Panama fever (28 page)

At the opening of the Company's July 1885 annual general meeting, the reality of the situation was beginning to undermine the faith of even the strongest believers in de Lesseps's Great Idea. Worries were expressed about the financial state of the company, the falling rate of excavation, the sporadic labor troubles, and the terrible rate of attrition from disease. De Lesseps countered with an inspired bout of oratory, speaking, without notes, for an hour, announcing that he would launch a lottery to raise the extra 600 million francs more he now said were needed. Furthermore, he would personally visit the Isthmus to inaugurate the “final stage of construction.” It says much for his magnetism that he was still able to charm an overwhelming vote of confidence from his audience.

It was a lottery bond issue that had saved the Suez Canal. In 1867, after the failure of a bond issue, de Lesseps had issued 5 percent lottery bonds, with four prize draws a year, each offering a 250,000-franc top prize. It had been a huge success and ensured the opening of the canal two years later. But under French law such an issue was restricted to undertakings of national importance and required a specific act of Parliament. Straightaway, de Lesseps found the government of the republic less helpful than had been the Imperial Senate. Although the Company organized, at great expense, a flood of petitions in favor of the legislation, the minister of works took no action until December, when he ordered a senior and scrupulously honest government engineer, Armand Rousseau, to go to Panama to give judgment on the project. In Rousseau's hands, it seemed, was the future of the canal.

In the meantime, after a gap of two months after the departure of Dingler, a new
Directeur Général
, Maurice Hutin, had taken over in September. There had already been drift in the leadership of the project, but Hutin himself left Panama only a month later, struck down with yellow fever. He would survive and return to the canal story later, but again there was a vacuum at the top of the organization on the Isthmus. Into the breach stepped twenty-seven-year-old Philippe Bunau-Varilla, as acting chief engineer.

His duties at either end of the canal had already stretched the young engineer, leaving him time, he says, for only two or three hours’ sleep a night, but he took on the new role with enthusiasm. His first initiatives were to improve recruitment and labor relations and to set a monthly excavation target of 1 million cubic meters for the first few months of 1886. With patriotic rhetoric, he urged on his French engineers and technicians.

Before the end of the year, however, disaster struck again on the Isthmus. On December 2 a violent storm lashed the Atlantic seaboard, with winds of up to a hundred miles an hour. Vessels crowded into the exposed harbor of Colón tried to escape out to sea, but at least ten were driven onto the shore. Bunau-Varilla rushed to the port, concerned above all about the safety of the newly built embankment of Cristóbal. At the harbor he was met by a terrible scene. Boats were smashed on the rocks or overturned, with their crews clinging to them like “a human bunch of grapes.” The seawall at Cristóbal survived, but more than fifty sailors were drowned. Meanwhile “Rain poured in torrents,” the
Star and Herald
reported. “The Chagres River has risen over twenty feet above its level.” The river was soon in huge flood, discharging twenty-five times its normal volume of water. In a stroke, much of the work and equipment were submerged.

The next day, with the sky again clear, Bunau-Varilla inspected his sector. “The points where my locomotive passed on the previous day were now covered by fourteen feet of water,” he wrote, “so I requisitioned three Indian canoes … as we paddled along through a channel apparently cut out of virgin forest all the workings were submerged and the tops of the telegraph poles were scarcely visible above the water.” After one canoe was damaged, the party had to crowd into two boats. “The load was almost too much,” Bunau-Varilla continues, “and the freeboard was not more than an inch above water. One of the engineers, a M. Philippe, said that he couldn't swim. I told him jokingly, ‘There is no danger. I could easily swim with you to the nearest trees.’ It was only then that I noticed the strangest phenomenon: the tops of the trees were not their usual green, but a distinct and ever-shifting black; as we drew nearer I saw they were covered with the most enormous and deadly spiders: tarantulas.”

The damage from the floods was straightaway noticed by Lieutenant William Kimball, who toured the works soon after to write the latest U.S. Navy report on the construction. At Bohío Soldado he found 3 million cubic meters of sand deposited in the trench by the subsiding waters, with railtrack and spoil cars buried to the depth of 2 meters. Kimball's report provides a fascinating and evenhanded snapshot of both progress on the works, and also, more generally, of life on the project at the turn of 1885–86. In some places he noticed progress from the findings of a report twelve months earlier. Work on the repair of the wharves had proceeded quickly. In
la grande tranchée
between Bas Obispo and Culebra “some very good work has been done,” even if a lot of it was by “hand-drills, small blasts, and hand work.” At Matachín, the central machinery depot, almost entirely staffed by Americans from New Orleans, seemed efficient and well equipped, although it had cranes too light for the task. In general, the accommodation and infrastructure seemed to have improved, with the exception of the hospitals, which had proved inadequate for the number of sick.

Kimball noted with interest the construction of a dam on the Río Grande to enable dredges to be floated further upriver—testament to Bunau-Varilla's idea to excavate as much as possible “in the wet.” It was also hoped that the flooding of the marshes would “improve the sanitary conditions near La Boca, which are at present very bad.” The water, it was believed, would prevent the “miasma” disturbed by the excavation from affecting the workmen.

Elsewhere, the lack of overall progress from the year before was more evident. At the site of the crucial dam at Gamboa, work had hardly started, and in the Paraíso section at the Panama City end of
la grande tranchée
, he noticed severe problems with slides. “The slips are not earth slides from the top of the bank,” he wrote, “but rather movements of the whole hillside, which in some places carries one bank almost intact across the cut with the top surface unbroken, and with the vegetation undisturbed.” Looking up, Kimball could see both the railway line and a channel built to keep the Río Grande from the canal suspended on the hillside 30 and 50 meters respectively above the new ditch. “There is a substratum of greasy clay all along the line,” he reported. “It would seem as if both the deflection of the Río Grande and the deflection of the railroad must slide into the canal.”

All along the line there was the impression of spoil carelessly dumped, damaging the railroad embankment in one place, narrowing the Chagres in another, contributing to the flooding. The machinery he saw in action was “considerable,” but impressed him “as neither large enough nor of the right kind.” The American Osgood and Mc-Naughton steam shovels were doing a good job, as were the U.S. and Scottish dredges, but they were too few in number. There was a lack of power drills and the French and Belgian ladder excavators were “ineffective.” The miracle machines that had dug the sand out of the Suez Canal had come to grief. “When working in soft earth, free from stones and roots,” wrote Kimball, “there is no doubt that the chains-of-buckets machines have a greater capacity than those of the steam-shovel, American type; but these perfect conditions are not to be had.”

There was also a lot of idle machinery, testament to failed experiments and other factors. In one place five excavators were seen delayed for lack of spoil trains. This was due to an absence of proper switching arrangements to transport the earth to a dump only half a kilometer away. At Matachín a contractor had stopped work as he hoped to get a higher price for removing rock that had not shown up on borings. In general, the hundred or so small contractors seemed to be getting in each others’ way, particularly over spoil removal. Furthermore, some of the companies, Kimball said, were “irresponsible parties,” who gave up when the going got hard or less profitable. Others did not have the necessary financial resources for what they had taken on and, forced to borrow from Isthmian bankers at 2 percent per month, soon went under. Either way, the results were delays, machinery standing idle again, and the inevitable demands of new contractors for more favorable terms.

Stoppages were also caused by labor shortages, arising not just from fear of further political violence, but also from the “forethought of others, who decide to leave the Isthmus before they are killed by the climate … by the poor quality and high prices of provisions; by the exorbitant rates charged for small drafts by the small bankers, who control such business; [and] by the lack of sufficient guarantees for hospital attendance.” Furthermore, the “men are in the habit of returning to their homes to spend what they accumulate, often leaving the works at the very time when from conditions of weather or arrangement of plant they can least conveniently be spared.” All this contributed to a turnover of workers of some 80 percent a year.

Kimball also reported the tensions between the French and their U.S. colleagues on the project. Apparently, the Americans were being accused of sabotaging excavators in order to stop the work, so their government could take control of the canal, “and other wild statements.” Perhaps Bunau-Varilla's patriotic rhetoric had sharpened divisions. Certainly, Kimball noticed great dedication on the part of some of the French engineers. The acting chief engineer, who showed Kimball “unremitting and repeated courtesies,” explained it thus: “The contagion of my confidence in our success had taken hold of all my men,” said Bunau-Varilla. “One man who fell was immediately replaced by another, and the battle went on.” “It is an impressive fact that there is money value in the prestige of M. de Lesseps, the courage of the French and the determination to finish the canal,” noted Kimball, “for otherwise the company would already have become bankrupt under the showing of 500m francs practically spent and not more than one tenth of the work accomplished.”

In spite of this gloomy, and, as it turned out, accurate, assessment of progress, Kimball still believed the canal would be built. “That with sufficient expenditure of money, time, brains, energy, and human life, the canal can be finished is self-evident,” he concluded, although refusing to estimate “the necessary quantity of all or any of them.” If the money from the lottery was forthcoming “the canal will be so far advanced by the time the money for the new loan is expended that the necessity for finishing it will be apparent.” Put another way, the temptation to throw good money after bad would be irresistible. This new financing was the key factor. “The Company has doubtless made some grave mistakes, but I am confident it has at its disposition all the necessary brains and energy,” wrote Kimball. “As for human life, that is always cheap.”

It has been suggested that 1885 was the blackest year of all for deaths from fever. We only have the figures for mortalities in the hospitals. For 1885, there was a similar official death toll as the year before, running at nearly a hundred a month, in spite of a slight lessening of the workforce. Records of burials in, for example, the foreign cemetery (of which Claude Mallet was the treasurer) suggest that these figures do not tell the whole story. On several occasions during the year Mallet was again called out to collect from the streets of Colón or Panama City the bodies of dead British subjects whom no one had been found to bury. There was a pattern of men employed on the canal or the railroad falling sick, being hospitalized at the contractor's expense, but then being discharged before fully fit. While looking unemployably ill, the patient would fall sick again shortly afterward—basically have another malaria attack—and find himself unable to afford to go to the hospital. Claude Mallet fought an ongoing battle with the Foreign Hospital to lower its costs of $2 a day, which he was obliged to pay for such “distressed” Britons. Many of these were railway engineers and laborers displaced from Peru by the war there at the beginning of the decade. But the hospital now had more patients trying to get in than they had space. And, Mallet was told, “under no circumstances would negroes be admitted.”

The Company still had its fair share of shocks. In October 1885, Bunau-Varilla was sent two new engineers to be chiefs of division. Both, he reports, were dead from yellow fever within two weeks. “Many a man of them had been happy to enlist,” he wrote of the still steady stream of new arrivals at Colón, “but felt his heart sink at the sight of the warm, low and misty shores of the deadly Isthmus. Some bore on their faces the obvious mark of terror …” To Bunau-Varilla, and others, it was this very fear that made someone susceptible to fever.

The French consulate had a terrible year, losing three diplomats and two of their wives in the twelve months. Within five months of each other, two Italian consuls had died. Both the Spanish consul and his wife came down with yellow fever. The wife recovered from her delirium to find that her husband was already buried.

The British consulate saw their Colón vice-consul, the young Fred Leay, who had so meticulously taken the witness statements from the Culebra massacre, come down with “Bilious Remittent Fever” and be invalided off the Isthmus. In January 1886, even Claude Mallet's hardy constitution was worn down, and he, too, contracted fever. He remembered lying in bed and hearing one of the three doctors called for consultation say that he would not live to see daylight again. “I had reached a state of semi-coma and did not care what happened,” he later wrote.

Fortunately a new consul, Colonel James Sadler, had at last arrived to relieve him. Mallet was allowed to retire for a short while to the healthier climes of Jamaica where he would recover, but he would therefore miss the two vital visits—of the government inspectors and of Ferdinand de Lesseps—the following month. It did not take his replacement James Sadler long to look around and assess the importance to Panama of the forthcoming inspections. Writing to the foreign secretary the Marquis of Salisbury on January 27, he warned of the unpopularity of Núñez and the risk of further revolution on the Isthmus. Taxes and resentment were high. “Crime is frequent,” he wrote, “and remains unpunished from want of means to support the cost of imprisonment, though political offenders are treated severely.” Everything, he said, was riding on Rousseau's report. If it should be favorable and the lottery issue approved, “the condition of the country may improve.” Otherwise, “should the works cease, fresh misery and disturbance would certainly occur on the Isthmus.”