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Panama I: Things to do in Panama when you Have Yellow FeverMalaria and Yellow Fever building the Panama Canal |
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The name "Panama" apparently derived from an Indian term meaning "many fish". But it also could have come from the word "panaba", or "far away", which Indians usually gave explorers who demanded the location of the nearest gold mine.[1] To facilitate the transport of booty between the New World and the Old in the sixteenth century, the Spaniards built a narrow road (two mules wide) crossing the hourglass-waisted isthmus of Panama.[2] The Caribbean end of the road, the port city of Nombre de Dios, grew fat on the gold passing through on its way to the Atlantic. This well-endowed, underdefended burg fell quickly to British pirate Francis Drake in 1572,[3] and was squabbled over by Britain, Spain, and the United States for the next few hundred years: each nation recognized that a canal dug through the isthmus would greatly increase trade between the Pacific coast and Atlantic ocean. Unfortunately, engineering limitations, fiscal folly, and a poor understanding of microbiology would hamper efforts well into the twentieth century. When the American Gold Rush began, it became obvious that sneaking over Panama, like those sixteenth-century mules, might be the fastest way to get to California. Wasting no time, a group of prospectors sailed to Panama, cross the fifty-odd miles by land, and board California-bound ships on the Pacific side. In his masterpiece The Path Between the Seas, David McCollough sums up the scene: The onslaught began first at Panama, early on the morning of January 7, 1849, when... some two hundred North Americans -- mostly unshaven young men in red flannel shirts loaded down with rifles, pistols, bowie knives, bedrolls, pots and pans, picks, shovels -- came swarming ashore in one great noisy wave... the invaders shouted and gestured [to the bewildered locals], trying to make themselves understood. Nobody seemed to have the least idea which way the Pacific lay and all were in an enormous hurry to get started. Amazingly, all of this first group survived the crossing. They came dragging into Panama city, rain-soaked, caked with mud, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, and ravenously hungry... old letters and little leather-bound journals mention the broiling heat and sudden blinding rains. They speak of heavy green slime on the Chagres [river], of nights spent in vermin-infested native huts, epidemics of dysentery, mules struggling up to their haunches in the impossible blue-black Panama muck.[4] Bad, But Not All That BadHowever miserable, this route saved a traveling distance of some eight or nine thousand miles. If gong by sea, the only alternate path was to sail around the southern tip of South America, a thirteen thousand mile journey. Nicaragua had already been proposed as an alternate site for a transoceanic canal; there was a straight shot that went no higher than 153 feet above sea level. A treaty with the United States in 1850 (The Clayton-Bulwer treaty) established a tidy diplomatic agreement concerning a possible canal, and furthermore Nicaragua was not considered the tropical deathtrap Panama was. However, crossing the isthmus at Panama was estimated to be under forty miles, considerably less than any overland route through Nicaragua. In skipping through Panama, the lucky traveler might shave months off his journey. Besides, the overland trip was not always disastrous: For wives and parents left behind [some] described as best they could those moments when magnificent multicolored birds burst into the sky; the swarms of blue butterflies -- "like blossoms blown away"; the brilliant green mountains, mountains to put Vermont to shame, said a young man from Bennington who was having a splendid time traveling up the Chagres. "The weather was warm but we had a roof to our boat... and what was of more consequence still we had on board a box of claret wine, a bacon, bread, and a piece of ice!"[5] This renewed interest in Panama spurred one Dr. Edward Cullen, an Irish physician and member of the Royal Geographic Society to explore it in 1850. Dr. Cullen claimed to have stridden across Panama in a light manner: he said his well-marked trail, located in the eastern half of present-day Panama, never rose more than 150 feet above sea level. A private company in the United States had already begun construction on a Panamanian railroad, but the United States Navy investigated Dr. Cullen's low-lying path, in a joint mission with Britain, France, and Colombia (then called New Grenada). The countries hoped that such a path through the narrow underbelly of the Americas would lead to a canal, rather than settle for the limited potential of an overland rail route. Confident in Dr. Cullen's appraisal of the ease of his crossing, Navy Lieutenant Isaac Strain set out with twenty-seven men into the jungles of east Panama. Strain had arrived some time before the other nations, but felt the trail would be easily found. He took only a few days' worth of provisions, and plunged into the forest. It Gave the Spaniards a Little TroubleThe Pacific Ocean had first been spied across the isthmus by the explorer Balboa.[6] He had crossed through the wilderness on the eastern side of Panama, close to the modern-day Colombian border. Balboa crossed the isthmus and returned without losing a single man, despite taking 190 armed Spaniards, several hundred indigenous Indians, and a pack of dogs.[7] Such a feat was astonishing, if only because the established Spanish colony in Panama at the time, La Antigua, suffered abject, wretched, steaming disaster. Twenty or thirty people died daily, with the bodies of those stricken with yellow fever, malaria, or malnutrition littering the streets. At one point, a mass grave was dug and corpses pitched in, but the hole was left open, the diggers certain that more bodies would arrive in the next few hours. Famine was also a problem: ...the dejected colonists subsisted on the buds and tender shoots of palm trees, and the flesh of some wild pigs which they were able to kill.... "Let us leave these deadly shores," [they cried,] "where the sea, the land, the heavens, and men repulse us."[8] ...Some [colonists] straggled away into the woods, eating strange roots and grasses, like animals. Young noblemen in brocades and scarlet silk coats, who had pledged their estates in order to come to Darien [the eastern part of Panama], dropped dead from hunger while crying for bread.[9] And the United States Navy Too
Such conditions hampered Lieutenant Strain. After disappearing into the jungle, he and his party were not seen for forty-nine days. Local Indians refused to serve as guides, his party's guns rusted beyond use in the humidity, food supplies ran out, and he began to follow the Chucunaque river eastward to the landmass of South America rather than towards either ocean. When the Indians, feeling pity, informed him that following the river was a poor choice, he bitterly concluded that they were trying to deceive him. Verging on starvation, his men devoured everything they could lay hands on, including live toads and a variety of palm nut that burned the enamel from their teeth and caused excruciating stomach cramps. The smothering heat, the rains, the forbidding jungle twilight day after day, were unlike anything any of them had ever experienced. Seven men died; one other went temporarily out of his mind... a British doctor who examined the survivors described them as the most "wretched set of human beings" he had ever seen. "In nearly all, the intellect was in a slight degree affected, as evinced by childish and silly remarks, although their memory, and the recollection of their sufferings, were unimpaired... They were literally living skeletons, covered with foul ulcers...." Strain's weight was seventy-five pounds. A few years later, at Colon, having never fully recovered, Strain died at age thirty-six.[10] To the west of Darien, starting in Colon, the Panamanian railroad effort experienced similar difficulties. The ubiquitous, if apocryphal, story was that a man died for every railroad tie laid down in the earth.[11] The railroad workers were from the United States, Europe, China, and also included some African slaves. Many had come to Panama to seek their fortune, and had arrived with little identity. No next of kin, permanent address, or even last name accompanied them. As disease and exhaustion took their toll on the workers, the disposal of unidentifiable bodies was a boon to those with proper connections. Medical schools and teaching hospitals needed cadavers to train budding physicians, and paid handsomely for anonymous bodies pickled in barrels shipped up from the tropics. The Panama Railroad Company itself sold the corpses abroad, and the income generated was sufficient to maintain the Company's own hospital. A reporter, touring the Company in 1855, noted the chief doctor at the Panama Railroad Company's hospital was conscientiously bleaching skeletons of dead workers, hoping to compile a museum of all the known races working on the railroad. This cadaver trade was not limited to Panamanian sources. Other participants were found, suggesting a widespread practice and a high demand for corpses. From The New York Times, March 12, 1852: Great excitement prevailed yesterday morning in the upper portion of our City, in consequence of a capture having been made of two men, who were engaged in stealing dead bodies, and forwarding them to the Eastern States, for dissection... It appears [they] landed... with a small vessel, loaded with a cargo of dead bodies of human beings, that were closely packed in casks, and intended to be conveyed to the steamboat piers... it is supposed the bodies were taken from Ward's Island or Potter's Field burying ground. Despite the massive loss of life, the railroad proper was completed in five years, spanning 47 miles from ocean to ocean, and, despite its inefficiency, ferried 400,000 people across the oceans between 1856 and 1866. However, cargo transport was still wanting; a canal was still called for. If At First You Don't Succeed
It was against this motley background of failed colonies, explorations, and the lone pyrrhic victory of the railroad that, in 1870, the United States Navy decided to have another go at it. Two ships set forth with Navy officers, a photographer, surveyors, draftsmen, doctors, telegraphers, and geologists. They brought whiskey and quinine; they brought blankets and rifles for every man. They brought 7,000 pounds of bacon, 10,000 pounds of bread, 6,000 pounds of tomato soup, 30 gallons of beans, 2,000 pounds of coffee, 100 bottles of pepper, 600 pounds of canned butter; in all, rations for some four months. They toted transits, compasses, mercurial mountain barometers, and current meters. Pocket anaeroid barometers! Gradienters! Spirit levels! They brought 100 miles of telegraph wire, and 600 pairs of extra shoes (one for every ten pounds of tomato soup, for those playing along at home). With all this equipment, they were to take measurements. North, south, east, west, up, and down. They were to record inclinations and declinations, astronomical positions, the heights of mountains and the depths of harbors. They were to gather rocks and soil, plants and animals. They were to note the climate and the disposition of the natives. In short, they were to completely characterize the narrow spit of land, and they were to waste no time, for the rains were coming, and with them, most wretched disease. The expedition was well-prepared for disaster. It was yet to be understood that mosquitoes were the chief carriers of yellow fever and malaria; the most able medical men of the period attributed such plagues to "miasmas", which were the gaseous emanations put forth by putrefying jungle vegetation. Thus, a mistrust of the rainy season would serve the Navy well, even if for the wrong reason. The engineers had some scant knowledge of the area offered by the builders of the Panamanian railroad, and, lacking all else, went into the jungle. They reported narrow mountain ridges with cliffs on both sides ("in the depths of which was heard the roaring of wild animals"[12]). They found the river Strain should have followed in 1854, and it took them down to the Pacific. However, they were also beset by Indians who "guided" them through the worst path imaginable. The journal accounts sound no more enjoyable than any other foray into the jungle: Friday, April 8 -- ...Eugenio, the machetero [machete-wielder], was bitten during the night by a scorpion or tarantula, and his leg and foot became so swelled that we were forced to leave him behind... passed a miserable night, tormented by mosquitoes and sand-flies. Saturday, April 9 -- Started down the right bank of the river. Left behind nine men who were shoeless. Cut through 5,000 feet, a dense mangrove [swamp]... Sunday, April 10 -- Another sleepless night, on account of insects... The author of the journal, Navy Commander Thomas O. Selfridge, described "mosquitoes so thick I have seen them put out a lighted candle with their burnt bodies."[13] However, the Navy, ever full of pluck, surveyed a substantial portion of Dr. Cullen's alleged route. There they found that the lowest point was 553 feet, rather than the piddling 150 Cullen claimed (digging a channel through 150 feet of dirt is substantially easier than digging one through 553.[14]) After deciding they'd seen enough of that route, they went a hundred miles west to investigate another possible canal pathway. There, in the swamp surrounding the Mandinga river, men were "obliged to pass the night in trees, the water rising so rapidly as to drive them from their beds."[15] In a full week, they barely covered two miles. Bereft of provisions, shoes (all 600 pairs gone!), "and no longer kept up by the charm of novelty," Selfridge took stock of his situation, grabbed a smaller crew, and pressed on till he crossed the mountains and accurately surveyed the route. He and his team had made notes on plants, animals, geology, geography, elevation, and the lay of the land. He had placed 96,000 surveying stakes, and, while failing to pick the exact route of the future canal, "the field of research [was] reduced and the problem narrowed," he said.[16] It was this expedition, and six more like it, that the Americans brought to a congress in Paris designed to produce a canal. The Navy had learned from the deaths at the railroad and the accounts of others, and had put together an extraordinary report detailing the problems, and perhaps some solutions, of the most ambitious engineering project the world had ever seen. Next time: Nobody listens to them. Footnotes
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