Panama fever (57 page)

The first meeting between Stevens, Shonts, Magoon, and Gorgas was a chance for a fresh look at the problems facing the enterprise. Magoon explained that just about everyone who could get off the Isthmus had left. The governor reckoned the main difficulty was with food supply—shortages caused by crop failures and an exodus of men from the countryside to work on the canal had driven prices to levels twice that of New York. On two recent occasions wages had been raised for the American workers, and both times the Panamanian merchants had increased their prices to match them. Magoon reckoned some of them were making profits of up to 100 percent. Shonts's reaction was to order the establishment of “commissary,” ICC-run shops along the line, free to sell to anyone, even though, as Magoon quickly pointed out, this was against the agreement made with the Panamanian merchants by Taft. Shonts, who clearly thought that Magoon had become a little too friendly with the locals, brushed this aside, telling the governor to “keep his eye on the ball… Our sole purpose on this Isthmus is to build the canal.”

The other priorities identified during this meeting were to improve the accommodation available to the workforce and to confront the specter of fever. “There are three diseases in Panama,” Stevens proclaimed to the assembled white staff the next day. “They are yellow fever, malaria and cold feet; and the greatest of these is cold feet.” From the start the new chief engineer projected a hardy image. “I have had as much or more actual personal experience in manual labor than any one here—surveys, hardships, railroad construction in all its details and operation,” he announced, calling on his subordinates to display “dogged determination and steady, persistent, intelligent work.” According to Frank Maltby, he was “enthusiastically cheered; the men looked at each other appreciatively as if to say, ‘That's the man to follow.’”

Stevens canceled the plan to build him a large official residence at Ancón, and ordered the removal of the canal headquarters to Culebra, right on top of the work and away from the temptations of Panama City. In his battered hat and rubber boots and overalls, and with an ever-present cigar, Stevens trudged up and down the works, assessing equipment and personnel, trying all the time to spread calm and determination among the workforce. The evenings were spent dealing with the administrative mess left by Wallace and hammering some sort of organization out of the chaos.

Frank Maltby fully expected to be replaced by a new man, but heard nothing from Stevens for a week after his arrival. Then he had a brisk summons by telegram: “Come to Panama on the first train. Stevens.” “We sat out on the veranda under a full tropical moon and among the magnificent Royal Palms of Ancon Hill,” Maltby wrote of their meeting. “Everyone else disappeared. Mr. Stevens did not talk much but asked questions—and could that man ask questions! He found out everything I knew. He turned me inside out and shook out the last drop of information I had.” Maltby learned subsequently that Stevens had had someone waiting in Washington to take his place, but, uniquely among Wallace's department heads, he kept his job. Maltby, in turn, was impressed by Stevens—the fact that he had gone through “the hardships of a pioneer in the rugged West” and his quick grasp of the issues at stake. “His desk was always clear,” Maltby wrote; “one could get a quick decision.” It was a great improvement on Wallace.

Stevens's first major decision came after only a week on the Isthmus. In the full knowledge that it would not play well to the press and his political bosses back in the States, on August 1 he ordered a stop to the excavation work in the Cut. No more dirt would fly until proper preparations had been made. In the Cut, half of the steam shovels were shut down, and the free workforce transferred to sanitation and accommodation.

Stevens thought little of the French machinery, however well restored. “I cannot conceive how they did the work they did with the plant they had,” he wrote of the de Lesseps effort. In its place he put in huge orders for new American machines. Wallace had been planning to try out various different designs of excavators, spoil cars, and locomotives, but Stevens just trusted to his experience and went ahead and ordered what he wanted. Stevens respected Wallace as an engineer and put his failure down not just to the “severe case of fright” from yellow fever that had precipitated his departure, but also to his unwillingness to take on his superiors. Stevens, unlike Wallace, had no seat (for now) on the Commission, but expected, and got, whatever he demanded. “I determined from the start,” he would write, “that the only line of policy that promised success was one of going ahead and doing things on my own initiative, without waiting for orders or approval.”

To be fair to Wallace his experimentation with excavation had provided useful experience. The Bucyrus shovels had proved to be strong and reliable, and now Stevens ordered dozens more, including several state-of-the-art 105-ton monsters. Where early models had gone wrong, changes were made, with speed and strength the primary requisites. Steel replaced iron, and parts liable to break were enlarged and strengthened. The result, according to Stevens, was “a machine in every way superior to any in existence.”

Stevens also ordered 120 locomotives and 800 cars to carry away the spoil, as well as new drills, vastly superior to those used by Wallace and the French. A compressed air pipeline was planned for the length of the Cut to power them. Stevens had by now seen enough to identify the bottleneck in the excavation effort. As he put it, “The problem was simply one of transportation.” To maximize the effectiveness of any excavator, it had to be serviced efficiently by spoil removal trains. Thus, for Stevens, the railway, the Panama Railroad, was the key to success on the Isthmus, something never fully appreciated by the French.

Stevens's first impression of the Panama Railroad had not been favorable. He described it in July 1905 as “two streaks of rust and a right of way.” Its management was “thirty years behind the times.” Most of it was still single-track, there were practically no sidings, and the rolling stock had been obsolete for years. In the summer of 1905 traffic was almost at a standstill with thousands of tons of freight piled in cars, on docks, and in warehouses, some of which had not moved for eighteen months. Even shipping papers and other records had been lost. Stevens was told the good news that there had been no collisions on the line for a year, but replied dismissively, “A collision has its good points as well as its bad ones—it indicates there is something moving on the railroad.”

Stevens brought in a new manager, W G. Bierd, and laid plans for the double-tracking of the whole line, the installation of a new telegraph line, and for the rebuilding of culverts and bridges. At the termini he ordered that new sidings and yards be started, along with extra warehouses, docks, and new coaling plants.

All this would need a massive influx of labor. While he was still in New York, Stevens had met William Karner and instructed him to return to Barbados and to keep the recruits flowing to the Isthmus (although Stevens did warn that he was a “crank” for Chinese labor). In addition, recruiting agents in Martinique and Cartagena were told to step up their work.

Since the disappointing first shipment in January, the attitude to working in Panama had been transformed in Barbados. Karner puts this down to an incident in early May 1905. On the return trip of a Royal Mail steamer from Colón to Bridgetown, “two colored men stepped from a rowboat to the landing,” he wrote, “almost in front of the window in my office … They attracted considerable attention from the men working on and around the landing. It was quite unusual to see a negro laborer riding in a cab, and when these two men, who were smoking, got into a cab and started uptown, the crowd of colored men and women stood aghast and wondered. They soon learned that the two men were in the first shipment I made, January 26th. They had saved money, paid their return passage and still had money for a good time at their home-coming … From that time on there was a steady increase in numbers in our shipments.” “Colón Man” had arrived in Barbados.

The “Panama Craze” that suddenly took hold of the island led to a repeat of the scenes witnessed at Kingston docks a generation earlier. On one recruiting day, described by American journalist Arthur Bullard, more than two thousand people crowded into Bridgetown's Trafalgar Square, where the police could barely control the crush. “I wanted to go and do you know the reason why?” asks Barbadian Benjamin Jordan, who was nineteen in 1905. “In Barbados they wasn't paying you nothing. Even getting ten cents an hour to come to Panama was better than staying in Barbados.” Another canal old-timer, interviewed for a television documentary in 1984, simply wanted to be part of the great project: “one of the greatest engineering feats the world has ever undertaken.” Soon groups of young men wearing their best suits and heading on foot for Bridgetown docks became a familiar sight all over the island. Panama offered excitement, adventure, an escape from the tiny, claustrophobic country with its poverty and rigid social and racial stratification. It was almost an act of rebellion. One group of young men on the way to Bridgetown, it was reported in the Legislative Council, passed a field where a gang of sugar estate workers was being supervised by the plantation manager. One of the young men in the Panama-bound crowd shouted: “Why you don't hit de manager in de head, and come along wid we!” It may have been meant in jest, but it sent a shiver of anxiety through the island's white elite.

According to Arthur Bullard the men waiting in Trafalgar Square were ushered a hundred at a time into a large warehouse where they were given a medical examination. Benjamin Jordan had passed all the medical checks, but had a final question to answer: “The doctor was examining us ten in a row,” he remembered. “He said he wasn't sending anyone to Panama under twenty. I was the smallest one in the bunch. When he came to this fella, he said, ‘How old are you boy?’ ‘Twenty.’ ‘How old are you boy?’ ‘Twenty.’ Everyone was twenty. When he come to me, I was the youngest of the group, you know. All of the other nine were twenty. I was the smallest. I was only nineteen and had got to put on a couple more years. ‘I am twenty-three, doctor.’ ‘No, boy, you're not twenty-three years old, but you'd like to go to Panama, wouldn't you?’ ‘Yes, doc.’ ‘Well I'll send you. But you nine, go home.’ Well I had to get out of the city fast,” says Jordan. “They were going to break my this that and the other to prevent the doctor sending me. I had to hurry up and get out of the town.”

Loading the steamer to Colón started at nine in the morning and took most of the day, as the men's contracts were checked and possessions carted on to the deck. Huge crowds gathered to see the men off and wish them good luck. “I never saw so many negro women in all my life,” wrote Bullard of the sailing day he witnessed. “All of them in their gayest Sunday clothes, and all wailing at the top of their voices.” Bullard was taking the same steamer to Colón. Onboard were seven ship's officers and more than seven hundred blacks. “Every square inch of deck space was utilized. Some had trunks, but most only bags like that which Dick Whittington had carried into London. There was a fair sprinkling of guitars and accordions.” As the boat got under way the singing of hymns started, with one side of the deck Church of England and the other nonconformist. “There was only one song, a secular one, on which they united,” writes Bullard: “Fever and ague all day long/At Panama, at Panama,/Wish you were dead before very long/At Panama, at Panama.”

The journey to Colón took about twelve days, and all the time the passengers remained on deck, in rain and sun with not enough room each to even stretch themselves out. On Bullard's ship, he writes, the decks were often hot enough to fry an egg, and the passengers had to be hosed down to keep them cool. Even so, in the heat tempers flared and on one occasion the captain had to threaten a man with his revolver to break up a fight. Seven men were clapped in irons and put in the baking-hot brig.

Young Benjamin Jordan got off the steamer at Colón in October 1905. “They brought me here, put me down in the Cut, put a pick and shovel in my hand. I had never seen a pick and shovel before. I started to cry.” His boss took away his tools and gave him a job as a waterboy fetching drinks for the other workers. Jordan was not the only new arrival to find the confusion, noise, and mass of unfamiliar machinery overwhelming and frightening. “On the appearance of the place, I thought I'd go straight home,” remembered one digger who arrived at the end of 1906. “Everything looked so strange, so different to home. I felt that I would go back home. But it wasn't so easy to do that, you know, so I continued.”

Karner in Bridgetown continued to increase his shipments dramatically. During the first nine months of 1905, fifteen steamer loads carried some three thousand Barbadians to the Isthmus under contract. Recruitment was halted in September due to a lack of accommodation for the workers, but was restarted at the beginning of 1906, during which twenty-one steamer voyages carried over sixty-five hundred new recruits. In March 1906 Karner even chartered a steamer, the
Solent
, to be engaged in nothing but carrying workers from Bridgetown to Colón.

There were Barbadians traveling to the Isthmus under their own steam as well, in roughly equal numbers to those going from the island under contract. This included those who did not like the idea of signing themselves up for nearly two years or had been rejected on medical grounds, as well as men who hoped to get better terms than the basic unskilled labor deal Karner was offering. Harrigan Austin was an experienced carpenter, and arrived in Panama on Sunday, October 9, 1905, having paid his own steamer fare. Austin was one of about a hundred men and women—nearly all West Indians—who responded to a competition staged in 1963 for “the best true stories of life and work on the Isthmus of Panama during the construction of the Panama canal.” The initiator was the Isthmian Historical Society, run by American Zonians. The competition was publicized in newspapers in Panama, Central America, and the Caribbean islands, and offered a first prize of $50. Although some respondents might have tailored their accounts to suit the purpose of winning the money, the large collection contains many diverse attitudes and opinions as well as a wealth of detail.