Читать книгу The Panama Canal: An Informal History of Its Concept, Building, and Present Status - Donald Barr Chidsey - Страница 7

Chapter

4

The Rush for the Gold

Virtually neglected for more than two hundred years, the idea of an interoceanic canal came back strong early in the nineteenth Century after the American colonies, Spanish and English, had won their independence. Great men with great minds at least toyed with the idea from time to time—Dewitt Clinton, Alexander Humboldt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. Many others, men who actually made plans, who applied for Charters, might best be described as overly imaginative, a trifle too enthusiastic.

Locks were by no means unknown, but some of those proposed for the waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific were new to this world.

There was the self-styled engineer who submitted to the Mexican authorities a plan for a canal at the Tehuantepec “waist.” This canal would be elevated, placed upon stone stilts somewhat after the manner of an ancient Roman aqueduct, only much larger. The ships at either end would be hoisted—cargo, passengers, and all—into this contraption by means of a hydraulic apparatus, and floated gracefully across the land, over the mountains, which were notably low at this point. The plan was not accepted.

There was the man who would have pierced the Panama mountains with a tunnel, to be entered by means of a series of locks on either side. The tunnel was to be 3.3 miles long. It was never dug.

There was the ineffable Felix Belly, a French newspaperman who could talk his way into almost anything, and who, for several years, had Nicaraguan government circles agog with his gorgeous canal plans while American and British diplomats watched and listened aghast. Belly was not an engineer, not a diplomat, not a financier, but he had a most wonderfully persuasive tongue. His plans, entirely impractical, got nowhere; and he went back to France and wrote a book about it, like a general after a war blaming everybody but himself.

Another who wrote about the canal possibilities of Nicaragua was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the Corsican and in the eyes of many the rightful Emperor Napoleon III of France. He was visited by a Nicaraguan statesman, who poured facts over him. The prince was impressed; but since he was in jail at the time, as a result of an ill-advised attempt to seize the throne, he could do little about raising funds. The visitor even proposed to name the project after the prisoner, Canale Napoleone de Nicaragua, in exchange for the use of his name on a prospectus. The prince agreed. He even wrote the prospectus itself, extolling the Nicaraguan route over that of Panama, though he had never visited either place. Once he had escaped, however, fleeing to England, he forgot about the matter.

There was Commander Bedford Clapperton Pim, R.N., a fanatical empire builder who hated the United States, and who on nothing and with no authority started to lay out plans for a combined railroad and canal across Nicaragua, ignoring the fact that an American Company already held the concession. Pim’s strange behavior was stopped short by his superiors, who sent him home.

There was Charles, Baron de Thierry, who talked the Colombian government into giving him an exclusive charter to build either a railroad or a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. There were those who doubted Thierry’s right to the title of baron, but everybody doubted his title of king of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas, as well as the title of king of the Maoris. He cut quite a swathe at Bogotá for some time, but he never did do anything about his charter, and soon he was off to New Zealand to rule over some of his subjects, who had never heard of him. He faded out, after a while, in a haze of bankruptcy.

Thierry s charter, when it lapsed, was taken up by three New Yorkers—William Henry Aspinwall and Henry Chauncey, financiers, and John Lloyd Stephens, a lawyer by profession but distinguised also as an archaeologist and travel writer. Stephens was the president.

These men meant business. They hired a couple of first-rate engineers and sent them to the isthmus to make a survey, and they floated stock to raise a million dollars, more or less, in the money market.

A curious thing had happened, just before they got their concession, a thing that would change history and most emphatically change the fate of the Panama Railroad Company. A casual contractor, a carpenter named James W. Marshall, who was building a sawmill for that eccentric Swiss John Augustus Sutter on the south branch of the American River in California, one evening thought he saw something that might be gold glitter in the tailrace of the almost completed mill, and he picked it out, and tested it, and sure enough it was. Just at first there was a notable lack of excitement about this find, the public being ill informed as to its importance and weary of false alarms, but late in that same year of 1848, as though at a signal, the gold rush suddenly began. Everybody wanted, by hook or by crook, to get to those hills back of San Francisco. They dropped what they were doing, they dug up their life savings, and with a pick or two, sometimes a shovel, occasionally a pan, they made for California. The whole feeling of the movement, a mass feeling, a mania, was that those who got there first would become millionaires overnight, so that the argonauts were surcharged with impatience and the need for haste. They would put up with anything if only they thought that they could get there fast.

There were various routes. The railroad did not go west of, roughly, St. Louis, and the overland routes from there to California were dusty and dangerous and took a long time. For middle westerners this was all right, but a great majority of the argonauts, especially in the beginning, were from the eastern states, particularly New England. They could go by ship to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and by land the rest of the way—which some of them, veterans of the Mexican War, reckoned would save money even if it did not save much time. They could sail to Greytown in Nicaragua and get across the country somehow to the Pacific, where they might at least hope to pick up a northbound steamer or schooner. They could go around Cape Horn, a trip that took, or certainly seemed to take, forever. Or they could go across Panama.

At the end of the Mexican War the government in Washington found itself called upon to deal with the faraway territory of California, where it maintained various army posts and naval stations, besides its federal offices. There was also the matter of the mails, for the Pony Express, an experiment, had proved a costly failure. So the federal government subsidized two steamship lines, one from New York to Chagres, a village at the mouth of the Panamanian river of that name; the other, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, from San Francisco to the city of Panama. Chaucey and Aspinwall were directors of the Atlantic Company.

This had been done, or at least started, before James Marshall noted that gleam in the tailrace of the mill and set the world on fire.

Neither Company provided any transportation across the isthmus. That was up to the travelers themselves, to make whatever deal they could with the natives.

The Panama Railroad Company men at first found the gold rush interesting enough but no real affair of theirs. They could not hope to get any passengers by rail across the isthmus until their job was finished, and they believed that by that time the rush would be over. They were to be proved wrong on both counts.

The engineers made a survey, and they found a pass through the mountains only 337 feet above sea level, the lowest yet, and soon after that they found another pass of only 275 feet.14 None of the previous would-be canal or road builders had noticed these gaps in the wall of mountain.

The Isthmus of Panama, usually thought of as a north-south strip, in fact is east-west, for it twists at this point. Panama City is located south and a little east of Limon Bay, so that the sun there rises over the Pacific, much as the sun in New Orleans, because of a great curve in the river (which is why it is called the Crescent City), rises over the west bank of the Mississippi.

The original plan had been to build a railroad from Panama City over or near the old mule track, the Camino Real, as far as Venta de Cruces, and from there, downhill now, to Limón Bay, which had been picked as the Atlantic terminal of the line. This was soon reversed. The Company bought Manzanillo Island on the east side of Limón Bay, 650 acres in size or about one square mile, and that was to be headquarters; but because of the mosquitoes and other insects the men did not sleep there but used instead an old brig anchored in the bay.

The plan was to cut through the jungle, laying track, from Limón Bay to the Chagres at Barbacoas, about half-way across the isthmus, then to the south bank of the Trinidad River, and from there directly down to Panama City.

Labor troubles started early. The engineers had meant to enlist local labor—every village had scads of men lying around doing nothing, men who presumably would jump at the chance to earn a few good hard American dollars— but they reckoned without the gold rush. Every vessel that dropped the hook at Chagres—there was no dock—was crammed to the gunnels with men who wanted to get across to the Pacific as soon as possible, not matter what the inconvenience, no matter what the cost. The residents of Chagres learned that their bongos—clumsy, canoelike craft—would, like their mules, command fancy prices. Moderate at first, they soon learned to ride the market, charging whatever they thought they could get. Naturally such men were not going to break their backs toiling in the jungle for pennies. The engineers quickly found that they had to go all the way to Cartagena to enlist cheap labor, and often enough even these men, once they had learned of the riches to be made propelling a bongo or leading a mule, deserted.

The gold rush, so far from abating, seemed to increase.

Often there was no ship waiting at Panama, where the argonauts were stranded for days at a time, for weeks, and where many of them died. The little fishing village of Henry Morgan s day had become a flourishing metropolis with all the trappings of civilization—bars, bordellos, crime in the streets. This condition, too, tended to drain off the cheap labor from the nearby countryside.

Cholera, dysentery, smallpox, malaria, and yellow fever raged in the little labor camp in Limon Bay, where at a given time, at least in the rainy season, half of the men or more would be on the sick list. There was no physician and not even a pretense of a hospital.

Chinese were brought in, about a thousand of them, and special barracks were built, special food ordered, and tea and even opium were supplied, the engineers having been told that all Chinese smoked opium and indeed couldn’t live without it. The coolies did not respond to this kindness. The work was too hard for them, the climate too hot, and they were homesick. They began to hang themselves or otherwise commit suicide, and this in large numbers. Soon there were fewer than two hundred left.

Irishmen were tried, and Frenchmen, and Negroes from Jamaica, who seemed the hardiest, though they were incurably lazy.

There was a story at the time, and it has persisted to this day, that the building of the Panama Railroad cost a laborer’s life for every tie. This is demonstrably false, and not just because it is too pat. There were 74,000 ties laid for this single-track, narrow-gauge railroad, and there were never, altogether, that many persons employed. It will never be known how many laborers died in the building of the railroad, because no records were kept of the Chinese deaths or those of the Negroes later brought in. It was recorded that 293 white men died, in five years; but the whole score must have been much bigger. It could have been 20,000. It could not have been anything like 74,000. But they still tell the story.

The ties themselves seemed to be in a conspiracy to defeat the project. Because of the sponginess of the soil—in the beginning, in the lowlands, it had been sheer swamp and the difficulty was in finding any bottom at all, much less bedrock—many more ties than would be customary had to be laid. The first ones were of native wood, locally cut, but these soon rotted away. Spruce and pine then were imported from the States, but the wetness and the heat demolished these in a short time. The only wood that would give good service, it was learned, was a lignum vitae from the province of Cartagena, Colombia, and this was so heavy that it was expensive to move, and so tough that it was expensive to cut, while holes had to be hored into it for the admission of the spikes that would hold down the rails.

All this cost money, and the shortage of labor made things that much worse. With only a few miles of track actually laid and ready for use the engineers already had spent the foundational $1,000,000, and their representatives in Wall Street tried in vain to raise more. The stock was selling at next to nothing, when there were any buyers at all. The outlook was glum.

Then on a stormy day in November of 1851 two steamships, finding the open roads at Chagres too turbulent for them, took refuge in Limon Bay a few miles to the east; one thousand gold seekers with their picks and their pans tumbled ashore to demand transportation—any kind of transportation—right away. The railroad people, up to their knees in muck, protested that the line only went as far as Gatun, about seven miles away. The argonauts didn’t care. They drew money from their pockets. The railroad people said that they were not equipped yet to handle passengers; they had no coaches, only flatcars. So the miners-to-be scrambled aboard the flatcars, and in a teeming rain they were driven through the jungle as far as Gatun, where they could hire bongos and bongo paddlers. The line had made its first money.

The word got out, and skippers, as a matter of course, took to putting in at Limón rather than the chancier Chagres. Even seven miles of that highly uncomfortable river trip were something to save—and worth paying for. Moreover, new miles were being added.

In Wall Street—such a sensitive area!—it became much easier to move Panama Railroad Company stock.

The engineers in the field learned that they could charge just about anything they pleased—and get it. So they did.

The line was pushed on, mile after tortured mile, until it reached the Chagres River at Barbacoas, about halfway across the isthmus. Little bridges had been built before, but the Chagres at this point was about 300 feet wide, and the railroad called in a subcontractor.

The Chagres is a wily river, a river no man should turn his back upon, if he can help it, for in the time it can take him to snooze, and with no warning whatsoever, the Chagres can cease to be an amiable, lazy stream, another Meander, and become a raging torrent. It did this at Barbacoas; but it waited until the bridge had been finished, and then dramatically it removed that bridge.

The whole job had to be done over. The subcontractor quit. The railroad Company itself began to build the new bridge.

At long last the line was finished. There were many shorings-up to be done, bridges to be strengthened, sidings to be enlarged, but at least the two steel bands met one another—at a point near Panama City. There had been no ceremony at the start of the work, and there was virtually none to mark its completion. Everybody involved stayed on the job, and it was midnight of January 7, 1855, when the last section of rail was laid—in a pouring rain.

The Culebra Cut, for a time the terminus of the Panama Railroad

Americans often are twitted about their fondness for superlatives, but the Panama Railroad undoubtedly could claim a record collections of “most’s.”

It was the first railroad to unite two oceans.

It was the shortest major railroad in history—47.57 miles.

It charged the highest rates, both for freight and passengers. (The Standard regular fare—there were extras—was $25 one way. This came to more than 50^ a mile, another record.)

It was the most expensive railroad ever to be built. It had cost almost $8,000,000, which came to $168,000 a mile; yet because of the impatience of the gold seekers and the exorbitant rates that the railroad charged, it had taken in $2,000,000 even before it was finished; and when it was sold to French interests in 1880, a controlling share—not the whole line—fetched more than $18,000,000.

It had paid more and bigger dividends than any other railroad.

It had carried more treasure than any other railroad. Until the first real transcontinental line was finished in Utah with the driving of a golden spike, in 1869, the Panama Railroad carried by far the greatest part of the gold bullion shipped east from California. In the short period of its glory it carried more than $750,000,000 of this, and without losing a dollar.

Moreover, it had settled an ages-long dispute. The Pacific, men had always said, is higher than the Atlantic; but no two engineers or no two scientists could agree on how much higher. “Colonel” George M. Totten, the chief engineer of the Panama Railroad, in his final report in 1855 said that he had found the mean level of the Pacific to be between 0.14 and 0.75 feet higher than the mean level of the Atlantic. However, he attributed this to local, temporary conditions. Actually the two oceans are the same level.

The Route of the Panama Railroad