Panama fever (31 page)

Nonetheless, Rogers, as many before him, was overwhelmingly impressed with the ambition of the scheme and the dedication of the project's leaders on the Isthmus. “The most bitter opponents were our own countrymen and a few Englishmen or former employees of the canal who had been discharged or had some other grievance against the company,” he remarked at the end of his report. Such types “were prone to exaggerated statements … or else malice.” “The contractors are young, zealous, and energetic men,” said Rogers, “the engineers are… both clever and capable, and no one can appreciate more than these men the difficulties that lie in their path. Instead of censure and detraction, they deserve the highest praise and respect… they wish well to an enterprise fraught with so much good for the human race, and they are doing their utmost under the circumstances to promote its success.”

Not all the Frenchmen on the Isthmus, of course, were quite so high-minded. At thirty-seven, Paul Gauguin had gone from riches to rags. His job as a broker had not survived the downturn of 1882, and he had since ruined his finances and his health through his taste for absinthe. In 1886, his long-suffering Dutch wife gave birth to their fifth child, and, with the situation desperate, he called on his wealthy sister, Marie, for help. She agreed to appeal to her husband, Juan N. Uribe, a rich Peruvian businessman who had offices and outlets all over and in particular, of late, in Panama. In the country where France was digging the canal, money was being made by the fistful and Uribe's fortune, it seemed, was benefiting from the project. Gauguin learned that Uribe was setting up a brokerage office and bank and needed someone who knew finance and could be trusted to replace him when he took his holidays in Europe.

In March 1887, Gauguin resolved to try his luck on the Isthmus, writing to his wife, “I will set off for America. I cannot continue to live here swamped by debts, a stultifying and lacklustre existence.” The plan was to settle in Panama, in the benign glow of the inspiring great work, and send for his family once he was established.

He arrived at Colón at the end of April, together with his friend, fellow artist Charles Laval. They were unimpressed with the town where, it seems, new hovels had sprung up since the fire, but nothing had been cleared away. In Panama City there was further disappointment. His brother-in-law was not running a bank but a general store, and not a very grand one either. There was certainly no work to be had for Gauguin. Finding that the price of land in Panama had so risen that it was unfeasible for him to settle there, Gauguin headed for the island of Taboga, which he hoped to find “practically uninhabited, free and fertile… the fish and fruit can be had for nothing.” “I'm taking my paints and brushes,” he wrote to his wife, “and will, living like a native, immerse myself far from mankind.”

But he was in for another disappointment. Taboga had become something of a tourist trap. It was the favored location for picnickers and day-trippers, and was dominated by the large sanatorium, to which well-favored Company employees would retreat to be free, for a while, of the stultifying heat of the mainland. Well-organized guided tours crisscrossed the island. The “native villages” had long ago wised up, and were now more than a little sham.

Gauguin returned to Panama, but the hotels were expensive, and his money was now running out. His friend Laval got work painting portraits of some of the better-off Company officials. Gauguin declined to do this, instead getting himself taken on as a laborer on the canal works. There he found that rumors were rife of the impending bankruptcy of the Company, and the reality of the job was far from the noble project he had envisaged. Gauguin was set to work with a pickax, chipping out holes for the dynamiters who would follow him. “I have to dig from five-thirty in the morning to six in the evening under tropical sun and rain,” he wrote to his wife. “At night I am devoured by mosquitoes.” The death toll wasn't that bad, he added sardonically, “only 9 out of 12 of the negroes die while for the rest it is a mere half.”

Gauguin resolved to work only as long as it took to earn the fare off the Isthmus. But after a couple of weeks he fell foul of the new law-and-order regime of General Vila, who was back in Panama as Núñez's strongman, determined to stamp out dissent and resistance to firm rule from Bogotá. Gauguin was arrested for urinating in a street, which, he protested, was an open sewer anyway. He was imprisoned and then fined. Eventually back at work, he had just saved enough from his pay of 600 francs a month for the fare to Martinique, when he was laid off, along with a raft of other workers, on orders from France.

Together with Laval, Gauguin left for Martinique on June 8. On their arrival Laval came down with a fever, probably malaria. During one cycle of the disease, he became so depressed that Gauguin had to prevent him from committing suicide. Soon after, Gauguin, too, was ill. “During my stay in Colón,” he wrote to his wife, “I was poisoned by the malarious swamps of the canal and I had just enough strength to hold out on the journey, but soon as I reached Martinique I collapsed. In short, for the last month I have been with dysentery and marsh fever. At this moment my body is a skeleton and I can hardly whisper; after being so low I expected to die every night…” His stomach cramps and continued weight loss were probably due to amoebic dysentery, which had by then developed into what would today be diagnosed as hepatitis or an abscess of the liver.

The sacking of Gauguin was part of a general freezing of the Company's activities. It was more than indecision about the issue of locks. Money had pretty much run out, as Rogers had predicted back in March. Nothing more could be done until the outcome was known of de Lesseps's latest attempt to float a stock issue.

This time only just over half of the stocks were taken up. It was hardly enough to paper over the cracks. And again the money was ruinously expensive. By late autumn the Company's finances were once more in a perilous state, and speculators had forced the value of the original canal shares to a new low on the bourse.

But at last, in October, a full two and a half years after the Rousseau report and Léon Boyer's advice had been received, Ferdinand de Lesseps gave in to pressure to redirect the works toward the completion of a lock canal. What de Lesseps's commission recommended was based on experience on the Isthmus. Following the success of the excavation “in the wet” at Mindi, after underwater blasting, several contractors had been experimenting with creating artificial lagoons along the line of the canal, and then assembling and launching waterborne dredges. These machines filled barges, which were then towed underneath a fixed-ladder excavator. This emptied them and lifted the spoil onto waiting trains or piped it out of the way. Thus water, rather than rail—vulnerable to rain and slides—would be used to carry out most of the moving of spoil. This led on to the new scheme. If pools could be created all along the route, separated by locks, then underwater excavation could continue with the canal open to traffic. As the various levels were lowered by dredging, the locks— five on either side of the Divide—could be gradually removed until the entire canal was at sea level. In the meantime, a working, and paying, lock canal would have been created, it was estimated, by 1891, but, crucially, only as a means to the completion of what Bunau-Varilla called, “the perfect, the final, project” of a canal
à niveau.

Characteristically, Bunau-Varilla claims the entire credit for this plan. In fact, he had, in early 1887, built dams at either end of the Cut and experimented with excavating “in the wet.” Whoever's idea it was, its strength did not lie in its engineering aspect alone. Indeed, the cost of the gradual transformation would still have been prohibitive. In addition, the constant supply of water to the summit level of the canal, essential to operate the locks, was dependent on vague, unsur-veyed schemes to build tunnels or viaducts from higher up the Chagres River. But the beauty of the plan was the distance it went toward reconciling the reality in the Culebra Cut with selling the change of plan to de Lesseps and his army of supporters, who had for years been persuaded of the overwhelming superiority of a sea-level trans-Isthmian route.

There was still the question of finding the new 600 million francs that this work had been estimated to cost. The following month de Lesseps reapplied to the government to run a lottery, outlining the temporary locks plan. At the same time, he announced that France's most brilliant engineer, Gustav Eiffel, had accepted the task of constructing the locks. Eiffel was newly famous as the creator of the giant iron structure just being started in Paris for the 1889 exposition. He was a good catch for the Company, although his name and expertise, it later emerged, came at an outrageous cost.

Eiffel swung into action and by January 1888 his men were on the Isthmus starting the excavation of the lock basins as the giant iron parts began to be shipped from France. In the meantime, de Lesseps set out to sell the new plan to the stockholders, reassuring them that the original vision was postponed, rather than lost, and that by 1890 the canal would be sufficiently advanced for the passage of twenty ships a day.

From the government, however, there was an ominous silence. Then, after two months of deliberation, the Cabinet announced that they would not be submitting the necessary lottery bill to the Chamber of Deputies. Once more the Company launched itself into lobbying, organizing petitions, and, it later came out, outright bribery of politicians. So, in early March, nine deputies of various political complexions introduced the bill the government had refused to back. Yet another commission was appointed to investigate.

De Lesseps could not afford to wait, and had to go with another bond issue. He promised that if the lottery was approved these new bonds could be converted to lottery bonds. But the issue in March 1888, the eighth in as many years, was the worst yet, with only a quarter being taken up. Clearly no more money was going to be forthcoming from this route. Soon after, de Lesseps was forced to borrow 30 million francs at a ruinous rate from his “friends” at the Crédit Lyonnais and Société Générale banks to keep the Company afloat. The lottery was now the only hope.

It looked at first as if the commission would reject the bill, but after the surprising last-minute change of mind of Charles François Sans-Leroy, a hero of the Franco-Prussian War, it was approved by a margin of 6 to 5. The debate in the Chamber, which was packed with canal supporters, on several occasions degenerated into a brawl. Nonetheless, the bill was approved by a wide margin on April 28, and was rubber-stamped by the Senate on June 8, though the Company was compelled to state in its loan prospectus that the granting of permission implied no government guarantee or responsibility.

Shares in the Company, which had fallen to a low of 250 francs in December, now soared. On the Isthmus, Bunau-Varilla believed that nothing could now stand in the way of the successful completion of “his” plan. In the Culebra Cut, he now only had to lower the floor to 140 feet above sea level, rather than 30 below. He was confident he could do this in three years, and now had nearly three thousand men on the site, working around the clock with the assistance of recently installed floodlights. The actual results of his company, Artigue et Sonderegger, do not back up Bunau-Varilla's boasts. In addition, in spite of the harsh regimes of Vila and his Conservative successors, tension and violence among the workers was again on the increase, made worse as the Company was forced to look farther afield for recruits, bringing new communities, such as Africans and Puerto Ri-cans, into the volatile racial mix. Yet whatever the chances of success with the lottery money secured, it was certain that should the issue fail, then all would be lost.

he lottery bill authorized the Company to borrow an additional 720 million francs, 600 million for the completion of the work and the rest for investment in French government securities to guarantee payment on the bonds and to furnish the cash prizes. Bimonthly drawings promised maximum wins of nearly 700,000 francs. Against their better judgment, the Company was persuaded by their bankers to offer the entire sale of two million bonds in one go. It would start on June 20 and run for six days.