Panama fever (9 page)

But amidst the euphoria there were plenty of lessons that later canal builders could have learned—had they not been blinded by the financial and heroic success of the railroad. The appalling death rates, the political instability and labor troubles, the dangers of the Chagres River and landslides would be the bitter enemies of the next generations of West Indians, Americans, and Europeans who went to “the golden Isthmus” to build a canal. The experience of nonwhites at the hands of the prospectors and U.S. bosses also looks forward to the confused and unfortunate racial attitudes of the American construction period. Indeed, the railroad, which had put Panama on the map as never before, was to turn out, for the people of the country, to be something of a mixed blessing.

In effect, the transit route had become a company town. Panama
was
the railway. The Company kept for itself the arrangement of accommodation and food for its employees, and everything was imported, just as all the expertise, labor, capital, materials, and tools for the railway construction had been. In effect, the local businessmen lost their control of cross-Isthmian freightage and storage—Panama's primary resource—and the entire transit zone came under the control and ownership of British or American interests. In the same way the New Grenadan authorities found themselves outmanned and outgunned by the railway's men, and deferred to the foreigners. The dollar replaced the peso as the common currency and English became almost as common as Spanish. Attempts to impose a toll for the local economy on tonnage on the railroad were defeated. The railroad and foreign interests, backed by the almost continual presence of the U.S. Navy, under the terms of the 1846 Bidlack Treaty to keep the transit open, were just too strong.

In the early 1850s Panamanian landowners had made small fortunes renting or selling properties for hugely inflated sums. But with the opening of the railway and the falling away of the gold rush, demand for accommodation and other services collapsed and the Panamanian economy went into a deep slump, even as the railway prospered.

It was boom and bust for the poor of the country as well. The demands of the gold rush had led to a bonanza for the country's muleteers, oarsmen, and porters, but the opening of the railway had ended those trades forever. In the meantime, thousands of men had flooded to the two terminal cities looking for work, causing chronic overcrowding and attendant filth and disease. Between 1842 and 1864, the population of Panama City had swollen from five thousand to thirteen thousand and a massive slum had grown up outside the city walls. With the completion of the railway, there was widespread unemployment. In fact, the lot of the majority of Panamanian citizens had actually worsened.

The huge influx of black workers also caused a great challenge to the region's delicate social structure and narrow, class-based political system, and hopeful laborers were still arriving from Jamaica even after the main construction work was finished, leading to calls for migrants without work to be turned away at Colón. The previously loose social stratification based on color had been magnified and solidified by the advent of the Americans. One observer described the situation in Colón in the mid-1850s: all the railroad officials, hotel and barkeepers were white, mainly American; the “better class of shopkeepers are Mulattoes from Jamaica,” while “dispensers of cheap grog, and hucksters of fruit and small wares are chiefly negroes.”

Influenced by the spread of European liberalism, and inflamed by the exclusion of local people from the prosperity of the railway, there was growing popular opposition to the foreign presence in Panama. In many ways Washington replaced Bogotá not just as the real power in Panama, but also as the focus of growing nationalist efforts to rid the Isthmus of empire-building foreigners.

Panama was now essentially an American protectorate. This did not go unnoticed around the world, and in 1857 Britain suggested that this new state of affairs was in violation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, offering instead to be one of a triumvirate of “protecting powers” alongside the United States and France. Showing early signs of the abandonment of the idea of a “neutral canal,” the Americans rejected the solution, citing the Bidlack Treaty as taking precedence.

New Grenada's rule on the Isthmus weakened further during its six-year civil war beginning in 1857, essentially a struggle between federalist, secular liberals and centrist, clerical conservatives, complicated by the regional rivalries of the scattered population. Together with economic depression, the 1860s in Panama saw constant turmoil or revolts, coups d'etat, and revolutionary conspiracies that so depleted the treasury that at one point mid-decade many public schools were forced to close through lack of funds. In response to separatist convulsions, as well as the “mob” threatening the railroad (or, more precisely, foreign or white elite Panamanian interests), U.S. troops were landed five times during the decade, sometimes at the request of Bogotá, sometimes not.

Between 1861 and 1865, the United States was, of course, fighting its own civil war, and the Panama route was used several times for moving troops, materials, and bullion from coast to coast. In the buildup to the war, and during the armed conflict itself, America's European rivals were quick to take advantage. The French emperor, Napoléon III, had long been obsessed with Central America, dreaming of control of a canal, and of a buffer against the alarming expansion of the United States. In 1861 and the following year, there were expeditions to Mexico from Spain, Britain, and France to demand payment of debt. But for France it was more than that. Troops were landed, and control established over much of the country. An Austrian Habsburg, Maximilian, was established as emperor. Never recognized by the United States, he was overthrown in 1867 after the withdrawal of French troops decimated by disease. But a legacy of deep distrust of French activities in the region had been firmly established in the United States. This would have profound effects on later canal efforts.

The United States leadership emerged from the Civil War determined to reverse creeping European intervention in their backyard and to point the United States in an outward-looking and expansionist direction. The vague aspirations of the Monroe Doctrine now became national dogma, and from being a defensive strategy it became a license for U.S. intervention throughout the hemisphere.

The directions of the expansion of American influence and interest—southward to Peru and Chile, producers of valuable raw materials such as nitrate of soda, copper and tin; and westward to the newly opened up markets of China and Japan—focused attention on the need for a trans-Isthmian canal. It was now becoming a cornerstone of American strategic ambitions, and part and parcel of the country's Manifest Destiny.

In 1866, the Senate requested that the Navy report on possible canal sites. Rear Admiral Charles H. Davis, having consulted the mishmash of Spanish, French, and other sources, came back with nineteen possibilities, including six in Panama and three in Darién, in modern-day Colombia, based on the Atrato River.

Late the same year, the U.S. minister in Bogotá negotiated a concession with Colombia for the exclusive right to build a canal, but the treaty, and further efforts over the next three years, never satisfied both sides. The Americans demanded a large measure of control and freedom of action in the transit zone, while Bogotá was fearful of further loss of sovereignty on the Isthmus, and tried to limit the number of U.S. employees or troops in Panama at any one time. On the Isthmus itself, the failure of these efforts was dismaying and further fueled secessionist temperament.

As the civil war raged in Colombia, sometimes sweeping into its northernmost province, then sweeping out again, Panama faced the prospect that even its key business (albeit foreign owned and controlled), the railroad, had seen its best days. The opening of the transcontinental railroad in the United States on May 10, 1869, ended the Panama Railroad (PRR)'s monopoly almost overnight. The previous year had seen record revenue for the business, but after that the line on the graph heads ever southward. Arrogant mismanagement of the railroad did not help, either. Panama sank further into poverty and sporadic anarchy, with U.S. troops landing twice more in the 1870s and Colombian soldiers in 1875.

However, the opening of the transcontinental railway did nothing to quiet calls in the United States for a trans-Isthmian canal. Never before had it been so plain that the United States was now truly a continental power, with two oceans separated by an enormous but, on paper, highly avoidable distance. The inauguration in 1869 of Ulysses S. Grant as the eighteenth American president brought further new momentum to U.S. canal policy. For one thing, Grant had actually been on the Isthmus. In his first address to Congress, the new president laid out his canal ambitions and soon established a new Inter-Oceanic Canal Commission—headed by Admiral Daniel Am-men—to investigate possibilities, and conduct and weigh new surveys of all the possible routes.

So for the first time, every possibility, however remote, was to be meticulously and systematically explored. What's more, the methodology would be the same everywhere so real comparisons would now be possible. At last myth would be separated from reality about the true prospects of an interoceanic canal.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE COMPETING ROUTES

The field was still open. Aside from Nicaragua and Panama, there had been surveying expeditions in Mexico, where, as elsewhere, concessions were granted, then resold, but no work was ever started. The San Blas route, where the Isthmus spans only thirty miles, had been visited by British and American explorers, who had expressed optimism about a “very remarkable depression” in the area's 1,000- to 1,500-foot mountainous spine, not that they had actually reached it. The region that had attracted the most excitement, however, was Darién, the section of the Isthmus spanning the present-day Panama-Colombia border, still inhospitable jungle today.

In 1850, an Irish doctor, Edward Cullen, had announced in England that he had found a short and convenient canal route from Caledonia Bay to the Gulf of San Miguel, with a break in the Continental Divide at only 150 feet above sea level. He also claimed that the previous year he had painlessly walked the route from coast to coast in a few hours. It seemed a sensational discovery. But subsequent investigations by an internationally manned surveying team had found no pass across the Continental Divide at this point at less than 1,300 feet above sea level. During the course of the exploration, several teams got lost and were either ambushed by hostile Cuna Indians or died of starvation or disease.

“It is proved beyond all doubt,” the leader of the surveyors had reported, “that Dr. Cullen never was in the interior, and that his statements are a plausible net-work of fabrications.” The Irish doctor wisely disappeared, though he emerged later as an army medic in the Crimea. It seems that his entire story was a gigantic lie, a dream built on wishful thinking, which had cost the lives of more than a dozen men.

But many were undeterred and optimistic stories still circulated. South of Caledonia Bay, a broad river, the Atrato, penetrates deep inland, offering a canal excavation of as little as twenty-eight miles. For this reason several French and British expeditions had been organized and sent to the area. Soon after Cullen's sensational claim, Wall Street millionaire Frederick M. Kelley heard a rumor of a “Lost Canal of Raspadura” linking deep inland, tributaries of the Atrato and the Tuyra rivers flowing to opposite oceans. In 1852 Kelley funded an expedition to investigate, led by John C. Trautwine, one of the experienced Panama Railroad engineers. His report was emphatic—there was no “Lost Canal”—but Kelley, described in his later years as “mystical and imaginative,” was clearly a man in the grip of an idea. As well as corresponding with and meeting the by now ancient Hum-boldt, he toured the capitals of Europe looking for support for a canal, and over the next twenty years spent an estimated $150,000 of his own money on further optimistic surveys in Darién, few of which even managed to venture far inland.

Rear Admiral Charles H. Davis, in his 1866 report for the U.S. Senate, had also favored Darién, in particular the more westerly route between Paterson's Caledonia Bay to the Gulf of San Miguel. On the map it looked simple: the narrow barrier between the oceans, the probable route taken by Balboa, is only forty miles, and large rivers promised to reduce further the necessary length of a canal there.

So the destination was Caledonia Bay when the first Grant expedition to leave the United States for the Isthmus headed out from Brooklyn Navy Yard on January 22, 1870, commanded by thirty-three-year-old Lieutenant Thomas O. Selfridge. “The Department has entrusted to you a duty connected with the greatest enterprise of the present age,” read his orders from Admiral Ammen. The weather was clear and bright.

For two months his hundred-man team, heavily armed to deter Indian attacks, searched the high mountain range near the Atlantic coast, but found no sign of Cullen's pass, and their thoroughness, something of a new departure for Darién surveys, left no room for doubt. From there Selfridge moved on to San Blas. There, like previous expeditions, they were turned away by Cuna Indians before completing an overland crossing of the Isthmus, but they saw enough to bury the hope of a “remarkable depression” and quickly to discard a sea-level or lock canal. Even if the long string of locks needed to lift ships to over a thousand feet could be built, every lock canal needs a supply of water at its summit elevation. Each time a lock is used, thousands of gallons of water pass “downstream.” At the top of the mountains of San Blas there were only trickling brooks. The only option was a tunnel, as others had concluded, and this time the estimate was at ten miles long. Nevertheless, because it was still the shortest route, Selfridge refused to rule it out as he led his exhausted team back to New York.