Panama fever (76 page)

William Baxter started work as an official guide in 1911. In that year there were fifteen thousand tourists. “They are generally comfortable men and women of 50 or more,” he wrote. The English tended to wear cork hats, though “some American men dress as if for a trip through the jungle when they go out on a sightseeing train. Most women wear heavy ugly shoes. All tourists carry umbrellas.” “Patriotic tourists, or perhaps it would be better to say ‘chauvinistic tourists,’ are rather common,” he continues. “They have two great topics: ‘The French Failure’ and ‘The Cost.’ It is futile to explain to them that a private company of Americans would have failed as the French company did, under the same conditions.
‘We
have done it, and they failed,’ is always the answer.”

For the “antlike” figures working far down below, the Cut was known as “Hell's Gorge.” The noise alone is hard to imagine. On a typical day there would be more than three hundred rock drills in operation, as well as the steam shovels, trains, and the blasting of some six hundred holes, with all the booming and crashing reflected and amplified by the walls of the “big ditch.” But that was only a part of it. As a Barbadian dynamite carrier, Arnold Small, remembered, “There was no shelter from the sun or the rain. There were no trees, then, just a bare place. When the sun shine, you get it, when it rain fall, you get it. When the wind blow, you get it.” Ten feet of rain fell in the Cut during 1909, converting it to a muddy nightmare. John Prescod was working at Bas Obispo “at the steam shovel in mud and water. One pair of boots last me one day. In the afternoon walk to the camp barefoot.” “I had never saw so much rain in all my life as I see in the Cut,” says another digger. “You had to work all through the rain, I remember when I was in the drilling gang, the boss allway say keep the drills agoing so as to keep your body warm sometimes, you are so cold that your teeth keep rocking together, in the morning you had to put your clothes on damp no sun to dry them.”

In the dry season the perpetual wet was replaced by 120-degree heat, and clouds of choking dust. “For the first couple of days or weeks, you are always out of breath,” says Arnold Small.

Harry Franck vividly remembered the day he spent during 1912 traversing the Cut enrolling workers in a census he was conducting. “The different levels varied from ten to twenty feet one above the other, each with a railroad on it, back and forth along which incessantly rumbled and screeched dirt-trains full or empty, halting before the steam-shovels, that shivered and spouted thick black smoke as they ate away the rocky hills and cast them in great giant handfuls on the train of one-sided flat cars that moved forward bit by bit at the flourish of the conductor's yellow flag. Steam-shovels that seemed human in all except their mammoth fearless strength tore up the solid rock with snorts of rage and the panting of industry, now and then flinging some troublesome, stubborn boulder angrily upon the cars … Each was run by two white Americans … the craneman far out on the shovel arm, the engineer within the machine itself with a labyrinth of levels demanding his unbroken attention. Then there was of course a gang of negroes, firemen and the like, attached to each shovel.”

All around, scores of drills were “pounding and grinding and jamming holes in the living rock.” Anywhere near them was “such a roaring and jangling that I must bellow at the top of my voice to be heard at all. The entire gamut of sound-waves surrounds and enfolds me.” There were gangs everywhere, on the floor of the canal and on the terraces and “stretching away in either direction till those far off look like upright bands of the leaf-cutting ants of Panamanian jungles.” And over it all hung heavy clouds of coal dust from the trains and shovels.

With so many men and machines crowded into this narrow space, almost nowhere was work more dangerous or life cheaper. “There were so many engines at a time in the Cut,” remembers Rufus Forde, “that most every month, a man lost his leg or badly damage. When any thing like that happen one engineer will turn to next engineer, one just grease the wheel. In those days a fowl life was more valuable than our lives.” One Panama-born West Indian remembered seeing a man cut cleanly in two, with his legs carried away by the train, which did not bother to stop. “Billy had been the engineer. He will stop his train on the tracks for a horse or a cow, but not for a human. Those were his words always.”

Tales of serious danger from accidents dominate the accounts of the West Indian workers. One remembered seeing a Spanish track layer hit by a locomotive and pushed for about twenty feet along the track. “He was still alive, with mostly all his skin was stripped off like a piece of ham bone. All I could hear him say was ‘Mi madre, mi madre!’” Harry Franck reckoned you needed “eyes and ears both in front and behind, not merely for trains but for a hundred hidden and unknown dangers to keep the nerves taut.” Scores of men were killed by being hit by the swinging boom of a steam shovel. Jan van Hardeveld narrowly escaped being crushed trying to right an overturned shovel, but soon after had his leg badly injured by a flying spike maul. Antonio Sanchez worked several months of 310 hours, the overtime being night work on track relocation when “the mud and slime was always present as well as the danger of the various spoil trains and rolling stock in dark and rainy nights.” In March 1909 he was disabled for three months when his foot was crushed by the wheel of a train.

Even worse than the traffic and machinery was the vast amount of dynamite being deployed to break up the rock so that it could be handled by the shovels. Accidents were numerous. Goethals blamed the incompetence of the workers, but some of the explosives became unstable from exposure to the Panamanian climate. On other occasions the subterranean heat in the Cut ignited the charges before the men were safely clear. Once, a premature explosion was caused by a bolt of lightning during a storm, killing seven men. The most common danger, however, was when excavating machinery hit unex-ploded charges. “It was a very awful sight to see how they dig out the bodies,” remembered Constantine Parkinson, “but it did not mean nothing in construction days people get killed and injured almost every day and all the bosses want is to get the canal built.”

The worst such accident occurred in December 1908, at Bas Obispo at the north end of the Cut. “Preparation was made to shoot down a high Hill in the center of the waterway on Sunday A.M.,” said Jamaican Z. McKenzie. “Unfortunately on Saturday about 12.30 P.M. the blast went off. I just leave the Gang to eat my lunch. I ran to the Spot & Saw what happened. Oh, it was a day of Sorrow for the living.” The accidental ignition of 22 tons of dynamite, in two separate explosions, was heard three miles away and left 60 injured and 23 men dead, 17 West Indians, 3 Spaniards, and 3 Americans. West Indian Amos Clarke remembered seeing “flesh hanging on the faraway trees. It was something terrible and awful to look at.”

Antonio Sanchez described going to work every day in the Cut as like “going to a battlefield … we had to sweat and be brave.” Even at a supposedly safe distance from the great explosions, bits of rock would be flung into the air for hundreds of feet. “Many times the rocks would hit laborers with such impact that they would fall unconscious on the spot,” he said. “As there were no other means for our protection, we used our shovels to cover our heads from the impact of the flying projectiles.” Harry Franck noticed that the track switchmen, or “switcheroos,” built sheet-iron wigwams, not as shelter from the sun, but as protection from flying rocks.

John Prescod was in a drilling gang near Empire in mid-April 1913. In one “difficult place,” at the bottom of a steep and unstable cliff, it was impossible to set up the drills due to rocks falling from above. His foreman was Charley Swinehart, the friend of the van Hardevelds. “General foreman came to spot,” Prescod wrote, “say your all don't started up yet no boss rock falling down un us. Say if I go up and set up a drill God dam it I going to fire the whole bunch of you I am sorry to say sad accident occurred. Rock fall from the bank knock Mr. Swinehart down in the canal Put him on a flatcar rush him to Ancón Hospital die the same day.” According to his official record, thirty-two-year-old Swinehart, an old-timer having been in Panama since April 1905, died of a fractured skull. Rose van Hardeveld says that he was still breathing as the hospital car rushed him to Ancón, but he passed away before his mother could reach his bedside. “Two days later, all of us who had become such close friends gathered in the hospital chapel to weep with the bereaved mother and sisters,” Rose writes. The surviving family returned, “brokenhearted,” to the States.

o stop the flooding Chagres from flowing into the Cut as the trench deepend, a huge earth dike was built across the north end at Gamboa. But as in French times, frequent flash floods caused delays and damage to equipment. Still the work was pushed on, even when, in 1910, the Cucaracha slide started up again. By 1912, it had deposited over three million cubic yards into the canal prism. And now the other side of the trench had come to life. At Culebra a huge crack appeared about a hundred yards away from the crest of the Cut. The new clubhouse was disassembled and moved away, as were some thirty other buildings in the town. But still the crack widened as the edge started to slip inexorably downward. Eventually seventy-five acres of what had been the town fell away into the canal. The mass dumped was twice that of the Cucaracha slide.

Goethals simply ordered it dug out again, but Gaillard was distraught. Then in January 1913 Cucaracha slid again, this time completely blocking the end of the Cut. For Gaillard, this seems to have been something of a final straw. He appeared to suffer a breakdown and left the Isthmus. Back in the United States he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died before the end of the year. Everyone assumed that it had been the pressure of digging the Cut that had killed him. His fellow engineer and friend William Sibert wrote of his death: “at the end of long years of patient, exacting work, of terrific responsibility, the tragic end has come … just as much a direct result of the struggle itself as if it were the work of a hostile bullet.”

Even as the shovels lowered the floor of the canal scoop by scoop, there were many who believed that the Cut could never be finished, that it would continue to fight back until it had defeated its de-spoiler. For their lock-canal plan the French had estimated that 23 million cubic yards had to be moved from the Cut. The Americans initially upped this to 53 million cubic yards, but the estimate rose to 78 million cubic yards in 1908, 84 million cubic yards in 1909, 89 million cubic yards in 1911, then to 100 million cubic yards in 1913. This was partly because of the widening of the bottom width but also due to breaks and slides. George Martin, who had been on the Isthmus since 1909, remembers when working in the Cut in 1911, his bosses’ “encouraging talk. ‘Boys, are you saving your money? It won't be long now, we will see water into the Cut.’ But we just take it for a joke,” he wrote. “I personally would say to my fellow men, that could never happen. My children would come and have children, and their children would come and do the same, before you would see water in the Cut, and most all of us agree on the same.”