Panama fever (58 page)

Harrigan Austin's Panama adventure did not start well. To raise the fare of
£2
10s. (US$14) for the passage, he had to pool the savings of his extended family, and took virtually nothing with him apart from his carpentry tools. He landed at Colón, “having had a hazardous trip, of thirteen days in bad weather, poor accommodation in general with sparing meals on a crowded ship, we were all more or less hungry. We saw after landing on the dock, a pile of bags of brown sugar. And the whole crowd of us like ants fed ourselves on that sugar.”

Austin was taken on straightaway and loaded with the other men into one of the freight cars, which were then “hurried off, and distributed at various Stations. My lot happened to be Las Cascadas.” The men were led to a camp of tents, and each was assigned an army-style cot. The next morning he was put to work repairing old French quarters at Bas Obispo. His foreman was a white man, but he appointed one of the experienced West Indians as subforeman “as really the only thing he knew to do was to watch us but really very little about handling or directing a carpenters’ gang.”

Other West Indians were less cynical about their American bosses. John Butcher arrived from Barbados on January 12, 1906, and, like Austin and some two thousand more workers, was employed on assembling and renovating buildings, a Stevens priority. His first assignment was as a plumber's helper. He instantly got on with his immediate boss, a young American, Edward T Nolan (they were still in touch with each other by letter in 1963). Nolan's superior, the assistant quartermaster, was “a real pusher,” Butcher remembered. “He always promised permanent work to the better workmen. Hearing this, I tried my best to work harder and more than anyone else. Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters—all accepted this challenge but of course, as far as plumbers were concerned there were none better than the Nolan-Butcher team. Through hard work, we excelled in whatever jobs we were assigned… As a husky, strong, active young man who was never afraid of work, I was always in demand. I still have the joy of just knowing that there are so few of those early houses on which I did not work.”

Many of the accounts written by West Indians show similar pride in their work and participation in the Panama project. Others took pleasure in the new skills they were rapidly forced to acquire—operating tools such as hammers and drills that they had never even seen before. But Harrigan Austin, already an artisan when he arrived, was deeply disappointed when he was put on the same wage level as the unskilled labor: “We were often forced to work in the rain,” he wrote, because if they stopped, their wages were cut. “Indeed to some degree life was some sort of semi-slavery and there was none to appeal to, for we were strangers and actually compelled to accept what we got.” In the case of an argument, says Austin, “the bosses and policemen right or wrong would always win the game, and those men who had the chances filling such position were generally of the dominating type who tried to bring others into subjection for their fame.”

The police of the Isthmus had given the massive influx of West Indians, or “Chombos” as they derogatorily called them, the same sort of welcome afforded to the arrivals of a generation before. There was particular dislike of their presence in Panama City, where large gangs were at work for the whole of 1905 building sewers and waterworks, and paving the main streets. On one occasion at the end of April a group of about 150 men staged a sit-in when their American foreman ordered them back to work before most had eaten their lunch. The demonstration grew more heated, with loud complaints about low wages and their late payment. The foreman summoned the local police, who charged the strikers and then chased them across the square in front of the old Administration Building. In the ensuing mêlée twenty-one workers were seriously enough injured by bayonet stabs and rifle butt blows to require hospital treatment.

“The disgraceful scenes of yesterday will live long in the memory of those who witnessed them,” wrote the
Star and Herald on
April 29. “The senseless attacks upon inoffensive persons was enough to make anyone's blood boil… Carelessness and utter indifference to the wants of the men who are brought here to do the actual work of digging the Canal is silently, but nevertheless, surely breeding trouble. Who is responsible? There is no denying the fact that the men have been brought here under false pretences and misrepresentations and have been badly paid and underfed … and in many cases put to work under incompetent men possessing an inherent hatred and contempt of the colored races.” The
Colón Independent
, a triweekly founded in 1899 by a Barbadian, Clifford Bynoe, would write a year later of this time, “One could scarcely breathe God's free air without being clubbed and kicked … The American occupation then was a terror and a disgrace.”

Consul Mallet, whose job it was to try to protect British citizens from such attacks and to seek redress from those responsible, blamed both the Americans and the Panamanians for the incident. Writing to the foreign secretary about the “serious disturbance,” he explained: “the majority of Americans here—I refer particularly to those who hold subordinate positions—exhibit an extraordinary contempt for the Jamaican negro, and most of the trouble so far has been due to the blustering behaviour of the foremen in charge of the gangs.” But he wrote too about the “intense dislike and jealousy felt by the police towards the coloured natives of Jamaica on the Isthmus.” There had been increasing complaints, he reported, about the violent methods resorted to by the native police when making an arrest for some trivial offense. “In fact,” he ended, “their arbitrary conduct is no better to-day than it was during the worst period of the Colombian regime on the Isthmus of Panama.”

After much prevarication Mallet at last extracted an official apology from the Panamanian secretary for foreign affairs. Magoon, of whom Mallet had a high opinion, made conciliatory noises, but the canal authorities asked the Panamanian police to arrest Jamaican Charles Schuar, who was seen as the leader of the workers’ action. He was promptly imprisoned and then deported.

There did follow, however, a reorganization of the police by an American instructor, and, on Mallet's suggestion, some West Indian constables were taken on to help police their own neighborhoods. But the West Indians remained wary. “In Jamaica a constable is a peacemaker,” one told an American journalist. “Here he just hits a man with a stick.”

From the very start, and for much of the construction period, the question of food would remain a leading catalyst for dissent and dissatisfaction among the West Indians. While prices rose fast to “Klondike” levels, wages had stayed the same for the workers. In November 1904, the PRR had actually lowered its minimum wage to bring it into line with the canal's pay rate. The money saved was spent on increases for the white skilled railroad employees. Further pay hikes for the Americans on the Isthmus had not been matched for the West Indians, many of whom now found themselves in a desperate situation. “Instead of the canal bringing with it those good old times it is bringing hard work and starvation pay for the majority and fortunes for the few,” complained the
Colón Independent
at the end of 1904.

On a wage of seldom more than a dollar a day, the West Indians were being asked to pay seventy-five cents for a dozen eggs and sixty cents for a chicken. Coffee and bread brought to the works by West Indian women cost an hour's wages. In their desperation, many were surviving on a diet of sugarcane and were becoming seriously malnourished. At the beginning of 1906, two American journalists from the New York magazine the
Independent
interviewed a man they described as of “unusual intelligence.” He declined to be named in the article, and is referred to only as a “Jamaican carpenter.” But he is of particular interest as he had been on the Isthmus since 1894, and had worked for the French at the height of the activity of the New Company. “Things were very different in those days,” he told the interviewers. “The workmen are more afraid of the Americans than of the French … there are no loafing jobs now, such as there used to be. It is like running a race all the time. You don't mind it for a day, but you can't keep it up.” Although the basic pay, he said, was better from the Americans, there were no longer chances to increase this through piecework. “Besides,” he went on, “the blacks had more chance of promotion under the French. They could get to be timekeepers or checkers then, but they can't now.”

The biggest difference for him was the cost of living. Yams used to be sixty for a dollar, but now you only got sixteen. “If they starve themselves,” he said of the West Indian laborers, “they can save a good deal. If they are well fed they don't save. Out of 80 cents a day it takes 50 to buy food, and then there are washing, clothing etc., besides. Some of the men try hard to save; buy 2 cents bread, 2 cents sugar, and go to work all trembly and can't lift a thing.”

William Karner backs this up. “In their anxiety to save money to send back home,” he wrote of the Barbadians, “they were literally starving themselves.” An American journalist, John Foster Carr, who visited the Isthmus in mid-1905, investigated this for himself: “I have looked into hundreds of their pots boiling over bonfires, as they crouched beside them,” he wrote. “A very large number contained nothing but rice, or a piece of yam, or some plantains. Others had added a small piece of salt pork, beef, or codfish. In the rainy season, when with damp wood their primitive fires fail them, they tell me that they have often to choose between half-cooked yams and rice— which the doctors say is not digestible—and biscuits … weak and anaemic are these poorly fed laborers. They fall easy victim to malaria, and on this account alone, the Chief Sanitary Officer maintains, pneumonia with seventy to ninety percent of fatal cases is prevalent among them, when the better-fed white man is nearly immune.”

After a steady average of four pneumonia cases a month, suddenly in October 1905 there were twenty-six, all West Indians. On December 13 the headline in the
Colón Independent
read: “Pneumonia Rampant On the Isthmus. Has taken an epidemic form. Fatal Among Colored People.” A doctor was asked by the newspaper for the attribution of the disease. “A severe cold,” he replied. “The laborers are generally wet with perspiration and will sit in the wind to cool off. Very often they go to bed in their wet clothes and when the chilly part of the night comes on the body becomes cold.” With the return of the wet season in spring 1906, the rate would jump again. Because viral pneumonia was almost unknown on the islands, the new arrivals were particularly vulnerable.

In November 1905, journalist Poultney Bigelow made his famous trip to Colón. An experienced reporter (and former law-school classmate of Theodore Roosevelt), Bigelow had made his name with stories on labor conditions in South Africa and the Far East. His father was John Bigelow, who had visited the Isthmus in 1886 together with de Lesseps and remained a lifelong supporter of the canal. Poultney Bigelow, however, seems to have been drawn to the story by the increasing rumors back in the United States that the project was in trouble from labor strife, confusion, and corruption.

In Colón, whose condition he described as worse than anything he had ever seen, even in the “slums of Canton,” Bigelow wandered the streets, unescorted by any official, interviewing those he came across. One Barbadian he met he described as wearing “a clean collar, a black derby hat and a good suit of clothes—an educated and prosperous example of his race.” From him he heard complaints about the high cost of living and the late payment of wages. “But his main grievance was that as a man of color he received no encouragement for his work; no one seemed to care whether he got good work out of his men or not—all the white men about him were trying to see how little they could do, each for himself.” Others reported that they received unequal justice and were treated with rudeness by the American bosses.

Worst of all, however, was the sickness. “Throughout my pestiferous excursion up and down this filthy city,” Bigelow wrote, “I could not find a single man or woman who had not suffered or was not suffering from fever of some kind.” One worker he met was “a splendid specimen of manhood, a negro such as would have been recruited with pride into the Tenth United States Cavalry.” But the man was sick and could only walk with difficulty. He felt he had been deceived, Bigelow reports. The place was “unfit to live in.” He was trying to get back to Jamaica but the next steamer was already full, taking away “400 negroes, all returning to Jamaica in disgust.”

The journalist's own steamer from Colón carried the same number of returnees, and when Bigelow met Swettenham and the chief justice of Jamaica they confirmed to him “what is denied by official authority in Washington” that “negroes are returning from the canal in portentous numbers” and that the men “were not honestly or humanely treated.”

In mid-December, Stevens wrote to Shonts: “Notwithstanding nearly six thousand new laborers were brought in between August 15 and November 15, our force shows little or no increase … our forces are being constantly depleted by departure from the Isthmus … The Jamaicans are returning almost universally.”