delegates were present, of
whom forty-two were engineers and only eleven Americans. It was charged
at the time that the congress was more political than scientific and
furthermore that it was “packed” so as to register only the will of De
Lesseps, who in turn recommended in the main such measures as the
syndicate putting up the money desired. However, the Congress gave a
quasi-public and scientific appearance to a project which was really
conceived only as a money-making proposition by a group of financiers.
There was and has since been bitter criticism of the vote by which the
Congress declared for a sea-level canal--a decision which the French
themselves were forced to reverse and which the United States definitely
abandoned early in its work. In the French Congress there were less than
100 of the 164 delegates present when the vote was taken. Seventy-eight
voted for sea-level and a majority of the engineers voted against it.

[Illustration: OVERWHELMED BY THE JUNGLE]

[Illustration: A LOTTERY TICKET SELLER]

In my description of the canal work the fundamental differences between
the respective advantages of the sea-level and the lock type of canal
will continually reappear. At this moment it is enough to say that the
obstacles to the sea-level plan are to be found in Culebra Hill and the
Chagres River. In the lock type of canal the cut at Culebra is 495 feet
below the crest of Gold Hill and 364 feet below the crest of
Contractor’s Hill opposite. The top width of this cut is over half a
mile. To carry the canal to sea-level would mean a further cut of
eighty-five feet with vastly enhanced liability of slides. As for the
Chagres River, that tricky stream crosses the line of the old French
canal twenty-three times. As the river is sometimes three or four feet
deep one day and nearly fifty feet deep at the same point the next--a
turbid, turbulent, roaring torrent, carrying trees, huts and boulders
along with it--the canal could obviously not exist with the Chagres in
its path. The French device was to dam the stream some miles above the
point at which the canal first crossed it and lead it away through an
artificial channel into the Pacific instead of into the Atlantic, where
it now empties. This task the American engineers have avoided by damming
the Chagres at Gatun, and making a great lake eighty-five feet above the
level of the sea through which the canal extends and which covers and
obliterates the twenty-three river crossings which embarrassed the
engineers of the sea-level canal.

It is fair to say, however, that today (1913), with the lock canal
approaching completion, there is a very large and intelligent body of
Americans who still hold that the abandonment of the sea-level plan was
an error. And it is a curious fact that while De Lesseps was accused of
“packing” his congress so as to vote down the report for a lock canal
which a majority of the engineers voting favored, Roosevelt, after a
majority of his “International Board of Consulting Engineers” had voted
for a sea-level canal, set aside their recommendation and ordered the
lock type instead.

[Illustration: MACHINERY SEEMINGLY AS HOPELESS AS THIS WAS RECOVERED AND
SET TO WORK]

Immediately after the adjournment of the International Congress at Paris
the stock of the canal company, $60,000,000 as a first issue, was
offered to the investing public. It was largely over-subscribed. The
French are at once a thrifty and an emotional people. Their thrift gives
them instant command of such sums of ready cash as astound financiers
of other nations. Their emotionalism leads them to support any great
national enterprise that promises glory for _La Patrie_, has in it a
touch of romance and withal seems economically safe. The canal
enterprise at the outset met all these conditions, and the commanding
figure of De Lesseps at its head, the man who had made Africa an island
and who dogmatically declared, “the Panama Canal will be more easily
begun, finished and maintained than the Suez Canal,” lured the francs
from their hiding places in woolen stockings or under loose hearth
stones.

[Illustration: THE POWER OF THE JUNGLE

Note how the tree has grown around and into this steel dump car at San
Pablo]

[Illustration: LA FOLIE DINGLER

This house, built by the French for $150,000, was sold for $25.00 by the
Americans]

[Illustration: NEAR THE PACIFIC ENTRANCE TO THE CANAL

The suction dredge is an inheritance from the French and still working]

It has been the practice of many writers upon the canal to ridicule the
unsuccessful effort of the French to complete it; to expatiate upon the
theatrical display which attended their earlier operations, and the
reckless extravagance which attended the period when the dire
possibility of failure first appeared to their vision; to overlook the
earnest and effective work done by the Frenchmen actually on the Isthmus
while riveting attention on the blackmailers and parasites in Paris who
were destroying the structure at its very foundations. It is significant
that none of the real workers on the canal do this. Talk with the
engineers and you will find them enthusiastic over the engineering work
done by the French. Those sturdy, alert Americans who are now putting
the Big Job through will take pains to give their predecessors the
fullest credit for work done, for dirt moved, for surveys made and for
machinery designed--a great lot of it is in use on the line today,
including machines left exposed in the jungle twenty years. Hundreds of
their buildings are still in use. If, after listening to the honest and
generous praise expressed by our engineers, the visitor will go out to
the cemetery of Mount Hope, near Cristobal, and read the lines on the
headstones of French boys who came out full of hope and ambition to be
cut down at twenty-two, twenty-five--all boyish ages--he will reflect
that it is ill to laugh because the forlorn hope does not carry the
breastworks, but only opens the way for the main army. And there are
many little French graveyards scattered about the Isthmus which make one
who comes upon them unawares feel that the really vital thing about the
French connection with the canal was not that the first blast which it
had been prepared to celebrate with some pomp failed to explode, or that
the young engineers did not understand that champagne mixed but badly
with a humid and malarial climate, but that the flower of a great and
generous nation gave their lives in a struggle with hostile nature
before science had equipped man with the knowledge to make the struggle
equal.

[Illustration: WHERE THE FRENCH DID THEIR BEST WORK

The greatest amount of excavations by the French was in Culebra Cut]

Today along a great part of our canal line the marks of the French
attainments are apparent. From Limon Bay, at the Atlantic end of the
canal, our engineers for some reason determined upon an entirely new
line for our canal, instead of following the French waterway, which was
dug for seven miles to a depth of fifteen feet, and for eight miles
further, seven feet deep. This canal has been used very largely by our
force in carrying material for the Gatun dam. At the Pacific entrance
they had dug a narrow channel three miles long which we are still using.
We paid the French company $40,000,000 for all its rights on the
Isthmus. There are various rumors as to who got the money. Some, it is
believed, never went far from New York, for with all their thrift the
French are no match for our high financiers. But whoever got the money
we got a good bargain. The estimate of our own commission in 1911 values
the physical property thus transferred at $42,799,826.

Bad luck, both comic and tragic, seemed to attend the French endeavors.
Count De Lesseps, with a national fondness for the dramatic, arranged
two ceremonies to properly dignify the actual beginning of work upon the
canal. The first was to be the breaking of ground for the Pacific
entrance, which was to be at the mouth of the Rio Grande River in the
Bay of Panama. A distinguished company gathered on the boat chartered
for the occasion at Panama, and there was much feasting, speaking and
toasting. Every one was so imbued with enthusiasm that no one thought
of so material a thing as the tide. On the Pacific coast the tide rises
and falls twenty feet or more, and while the guests were emptying their
glasses the receding tide was emptying the bay whither they were bound.
When they arrived they found that nearly two miles of coral rock and mud
flats separated them from the shore where the historic sod was to be
turned. Accordingly, excavation was begun _pro forma_ in a champagne box
filled with earth on the deck of the ship. The little daughter of De
Lesseps dealt the first blow of the pick, followed by representatives of
Colombia. To complete the ceremony the Bishop of Panama gravely blessed
the work thus auspiciously begun, and the canal builders steamed back to
Panama.

[Illustration: AN OLD SPANISH CHURCH

This edifice, still standing at Nata, is said to be the oldest church in
Panama]

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

JUNCTURE OF FRENCH AND AMERICAN CANALS

The American Canal is the wider, and affords the more direct route to
the sea]

Later, the same party assembled to witness the first blast at
Culebra--for the French made the first attack on that redoubtable
fortress, which after the lapse of thirty-five years is stubbornly
resisting our American sappers and miners. But after due preparations,
including wine, the fair hand of Mlle. Ferdinande De Lesseps pressed the
button--and nothing happened. Some fault in the connections made the
electric spark impotent, and the chroniclers of the time do not record
exactly when the blast was actually fired. But in the official canal
paper the ceremony was described as “perfectly successful,” and the
reporter added that picturesque detail which Koko said “imparts an
artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and uninteresting
statement of fact,” by saying that the rocks were “much less resistant
than we had expected.”

[Illustration: PART OF THE TOLL OF LIFE

This cemetery on the westerly slope of Ancon Hill is one of the Zone’s
pathetic spots]

These needless ceremonies and the false reports which attended them were
merely what in our cynical age and nation are called press-agent
“stunts,” and were necessitated by the need for interesting the French
people in the work, lest they let the market for the shares slump. They
were early symptoms of the evil that culminated in the revelations of
blackmail and forced tribute paid the French press when the final
collapse was impending and inevitable.

De Lesseps indeed was a master in the art of “working the press,” and
had he confined his activities to that, without interfering with his
engineers, history might have told a different story of his canal
management. But lest doubt should seize upon would-be investors, he
continually cut down the estimates of his engineers, and issued
flamboyant proclamations announcing triumphs that had not been won and
prophesying a rate of progress that never could be attained. When his
very capable Technical Commission, headed by Col. George M. Totten, the
builder of the Panama Railroad, estimated the total cost of the canal at
$168,600,000, he took the report to his cabin on shipboard and there
arbitrarily, with no possible new data, lopped off about $37,000,000.
Even at that, he calmly capitalized his company at 600,000,000 francs or
$120,000,000, though his own estimate of the cost of the canal exceeded
that amount by more than $12,000,000. One-half of his capital stock or
$60,000,000 the Count had reserved for the United States, but sold not a
dollar’s worth. The $60,000,000 first offered in France was, however,
eagerly subscribed. Of course it was wholly insufficient.

We know, what the unfortunate French investors could not, and their
directors probably did not know, that the canal could never be built by
a private company seeking profit. Neither could it be built by private
contract, as we discovered after some discouraging experiences of our
own. The French builders were at the mercy of the stock market. A
hurtful rumor, true or false, might at any time shut off their money
supplies. Experience has pretty thoroughly demonstrated that the
confidence of the investing public cannot long be maintained by false
reports or futile promises, but both of these devices the French worked
until the inevitable catastrophe.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

THE ANCON HOSPITAL GROUNDS

The beauty of the grounds is due to early French planning]

[Illustration: A SUNKEN RAILROAD

Nine feet below the boat is the roadbed of the old Panama railroad]

Disease on the Isthmus coöperated with distrust in Paris to bring about
failure. The French in 1880 knew nothing of the modern scientific
systems for checking yellow-fever contagion and the spread of malaria.
The part mosquitoes play as carriers of disease germs was not dreamed
of. Beyond building excellent hospitals for the sick, some of which we
still use, and dosing both sick and well liberally with quinine, they
had no plan of campaign against “Yellow Jack.” As a result, death
stalked grimly among them, and the stories written of his ravages are
ghastly. On the south side of Ancon Hill, where the quarry has gashed
the hillside, stood, until recently, a large frame house, built for
Jules Dingler, first director-general of canal work. It cost $150,000,
though perhaps worth a third of that sum, and was called “La Folie
Dingler.” But it was a rather tragic folly for poor Dingler, for before
he had fairly moved into it his wife, son and daughter died of yellow
fever and he returned to Paris to die too of a broken heart. His house,
in which he anticipated such happiness, became a smallpox hospital, and
was finally sold for $25 with the stipulation that the purchaser remove
it.

[Illustration: A ZONE WORKING VILLAGE

The low houses were built by the French: all screening added by
Americans]

A dinner was given M. Henri Boinne, secretary-general of the company.
Some one remarked that there were thirteen at the table, whereupon the
guest of honor remarked gaily that as he was the last to come he would
have to pay for all. In two weeks he was dead--yellow fever. Others at
the dinner followed him. Of the members of one surveying party on the
upper waters of the Chagres--a region I myself visited without a
suggestion of ill effects--every one, twenty-two in all, were prostrated
by disease and ten died. Bunau-Varilla, whose name is closely linked
with the canal, says: “Out of every one hundred individuals arriving on
the Isthmus, I can say without exaggeration that only twenty have been
able to remain at their posts at the working stations, and even in that
number many who were able to present an appearance of health had lost
much of their courage.”

Col. Gorgas tells of a party of eighteen young Frenchmen who came to the
Isthmus, all but one of whom died within a month. The Mother Superior of
the nursing sisters in the French hospital at Ancon lost by fever
twenty-one out of twenty-four sisters who had accompanied her to the
Isthmus.

How great was the total loss of French lives can only be guessed. The
hospital records show that at Ancon, 1041 patients died of yellow fever.
Col. Gorgas figures that as many died outside the hospital. All the
French records are more or less incomplete and their authenticity
doubtful because apprehension for the tender hopes and fears of the
shareholders led to the suppression of unpleasant facts. The customary
guess is that two out of every three Frenchmen who went to the Isthmus
died there. Col. Gorgas, who at one time figures the total loss during
the French régime at 16,500, recently raised his estimate to 22,000,
these figures of course including negro workmen. Little or no effort
was made to induce sanitary living, as under the Americans, and so
ignorant were the French--as indeed all physicians were at that time--of
the causes of the spread of yellow fever, that they set the legs of the
hospital beds in shallow pans of water to keep the ants from creeping to
the beds. The ants were stopped, but the water bred hosts of wrigglers
from which came the deadly _stegomyia_ mosquito, which carries the
yellow-fever poison from the patient to the well person. Had the
hospital been designed to spread instead of to cure disease its managers
could not have planned better.

[Illustration: NEGRO QUARTERS, FRENCH TOWN OF EMPIRE

Paving and sanitary arrangements due to American régime]

It is a curious fact that, in a situation in which the toll of death is
heaviest, man is apt to be most reckless and riotous in his pleasures.
The old drinking song of the English guardsmen beleaguered during the
Indian mutiny voices the almost universal desire of strong men to flaunt
a gay defiance in the face of death:

  “Stand! Stand to your glasses steady,
     ’Tis all we have left to prize,
   One cup to the dead already,
     Hurrah, for the next that dies”.

Wine, wassail and, I fear, women were much in evidence during the hectic
period of the French activities. The people of the two Isthmian towns
still speak of it as the _temps de luxe_. Dismal thrift was banished and
extravagance was the rule. Salaries were prodigious. Some high officials
were paid from $50,000 to $100,000 a year with houses, carriages,
traveling expenses and uncounted incidentals. Expenditures for
residences were lavish, and the nature of the structures still standing
shows that graft was the chief factor in the cost. The director-general
had a $40,000 bath-house, and a private railway car costing
$42,000--which is curiously enough almost exactly $1000 for each mile of
the railroad it traversed. The hospital buildings at Colon cost
$1,400,000 and one has but to look at them today to wonder how even the
$400,000 was spent.

The big graft that finally was one of the prime factors in wrecking the
company was in Paris, but enough went on in Colon and Panama to make
those two towns as full of easy money as a mining camp after a big
strike. The pleasures of such a society are not refined. Gambling and
drinking were the less serious vices. A French commentator of the time
remarks, “Most of the commercial business of Panama is transacted
standing and imbibing cocktails--always the eternal cocktail! Afterward,
if the consumer had the time and money to lose, he had only to cross the
hall to find himself in a little room, crowded with people where
roulette was going on. Oh this roulette, how much it has cost all grades
of canal employees! Its proprietor must make vast profits. Admission is
absolutely free; whoever wishes may join in the play. A democratic mob
pushes and crowds around the table. One is elbowed at the same time by a
negro, almost in rags, anxiously thrusting forward his ten sous, and by
a portly merchant with his pockets stuffed with piasters and bank
notes”.

These towns, which bought and consumed French champagnes and other wines
by the shipload, could not afford to build a water system. Water was
peddled in the streets by men carrying great jars, or conducting carts
with tanks. There were millions for roulette, poker and the lottery, but
nothing for sewers or pavements and during the wet season the people,
natives and French both, waded ankle deep in filth which would have
driven a blooded Berkshire hog from his sty. When from these man-created
conditions of drink and dirt, disease was bred and men died like the
vermin among which they lived, they blamed the climate, or the Chagres
River.

Amidst it all the work went on. So much stress has been laid upon the
riot in the towns that one forgets the patient digging out on the hills
and in the jungle. In 1912 the Secretary of the United States Canal
Commission estimated the amount of excavation done by the French, useful
to our canal, at 29,709,000 cubic yards worth $25,389,000. That by no
means represented all their work, for our shift in the line of the canal
made much of their excavation valueless. Between Gold Hill and
Contractor’s Hill in the Culebra Cut, where our struggle with the
obstinate resistance of nature has been fiercest, the French cut down
161 feet, all of it serviceable to us. Their surveys and plats are
invaluable, and their machinery, which tourists seeing some pieces
abandoned to the jungle condemn in the lump, has been of substantial
value to us both for use and for sale.

[Illustration: FILTH THAT WOULD DRIVE A BERKSHIRE FROM HIS STY

A typical scene in the negro quarters of Colon during the period of
French activity in Panama]

But under the conditions as they found them, the French could never have
completed the canal. Only a government could be equal to that task.
President Roosevelt found to his own satisfaction at least that neither
private contract nor civilian management was adequate. Most
emphatically, if the desire for profit was to be the sole animating
force the canal could never be built at all. When the discovery that
the canal enterprise would never be a “big bonanza” dawned on the French
stockholders distrust was rapidly succeeded by panic. Vainly did De
Lesseps repeat his favorite formula, “The canal will be built.” Vainly
did the officers of the company pay tribute to the blackmailers that
sprung up on every side--journalists, politicians, discharged employees,
every man who knew a weak point in the company’s armor. Reorganizations,
new stock issues, changes of plan, appeals for government aid, bond
issues, followed one after another. The sea-level canal was abandoned
and a lock canal substituted. After repeated petitions the French
Chamber of Deputies, salved with some of the spoil, authorized an issue
of lottery bonds and bankruptcy was temporarily averted. A new company
was formed but the work languished, just enough in fact being done to
keep the concession alive. After efforts to enlist the coöperation of
the United States, the company in despair offered to sell out altogether
to that government, and after that proffer the center of interest was
transferred from Paris to Washington.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood and Underwood_

CANAL VALLEY NEAR PEDRO MIGUEL

Through the line of hills in the background extends the deepest part of
the Culebra Cut]

The French had spent in all about $260,000,000 and sacrificed about 2000
French lives before they drew the fires from their dredges, left their
steam shovels in the jungle and turned the task over to the great
American Republic.

CHAPTER VII

THE UNITED STATES BEGINS WORK

The probable failure of the French became apparent some years before the
actual collapse occurred and public opinion in the United States was
quite ready for the assumption of the work and its expense by our
government. Of course that opinion was not wholly spontaneous--public
opinion rarely is, notwithstanding the idealists. There were many
parties in interest who found it profitable to enlist various agencies
for awakening public opinion in this country to the point of buying the
French property and saving something out of the wreck for the French
stockholders. But, as a matter of fact, little artificial agitation was
needful. The people of the United States readily agreed that a
trans-isthmian canal should be built and owned by the United States
government. There was honest difference of opinion as to the most
practicable route and even today in the face of the victory over nature
at Panama there are many who hold that the Nicaragua route would have
been better.

Naturally the start made by the French had something to do with turning
the decision in favor of the Isthmus, but it was not decisive. The
French had no rights that they could sell except the right of veto
conferred by their ownership of the Panama Railroad. Their franchise
from Colombia expressly prohibited its transfer to any other government,
so it was unsalable. But the charter of the Panama Railroad, which the
French had acquired, provided that no interoceanic canal should be built
in Colombia without the consent of the railroad corporation. This to
some extent gave the French the whiphand. What they had to sell was the
controlling stock of the railroad company, the land they had acquired in
Colombia, the machinery on the spot and the work they had completed. But
all of this was of little value without a franchise from Colombia and
the one the French held could not be transferred to a government, and
was of little worth anyway as it would expire in 1910, unless the canal
were completed by that year--a physical impossibility.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

PANAMA SOLDIERS GOING TO CHURCH]

In 1898 the race of the battleship “Oregon” around Cape Horn to join the
United States fleet off Cuba in the Spanish-American war offered just
the graphic and specific argument necessary to fix the determination of
the American people to dig that canal and to own it. That voyage of
10,000 miles which might have been avoided by a ditch fifty miles long
revolted the common sense of the nation, and the demand for instant
action on the canal question was universal. Accordingly in 1899
President McKinley appointed what was known as the Walker Commission,
because headed by Admiral John G. Walker, to investigate all Central
American routes. They had the data collected during almost a century at
their disposal and very speedily settled down to the alternative between
the Panama and the Nicaragua routes. Over this choice controversy raged
long and noisily. While it was in progress the bullet of an assassin
ended the life of President McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt succeeded
him.

The Isthmian Canal was precisely the great, epoch-marking spectacular
enterprise to enlist the utmost enthusiasm and energy of this peculiarly
dynamic President. A man of strong convictions he favored the Panama
route--and got it. He believed in a lock canal--and enforced his beliefs
over the report of the engineers whose expert professional opinions he
invited. Of a militant temperament he thought the canal should be dug by
the army--and that is the way it was built. Not over tolerant of other
people’s rights he thought the United States should have a free hand
over the canal and adjacent territory--and when Colombia, which happened
to own that territory, was slow in accepting this view he set up out of
nothing over night the new Republic of Panama, recognized it as a
sovereign state two days afterwards, concluded a treaty with it, giving
the United States all he thought it should have, and years later, in a
moment of frankness declared “I took Panama, and left Congress to debate
it later.”

[Illustration: THE OFFICIAL UMPIRE, COCLE]

About the political morality and the personal ethics of the Roosevelt
solution of the diplomatic problem there will ever be varying opinions.
Colombia is still mourning for her ravished province of Panama and
refuses to be comforted even at a price of $10,000,000 which has been
tentatively offered as salve for the wound. But that the canal in 1913
is just about ten years nearer completion than it would be had not
Roosevelt been President in 1903 is a proposition generally accepted.
History--which is not always moral--is apt to applaud results regardless
of methods, and the Republic and Canal of Panama are likely to be
Roosevelt’s most enduring monuments--though the canal may outlast the
Republic.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

THE MAN AND THE MACHINE

President Roosevelt and the monster steam shovel figure largely in the
story of Panama]

Prior to this time there had been several sporadic negotiations opened
with different nations of Central America for canal rights. The most
important one was a treaty signed at Bogotá in 1870 by an envoy
especially authorized by President Grant. But this treaty was never
ratified by our Senate, and was amended out of acceptable form by the
Colombian Senate. For the purposes of this narrative we may well
consider the diplomatic history of the canal to begin with the passage
of the Spooner act in 1902. This act, written by Senator John C. Spooner
of Wisconsin, authorized the Panama route if the French property could
be bought for $40,000,000 and the necessary right of way secured from
Colombia. Failing this the Commission of seven members created by the
act was authorized to open negotiations with Nicaragua. Events made it
quite apparent that the Nicaragua clause was inserted merely as a club
to be used in the negotiations with Colombia and the French company.
With the latter it proved highly effective, for although the American
attorney for the company, Mr. William Nelson Cromwell, fixed a price at
first upon the property of $101,141,500 an apparently active opening of
negotiations with Nicaragua caused an immediate drop to the prescribed
$40,000,000. With that offer in hand the Commission unanimously reported
to the President in favor of the Panama route.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

LANDING PIGS FOR MARKET]

The Republic of Colombia was less tractable, and naturally so as it held
a stronger hand. When negotiations began the French concession had but
seven years more of life. If their progress could be prolonged for that
period practically all that the United States would have paid the French
would be paid to Colombia. Meanwhile the French property was wholly
unsalable without a Colombian franchise. The one weak point in the
Colombian armor was the possibility that the United States might finally
turn to Nicaragua, but this contingency was made unlikely by the report
of the Commission, and by the general desire of the American people
which was undoubtedly for the Panama route.

[Illustration: THE TRAIL NEAR CULEBRA]

In 1903 the Colombian Minister at Washington negotiated with Senator Hay
a treaty which by a lucky chance failed of ratification in the Panama
Senate. It never reached our Senate, but it is quite incredible that it
could have succeeded there, for it had several features that would have
led to endless disagreement between the two countries--might indeed have
resulted in the United States annexing Colombia altogether. For example
the Canal Zone was to be governed by a joint commission of the two
countries--Colombia remaining sovereign over the territory. The United
States was to explicitly guarantee the sovereignty of Colombia against
all the world. Colombia was to police the Zone. Each of these sections
was big with possibilities of trouble. That Colombia did not speedily
ratify this treaty would be inexplicable, for it was all to the
Colombian good, except for the fact that by delaying any action for
seven years the French property along the line of the canal, valued at
$40,000,000, would drop into the Colombian treasury.

[Illustration: IN THE BANANA COUNTRY, ON THE COAST NEAR BOCAS DEL TORO]

Delay, however, while good enough for the Colombians, did not suit the
Panamanians, nor did it please Theodore Roosevelt, whom Providence,
while richly endowing him otherwise, had not invested with patience in
the face of opposition. The Panamanians, by whom for the purposes of
this narrative I mean chiefly the residents of Colon and the city of
Panama, wanted to see some American money spent in their various marts
of trade. The French were rapidly disappearing. The business of all
their commercial institutions from dry goods stores down to saloons was
falling off. Even the lottery did not thrive as of yore and the
proprietors of the lesser games of chance, that in those days were run
quite openly, were reduced to the precarious business of robbing each
other. All these and other vested interests called for immediate
negotiation of any sort of a treaty which would open the spigots of
Uncle Sam’s kegs of cash over the two thirsty Isthmian towns. It was
irksome too to think that the parent state of Colombia would make the
treaty and handle the cash accruing under it. The Yankees were ready to
pay $10,000,000 down, and it was believed a further rental of $250,000
for the right to build a canal every foot of which would be on the
territory of the Province of Panama. If Panama was a sovereign state
instead of merely a province, all this money would be used for the
benefit of but 400,000 people, including Indians and negroes, who of
course could not be expected to have much to say about its use. If
employed in public works, it would only have to spread over about 32,000
square miles, or a territory a little smaller than Indiana. But of
course it would chiefly go to the two cities. On the other hand if
Colombia made this treaty the capital city Bogotá would get the lion’s
share of the spoil, and for that matter all the provinces would share in
the division with Panama, which had the goods for sale.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

THE BEST RESIDENCE SECTION, COLON]

What more natural than that the Panamanians should turn their thoughts
toward secession from Colombia? It was no novel channel for their
meditations, for, as has been pointed out already, there had been 53
revolutions in Colombia in 57 years. Red revolution had become a
commonplace except for the poor fellows who got themselves killed in
them, or the widows and children thrown on the charity of a rather
uncharitable people. Always hitherto the result of the revolutions had
been the same--Panama had either been whipped into subjection, or had
voluntarily returned to the domination of Colombia. But that was before
there was a $10,000,000 prize at stake.

[Illustration: THE OLD FIRE CISTERN, PANAMA]

In several of these revolutions the United States had interfered, always
in behalf of Colombia and always with fatal effect upon the hopes of the
revolutionists. For the key to the military situation in Panama was the
railroad. In every well ordered revolution--for the business of
revolting had become a science--the conspirators began by corrupting the
federal soldiers at Panama City where alone any garrison was maintained.
This done they proclaimed Panama a free and independent state. As there
was no land communication between Bogotá and the Isthmus the federal
government was compelled to send its troops to Colon and thence across
the Isthmus to Panama by railroad. If the revolutionists could destroy
or obstruct the railroad their chances for success would be greatly
enhanced.

But under a treaty with Colombia in 1846 the United States guaranteed
the neutrality of the railroad and this guarantee was sensibly
constructed to include the task of keeping the line open for traffic. In
several revolutions, therefore, United States marines were detailed to
guard the line, and Colombia being thus enabled to pour its superior
forces into Panama crushed out rebellion with comparative ease. If the
experience of the 53 revolutions counted for anything, it indicated that
Panama could not throw off the Colombian yoke as long as the United
States kept the railroad open for Colombian troops.

Let us consider the situation toward the midsummer of 1903. In
Washington was the Roosevelt administration keenly eager to have the
canal work begun as a great deed to display to the nation in the coming
presidential campaign. In New York was Mr. William Nelson Cromwell,
representing the French company and quite as keen for action which would
enable him to sell the United States $40,000,000 worth of French
machinery and uncompleted canal. At Bogotá was the Colombian legislature
talking the Hay-Herrara treaty to death and giving every indication of a
purpose of killing it. Spanning the Isthmus was the all important
railroad which was part of the property the French so greatly desired to
sell. And at Panama and Colon were groups of influential men, high
financiers in a small way--a leader among them was the owner of the
Panama lottery--exceedingly anxious to have the handling of that
$10,000,000 which the United States would pay for a franchise, and quite
desirous to have the country tributary to those two towns suddenly
populated by 40,000 to 50,000 canal workmen, all drawing money from the
United States and spending it there.

[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT

ANCON HILL FROM HARBOR OF PANAMA

The town nestles under the northeast side of the hill which is
precipitous and cuts of the sun’s rays early in the afternoon. From the
crest the most beautiful view in Panama may be enjoyed.]

What happened was inevitable. Under the conditions existing only two
things could have prevented the successful revolution which did
occur--the quick ratification of a satisfactory treaty between the
United States and Colombia, or an observance by the United States of the
spirit as well as the letter of neutrality in the inevitable revolution.

Neither of these things happened. The Congress at Bogotá failed to
ratify the treaty. In Panama and Colon the revolutionary Junta
conspired, and sent emissaries to Washington to sound the government
there on its attitude in case of a revolution. To their aid came Mr.
Cromwell and M. Bunau-Varilla, a highly distinguished French engineer
also interested in the plight of his countrymen. Dr. Amador was chosen
to sound the then Secretary of State John Hay. He was told, according to
trustworthy reports, that while the United States guaranteed Colombia
against foreign aggression it did not bind itself to protect the
sovereignty of that state against domestic revolution. In the event of
such an uprising all it was bound to do was to see that traffic over the
railroad was unimpeded. This sounded and still sounds fair enough, but
there were minds among the revolutionists to see that this policy opened
the way for a successful revolution at last.

For this is the way in which the policy worked when put to the test--and
indeed some of the incidents indicate that the Roosevelt administration
went somewhat beyond the letter of the rule Secretary Hay had laid down.
Our government knew before the revolutionary blow was struck that it
was imminent. It is said indeed that when the revolutionists suggested
September 22nd as the date for the spontaneous uprising of the people
the Secretary sagaciously suggested that the Congress of Colombia would
not then have adjourned and that it might seem irregular to base a
revolution on the omission of the legislature to act when it was still
in session and could correct that omission. For this, or some other
reason, the revolution was postponed until November 5th. The Colombian
minister at Washington kept his government advised of the suspicious
activity there of the agents of the Junta and warmly advised the heavy
reënforcement of the garrison at Panama. But his home government was
slow to follow his advice. When it did move it was checked by the French
managers of the railroad.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

THE TWO PRESIDENTS; ROOSEVELT AND AMADOR]

Colombia’s only considerable seaport on the Pacific is Buenaventura and
at this point troops were collected to reënforce Panama. Two Colombian
gunboats in harbor at Panama were ordered to go after the troops. Coal
was needed for the voyage. The only source of coal supplies on the
Isthmus was the Panama Railroad which had long made a practice of
selling the fuel to all comers. But to the request of the Colombian navy
for coal at this time the railroad agent, evidently primed for the
occasion, put in a reluctant negative. All his coal was at Colon, and
the pressure of commercial business was so great that he could not move
it across the Isthmus in season to be of use to the gunboats. So those
troops stayed at Buenaventura and the Junta at Panama went on with its
plotting.

Now Colombia tried another plan to reënforce its Panama garrison--or to
replace it, for by this time the troops that had been there were won
over to the smoldering conspiracy. About four hundred soldiers were sent
down by the Gulf and landed at Colon. That they were landed at all seems
like a slight error in carrying out the Roosevelt policy, for in the
harbor of Colon lay the United States cruiser “Nashville” and gunboat
“Dixie” whose commanders had this despatch from the Secretary of the
Navy:

  “Maintain free and uninterrupted transit. If interruption is
  threatened by armed force occupy line of railroad. Prevent landing of
  any armed force with hostile intent either government or insurgent,
  either at Colon, Porto Bello or other points.”

Now there are some curious features about this despatch. On November
2nd, its date, there was no insurrection, therefore no insurgents. If
the administration intended to take official cognizance of the
activities of the Junta it must have known that the conspirators had no
ships and could not therefore plan landing any forces. The order then
was plainly designed to prevent Colombia from landing troops in its own
territory--a most extraordinary policy to adopt toward a friendly
nation. It was furthermore an order equivalent to assuring the success
of the foreshadowed revolution, for as there was no way except by sea
for Colombia to send troops to put down the insurgents, it was evident
that for the United States by its superior force to close the sea
against her was to give Panama over to the revolutionists.

[Illustration: CHOLO CHIEF AND HIS THIRD WIFE

The Chief is said to have poisoned her two predecessors]

However 400 troops were landed on the 3rd of November. The commander of
the “Nashville” probably thought his orders only operative in case of an
outbreak of insurrection and thus far there had been none. It became
time for the railroad company to declare its second check--which in this
case was checkmate. When the two generals in command of the Colombian
forces ordered special trains to transport their men to Panama the agent
blandly asked for prepayment of the fares--something above $2000. The
generals were embarrassed. They had no funds. It was of course the
business of the road, under its charter from Colombia, to transport the
troops on demand, and it was the part of the generals to use their
troops to compel it to do so. Taking the matter under advisement they
went alone across to Panama to investigate the situation. There they
were met by Gen. Huertas, in command of the garrison who first gave them
a good dinner and then put them under arrest informing them that Panama
had revolted, was now an independent republic, and that he was part of
the new régime. There was no more to it in Panama. The two generals
submitted gracefully. The Junta arrested all the Colombian officials in
Panama, who thereupon readily took oath of fealty to the new government.
A street mob, mainly boys, paraded cheering for Panama Libre. The Panama
flag sprang into being, and the revolution was complete.

[Illustration: _Photo by Prof. Lutz_

NATIVE HOUSE AND GROUP AT PUERTA PINAS]

[Illustration: WHAT THEY CALL A STREET IN TOBAGA]

Out in the harbor lay three Colombian gunboats. Two swiftly displayed
Panama flags which by singular good fortune were in their lockers. The
third with a fine show of loyalty fired two shells over the insurgent
city, one of which, bursting, slew an innocent Chinaman smoking opium in
his bunk. The city responded with an ineffective shot or two from the
seawall and the sole defender of the sovereignty of Colombia pulled down
its flag.

At the other end of the line the situation was more serious and might
well have caused bloodshed. Col. Torres, in charge of the troops there,
on hearing the news from Panama demanded a train at once, threatening
that unless it was furnished he would attack the Americans in the town.
He had more than 400 armed men, while on the “Nashville” were but 192
marines. In such a contest the Colombians could have relied upon much
assistance from the natives. With a guard of 42 marines employees of the
railroad prepared its stone freight house for defense while American
women and children were sent to vessels in the harbor. The Colombian
colonel had fixed two o’clock as the hour for beginning hostilities but
when that time arrived he invited a conference, and it was finally
agreed that both parties should retire from Colon, while he went to
Panama to consult with the jailed generals. During his absence the
“Dixie” arrived with 400 marines, and a little later the “Atlanta” with
1000. With this overwhelming force against him Col. Torres recognized
that the United States was back of the railroad’s refusal of
transportation and so yielded. With his troops he sailed again for
Cartagena.

[Illustration: HINDOO MERCHANTS ON THE ZONE]

Two days after the revolution--bloodless save for the sleeping
Chinaman--the United States recognized the Republic of Panama. Twelve
days later, with M. Bunau-Varilla who had by cable been appointed
minister to Washington, a treaty was concluded by which the United
States was granted all it desired for the furtherance of the canal
project. Much of the subsequent time of President Roosevelt was taken up
in arguing that he had not gone beyond the proper bounds of diplomacy in
getting this advantage, but the world though accepting the result has
ever been incredulous of his protestations of good faith. And the end is
not yet. Colombia has not condoned the part taken by the United States,
and the State Department has long been endeavoring to discover some way,
not too mortifying to our national self-esteem, by which we may allay
Colombia’s discontent. And as for that nation it has persistently
refused to recognize Panama as independent, one of the results of which
has been that the perpetrators of crime on the Isthmus may skip blithely
over the line to Bogotá or Cartagena and enjoy life free from dread of
extradition.

[Illustration: CHAME BEACH, PACIFIC COAST

Where sand is obtained for locks on the Pacific division]

Briefly summarized the terms of the treaty thus expeditiously secured
are:

1. The guaranty of the independence of the Republic of Panama.

2. The grant to the United States of a strip of land from ocean to
ocean, extending for five miles on each side of the canal, to be called
the Canal Zone and over which the United States has absolute
jurisdiction. From this Zone the cities of Panama and Colon are
explicitly excluded.

3. All railway and canal rights in the Zone are ceded to the United
States and its property therein is exempted from taxation.

4. The United States has the right to police, garrison and fortify the
Zone.

5. The United States is granted sanitary jurisdiction over the cities of
Panama and Colon, and is vested with the right to preserve order in the
Republic, should the Panamanian government in the judgment of the United
States fail to do so.

6. As a condition of the treaty the United States paid to Panama
$10,000,000 in cash, and in 1913 began the annual payment of $250,000 in
perpetuity.

Thus equipped with all necessary international authority for the work of
building the canal President Roosevelt plunged with equal vehemence and
audacity into the actual constructive work. If he strained to the
breaking point the rights of a friendly nation to get his treaty, he
afterwards tested even further the elasticity of the power of a
President to act without Congressional authority.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

FRENCH DRY DOCK, CRISTOBAL]

We may hastily pass over the steps forward. Mr. Cromwell was paid the
$40,000,000 for the French stockholders, and at once there arose a
prodigious outcry that the Frenchmen got but little out of it; that
their stock had been bought for a few cents on the dollar by speculative
Americans; that these Americans had financed the “revolution” and that
some of the stock was held by persons very close to the administration.
None of these charges was proved, but all left a rather bad impression
on the public mind. However the United States received full value for
the money. April 28, 1904, Congress appropriated the $10,000,000 due
Panama, and with the title thus clear Lieutenant Mark Brooke, U. S. A.,
at 7:30 A. M. May 4th, formally took over the territory in the name of
the United States. An excellent opportunity for pomp and ceremony, for
fuss and feathers was thus wasted. There were neither speeches, nor
thundering salutes and the hour was obviously unpropitious for
champagne. “They order these things better in France,” as “Uncle Toby”
was wont to say.

[Illustration: WHAT THE WORK EXPENDED ON THE CANAL MIGHT HAVE DONE

Build a Chinese wall from San Francisco to New York, or dig a ditch 10
feet deep and 55 feet wide across the United States at its widest part]

When little more than a decade shall have rolled away after that wasted
ceremonial moment the visitor to the Isthmus will gaze upon the greatest
completed public work of this or any other past age. To conceive of some
task that man may accomplish in future that will exceed in magnitude
this one is in itself a tax upon the most vivid imagination. To what
great work of the past can we compare this one of the present?

[Illustration: _Courtesy Scientific American_

A GRAPHIC COMPARISON

The “spoil” taken from the canal would build 63 pyramids the size of
Cheops in Broadway from the Battery to Harlem]

The great Chinese wall has been celebrated in all history as one of
man’s most gigantic efforts. It is 1500 miles long and would reach from
San Francisco to St. Louis. But the rock and dirt taken from the Panama
Canal would build a wall as high and thick as the Chinese wonder, 2500
miles long and reach from San Francisco to New York in a bee-line.

[Illustration: WHAT THE PANAMA CONCRETE WOULD DO]

We cross thousands of miles of ocean to see the great Pyramid of Cheops,
one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. But the “spoil” taken
from the canal prism would build sixty-three such pyramids which put in
a row would fill Broadway from the Battery to Harlem, or a distance of
nine miles.

The Panama Canal is but fifty miles long, but if we could imagine the
United States as perfectly level, the amount of excavation done at
Panama would dig a canal ten feet deep and fifty-five feet wide across
the United States at its broadest part.

New York City boasts of its great Pennsylvania terminal, and its
sky-piercing Woolworth Building; Washington is proud of its towering
Washington Monument, the White House and the buildings adjacent thereto.
But the concrete used in the locks and dams of the canal would make a
pyramid 400 feet high, covering the great railway station; the material
taken from Culebra cut alone would make a pyramid topping the Woolworth
tower by 100 feet, and covering the city from Chambers to Fulton Street,
and from the City Hall to West Broadway; while the total soil excavated
in the Canal Zone would form a pyramid 4200 feet or four fifths of a
mile high, and of equal base line obliterating not only the Washington
Monument but the White House, Treasury, the State, War and Navy
Buildings and the finest part of official Washington as well.

Jules Verne once, in imagination, drove a tunnel through the center of
the earth, but the little cylindrical tubes drilled for the dynamite
cartridges on “the line” (as people at Panama refer to the Canal Zone)
would, if placed end to end, pierce this great globe of ours from side
to side; while the dirt cars that have carried off the material would,
if made up in one train, reach four times around the world.

[Illustration: _Courtesy Scientific American_

PROPORTIONS OF SOME OF THE CANAL WORK]

But enough of the merely big. Let us consider the spectacle which would
confront that visitor whom, in an earlier chapter, we took from Colon to
view Porto Bello and San Lorenzo. After finishing those historical
pilgrimages if he desired to see the canal in its completed state--say
after 1914--he would take a ship at the great concrete docks at
Cristobal which will have supplanted as the resting places for the
world’s shipping the earlier timber wharves at Colon. Steaming out into
the magnificent Limon Bay, the vessel passes into the channel dredged
out some three miles into the turbulent Caribbean, and protected from
the harsh northers by the massive Toro Point breakwater. The vessel’s
prow is turned toward the land, not westward as one would think of a
ship bound from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but almost due south. The
channel through which she steams is 500 feet wide at the bottom, and 41
feet deep at low tide. It extends seven miles to the first interruption
at Gatun, a tide water stream all the way. The shores are low, covered
with tropical foliage, and littered along the water line with the débris
of recent construction work. After steaming about six miles someone
familiar with the line will be able to point out over the port side of
the ship the juncture of the old French canal with the completed one,
and if the jungle has not grown up too thick the narrow channel of the
former can be traced reaching back to Colon by the side of the Panama
Railroad. This canal was used by the Americans throughout the
construction work.

[Illustration: _Courtesy Scientific American_

THE “SPOIL” FROM CULEBRA CUT WOULD DO THIS]

At this point the shores rise higher and one on the bridge, or at the
bow, will be able to clearly discern far ahead a long hill sloping
gently upward on each side of the canal, and cut at the center with
great masses of white masonry, which as the ship comes nearer are seen
to be gigantic locks, rising in pairs by three steps to a total height
of 85 feet. For 1000 feet straight out into the center of the canal
extends a massive concrete pier, the continuation of the center wall, or
partition, between the pairs of locks, while to right and left side
walls flare out, to the full width of the canal, like a gigantic U, or a
funnel guiding the ships toward the straight pathway upward and onward.
A graceful lighthouse guides the ships at night, while all along the
central pier and guide wall electric lights in pairs give this outpost
of civilization in the jungle something of the air at night of a
brightly lighted boulevard.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

IN A TYPICAL LOCK

The bridge across is temporary, for construction purposes only. Gates
are still skeletonized awaiting the steel sheathing]

Up to this time the ship had been proceeding under her own steam and at
about full speed. Now slowing down she gradually comes to a full stop
alongside the central guide wall. Here will be waiting four electric
locomotives, two on the central, two on the side wall. Made fast, bow
and stern, the satellites start off with the ship in tow. It will take
an hour and a half to pass the three locks at Gatun and arrangements
will probably be made for passengers to leave the ship and walk by its
side if desired, as it climbs the three steps to the waters of Gatun
Lake 85 feet above.

Probably the first thing the observant passenger will notice is that as
the ship steams into the open lock the great gates which are to close
behind her and hold the water which flows in from below, slowly lifting
her to the lock above, are folded flush with the wall, a recess having
been built to receive them. The chamber which the vessel has entered is
1000 feet long, if the full water capacity be employed, 110 feet wide
and will raise the ship 28¹⁄₃ feet. If the ship is a comparatively small
one the full length of the lock will not be used, as intermediate gates
are provided which will permit the use of 400 or 600 feet of the lock as
required--thus saving water, which means saving power, for the water
that raises and lowers the ships also generates electric power which
will be employed in several ways.

Back of each pair of gates is a second pair of emergency gates folded
back flush with the wall and only to be used in case of injury to the
first pair. On the floor of the canal at the entrance to the lock lies a
great chain, attached to machinery which, at the first sign of a ship’s
becoming unmanageable, will raise it and bar the passage. Nearly all
serious accidents which have occurred to locks have been due to vessels
of which control has been lost, by some error in telegraphing from the
bridge to the engine room. For this reason at Panama vessels once in the
locks will be controlled wholly by the four locomotives on the lock
walls which can check its momentum at the slightest sign of danger.
Their own engines will be shut down. Finally at the upper entrance to
the locks is an emergency dam built on the guide wall. It is evident
that if an accident should happen to the gates of the upper lock the
water on the upper level would rush with destructive force against the
lower ones, perhaps sweeping away one after the other and wrecking the
canal disastrously. To avert this the emergency dams are swung on a
pivot, something like a drawbridge, athwart the lock and great plates
let down one after the other, stayed by the perpendicular steel
framework until the rush of the waters is checked. A caisson is then
sunk against these plates, making the dam complete.

The method of construction and operation of these locks will be more
fully described in a later chapter. What has been outlined here can be
fully observed, by the voyager in transit. The machinery by which all is
operated is concealed in the masonry crypts below, but the traveler may
find cheer and certainty of safety in the assurance of the engineer who
took me through the cavernous passages--“It’s all made fool proof”.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

LOCK AT PEDRO MIGUEL UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The picture shows strikingly the construction of the locks in pairs, the
inner pair being for precautionary purposes]

[Illustration: RANGE TOWER AT PACIFIC ENTRANCE]

Leaving the Gatun locks and going toward the Pacific the ship enters
Gatun Lake, a great artificial body of water 85 feet above tide water.
This is the ultimate height to which the vessel must climb, and it has
reached it in the three steps of the Gatun locks. To descend from Gatun
Lake to the Pacific level she drops down one lock at Pedro Miguel, 30¹⁄₃
feet; and two locks at Miraflores with a total descent of 54²⁄₃ feet.
Returning from the Pacific to the Atlantic the locks of course are taken
in reverse order, the ascent beginning at Miraflores and the complete
descent being made at Gatun. Gatun Lake constitutes really the major
part of the canal, and the channel through it extends in a somewhat
tortuous course for about twenty-four miles. So broad is the channel
dredged--ranging from 500 to 1000 feet in width and 45 to 85 in
depth--that vessels will proceed at full speed, a very material
advantage, as in ordinary canals half speed or even less is prescribed
in order to avoid the erosion of the banks.

The lake which the voyager by Panama will traverse will in time become a
scenic feature of the trip that cannot fail to delight those who gaze
upon it. But for some years to come it will be ghastly, a living
realization of some of the pictures emanating from the abnormal brain of
Gustave Doré. On either side of the ship gaunt gray trunks of dead trees
rise from the placid water, draped in some instances with the Spanish
moss familiar to residents of our southern states, though not abundant
on the Isthmus. More of the trees are hung with the trailing ropes of
vines once bright with green foliage and brilliant flowers, now gray and
dead like the parent trunk. Only the orchids and the air plants will
continue to give some slight hint of life to the dull gray monotony of
death. For a time, too, it must be expected that the atmosphere will be
as offensive as the scene is depressing, for it has been found that the
tropical foliage in rotting gives out a most penetrating and
disagreeable odor. The scientists have determined to their own
satisfaction that it is not prejudicial to health, but the men who have
been working in the camps near the shores of the rising lake declare it
emphatically destructive of comfort.

The unfortunate trees are drowned. Plunging their roots beneath the
waters causes their death as infallibly, but not so quickly, as to fill
a man’s lungs with the same fluid brings on his end. The Canal
Commission has not been oblivious to the disadvantages, both aesthetic
and practical, of this great body of dead timber standing in the lake,
but it has found the cost of removing it prohibitive. Careful estimates
fix the total expense for doing quickly what nature will do gratis in
time at $2,000,000. The many small inlets and backwaters of the lake
moreover will afford breeding places for the mosquitos and other
pestilent insects which the larvacide man with his can and pump can
never reach, and no earthly ingenuity can wholly purify.

[Illustration: BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF PEDRO MIGUEL LOCKS]

One vegetable phenomenon of the lake, now exceedingly common, will
persist for some time after the ocean-going steamers begin to ply those
waters, namely the floating islands. These range from a few feet to
several acres in extent, and are formed by portions of the spongy bed of
the lake being broken away by the action of the water, and carried off
by the current, or the winds acting upon the aquatic plants on the
surface. They gradually assume a size and consistency that will make
them, if not combated, a serious menace to navigation. At present the
sole method of dealing with them is to tow them down to the dam and send
them over the spillway, but some more speedy and efficacious method is
yet to be devised. However as the trees now standing fall and
disintegrate, and the actual shores of the lake recede further from the
canal the islands will become fewer, and the space in which they can
gather without impediment to navigation greater. Another menace to a
clear channel which has put in an appearance is the water hyacinth which
has practically destroyed the navigability of streams in Florida and
Louisiana. Conditions in Gatun Lake are ideal for it and the officials
are studying methods of checking its spread from the very beginning.

[Illustration: _Photo by Critchlow_

THE VEGETABLE MARTYRS

The trees in the district flooded by Gatun Lake are being slowly drowned
and will finally disappear]

The waters of the lake cover 164 square miles and are at points
eighty-five feet deep. In the main this vast expanse of water, one of
the largest of artificial reservoirs, containing about 183 billion cubic
feet of water, is supplied by the Chagres River, though several smaller
streams add to its volume. Before the dam was built two or three score
yards measured the Chagres at its widest point. Now the waters are
backed up into the interior far beyond the borders of the Canal Zone,
along the course of every little waterway that flowed into the Chagres,
and busy launches may ply above the sites of buried Indian towns. The
towns themselves will not be submerged, for the cane and palm-thatched
huts will float away on the rising tide. Indeed from the ships little
sign of native life will appear, unless it be Indians in cayucas making
their way to market. For the announced policy of the government is to
depopulate the Zone. All the Indian rights to the soil have been
purchased and the inhabitants remorselessly ordered to move out beyond
the five-mile strip on either side of the canal. This is unfortunate as
it will rob the trip of what might have been a scenic feature, for the
Indians love to build their villages near the water, which is in fact
their principal highway, and but for this prohibition would probably
rebuild as near the sites of their obliterated towns as the waters would
permit.

In passing through the lake the canal describes eight angles, and the
attentive traveler will find interest in watching the range lights by
which the ship is guided when navigating the channel by day or by
night--for there need be no cessation of passage because of darkness.
These range lights are lighthouses of reënforced concrete so placed in
pairs that one towers above the other at a distance back of the lower
one of several hundred feet. The pilot keeping these two in line will
know he is keeping to the center of his channel until the appearance of
two others on either port or starboard bow warns him that the time has
come to turn. The towers are of graceful design, and to come upon one
springing sixty feet or more into the air from a dense jungle clustering
about its very base is to have a new experience in the picturesque. They
will need no resident light keepers, for most are on a general electric
light circuit. Some of the more inaccessible however are stocked with
compressed acetylene which will burn over six months without recharging.
The whole canal indeed from its beginning miles out in the Atlantic to
its end under the blue Pacific will be lighted with buoys, beacons,
lighthouses and light posts along the locks until its course is almost
as easily followed as a “great white way.”

Sportsmen believe that this great artificial lake will in time become a
notable breeding place for fish and game. Many of our migratory northern
birds, including several varieties of ducks, now hibernate at the
Isthmus, and this broad expanse of placid water, with its innumerable
inlets penetrating a land densely covered with vegetation, should become
for them a favorite shelter. The population will be sparse, and mainly
as much as five miles away from the line of the canal through which the
great steamers will ceaselessly pass.

[Illustration: NATIVE STREET AT TABOGA]

During the period of its construction that portion of the canal which
will lie below the surface of Gatun Lake was plentifully sprinkled with
native villages, and held two or three considerable construction towns.
Of the latter Gorgona was the largest, which toward the end of canal
construction attained a population of about 4000. In the earlier history
of the Isthmus Gorgona was a noted stopping place for those crossing the
neck, but it seems to have been famed chiefly for the badness of its
accommodations. Otis says of it, “The town of Gorgona was noted in the
earlier days of the river travel as the place where the wet and jaded
traveler was accustomed to worry out the night on a rawhide, exposed to
the insects and the rain, and in the morning, if he was fortunate regale
himself on jerked beef and plantains.”

The French established railroad shops here which the Americans greatly
enlarged. As a result this town and the neighboring village of Matachin
became considerable centers of industry and Gorgona was one of the
pleasantest places of residence on “the line.” Its Y. M. C. A. clubhouse
was one of the largest and best equipped on the whole Zone, and the town
was well supplied with churches and schools. By the end of 1913 all this
will be changed. The shop will have been moved to the great new port of
Balboa; such of the houses and official buildings as could economically
be torn down and reërected will have been thus disposed of. Much of the
two towns will be covered by the lake, but on the higher portions of the
site will stand for some years deserted ruins which the all-conquering
jungle will finally take for its own. The railroad which once served its
active people will have been moved away to the other side of the canal
and Gorgona will have returned to the primitive wilderness whence
Pizarro and the gold hunters awakened it. Near its site is the hill
miscalled Balboa’s and from the steamships’ decks the wooden cross that
stands on its summit may be clearly seen.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

GAMBOA BRIDGE WITH CHAGRES AT FLOOD

For contrasting picture showing the river in dry season, see page 192]

Soon after passing Gorgona and Matachin the high bridge by which the
railroad crosses the Chagres at Gamboa, with its seven stone piers will
be visible over the starboard side. This point is of some interest as
being the spot at which the water was kept out of the long trench at
Culebra. A dyke, partly artificial, here obstructed the canal cut and
carried the railroad across to Las Cascadas, Empire, Culebra and other
considerable towns all abandoned, together with that branch of the road,
upon the completion of the canal.

[Illustration: THE Y. M. C. A. CLUB HOUSE AT GATUN]

Now the ship passes into the most spectacular part of the voyage--the
Culebra Cut. During the process of construction this stretch of the work
vied with the great dam at Gatun for the distinction of being the most
interesting and picturesque part of the work. Something of the
spectacular effect then presented will be lost when the ships begin to
pass. The sense of the magnitude of the work will not so greatly impress
the traveler standing on the deck of a ship, floating on the surface of
the canal which is here 45 feet deep, as it would were he standing at
the bottom of the cut. He will lose about 75 feet of the actual height,
as commanded by the earlier traveler who looked up at the towering
height of Contractors Hill from the very floor of the colossal
excavation. He will lose, too, much of the almost barbaric coloring of
the newly opened cut where bright red vied with chrome yellow in
startling the eye, and almost every shade of the chromatic scale had its
representative in the freshly uncovered strata of earth.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

WORKING IN CULEBRA CUT

The picture is taken at a comparatively quiet time, only two dirt trains
being visible]

The tropical foliage grows swiftly, and long before the new waterway
will have become an accustomed path to the ships of all nations the
sloping banks will be thickly covered with vegetation. It is indeed the
purpose of the Commission to encourage the growth of such vegetation by
planting, in the belief that the roots will tie the soil together and
lessen the danger of slides and washouts. The hills that here tower
aloft on either side of the canal form part of the great continental
divide that, all the way from Alaska to the Straits of Magellan divides
the Pacific from the Atlantic watershed. This is its lowest point. Gold
Hill, its greatest eminence, rises 495 feet above the bottom of the
canal, which in turn is 40 feet above sea level. The story of the
gigantic task of cutting through this ridge, of the new problems which
arose in almost every week’s work, and of the ways in which they were
met and overcome will necessitate a chapter to itself. Those who float
swiftly along in well-appointed steamships through the almost straight
channel 300 feet wide at the bottom, between towering hills, will find
the sensation the more memorable if they will study somewhat the figures
showing the proportions of the work, the full fruition of which they are
enjoying.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

MIRAFLORES LOCK IN MARCH, 1913

This lock is in two stories with a total lift of 56²⁄₃ feet; the Pacific
tides rise in the canal to the lower lock]

At Pedro Miguel a single lock lets the ship down to another little lake
hardly two miles across to Miraflores where two more locks drop it down
to tide water. From Miraflores the traveler can see the great bulk of
Ancon Hill looming up seven miles away, denoting the proximity of the
city of Panama which lies huddled under its Pacific front. Practically
one great rock is Ancon Hill, and its landward face is badly scarred by
the enormous quarry which the Commission has worked to furnish stone for
construction work. At its base is the new port of Balboa which is
destined to be in time a great distributing point for the Pacific coast
of both North and South America. For the vessels coming through the
canal from the Atlantic must, from Balboa, turn north or south or
proceed direct across the Pacific to those Asiatic markets of which the
old-time mariners so fondly dreamed. Fleets of smaller coastwise vessels
will gather here to take cargoes for the ports of Central America, or
for Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and other Pacific states of South America.
The Canal Commission is building great docks for the accommodation of
both through and local shipping; storage docks and pockets for coal and
tanks for oil. The coaling plant will have a capacity of about 100,000
tons, of which about one-half will be submerged. One dry dock will take
a ship 1000 feet long and 105 feet wide--the width of the dock itself
being 110 feet. There will be also a smaller dock. One pier, of the most
modern design, equipped with unloading cranes and 2200 feet long is
already complete, and the plans for additional piers are prepared. The
estimated cost of the terminals at Balboa is $15,000,000.

[Illustration: NAOS, PERICO AND FLAMENCO ISLANDS TO BE FORTIFIED]

The Suez Canal created no town such as Balboa is likely to be, for
conditions with it were wholly different. Port Said at the Mediterranean
end and Aden at the Red Sea terminus are coaling stations, nothing more.
Geographical considerations however are likely to give to both Balboa
and Cristobal--particularly the former--prime importance as points of
transshipment.

[Illustration: BEGINNING OF NEW BALBOA DOCKS]

The machine shops long in Gorgona and Matachin have been removed to
Balboa, and though since the completion of the canal the number of their
employes has been greatly decreased, the work of repairing and
outfitting vessels may be expected to maintain a large population of
mechanics. The administration offices now at Culebra will also be moved
to Balboa, which in fact is likely to become the chief town of the Canal
Zone. Here is to be an employes’ club house, built of concrete blocks at
a cost of $52,000. Like the other club houses established during the
construction period it will be under the direct administration of the Y.
M. C. A. The town of Balboa, and the club house will be in no small
degree the fruit of the earnest endeavor of Col. Goethals to build there
a town that shall be a credit to the nation, and a place of comfort for
those who inhabit it. His estimate presented to Congress of the cost and
character of the houses to be furnished to officers of various grades
and certain public buildings may be interesting here. The material is
all to be concrete blocks:

  Governor’s house                                               $25,000
  Commissioners’ and high officials’ houses, each                 15,000
    Houses of this type to have large center room, a sitting
    room, dining room, bath, kitchen and four bed rooms.
  Families drawing $200 a month                                    6,000
  Families drawing less, in 4-family buildings                     4,000
  Bachelor quarters, for 50                                       50,000

Besides these buildings for personal occupance Balboa will
contain--unless the original plans are materially modified:

  Hotel                                                          $22,500
  Commissary                                                      63,000
  School                                                          32,000
  Police station and court                                        37,000

[Illustration: THE OLD PACIFIC MAIL DOCKS AT BALBOA]

When Col. Goethals was presenting his estimates to Congress in 1913 the
members of the Committee on Appropriations looked somewhat askance on
the club-house feature of his requests, and this colloquy occurred:

  “The Chairman: ‘A $52,000 club house?’

  “Col. Goethals: ‘Yes, sir. We need a good club house, because we
  should give them some amusement, and keep them out of Panama. I
  believe in the club-house principle.’

  “The Chairman: ‘That is all right, but you must contemplate a very
  elaborate house?’

  “Col. Goethals: ‘Yes, sir. I want to make a town there that will be a
  credit to the United States government.’”

Looking out to sea from the prow of a ship entering the Pacific Ocean
you will notice three conical islands rising abruptly from the waves,
to a height of three or four hundred feet. To be more precise the one
nearest the shore ceased to be an island when the busy dirt trains of
the Canal Commission dumped into the sea some millions of cubic yards of
material taken from the Culebra Cut, forming at once a great area of
artificial land which may in ensuing centuries have its value, and a
breakwater which intercepts a local current that for a time gave the
canal builders much trouble by filling the channel with silt. The three
islands, Naos, Flamenco, and Perico are utilized by the United States as
sites for powerful forts. The policy of the War Department necessarily
prevents any description here of the forts planned or their armament.
Every government jealously guards from the merely curious a view of its
defensive works, and the intruder with a camera, however harmless and
inoffensive he may be, is severely dealt with as though he had profaned
the Holy of Holies. Despite these drastic precautions against the
harmless tourist it is a recognized fact that every government has in
its files plans and descriptions of the forts of any power with which it
is at all likely to become involved in war.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

THE PACIFIC GATEWAY

The gun points to canal entrance; high hills in the background are
beyond the canal]

It may be said, however, without entering into prohibited details, that
by the fortifications on the islands, and on the hills adjacent to the
canal entrance, as well as by a permanent system of submarine mines the
Pacific entrance to the canal is made as nearly impregnable as the art
of war permits. The locks at Miraflores are seven miles inland and the
effective range of naval guns is fourteen miles, so that but for the
fortifications and a fleet of our own to hold the hostile fleet well out
to sea the very keystone of the canal structure would be menaced. Our
government in building its new terminal city at Balboa had before it a
very striking illustration of the way in which nations covet just such
towns. Russia on completing her trans-Siberian railroad built at Port
Arthur a terminal even grander and more costly than our new outpost on
the Pacific. But the Japanese flag now waves over Port Arthur--and
incidentally the fortifications of that famous terminal were also
considered impregnable. Perhaps the impregnable fort like the unsinkable
ship is yet to be found.

At Balboa the trip through the completed canal will be ended. It has
covered a fraction over fifty miles, and has consumed, according to the
speed of the ship and the “smartness” of her handling in locks, from
seven to ten hours. He who was fortunate enough to make that voyage may
well reflect on the weeks of time and the thousands of tons of coal
necessary to carry his vessel from Colon to Balboa had the canal not
existed.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

COMPLETED CANAL AT COROZAL]

From Balboa to the ancient and yet gay city of Panama runs a trolley
line by which the passenger, whose ship remains in port for a few days,
or even a few hours, may with but little cost of time or money visit one
of the quaintest towns on the North American continent. If the climate,
or the seemingly ineradicable sluggishness of the Panamanian do not
intervene the two towns should grow into one, though their governments
must remain distinct, as the Republic of Panama naturally clings to its
capital city. But seemingly the prospect of a great new port at his
doors, open to the commerce of all the world, where ships from Hamburg
and Hong Kong, from London and Lima, from Copenhagen and from Melbourne
may all meet in passing their world-wide ways, excites the Panamanian
not a whit. He exists content with his town as it is, reaching out but
little for the new trade which this busy mart next door to him should
bring. No new hotels are rising within the line of the old walls; no new
air of haste or enterprise enlivens the placid streets and plazas.
Perhaps in time Balboa may be the big town, and Panama as much outworn
as that other Panama which Morgan left a mere group of ruins. It were a
pity should it be so, for no new town, built of neat cement blocks, with
a Y. M. C. A. club house as its crowning point of gaiety, can ever have
the charm which even the casual visitor finds in ragged, bright-colored,
crowded, gay and perhaps naughty Panama.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FORMATIVE PERIOD

American control of the canal, as I have already pointed out, was taken
over without any particular ceremony immediately after the payment to
Panama of the $10,000,000 provided for in the treaty. Indeed so slight
was the friction incident to the transfer of ownership from the French
to the Americans that several hundred laborers employed on the Culebra
Cut went on with their work serenely unconscious of any change in
management. But though work was uninterrupted the organization of the
directing force took time and thought. It took more than that. It
demanded the testing out of men in high place and the rejection of the
unfit; patient experimenting with methods and the abandonment of those
that failed to produce results. There was a long period of this
experimental work which sorely tried the patience of the American people
before the canal-digging organization fell into its stride and moved on
with a certain and resistless progress toward the goal.

In accordance with the Spooner act President Roosevelt on March 8, 1904,
appointed the first Isthmian Canal Commission with the following
personnel:

  Admiral John G. Walker, U. S. N., _Chairman_,

  Major General George W. Davis, U. S. A.,

  William Barclay Parsons,

  William H. Burr,

  Benjamin M. Harrod,

  Carl Ewald Gunsky,

  Frank J. Hecker.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

TUNNEL FOR THE OBISPO DIVERSION CANAL]

In 1913 when the canal approached completion not one of these gentlemen
was associated with it. Death had carried away Admiral Walker, but
official mortality had ended the canal-digging careers of the others.
Indeed under the rule of President Roosevelt the tenure of office of
Isthmian Commissioners was exceedingly slender and the whole commission
as originally designed was finally abolished being replaced by one made
up, with one exception, of officers of the army and navy. The first
commission visited the Isthmus, stayed precisely 24 days, ordered some
new surveys and returned to the United States. The most important fact
about its visit was that it was accompanied to the scene of work by an
army surgeon, one Dr. W. C. Gorgas, who had been engaged in cleaning up
Havana. Major Gorgas, to give him his army title, was not at this time a
member of the Commission but had been appointed Chief Sanitary Officer.
I shall have much to say of his work in a later chapter; as for that
matter Fame will have much to say of him in later ages. Col. Goethals,
who will share that pinnacle was not at this time associated with the
canal work. Coincidently with the Commission’s visit the President
appointed as chief engineer, John F. Wallace, at the moment general
manager of the Illinois Central Railroad. His salary was fixed at
$25,000 a year.

In telling the story of the digging of the Panama Canal we shall find
throughout that the engineer outshines the Commission; the executive
rather than the legislative is the ruling force. The story therefore
groups itself into three chapters of very unequal length--namely the
administrations as chief engineers of John F. Wallace, from June 1,
1904, to June 28, 1905; John F. Stevens, June 30, 1905, to April 1,
1907, and Col. George W. Goethals from April 1, 1907, to the time of
publication of this book and doubtless for a very considerable period
thereafter.

Each of these officials encountered new problems, serious obstacles,
heartbreaking delays and disappointments. Two broke down under the
strain; doubtless the one who took up the work last profited by both the
errors and the successes of his predecessors. It is but human nature to
give the highest applause to him who is in at the death, to immortalize
the soldier who plants the flag on the citadel, forgetting him who fell
making a breach in the outer breastworks and thereby made possible the
ultimate triumph.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

THE TWO COLONELS

W. C. Gorgas and George W. Goethals, whose combined work gave the canal
to the world.]

Wallace at the very outset had to overcome one grim and unrelenting
enemy which was largely subdued before his successors took up the work.
Yellow fever and malaria ravaged the Isthmus, as they had done from time
immemorial, and although Sanitary Officer Gorgas was there with
knowledge of how to put that foe to rout the campaign was yet to be
begun. They say that Wallace had a lurking dread that before he could
finish the canal the canal would finish him, and indeed he had sound
reasons for that fear. He found the headquarters of the chief engineer
in the building on Avenida Centrale now occupied by the United States
legation, but prior to his time tenanted by the French Director-General.
The streets of the town were unpaved, ankle deep in foul mire in the
rainy season, and covered with germ-laden dust when dry. There being no
sewers the townsfolk with airy indifference to public health emptied
their slops from the second-story windows feeling they had made
sufficient concession to the general welfare if they warned passersby
before tilting the bucket. Yellow fever was always present in isolated
cases, and by the time Wallace had been on the job a few months it
became epidemic, and among the victims was the wife of his secretary.

[Illustration: A WALK AT ANCON]

[Illustration: IN THE HOSPITAL GROUNDS]

However, the new chief engineer tackled the job with energy. There was
quite enough to enlist his best energies. It must be remembered that at
this date the fundamental problem of a sea level _vs._ a lock canal had
not been determined--was not definitely settled indeed until 1906.
Accordingly Engineer Wallace’s first work was getting ready to work. He
found 746 men tickling the surface of Culebra Cut with hand tools; the
old French houses, all there were for the new force had been seized upon
by natives or overrun by the jungle; while the French had left great
quantities of serviceable machinery it had been abandoned in the open
and required careful overhauling before being fit for use; the railroad
was inadequate in track mileage and in equipment. Above all the labor
problem was yet to be successfully solved. In his one year’s service
Wallace repaired 357 French houses and built 48 new ones, but the task
of housing the employees was still far from completed. Men swarmed over
the old French machinery, cutting away the jungle, dousing the metal
with kerosene and cleaning off the rust. Floating dredges were set to
work in the channel at the Atlantic end--which incidentally has been
abandoned in the completed plans for the canal though it was used in
preliminary construction. The railroad was reëquipped and extended and
the foundation laid for the thoroughly up-to-date road it now is.
Meanwhile the surveying parties were busy in the field collecting the
data from which after a prolonged period of discussion, the vexed
question of the type of canal, should be determined.

Two factors in the situation made Wallace’s job the hardest. The
Commission made its headquarters in Washington, 2000 miles or a week’s
journey away from the job, and the American people, eager for action,
were making the air resound with cries of “make the dirt fly!” In a
sense Wallace’s position was not unlike that of Gen. McClellan in the
opening months of the Civil War when the slogan of the northern press
was “On to Richmond,” and no thought was given to the obstacles in the
path, or the wisdom of preparing fully for the campaign before it was
begun. There are many who hold today that if Wallace had been deaf to
those who wanted to see the dirt fly, had taken the men off the work of
excavation until the type of canal had been determined and all necessary
housing and sanitation work had been completed, the results attained
would have been better, and the strain which broke down this really
capable engineer would have been averted.

[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_

FRENCH COTTAGES ON THE WATER FRONT, CRISTOBAL]

Red tape immeasurable wound about the Chief Engineer and all his
assistants. Requisitions had to go to the Commission for approval and
the Commission clung to Washington tenaciously, as all federal
commissions do wherever the work they are commissioned to perform may be
situated. During the Civil War days a story was current of a Major being
examined for promotion to a colonelcy.

“Now, Major,” asked an examiner, “we will consider, if you please, the
case of a regiment just ordered into battle. What is the usual position
of the colonel in such a case?”

“On Pennsylvania Avenue, about Willard’s Hotel,” responded the Major
bravely and truthfully.

The officers who directed Wallace’s fighting force clung to Pennsylvania
Avenue and its asphalt rather than abide with Avenidà Centrale and its
mud. So too did succeeding commissions until Theodore Roosevelt, who had
a personal penchant for being on the firing line, ordered that all
members of the Commission should reside on the Isthmus. At that he had
trouble enforcing the order except with the Army and Navy officers who
made up five-sevenths of the Commission.

How great was the delay caused by red tape and absentee authorities
cannot be estimated. When requisitions for supplies reached Washington
the regulations required that bids be advertised for. I rather discredit
the current story that when a young Panamanian arrived at Ancon Hospital
and the mother proved unable to furnish him with food, the doctor in
charge was officially notified that if he bought a nursing bottle
without advertising thirty days for bids he must do so at his own
expense. That story seems too strikingly illustrative of red-tape to be
true. But it is true that after Col. Gorgas had worked out his plans
for furnishing running water to Panama, and doing away with the cisterns
and great jars in which the residents stored water and bred mosquitoes,
it took nine months to get the iron pipes, ordinary ones at that, to
Panama. Meanwhile street paving and sewerage were held up and when
Wallace wired the Commission to hurry he was told to be less extravagant
in his use of the cable.

[Illustration: PAY DAY FOR THE BLACK LABOR]

No man suffered more from this sort of official delay and stupidity than
did Col. Gorgas. If any man was fighting for life it was he--not for his
own life but that of the thousands who were working, or yet to work on
the canal. Yet when he called for wire netting to screen out the
malarial mosquitos he was rebuked by the Commission as if he were asking
it merely to contribute to the luxury of the employees. The amount of
ingenuity expended by the Commission in suggesting ways in which wire
netting might be saved would be admirable as indicative of a desire to
guard the public purse, except for the fact that in saving netting they
were wasting human lives. The same policy was pursued when appeals came
in for additional equipment for the hospitals, for new machinery, for
wider authority. Whenever anything was to be done on the canal line the
first word from Washington was always criticism--the policy instantly
applied was delay.

Allowing for the disadvantages under which he labored Mr. Wallace
achieved great results in his year of service on the Isthmus. But his
connection with the canal was ended in a way about which must ever hang
some element of mystery. He complained bitterly, persistently and justly
about the conditions in which he was compelled to work and found in
President Roosevelt a sympathetic and a reasonable auditor. Indeed,
moved by the Chief Engineer’s appeals, the President endeavored to
secure from Congress authority to substitute a Commission of three for
the unwieldy body of seven with which Wallace found it so hard to make
headway. Failing in this the President characteristically enough did by
indirection what Congress would not permit him to do directly. He
demanded and received the resignations of all the original
commissioners, and appointed a new board with the following members:

  Theodore P. Shonts, _Chairman_,

  Charles E. Magoon, _Governor of the Canal Zone_,

  John F. Wallace, _Chief Engineer_,

  Mordecai T. Endicott,

  Peter C. Hains,

  Oswald H. Ernst,

  Benjamin M. Harrod.