Panama fever (67 page)

By July 1906, as malaria and pneumonia hit hard, “The wailing and singing at the labor camp went on so often that there was hardly a night when the camp was silent… Slowly but surely my natural fortitude was giving way, and I was becoming a nervous, fearful woman. I believe it was the consciousness of what would happen to the children that kept me from going to pieces.”

But then their youngest daughter, Sister, fell seriously ill with a combination of malaria and dysentery. She became, Rose wrote, “a limp, feverish little bundle, crying night and day.” She was told to give her quinine, but the young girl could not keep it down. “All the time I was becoming lower in spirits and less able to cope,” Rose remembered. “The thought of putting my baby in a strange hospital was the last straw. That night I gave way to old-fashioned screaming hysterics, outside beside the roaring cataract. Poor little Janey clung to me, her frightened eyes searching mine for the cause of such carryings on! After that when I sat through the long nights, comforting my whimpering child in my arms, the howling and moaning from the labor camp no longer grated so shatteringly on my nerves. I knew what it was to seek relief in wailing. Though for me, such yielding to hysterics was a matter for private shame, never to be regarded as an accepted social custom, I could concede to the black people whatever gratification they might find that way.”

Sister recovered and Rose found that she could now sleep through the nightly din from the labor camp. Martina Milliery's improved English meant that she was a real support and help for her friend. Rose's spirits were also lifted when she started helping out her husband by writing out Sunday passes for his team of Spanish workers. “With this little job to do for my husband, for the Canal Commission, for President Teddy Roosevelt, and for my country, I was in my glory,” she wrote. “I sometime had difficulty writing those strange Spanish names, but still I liked doing it for these black-eyed and very deferential men.”

ost of the new Spanish arrivals, like van Hardeveld and Jantje Milliery's gang, had been put to work on track construction and repair. The basic work on the Panama Railroad main line had been slow going. It was not entirely double-tracked until well into 1907, but a maze of sidings, branch, and service lines had been constructed—some 350 miles by June 1906. Most of this track, however, was in the Cut. Here, readying completion by late that year, in spite of all the prevailing sickness, was Stevens's great digging machine, perhaps his era's most important contribution to the American canal.

The lock-canal plan adopted that summer would still require, it was originally (underestimated, the digging out and removal of more than 50 million cubic yards of rock and soil. For this to be achieved as quickly and cheaply as possible would require, first, the greatest possible number of steam shovels in operation in the space available. Therefore the excavation was planned to proceed along a series of horizontal benches, or terraces across the valley in the making, each wide enough to carry two parallel rail tracks. Thus, in places, up to seven shovels could work on the same hillside almost stacked on top of each other up the terraced slope. Next, it was crucial that the shovels be working at maximum efficiency. Under normal conditions, tests had shown, it took about a minute and a half (seven bucket loads) for a shovel to fill a single spoil car; about forty-five minutes for an entire train. In the case of the smaller French trains and cars, it was much less. Thus, Stevens calculated, if it were never to be idle, each shovel required the service of a virtual conveyor belt of three to five entire spoil trains so that there would be at least one in attendance at all times. To run this sort of traffic in the narrow confines of the Cut required an enormous and highly intricate track system the likes of which probably no one else in the United States had the expertise to design and build.

But Stevens went further. To put it simply, by starting the work at the two ends of the nine-mile Cut and working inward toward its highest point, the site could, in the main, be organized so that there was a small but significant upward gradient on the terraces. This meant that empty spoil trains would be climbing up to their shovels, but then, when fully loaded, had a downhill journey to the dump sites. The scheme had the added advantage that water in the ditch, a constant annoyance for the French, naturally flowed away to both ends where it was easily disposed of with giant pumps. If Stevens's track system was fantastically skillful and intricate, like the assembly line in one of the new mechanized U.S. factories, the use of the gradient— whereby nature was made a helper rather than an enemy—was engineering at its simplest and most brilliant.

A surprising number of the “moving” parts of this system were still from the French era. At the end of 1906, over half the locomotives in the Cut were old Belgian machines, able, in dry weather, to pull about thirteen small 9-cubic-yard cars. But as fast as the new American models arrived, they replaced the old plant. The U.S. locomotives could haul four or five times the volume of dirt. In the same way, the new American spoil cars were also on a different scale, of a different age, immensely strong and able to hold at least three times more weight than the old French models. On one occasion a single rock weighing some thirty-four tons was loaded onto a single one of these new cars without mishap.

There was another important innovation: instead of individual cars self-tipping when wet soil or clay stuck and had to be removed by shovel, the American cars were one-sided only and linked together with panels, making a single long surface, like a giant conveyor belt. This not only meant a greater area was available, but also brought into play at the dump sites an ingenious invention. At the end of each of the new trains was a wagon holding what looked like a giant, onesided snowplow, linked to the locomotive at the other end by a thick chain. When the spoil arrived at the dumping site—whether it be a marsh fill, a dam, or a causeway—the open side of the cars faced where the soil was required, and the plow, its blade at an angle of about forty-five degrees, was pulled from one end of the “belt” to the other, scraping the mud and rocks over the side. The empty spoil car departed, followed along the dumping site track by another specially adapted locomotive with armlike blades at ground level. These flattened the soil, making room for the next load. When a new and firm terrace had been thus created, the rails were simply moved across to the edge and the process repeated. The contrast with the French period, when much of the spoil had to be unloaded by hand, is sharp. The saving in man-hours was immense.

The most labor-intensive aspect of the process was now moving track, either at the dump sites or in the Cut, where teams would have to update the intricate system as the site constantly changed shape and dimensions. Then, at the end of 1906, the general manager of the Panama Railroad, W G. Bierd, came up with an ingenious invention, a swinging boom mounted on a flatcar that lifted extant track and moved it nearby without the need for disassembly. It was a slow process, but not nearly as slow as doing it by hand. Like the other innovations, it was just the sort of miracle machine that de Lesseps had hoped in vain would come to the rescue of his own canal effort.

As well as heavier, stronger, and cleverer machinery, the railroadera American canal builders had more useful experience than their French forebears. The railway boom in the United States had provided an invaluable training ground for hundreds of American engineers, whose expertise was far in excess of anything available to the de Lesseps effort. It was not just Stevens and Bierd, but a host of switchmen, signalmen, locomotive drivers and mechanics, electrical engineers, and railroad foremen. If transportation, the railway, was the key to building the canal, as Stevens had decided, then he had a depth of talent to call on.

The Americans also had the luxury of time. Stevens may have had a tightfisted Congress and, in parts, suspicious domestic press to contend with, but that was nothing compared to the pressure on a private company watching the bourse every day and with its life in the hands of volatile “confidence” and the “folly and gullibility of Capital.” It helped that Stevens was not easily thrown by advice or instructions from above. But, crucially, largely freed of direct money-raising concerns, he had the freedom to do what was right for the engineering of the canal rather than for its public relations. So instead of having to feed the
Bulletin
monthly excavation figures, he was able to concentrate on the painstaking, unglamorous preparatory work, without which the canal project would not have succeeded.

The long delay between the stopping of “making the dirt fly” in August 1905 and the resumption of excavation in earnest at the beginning of 1907 turned out to be time very well spent. In spite of the terrible rates of sickness among the workforce, the digging machine was now ready, and excavation records were about to be shattered.

he massively increased traffic on the railroad, serving not just the engineering part of the project but the houses, shops, and restaurants of the employees as well, did have its downside. There were virtually no roads on the Isthmus, and often the only way to get somewhere was to walk along the tracks. As the line got busier, it became more dangerous, and railroad accidents started becoming an almost daily fact of life. Often, amid the shouts, blasts, and din of the works, and partially deafened by the side effects of quinine, men simply did not hear the danger in time. In mid-August, after she had spent “a very pleasant day in Gorgona,” the train carrying Mary Chatfield back to Panama City “ran over a colored man, cutting off one leg far above his knee, and I think, killing him—I hope so—he was so mutilated. A fearful sight,” she wrote home. “The school teacher at Cristóbal and a nurse from Ancón were in the car with me. The nurse went right out to see what she could do, but I sat still and shuddered.”

Although West Indians were most at risk, especially soon after they arrived, due to their lack of familiarity with locomotives and track, the danger affected everyone, particularly in the Cut, where a bewildering network of tracks, in constant use, now covered almost every flat surface. On September 17, Jantje “Teddy” Milliery had lunch at home as usual, before returning to his work site just below their House Number Seven. He stepped over the first two tracks across his route, but then, just as he reached a third track, he turned to wave to his wife and baby son watching him from the doorway of their house. At that moment he was hit by ICC Locomotive No. 215, an empty spoil train that was reversing without the customary lookout in place on the end car. According to his official file, his “pelvis and both lower extremities [were] completely crushed.” “I saw the accident and reached Jantje before he died,” Jan would tell Rose. “I tried to tell him we would look after his wife and baby. I hope he understood me. He had such an awful time dying …”