Panama fever (19 page)

The British islands had not prospered in the years after the construction of the railroad. Since the then all-time-low sugar price of 1850, the value of the colonies’ principal export had fallen a further 30 percent. After emancipation in 1834, many former slaves, keen to establish their independence and a different life from that of plantation labor, had opted to set up small plots, producing food for themselves and for market. But most of the freeholds were under five acres—large enough for one family perhaps, but not enough to afford a livelihood for their sons and daughters, much less their grandchildren.

Furthermore, blacks remained condemned by the West Indian social structure to a permanent lower-class status, denied real recognition of their freedom, autonomy, or even humaneness. In response to this, a tradition of emigration grew up throughout the islands. Only by going abroad could a Jamaican or Barbadian find levels of reward for labor sufficient for their needs as well as lower levels of abuse.

Nevertheless, it is wrong to see the emigrants solely as passive objects, or victims of these conditions. In spite of everything, black West Indians had developed a strong sense of independence and personal dignity. The trend toward emigration also points to the ambition of the ex-slaves’ descendants to “better themselves”—to see the world outside their small island, and to earn enough to improve their conditions at home, to be masters of their own destiny. The Caribbean basin offered many good opportunities for work, not only on the Panama Railroad in the 1850s, but on other railway projects as well, in goldfields and metal and rubber industries, in logging or in plantations being set up throughout the area. The islands also exported teachers, missionaries, and ministers as well as colonists to previously unsettled areas.

In many ways the emigration to Panama during the French period is part of this pattern. There were particular “push” factors, such as the severe drought in Jamaica in 1879, but the project, in the eyes of the emigrants, also offered great opportunities. They made the journey to Panama not just to escape poverty at home, but just as much to “see the world,” “learn a foreign language,” or “seek adventure.” The chance of work on the canal was seen as a means of truly freeing themselves through their own efforts.

Nevertheless, the 1880s represent a quantum leap in West Indian emigration. Although records are incomplete, there seem to have been some five hundred British West Indians working on the canal by October 1881, 40 percent of the total workforce. The following year and for the rest of the project this percentage rose to 60 percent, as the overall workforce ballooned to over twenty thousand by 1884.

Early in 1881, the Company took on the services of Charles Gad-paille, a Jamaica-based Frenchman, to handle recruitment in the islands. Straightaway, he started posting advertisements in the local press. One such read:

A trip to Colón?

Wanted immediately!

10 000 labourers

for the

Panama Canal Company.

No indenture. Passengers returning when they like.

Both passage and food given.

$1.50 to $3.00 a day
^*

Medical care given when sick.

Apply to Charles Gadpaille

Hincks Street,

Agent, Panama Canal Company.

Daily wage rates in Jamaica for a field laborer in the 1880s were between sixpence and two shillings, less for women and children, so this was a great offer. If it seemed too good to be true, that is because it was. Gadpaille had no right to make many of these promises, as shall be seen. As well as newspaper advertisements, the agent posted flyers and sent runners into rural areas to drum up recruits.

Gadpaille concentrated his efforts in Jamaica, Barbados, Saint Lucia, and Martinique. Although the Company might have favored the French-speaking Martinicans, in fact they were less than impressed with workers from the Gallic Caribbean islands, considering them “pretentious, and always complaining, for they had been ruined by the political customs in vogue in the old French colonies.” So the vast majority of the workers on the French canal came from Jamaica, with Saint Lucians the next largest group. The first arrivals, in 1881 and 1882, tended to be skilled laborers and artisans who were not involved in cultivation on small freeholdings, but had drifted into the towns and cities as they were displaced from estate labor. After this first period, the typical migrant was male, an agricultural worker, twenty-five to thirty-five years old.

Henri Cermoise was highly impressed with the new arrivals from Jamaica. “They were excellent workers,” he wrote, “much more active and energetic than the Isthmians and easier to manage.” Back at home, some of the planters were less than pleased at seeing their pliant labor force leave the country, but for now the governments of the islands saw the money that would be sent home outweighing the disadvantages to the planters. The governor of Jamaica's annual report of 1882 commended the returning emigrants, “bringing with them money with which they arrange their affairs and aid their families.”

But for every laborer returning with his pockets rattling with coins, there was another who came back in a different state, or didn't make it back at all. Some Jamaican workers, Governor Musgrave reported in 1882, “are left when ill to die in the streets of Colón.” His main complaint was that his government was “put to large expenses for the relief, burial, or return to the colony of any natives whose case comes before the British consular authorities. And, moreover, many of those who return are so broken down by Chagres Fever, and other disorders, that they become a burden upon the community, and the poor rates.” It was clear that, already, disease was taking a toll on all sections of the workforce.

*
Wages here, as throughout the French period, are in Colombian silver dollars, equivalent to about US$0.65–0.70.

CHAPTER TEN

FEVER

The beginning of the project's first wet season had seen the initial serious outbreaks of disease. The first high-profile death among the thousand-odd employees occurred in the second week of June 1881, soon after the beginning of the rains. A distinguished and experienced engineer named Etienne died on July 25, supposedly of
“ataxie cérébrale”
—”a fit of the brain.” On the Isthmus at the time, on a two-week tour of inspection, was thirty-nine-year-old Henri Bionne, the Company's secretary. On July 9 he had dined in Henri Cermoise's mess hut at Gamboa for which the excellent Belgian cook had pulled out all the stops. “He drank to our success on the Isthmus,” remembered Cermoise. “We drank to his good luck.” Bionne boarded a boat home for France on the evening of Sunday, July 24, and at the captain's table that night he reported himself feeling poorly and without appetite. The following afternoon he was visited in his cabin by Georges Hopkins, the ship's doctor, who found him in the throes of a violent shaking fit, which was followed by a high fever. According to the doctor's report, reprinted in the
Bulletin
, Bionne was given quinine, and, the next day, a mustard bath. After this he felt better, and even had a little to eat. The doctor was much encouraged that his patient seemed to show no signs of the symptoms of yellow fever. But on the Thursday morning, he was “evidently in a state of delirium.” He was given more quinine and mustard treatment, but “his state worsened quickly; after a fit, he fell into a coma during which he died… the last symptoms indicate kidney failure.” His body was hastily disposed of, shunted overboard in the Gulf of Mexico.

The doctor's diagnosis was that Bionne had died of a breakdown of his nervous system. For the benefit of readers of the
Bulletin
, he was keen to stress that it had not been yellow fever. This illness held a particular fascination and horror for Europeans and North Americans. Emerging in the Caribbean in the 1640s, supposedly from the Mayans on the mainland, or, as recent theories suggest, from mosquito stowaways on the slave ships from Africa, the disease spread to Barbados and Cuba, where it killed one-third of the island's inhabitants. Outsiders in the region seemed particularly vulnerable. In 1665, it claimed the lives of all but 89 of an English squadron of 1,500 stationed in Saint Lucia. Spaniards on imperial duty carried it back to their home cities, where it wreaked havoc. For the next two hundred years, the disease also came and went along the southern and eastern coasts of the United States over a hundred times, on one occasion killing more than 5,000 in the Mississippi Valley. In 1793, the city of Philadelphia was decimated by yellow fever, or “yellow jack” as it became known. Famously, Napoléon's Polish legion of 25,000 men, sent to recapture Haiti from Toussaint L'Ouverture and to reestablish control of France's North American empire of Louisiana and New Orleans, was wiped out by yellow fever and retreated, vanquished, home.

Yellow fever is an almost uniquely distressing, disgusting, and terrifying disease. There is still no cure, apart from treating the results of the disease, such as kidney failure, and in the 1880s a strong adult would have only about an even chance of surviving an attack. At that time it was treated with whiskey, mustard seed, brandy, and cigars. If you do survive, you are then subsequently immune. Thus the disease, to flourish into an epidemic, needs an influx of nonimmune subjects. Caused by an arbovirus, a small virus transmitted by the bites of certain mosquitoes, the early symptoms include headaches, loss of appetite, and muscle pain. A high temperature follows, accompanied by severe back pain, which many described as like being on the rack. After that comes a burning, agonizing thirst, the telltale jaundice as the face and eyes yellow, and the dreaded
“vomito negro”
—vomiting up choking mouthfuls of dark blood, as the virus causes liver and kidney failure and multiorgan dysfunction and hemorrhage. The brain is often affected as well, producing delirium, seizures, and coma. The medical shock, caused by extreme fluid loss, can in itself be fatal.

Part of the terror of the disease was in its mystery, how it arrived from nowhere, created havoc, and then just as inexplicably disappeared. As well as there being no effective treatment, there was little idea of how the disease was transmitted. Some doctors suggested that it was due to a certain wind off the sea; others were sure it was some sort of fungus. One insisted that it came from eating apples. Most agreed, though, that it was airborne, and as it was so often found around ports, that it had to have something to do with mud, filth, or dead animals. Worst of all for causing infection, it was believed, was the patient himself, or anything that he had touched. Victims were shunned, given a hasty burial, and their clothes destroyed.

Fevers came under many names on the Isthmus. As well as yellow fever there is mention of
calentura
, miasma, the shakes, blackwater fever, the chills,
paludisme
, ague, pernicious fever, putrid fever, and, particularly nasty, “Chagres” or “Panama Fever.” Yellow fever was the most feared by whites, but these versions of malaria were actually the biggest killers.

Caused by a parasite that is transmitted to humans through the bites of an infected
Anopheles
mosquito, malaria remains a huge scourge at the beginning of the twenty-first century, killing around a million people a year in Africa alone. The parasites migrate to the liver and then infect red blood cells, where they multiply, rupturing the cells, then spread further. The weakening and disruption of the body's blood results in many symptoms that are similar to those of yellow fever: uncontrolled shivering, chattering teeth, high fever, sweating and a burning thirst, headaches, nausea and vomiting, muscle pain, and anemia. This can lead to jaundice, convulsions, coma, rupture of the spleen, and subsequent massive hemorrhage. If you live, you will be severely weakened mentally, as well as physically. Unlike yellow fever, malaria attacks confer no instant immunity and can recur to those who survive, often killing on the third or fourth attack. The only effective treatment at the time was the administration of quinine, a palliative made from the bark of the cinchona tree, a trick learned from the Incas of Peru. Quinine stops the disease's progress by interfering with the growth and reproduction of the parasites in red blood cells. But when malaria patients stop taking quinine they relapse. This was more common than might be thought: quinine not only tasted disgustingly bitter, it also had side effects including nausea, painful earache, deafness, and, most dangerous of all, hypoglycemia.

For centuries, people had believed that malaria was caused by “miasma”—toxic emanations from the rich corruption of tropical soil. That is why de Lépinay had argued during the Paris Congress that to dig up so much earth in Panama would be particularly dangerous. In the early 1880s, recent studies near Rome had led to the theory that it was a bacterium in the soil, made airborne when released, that caused the malaria symptoms. Although isolated individuals had suggested that neither yellow fever nor malaria were airborne but were transmitted by mosquitoes, and numerous experiments with this idea were being carried out in Cuba as early as 1881, the development and acceptance of the theory were some years away. Until that time, the “miasma” theory held sway, and the Isthmus was consequently a death trap.