Panama fever (20 page)

Two days after Bionne had boarded his steamer to France, Blasert, Cermoise's “indestructible” Belgian friend from the Gamboa camp, put his wife and children on the boat back to France. The very next day he took sick, with yellow fever according to Cermoise, and died soon after. He, too, had been at the Bionne dinner.

As others of his companions starting sickening and dying, including the much-praised Belgian cook, even Cermoise's optimism and humor faltered. “There was a dismal period for the administration,” he wrote. “It seemed as if a wind of death was blowing on its employees.” Even at Emperador, high in the mountains and seemingly the healthiest spot on the line, there was a bad outbreak of yellow fever. “The situation looked bad,” said Cermoise. “These successive deaths… had shaken our courage, striking the imaginations of even the bravest men; everyone anxiously began thinking of steamers home; in a word, we were struck by one of those moral weaknesses from which a panic is born.”

Armand Reclus was away in Paris, having left Louis Verbrugghe in charge. On October 5, 1881, the lawyer wrote to France: “At the moment, the state of health conditions in Panama is distressing: an upsurge of disease is occurring… the morale of our personnel is a bit shaken by the sudden deaths … Natanson and Marinovitch are leaving Panama. All the pretty promises they made to Abel Couvreux have been broken.” This panic, the fear of disease, was almost as bad for the project as the actual fatalities.

Inevitably, rumors reached Europe, but de Lesseps, addressing a Geographical Congress at Vienna that month, insisted: “No epidemic of maladie had manifested itself at Panama. Only a few cases of yellow fever had appeared, and these had been imported from abroad.” But even worse was to come. In November, Gaston Blanchet, whose marriage the previous year had made him a popular figure in Panama, became shivery and feverish while on an expedition mapping the headwaters of the Chagres. He made it back to Panama City, but died two days later. “Mr. Blanchet's death is an irreparable loss to the Company,” the British consul reported back to London. “Operations will be almost entirely at a standstill until his successor arrives.”

The “casualty figures” from the French construction period were argued over at the time, and have been ever since. Contemporary American newspapers hostile to the project doubtlessly exaggerated their reports, claiming that among the couple of hundred white technicians alone nearly seventy had perished in the first twelve months. The Company retaliated by ridiculing the figures. The best estimate is that about fifty men died in the first year, from an average workforce of about a thousand for this period. Many more, though, were incapacitated by illness.

As part of his pitch to investors in the canal, de Lesseps had promised up-to-date hospitals would be built to serve the workers on the project. And he was as good as his word. A hundred-bed hospital was constructed in Colón, and work started on a huge five-hundred-bed establishment on Ancón Hill, a salubrious and breezy spot high above Panama City. Huge sums were spent—a million dollars on the Colón hospital and more than five and a half million dollars at Ancón, on a seventeen-building complex that included its own fresh water supply, a vast laundry, an abattoir, and a farm that provided the patients with an abundance of milk, eggs, and fresh vegetables. Outside the ward windows, patients could enjoy a well-laid-out garden, irrigated on a terrace system, bright with herbs and flowers. Inside, as a contemporary noted, “the hospital rooms are so vast and well-ventilated that, even in the ones occupied by Negroes stricken with marsh fever, visitors with the most acute sense of smell could not detect the slightest odour.” It was by some distance the best hospital anywhere in the tropics.

A further half a million dollars was spent on building an extensive sanatorium on the island of Taboga, about an hour and a half by steamer out into the Bay of Panama. In its lavish and beautiful surroundings, employees could convalesce after a time in one of the hospitals, or just take a break from the feverish climate of the mainland.

In charge of the medical operation was the former head of the sanitary division at Suez. He ran a team of six doctors and thirty nurses from the order of St. Vincent de Paul, led by Sister Marie Roulon. Their care, though medically primitive by later standards, was much praised. “She is one of those rare women whose personal zeal is contagious,” wrote the
New York Herald's
occasional Panama correspondent of Sister Roulon in October 1881. “Every one of her Sisters has caught the trick of her cheery kindness … When all healing is unavailing, they make even the scorched death of yellow fever easy if such a thing can be.”

But in November the rains ended, and as the pools of stagnant water on which the mosquitoes depended to hatch their young dried up, so rates of infection fell away. In addition, according to Henri Cermoise, the skillful and courageous leadership of Louis Verbrugghe did much to calm exaggerated fears. But now that the small window of dry weather had returned, it was imperative that work be pushed ahead with as much urgency as possible.

y November 1881, Henri Cermoise's task of mapping the precise axis of the canal was completed and it was time to set it out on the ground, with a line of stakes either side of the area to be excavated. Together with Montcenaux, he was given a ten-kilometer section to mark out in the area of Gorgona. Cermoise was happy to be back out in the field, and to be reunited with his friend, who, as Cermoise had predicted, had caught a fever while working near Gatún, and had very nearly died. At first, writes Cermoise, Montcenaux had presented the symptoms of the dreaded
vomito negro
—yellow fever—but as he had survived, Cermoise deduces, it must have been something else. “There's only one certain way to diagnose fever,” he wrote. “Did he die? Then it's Yellow Fever. Did he recover? Then it is only an attack of bilious fever.”

At Gorgona they camped out in an open shack in the middle of the village until, fifteen days later, a prefabricated house was sent up to them by the Company. In the meantime, they started the job of clearing vegetation from their ten kilometers. They were all too familiar with this arduous task from their surveying work at Gamboa, but this was now on a different level. Previously, their
“tranches”
had been fairly haphazard—they had been able to bypass obstacles or particularly enormous trees—but now they had to stick exactly to the route on their maps as well as create a much wider and more complete clearance.

Missing the Belgian cook, Cermoise now found the available provisions scarce and expensive. As elsewhere on the Isthmus, the local retailing (the single shop) was run by a Chinese gentleman, in this case married to a local. As more and more foreign workers arrived on the Isthmus, so prices climbed with demand.

Many of the people turning up, Cermoise complains, were still of dubious qualifications or even competence. At one point a carpenter working on the accommodation requested thirty nails from the workshop in Panama, carefully carving a piece of wood in the exact dimensions and size of what he required. A fortnight later the order duly arrived, to exactly the right dimensions, but each one made of wood and so utterly useless. In all, there was a feeling of muddling through.

Among the imported workers, reported the
Star and Herald
, there was also dissatisfaction. At the beginning of January 1882a general strike broke out in Colón, based on demands for $1.50 rather than $1.20 a day. The following day, January 6, the strike was “in full blast,” and had drawn in workers on the railway, the steamers, and the canal itself. Fearing wider trouble, the American consul summoned the U.S. Navy. The standoff continued for a week, with the works of the Isthmus at a standstill, while the Company tried in vain to import enough new men to cover the gaps. On January 13, the bosses offered $1.35, but the workers stuck to their guns, citing the huge rise in the prices of provisions over the previous twelve months. The
Star and Herald
sympathized with this, but urged the strikers to do the right thing and take the offer, as soon the Isthmus would be flooded with labor and their negotiating power would be gone. Finally, on January 14, the paper could report the end of the strike: “The railway wharf is again a scene of life and animation … The price paid for labor by the Railway Company is $1.50 per day.” When the U.S. warships arrived two weeks later, all was peaceful.

On January 20, 1882, the first spade load came out of the actual line of the canal at Emperador. This was fitting, as here was the highest position on the canal route, the point at which the depth of the trench to be dug to reach sea level was over 350 feet. The French called the area
“la section de la grande tranchée.”
A spectacular explosion in the presence of a number of invited guests launched the work, after which the great and the good retreated to Panama for a banquet followed by a gala dance.

It was a great boost for the project that actual excavation was under way, but for the next four months of the dry season the Company was unable to get mechanical diggers into place and operational. The work fell to some seven hundred men, mostly Jamaicans, toiling away with pick and shovel, so progress was slow. Much of the overall workforce was still employed with erecting buildings, laying track, and improving access to the site.

From Matachín to Gatún work was still needed pegging out the line, which was not entirely cleared of vegetation until May. In February, Henri Cermoise and Montcenaux had been sent to San Pablo, an isolated spot offering few diversions apart from watching the trains go past and hunting for iguanas and local wild turkeys. Two months later, just as their time there was coming to an end, Cermoise suddenly felt “invaded by a persistent tiredness.” He had a headache, could hardly eat, and was left indifferent by even the most succulent iguana eggs. For him, the attack seemed inevitable. Montcenaux had done his time while at Gatún, now it was his turn. Soon, he felt dizzy, then overcome with aches and was unable to stand up. After that he suffered a high fever for two days, during which, “unfortunately, my reason left me on several occasions.” He was convinced that he had been taken with yellow fever. Montcenaux, however, did not panic, dosing his friend with quinine and calling for help from a passing train, which took Cermoise to Panama City.

To his relief, at the hospital Cermoise was diagnosed with
calentura
, rather than yellow fever. But for fifteen days he suffered a high fever and delirium, never sure if he was awake or asleep. When he regained his senses, he felt lucky compared to the man he saw in the bed next to him who, weakened by fever and blood loss from vampire bat attacks, also had some type of larvae in the top of his nose, which in a few days burrowed into his head and killed him.

But the new hospitals were far from full, in spite of the fact that the labor force was increasing quickly on the Isthmus, mainly as a result of Charles Gadpaille's efforts in Jamaica. In May 1882, the British consul reported three thousand men at work along the line, and that “The sanitary condition is very favourable. There are about forty-two cases of various types of fever, none of which are of an alarming nature. The average is fourteen cases in 1,000, which I consider a very feeble percentage, owing to the nature of the work the men are engaged in. I am happy to say that the natives of the West Indies stand the climate very well, and supply the Company with a good nucleus.” By this time the entire line had at last been cleared to a width of 300 meters, a task that had taken much more time and effort than had been anticipated.

The following month, June 1882, de Lesseps told the third annual shareholders’ meeting of the details of the purchase of the PRR and asked for a bond issue to pay for this expenditure. He also announced that excavation work had now started at Gatún, Gamboa, Bas Obispo, Culebra, Gorgona, and Paraíso. In twelve months’ time, he breezily predicted, 5 million cubic meters would have been removed from Culebra. There was more good news. In February a contract had been signed with an American company, Huerne, Slaven & Company, to dig a channel to a depth of 2.5 meters between Colón and Gatún. The excavation was reckoned at 6 million cubic meters, which would take eighteen months from a start date of August 1882. This, de Lesseps explained, would bring American mechanical skill and might to the project, and bury forever the fear that the United States was opposed to the canal. Shareholders were delighted and readily approved a bond issue to be held that September.