Panama fever (60 page)

Jantje Milliery had arrived at Ellis Island at the end of 1902, having briefly lived in Brussels after leaving South Africa. He married a Dutch woman, Martina Korver, from Rotterdam, the following year and they lived in Jersey City Heights. He had applied to the ICC on June 26, 1905, enclosing a reference from the Dutch consul general of Orange Free State: “Applicant is apparently a steady reliable man,” it reads. “He is conversant with track repair methods, and speaks English very well.” On July 5 he received an appointment, and sailed for Panama on the tenth. The money was not that good—he started on $1,000 a year (van Hardeveld, five years older and already a U.S. citizen, was on $1,700)—but being part of the canal meant more to Milliery than the money: it was a means to becoming an American.

That evening Jan van Hardeveld returned exhausted from his day's work. Rose and the girls had spent the afternoon trying to establish which was worse—the soggy heat of outside or the eye-watering stench of the interior of the house. Rose begged him to take some time to help her sort out the mess, but he was “so absorbed in his work that he could not see what overwhelming difficulties confronted me in trying to care for the family.” “You don't know what you are asking,” Jan replied impatiently. He could not leave his unreliable West Indian laborers for a minute, he said. “We're here to dig this canal.”

Jantje stepped in to help Rose in the business of rapid acclimatization, showing her how to hold a damp matchbox at a certain angle to strike and get a light. The local plantains, he explained, could be fried or roasted in their skins. It was all right to buy beef, but it should be cooked for a long time and then only the broth used.

Soon after her arrival Rose was taken to a local party, where she felt very out of place as the only “white” woman in the room. “The people of the new Republic of Panama considered us an uncouth race,” she soon learned. There was at that time only one other white American woman in Las Cascadas, an old tropical hand with an alarmingly pinched and yellow face. It was very much a frontier town. Going to and fro, Rose had noticed “dingy places bearing across the front the word
Cantina
… by the smells around the places, and the conditions of the men and women coming out of them, I knew they must be saloons. It worried me to see the little black children running in and out, freely, to see the black women staggering, laughing, cursing, and to watch our own men going in for drinks.” She had quickly discovered that Jan and Jantje carried a demijohn of rum beside their workplace icebox—”and that bothered me too.” Soon Rose found herself involuntarily averting her eyes when she passed the cantina near her house. “A brown woman sat there looking out,” Rose remembered. “She reminded me of a fat spider waiting for someone to devour. She often smiled and nodded at me in a friendly way, but I hated her.”

Then at last their proper house was ready, or ready enough for them to move in. The first building erected on the site by the French, it was known as House Number One. Despite the grand name, it was small and dingy, with only one bedroom and a tiny kitchen. But from its high position it offered a view all along the line of the canal as far as the Pacific Ocean to the south and Bas Obispo in the north, where, “the good old Star Spangled Banner, doubly beautiful and precious in this strange country, flew from the pole on top of the hill in Camp Elliott, the United States Marine Corps station.” And just below, indeed virtually under the house, was the Cut, where, Rose writes, “the French had made a noticeable beginning.” Immediately below the house lay “pieces of machinery overturned, strings of cars, engines, and twisted rails, all covered with growing vines and brush. Large trees had grown up through the couplings of a string of cars at the foot of the hill.” Farther down, however, the Americans were at work, and Jan was able to point out to the children the Bucyrus shovel served by his track-shifting gang.

For the children it was thrilling to be so close to their father at work and to the most spectacular section of the canal. According to Rose they “quickly assumed something of their father's proprietary feeling” about the project. They were also making the most of being virtually the only American children among many homesick adults. At the new house ice was delivered every day and in November an ICC-operated food store opened at Empire, two miles away. Even so, day after day was the same meal: “beans, soggy crackers, Danish butter, and fruit. Occasionally a chicken relieved the monotony.” On one occasion Rose took the train to Panama City, where she found that anything could be obtained but at exhorbitant prices. She was also unimpressed by the “crooked gambling houses, filthy saloons and brothels. The well-known ‘American sucker’ had come to the Isthmus and was being properly fleeced by those who knew how.”

Toward the end of the year, a trickle of wives started arriving. One in Las Cascadas had a fright on her first day when she mistook an iguana for a crocodile, and “remained in a permanent state of terror … every little bug made her hysterical.” Rose did her best to help the newcomers become oriented, and, doing so, she wrote, “I sometimes succeeded in bolstering my own failing morale.” Meanwhile her husband was becoming increasingly tired and grumpy, endlessly complaining about the standard of work of his West Indian laborers. “There was little I could say or do to make him relax,” wrote Rose. “The Canal about which he was so intensely, feverishly concerned might have been his own personal project—his and Teddy Roosevelt's.”

Other Americans needed more than the belief in Roosevelt's “great march of progress” to induce them to come to the Isthmus and stay there for any length of time. The first step was to offer exceptional wages. Soon after taking over, Stevens established four recruiting agents, one in New York, one in New Orleans, and two roving. These interviewed candidates and promised anything up to double his current salary in the United States. They also offered free transportation to Panama, free furnished accommodation and medical care, and long, six-week annual paid holidays. According to a senior American administrator on the Isthmus, “Special inducements were added one after another, until an established system was developed which contained perquisites and gratuities which in number and value far exceeded anything of the kind bestowed upon a working force anywhere on the face of the globe.” But the initial results were disappointing. Jobs were easy to come by in the United States at that time. More than anything else, though, the shadow of fever still darkened Panama's reputation.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE RAILROAD ERA

Crossing the Isthmus by railroad during his first week in Panama, Stevens's fellow passengers had pointed out Gorgas's sanitation squads draining pools, fumigating houses, and oiling waterways. Each spotting was cause for new “ridicule, not only of Colonel Gorgas but also of the mosquito theory, some of these comments reflecting very severely upon the quality of the Colonel's mental equipment. My attention,” Stevens later wrote, “was repeatedly called to the great waste of money and the utter futility of the whole procedure.”

Since the arrival of Magoon, Gorgas had at last started receiving supplies, and Stevens and Shonts, with Roosevelt's instructions ringing in their ears, had further upped the backing for the Sanitation Department. Shonts, although still skeptical about the mosquito theory, had in July 1905 increased Gorgas's workforce from two hundred to over two thousand. Stevens initially shared Shonts's doubts. But he was so impressed both with the urgent need to combat the fearful disease and by Gorgas's conviction that he could do it, that he decided to provide full support and funding.

So began, in July 1905, one of the most famous sanitary campaigns in history. Mosquito brigades were formed for every district of Panama and Colón. Panamanian doctors were recruited at the local level, responsible for daily house-to-house inspections. A combination of respect for Magoon and Gorgas's charm and tact produced new compliance from the residents of Panama City, who were offered a $50 reward for reporting a case of yellow fever. For each one—and there were forty-two cases in July—their movements during the days before the appearance of the first symptoms were painstakingly traced to find the source of infection.

But nothing was left to chance. Every dwelling, from the grandest
palacio
to the tiniest shack, was now meticulously fumigated. Teams were sent out through the streets, with each man carrying a ladder and a gallon of glue. On their shoulders they had strips of paper 6 feet long and 3 inches wide to stick over doors, windows, holes, and openings in the wall to prevent the smoke or the insects escaping when the pans containing sulphur or pyrethrum and alcohol were lit inside. If it was a large building, once it was sealed the sulphur smoke was pumped in from outside, through a tube inserted into the door through the keyhole. In a year, 330 tons of sulphur and 120 tons of pyrethrum—the entire annual output of the United States—were used up. “The fumigation campaign was so intense,” remembered one sanitary squad worker, “that there was a big, thick white cloud of smoke from the sulphur hanging over the Zone and Panama City, and even the leaves on the trees curled up.”

At the same time other teams checked on the water that people kept in barrels for everyday use, unwittingly providing breeding grounds for the next generation of
Aêdes aegypti.
In early July 1905 running water had at last been connected for Panama City, which was of great assistance to the efforts of the sanitary squads. So with households in the city largely clear of water containers, the squads could concentrate on potential breeding sites among rubbish and elsewhere. “An empty tin can was the special aversion of the Sanitary Squad,” wrote Frank Maltby. “We became so clean, orderly, and ‘dried out’ that it was painful.” Where water could not be removed—in cesspools, cisterns, puddles, or potholes—other teams arrived to spray the surface of the water with kerosene to smother the “wrigglers.” In a year, over two and a half million gallons of oil was used in this way. Success demanded total thoroughness. Gorgas even had the holy water in the font of the cathedral changed every day once it was found that mosquitoes were breeding there.

Indeed, with most households dispensing with domestic water containers, the yellow fever mosquitoes started laying their eggs wherever they could find pools of water—in hollowed-out stones and even in the leaves of trees, in particular that of the
calocasia
, which grew in weedlike profusion around the houses. As well as clearing all vegetation from the vicinity of living quarters, Gorgas's squads started laying traps. Such is the fastidiousness of the female
Aëdes aegypti
that the bowls of sweet clean water now left out by the sanitarians proved far more tempting for ovipositing than a dirty puddle. Every day the water in the traps was simply emptied on to the dry ground and replaced. “They eagerly accepted the much cleaner tin pans placed out for their particular benefit,” writes Joseph Le Prince, “and thus involuntarily committed race suicide.”

As well as aiming to exterminate the
A¨des aegypti
by attacking its larval stage, Gorgas sought to prevent any adult survivors from coming into contact with humans, or more precisely, vulnerable white Americans. The U.S. workforce now found itself thoroughly protected by metal screens. Because of the warm, salty, and damp climate of the Isthmus only very pure copper would resist rapid corrosion (even so, the screens on every American home or dwelling place had to be checked by yet another team every week). It was all astronomically expensive. One order for high-grade copper screening, signed off by Stevens in the autumn of 1905, came to $90,000, nearly double the entire Sanitary Department budget for the previous year. Orders also went in for three thousand rubbish bins, four thousand buckets, a thousand brooms, and 5,000 pounds of common soap. Alongside the specific antimosquito measures came a massive expansion of the medical facilities. A second hospital at Colón belonging to the Panama Railroad was taken over and the capacity of Ancón hospital was extended to 1,500 beds and the staff to 470. Twenty district hospitals were opened the length of the line, along with forty smaller field hospitals, as work started on refurbishing the old French sanatorium on Taboga. In his first twelve months Gorgas had been allowed to spend $50,000. For the next year, his expenditure topped $2 million.

If this was throwing money at the problem, it worked. In August cases of yellow fever fell by nearly a half to twenty-seven, with nine deaths. The following month there were only seven cases and four deaths. The last death from yellow fever was reported in Panama City on November 11, 1905. As they gathered in the autopsy room, Gorgas instructed his staff to take a good look at the man: he was, said Gorgas, the last yellow fever corpse they would see.

And so it proved. It may have taken twice the eight months required in Havana, but now Panama was free of yellow fever, for the first time, and forever. It was a massive breakthrough for the American canal.