Panama III: Death and Dying in Panama

In Brief

Building the Panama canal wasn't so much an exercise in engineering as it was a battle against the very laws of nature. Filth, disease, ignorance and all their merry companions killed three of four of the intrepid Frenchies who came to build the thing. In the grand tradition of mocking sanitation standards throughout History, join History House on the final leg of our tour through the Panama canal.

Party On

You might also be interested in: Panama I: Things to do in Panama when you Have Yellow Fever Malaria and Yellow Fever building the Panama Canal Panama II: The Canal That Almost Wasn't More about how the Panama Canal was built in spite of its creators.

Last time, we talked about bumbling French efforts to secure adequate information to plow a canal through the center of Panama. (The time before that, we touched on Central American jungle living.) Four our final act, we take a tour through the impeccable sanitation standards that kept the canal workers in tip-top health. We'll start with Colon, the main city on the north end of the Panama Canal. Colon, had, to put it gently, sanitation problems during the canal's construction.[1] This was no doubt due to its inhabitants, thousands of working-class Frenchmen and thousands more non-French adopting working-class French habits. It was, in the words of a visitor,

A foul hole, by comparison, the ghettoes of White Russia, the slums of Toulon, Naples, and old Stamboul... deserve prizes for cleanliness. There are neither sewers nor street cleaners... toilets are quite unknown[2] ...all the rubbish is thrown into the swamps or onto rubbish heaps.

Piles of discarded wine bottles were seen as high as two-story houses: ditch-diggers and roughnecks could not be encouraged to drink lemonade. Besides, water was frequently impure; liquor was safer to drink, and it tended ameliorate the boredom. As American newspaperman Joseph Bucklin Bishop would later recount, Colon was a "genuine bacchanalian orgy", a "veritable sink of iniquity... Champagne, especially, was comparatively so low in price that it 'flowed like water,' and... the consequences were as deplorable as they were inevitable." A contemporary English historian, James Anthony Froude, asserted

In all the world there is not, perhaps, now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disease, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering.[3]

Mos Eisley spaceport? He added the place was awash with "doubtful ladies", and that "everything which imagination can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into that locality." Of course, he was talking about nearby Jamaica. The mollycoddle never even made it to Panama. He'd apparently seen enough: "my curiosity was less strong than my disgust." Pansy. We bet he got wedgies in the schoolyard.

Not Just Dirty, But Filthy Too

This moral decay dovetailed nicely with the physical decay laborers saw all around them. Rats, toads, and snakes infested the refuse piled around houses and city streets. The work had begun in the four-month Panamanian dry season; the task was to cut a swath fifty feet wide through the jungle from ocean to ocean. Thick, creeping, sweating vegetation obscured the view. The men had to deal with mountains and swamps, pumas and jaguars, ticks, fleas, spiders, chiggers, no-see-ums, and several species of poisonous snakes. While they hewed the dense forest down with hand tools, the skies opened and rain rotted everything. Metal quickly grew bright orange with rust. Mold crept on to sopping shoes, belts, backpacks, and instrument cases overnight. Clothes never dried; laundry facilities were unheard of. Glued furniture collapsed under tired, sweaty behinds.

The design of the canal sucked, too. As digging commenced, the trench filled in with mud and clay from the sides. With no vegetation to hold the soil together, mudslides were rampant. Train tracks built alongside the trench frequently dislodged and tumbled in. Hundreds of men, grunting, up to their waists in mud, were required to upright the tracks, and, sometimes, the engine. Some weeks later it would happen again. And again. We imagine twenty thousand Frenchmen stuck in muck for twelve hours daily, returning home to drink themselves into stupors, getting in line for the available whores, waking up hung over, and starting again. It was wretched: at least Sisyphus got to deal with dry land.[4]

The Shakes: Malaria or Delirium Tremens?

When the rains weren't destroying equipment or the dig itself, they provided a hearty breeding ground for mosquitoes. While a few physicians had suggested insects were the carriers of yellow fever and malaria, everyone on the isthmus subscribed firmly to the belief that disease was due to noxious fumes emanating from the jungle itself. Puddles around town were left untended; mosquito larvae were hatching everywhere. The hospital at Colon, the finest medical facility south of the United States, was roundly bedecked with little clay pots filled with water to protect plants from ant infestations. Likewise, the legs of beds were in pans of water. Unfortunately, what was seen as essential to a cheery garden proved to be the perfect environment for breeding millions upon millions of disease-bearing pests. To make matters worse, the hospital windows had no screens to keep bugs out. Patients were grouped in rooms not by disease or affliction but instead by nationality, thus ensuring efficient cross-infections. Yellow fever, once contracted, had less than a fifty percent survival rate.

Malaria victims fared no better.[5] They grew feverish and had intense bouts of the shakes: hospital beds would rock across the floor, the entire room of afflicted patients seemed to pitch about like the cast of Soul Train. The chief preventative was quinine, a curious alkaloid derived from the bark of the cinchona tree,and it tasted awful. It was prone to give recipients headaches and vomiting, and occasionally a ringing in the ears loud enough to cause deafness. It had to be mixed with liquor just to get it down, and was used for nearly all European imperialistic exercises in the nineteenth century. (Because the British happen to like things that taste terrible, quinine can still be found today in the tonic you mix your gin with.)

Another disease preventative, doctors claimed, was clean living. It was believed a moral, upright citizen would be far better equipped to fight off the ravages of miasma-induced fevers than the lout, the drunk, the dandy or the fruit. (We suspect the GOP would be right proud.) The death of some of the more discreet individuals was apt to cause shock, for it ran counter to the belief: such-and-such was a moral person; what business did he have dying? Fortunately for the drunk, straight whiskey, bourbon, or rum were also considered to be effective prophylactics. However, drinking took its toll in alcoholism and the odd industrial accident. It was not really effective against malaria anyway -- perhaps two or three of every four workers coming from France succumbed to malaria or yellow fever, and all available evidence suggests at least that many were rampant alcoholics. Little has apparently changed in the last 100 years.

Utter, Franc Doom

Predictably, the entire enterprise of disease, drunkenness and death proved less than profitable. Great steel dredges, weighing hundreds of tons (and designed by a Canadian druggist named H. Bartholomew Slavens, who had no previous engineering experience, we kid you not) rusted in a scant few months. In a fitting tribute to decay, they can still be seen today in Panama's remoter regions. Thousands of workers died. Unneeded supplies were sent to the isthmus and simply sat on the docks and rusted: tens of thousands of door hinges, windows, clothes, and furniture. Fatalities and emigrations produced a ninety percent turnover rate. On the other side of the Atlantic, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the canal's chief architect, had been been bribing politicians to allow more bonds to be issued to float this absurd expense. The resulting scandal kicked French officials from their posts and thrust thousands of French investors into abject beggary. By 1889 the effort had failed, and years would pass before an American sojourn proved successful. The entire nation of France had sunk its fortunes into a swampy hole, and, humiliated, spent the next forty years preparing itself to welcome marauding Germans.

Footnotes

1. Are we the only ones who find the city's name ironic?
2. Liss, p.16. Indeed, so thought the artist Paul Gauguin during a brief stint as a day laborer there. He saw no difference between the street and a urinal, and, one drunken night, acted accordingly. He was arrested and fined, despite his protests that the curb was fetid and soaked with human befoulment already. He worked to pay off the fine and fled the country as soon as possible (The opportunities to make money painting portraits existed, but he snootily concluded that such mundane art was not for him). He would later move to Tahiti and marry a 14-year old, thus ensuring everlasting fame.
3. McCullough, p.146
4. For you dropouts who missed the "Greek Myths" section of literature in junior high, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, but it kept rolling back down.
5. "Malaria" comes from the Italian mal'aria, meaning "bad air". The French word, paludisme, means something closer to "marsh fever".

Bibliography

1. David McCullough. The Path Between the Seas. Simon and Shuster, 1977.
2. Sandra W. Meditz, Dennis M. Hanratty, eds.. Panama: A Country Study. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989.
3. Marion J. Simon. The Panama Affair. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. [Out of Print]

 
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