Panama fever (8 page)

By October 1851, eight miles had been constructed and the railway reached to Gatún. But in New York the promoters began to doubt that the line would ever be completed. The value of the stock went into free fall, and the work came to a standstill.

CHAPTER FOUR

“A NATURAL CULMINATING POINT”

It was a fierce southwesterly storm off the Caribbean coast of the Isthmus that saved the railroad project. In December 1851, two ships from Georgia and Philadelphia, filled with over a thousand hopeful gold hunters bound for the Chagres River, found themselves in serious trouble and were driven to take shelter in Limón Bay. The impatient passengers swarmed onshore and demanded to be taken inland by rail. The railroad engineers protested that there were no passenger cars, but the prospectors eagerly piled into wooden cattle trucks and were transported the eight miles to Gatún. It cut a precious day off the transit and after that everyone demanded the same. The railway never looked back; and from then on, as fast as the beleaguered workers pushed on across the Isthmus, the California-bound passengers were right behind them. What's more, they were prepared to pay huge sums, sometimes more than $25, for their tickets. The initial rates set by the railway managers were, one admitted, “intended to be, to a certain extent prohibitory, until we could get things in shape,” but there were plenty of takers and the planned reduction in fares was never necessary. So from that day on, the “goose began to lay golden eggs with astonishing extravagance.”

Early the following year, the Panama Railroad Company formally inaugurated the growing town on Manzanillo Island, the Atlantic terminus of the route. They named it Aspinwall, after the company's American boss, but the locals were having none of this, passing a law calling the town Colón, after Christopher Columbus. For a while confusion reigned, as the local post service refused to deliver mail addressed to Aspinwall, and eventually the American name was dropped. Up the coast, the town of Chagres at the river mouth quickly lost its previous importance, declined, and then disappeared altogether. Colón was now the key port and town on Panama's Atlantic coast. For the hundreds of thousands of men and women who would come to Panama over the next sixty years for the railway or to build the canal, it would be their first sight of the Isthmus.

For almost all, it was a hugely dispiriting experience. Although streets and squares were laid out, there were neither paved roads nor sewers. The town was separated from the mainland by a small channel, known as Folks River, slightly above the tide level, where vultures hovered, attracted by the offensive and rotten stench that circulated with the breeze coming from the swamps. When travelers arrived from Panama or New York, the population of eight hundred would be doubled, and the town would come to life of a sort. An account published in 1855 describes how “the hotels—great, straggling, wooden houses—gape here with their wide open doors, and catch California travelers, who are sent away with fever as a memento of the place, and shops, groggeries, billiard rooms, and drinking saloons thrust out their flaring signs to entice the passer-by.” All the buildings, with the exception of the Railroad office and the “British consul's precarious corrugated iron dwelling,” were of wood, and many were on rickety stilts over the stinking morass that almost surrounded the island.

“I thought I had never seen a more luckless, dreary spot,” wrote one visitor in the 1850s. “It seemed as capital a nursery for ague and fever as Death could hit upon anywhere.” Colón, the wettest and filthiest place on the Isthmus, was indeed a death trap for the workers the company imported to push the railway project along. A huge recruitment drive saw arrivals from all over the world. Among the Europeans were Englishmen, Irishmen, French, Germans, and Aus-trians. In 1852, one thousand Africans were brought in, and the following year some eight hundred Chinese workers were contracted. A number died on the way from Canton, on transport, according to a historian of the railway, “as filthy and odorous as any slavers.” The terms of the contract were not far removed from slavery, either. The contractor was paid $25 per man per month, of which the workers saw about $4, with food and clothing thrown in. The men were expected to labor up to eighty hours a week, even in the drenching rain. Right from the start the Chinese proved particularly susceptible to the local strains of malaria. After less than a year, only some two hundred of the original intake had survived and these shattered remnants were shipped off to Jamaica.

It was to this island that the Railroad Company now looked to solve its labor crisis. Jamaica, along with the other sugar islands, was in a chronically depressed state. Malnutrition was rife, worsening the effects of the devastating cholera epidemic of 1850. Thus there was a great response when the Railroad Company's recruiting agent, Hutchins and Company of Kingston, starting advertising for workers, promising food and doctors, and wages of 3s 2d per day minimum.

By July 1854 two to three thousand adult males had left Kingston for Panama, and by the end of the following year almost five thousand had made the journey One newspaper editor claimed: “We could name many persons who were walking the streets of the City for a long period of time,—literally starving because they could not get employment,—who are now doing well in Chagres.” The West Indians quickly acquired a reputation for being the best pick-and-shovel men and the hardiest of the imported workers.

A large proportion of the Jamaicans were more or less resistant to yellow fever, the disease most dreaded by Europeans on the Isthmus. Like Panamanians, many would have had a mild dose during childhood, thus becoming immune. But they readily succumbed to malaria and especially to environmental diseases such as pulmonary infections, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, and many contracted these complaints on arrival, partly because they turned up in a malnourished state and thus had no resistance.

Typhoid, dysentery, smallpox, hookworm, and cutaneous infections were also endemic on the Isthmus. No record was kept of the number of workers who died during the railroad construction, but estimates are from six to twelve thousand. The worst year was 1852, when a cholera epidemic killed unnumbered workers and all but two of the fifty American technicians then on-site. One railroad historian reckoned that on average over the five years of construction one in five of the workers died every month. An account written in 1912 describes how “workers who toppled over in the jungle [and] managed to drag themselves to the tracks… were picked up and taken to the hospital in Aspinwall… Others swallowed by the sinkholes or eaten alive by ants and land crabs, disappeared without a trace.”

Food was scarce and expensive. Although strips of dried jerked beef were a staple, workers and whites alike ate monkey, iguana, or snake stew to survive. Often it was best not to ask what was put in front of you in the so-called hotels. Water was also hard to come by. In Panama it came from a spring about a mile outside the city, and was carried in earthen crocks holding three gallons, and sold for ten cents a crock, which was almost a fifth of the daily wage for a worker. Alcohol, in contrast, was cheap and plentiful. American technicians drank champagne cocktails for breakfast, with quinine instead of bitters. According to a local newspaper, it was this intemperance that led to many falling ill. “In most cases,” the paper wrote, “sickness and death have occurred from imprudence in drinking spirituous liquors, gluttony and a careless exposure to wet weather.”

The lawlessness of the gold trail was also a real problem for the railway construction. Finding the local police inadequate, the Railroad Company bosses made a secret deal with the provincial governor to set up their own force. In 1852 they imported a notorious Indian fighter and former Texas Ranger called Ran Runnels to lead a small but heavily armed company of about forty men, described by a contemporary as “a bare-footed, coatless, harum-scarum looking set.” Brushing aside the local police force, they had the power of life and death on the Isthmus, liberally engaging in whipping, imprisonment, and shooting. On several occasions dozens of men were hanged along the seawall in Panama City. In 1853 the vigilante force broke up a strike by railway workers, in the process publicly flogging the Panamanian official who had been instrumental in organizing the action. The force was also useful for providing surveillance of their contracted workers, to prevent them from taking up agricultural plots or going to work in the better-paid transit business. As well as withholding wages, the Railroad Company authorized lashings by overseers and the use of stocks to keep men on the job.

All the time the railway, tiny in length, but a massive undertaking considering the conditions, was steadily lengthening. By July 1852, the track had reached Barbacoas, about halfway across the Isthmus, where it was to cross the Chagres River. At this point the work was returned to a contractor, whose first job was the construction of a bridge there, where the Chagres flowed through a rocky channel, some three hundred feet wide.

It was the first taste of the power and unpredictability of the Chagres. A bridge was built, then promptly destroyed when a freshet swept away one of its spans. The Railroad Company was once again compelled to take the enterprise into its own hands.

The bridge was rebuilt and in May 1854 the track reached Gorgona, and work started in Panama City heading up the Río Grande Valley. Although incomplete, the railway was by now making serious money. In 1854, with thirty-one miles in operation, 32,000 were transported, and the outfit's gross income exceeded a million dollars. This was in spite of a falling off of the stream of gold prospectors; by now the Isthmus was one of the major passenger routes of the world, and still the best way to get from the East to the West Coast of the United States, whoever you were. The Bishop of California crossed in December 1853 and left a vivid account of the “pale and miserable” Irish workers, and the “oaths and imprecations” of the “ruffians” and “women of the baser sort” he encountered at Las Cruces.

Setbacks continued even as the line neared completion. A forty-foot-deep cut was dug near Paraíso high in the mountains. When the first rain came, the surface became saturated and the greasy soil moved into the cut, burying the railroad to a depth of some twenty feet. In December 1854 a hurricane from the northeast exposed the weakness of Limón Bay, destroying every ship anchored in the port. Nevertheless, at midnight on January 27, 1855, under a torrential tropical rain, two work crews met, bringing into existence the first railroad that crossed a continent. In many ways it was a heroic achievement, and that is certainly how it was viewed in the international press. The project was officially inaugurated on February 15, 1855, with elaborate celebrations. The
Aspinwall Daily Courier
described the whistles blowing from the heights to the Pacific lowlands, while for another English-language paper, the
Star and Herald
, originally established in 1849, it was first and foremost a triumph of Yankee entrepreneurship ability.

Indeed, a precedent had been set of American engineering ingenuity and success in the tropics. More than that, Panama was now the site of an internationally important transport breakthrough. In an age where commerce and progress were the drumbeats of the world, the excitement was irresistible. The official history of the railroad construction, published in 1862, eulogized that “no one work … has accomplished so much, and … promises for the future so great benefit to the commercial interests of the world as the present railroad thoroughfare between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the Isthmus of Panama… it forms a natural culminating point for the great commercial travel of the globe.”

Because of the railroad, the prospect of a canal had improved almost immeasurably. It was a giant step forward. Not only had the lowest pass in the entire Continental Divide outside Nicaragua been discovered at Culebra, but also the railway, with its “slender feeler of progress,” had opened up the interior. The railroad would serve as the right hand of the canal builders, and it would offer a great advantage to Panama when the “battle of the routes” would be fought with Nicaragua.

But the greatest lure that the railroad presented to those who dreamt of a trans-Isthmian canal was financial. It had cost a fortune to build—estimates are as high as $7 to $9 million, or $170,000 per mile—but for those who had put up the money, the payback was huge. Even before it was finished, a third of the cost had been recouped. In a single month, March 1855, receipts topped $120,000. Fares remained incredibly high and steamship companies happily paid huge sums—one-half of their entire freight costs—to unload onto the railway and then reload at the other end.

Panama was not the only trans-Isthmian transit route. In Nicaragua, the American entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt had established a transit for passengers, which involved flat-bottomed craft sailing up the San Juan River and across the lake where they were transferred to carriages for the trip to the Pacific. He also commissioned a detailed canal survey in Nicaragua, but was unable to raise the capital to start work. Although many thousands chose Vanderbilt's route, it didn't hurt the business at Panama. In the first six years after it was finished, the Railroad Company made profits in excess of $7 million. Dividends were 15 percent on average and went as high as 44 percent. At one time, Panama Railroad stock was the highest-priced on the New York Exchange. Panama seemed indeed the golden Isthmus once again.