# Panama, past and present/Chapter 1

PANAMA PAST AND PRESENT
CHAPTER I
GEOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION
AHUNDRED thousand years ago, when the Gulf of Mexico extended up the Mississippi Valley to the mouth of the Ohio, and the ice-sheet covered New York, there was no need of digging a Panama Canal, for there was no Isthmus of Panama. Instead, a broad strait separated South and Central America, and connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This was the strait that the early European navigators were to hunt for in vain, for long before their time it had been filled up, mainly by the lava and ashes poured into it by the volcanoes on its banks.
But though the formation of the Isthmus is for the most part volcanic, it has very few volcanoes of its own, and all of these have been extinct for untold centuries. The so-called volcano in the Gaillard Cut, about which so much was once said in the American newspapers, was nothing but a small mass of rock that had become heated in a curious and interesting way. The intense heat of the sun—thermometers have registered a hundred and twenty degrees in certain parts of the Cut at noon—caused the spontaneous combustion of a deposit of ​sulphur and iron pyrites or "fool's gold." The smoldering sulphur heated a small pocket of soft coal, which in turn produced heat enough to crack holes in the rock, out of which came blue sulphur smoke and steam from rain water that had dropped on this natural stove. Except that care had to be taken in planting charges of dynamite in drill-holes near by, this toy volcano had no effect whatever on the canal work, and was presently dug up by a steam-shovel, and carried away on flat-cars.
Volcanic eruptions are unknown on the Isthmus of Panama, and earthquakes are very rare. The great earthquake that devastated the neighboring republic of Costa Rica in 1910, barely rattled the windows in Panama. The last shock of any severity was felt there in 1882, when considerable damage was done to the cathedral, and to the Panama Railroad, and the inhabitants were very badly frightened. But for more than two hundred years there has been no earthquake strong enough to bring down the famous "flat arch" in the church of San Domingo, in the city of Panama. This arch, which was built at the end of the seventeenth century, has a span of over forty feet and a rise of barely two, and all the engineers that have seen it agree that only a little shaking would be needed to make it fall.
Geographically, Panama is the connecting link between South and Central America. Politically, it lies between the republic of Costa Rica and the United States of Colombia, of which it was once a part. It is a much larger country than most people realize, having a length of four hundred and twenty-five miles, and a width of from thirty-one to one hundred and eighteen miles, with ​an area of about thirty-three thousand, five hundred square miles, which is very nearly the size of the State of Maine. At the place where the canal is being built, the Isthmus is about forty miles wide, but though the actual distance from ocean to ocean is less in other places, the only break in the central range of mountains, the Cordilleras del Bando, that runs from one end of the country to the other, occurs at this point. At the narrowest part of the Isthmus, near the South American end, the hills are from one to two thousand feet high, while near the Central American end there are not a few peaks of from six to seven thousand feet. At the summit of the old pass at Culebra, before the engineers began to cut it down, the continental divide was only two hundred and ninety feet above sea-level.
On either side of the Cordilleras, broad stretches of jungle or open prairie slope down to the sea, the former predominating on the Atlantic side, the latter on the Pacific. Numerous streams flow into the two oceans. The largest of these is the Tuyra, which, with its tributary, the Chucunaque, empties into the Gulf of San Miguel, near the spot where Balboa waded into the Pacific (see page 61). The second largest and the best known of the rivers of Panama is the famous Chagres, whose mouth is only six miles from the Atlantic entrance of the canal. Like the Tuyra and the Chepo on the Pacific side, the Chagres is navigable for large canoes and small launches for many miles, particularly in the rainy season. River communication is very important in a heavily wooded country where roads are scarce and bad, as they were in the United States before ​the Revolution, and are still on the Isthmus to-day. Though most of the smaller streams are little more than creeks, they produce a great volume of water-power which may some day be utilized.
There are no lakes of any size, but there are several lagoons or natural harbors, almost completely landlocked. Chiriqui Lagoon, on the Atlantic near the Costa Rica line, has long been used as a coaling station by the United States Navy. The deep Gulf of Panama, on the Pacific, bends the greater part of the Isthmus into a semicircle.
Instead of running north and south, as you would naturally suppose, the Isthmus runs almost due east and west. That is because South America lies much farther to the east than most of us realize; so much so, that if an airship were to fly far enough in a bee line from New York to the south, it would find itself over the Pacific, off the coast of Peru. At Panama, the Pacific, instead of being west of the Atlantic, is southeast of it. That is why the Spaniards, coming overland to this new ocean from the one they had left on the north, called it the "South Sea." A glance at the map on page 4 will make this plain. It sorely puzzles the visitor to the Isthmus to find the points of the compass apparently so badly twisted, particularly when he sees the sun rise out of the Pacific and set in the Atlantic.
AREA OF HEATED ROCK IN CULEBRA CUT.
Once thought to be a volcano.
​townspeople walk out among the stranded boats, and hold a market there (see page 213). The tide comes rushing in, when it rises, in a great wave or bore, something like that in the Bay of Fundy, with a heavy roar that can be heard far inland on a still night. But at Colon, on the Atlantic, the rise and fall of the tide is less than two feet. This curious fact, that the tides rise and fall ten times as far on one side of the Isthmus as on the other, is doubtless what has caused the wide-spread belief that at Panama one ocean is higher than the other. People who say that, forget that the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific meet
MANGOES.
at Cape Horn, and that sea-level is sea-level the world over.
Panama is about eight hundred miles from the equator, in the same latitude as Mindanao in the Philippines. Its climate is thoroughly tropical. Gilbert, the only poet the Isthmus has ever produced, summed it up neatly in the first stanza of one of his best-known poems, "The Land of the Cocoanut Tree":
Away down South in the Tropic Zone; North latitude nearly nine, When the eight month's pour is past and o'er,
The sun four months doth shine;
Where it 's eighty-six the year around,
And people rarely agree; Where the plantain grows and the hot wind blows, Lies the Land of the Cocoanut Tree.
"Eighty-six the year around" may seem an underestimate but, as a matter of fact, the mercury stays very close to that point from year's end to year's end, seldom rising above ninety. (The temperature of a hundred and twenty, spoken of on page 3, was only found in the deepest parts of the Gaillard Cut at noon.) At night it is always cool enough to necessitate a light covering, and never so hot that one cannot sleep, as it too often is in a Northern summer. It is always summer in Panama, and no hotter in August than in December. Snow-storms and cold weather are, of course, unknown, though three times since the Americans established a weather bureau on the Isthmus it has recorded brief local showers of hail.
Instead of four seasons, there are two: the rainy and the dry. From April to the end of November it rains very frequently, not every day, as is sometimes declared, but often enough and hard enough to fill, in those nine months, a tank from twelve to fifteen feet deep. With so much rain, and an ocean on either hand, the dampness and humidity are very great. Mold gathers on belts and shoes; guns and razors become rusty unless coated with oil; books must not be left outside air-tight glass cases or they will fall to pieces; and every sunshiny day the clothes closets are emptied and the garments hung out to air.
CULEBRA CUT, LOOKING NORTH
When completed, the bottom of the canal will be forty-five feet below the level shown in this picture.
​the morning paper announces that the Chagres River has risen forty feet in two days and is still rising. The rainfall is much heavier on the Atlantic side than the Pacific. They have a saying at Colon that there are two seasons on the Isthmus, the wet and the rainy; and the people of that town used to boast that it rained there every day in the year. But their local pride had a sad fall at the end of the record dry season of 1912. At Colon, as well as elsewhere, it had not rained for months, wide cracks had opened in the hard, dry ground, and the whole country-side was as brown and ragged as an old cigar. When at last "the rains broke" at Ancon, over on the Pacific side, in a magnificent cloudburst—six solid inches of water in three hours—they were still carrying drinking-water to Colon in barges, and had to borrow Ancon's new motor fire-engine to pump it through the mains.
When the rains have come, it is a wonderful sight to see how quickly the old, half-dead vegetation disappears, and the new green stuff comes rushing up. Though the soil is not rich, the heat and moisture cause plants to grow with incredible speed and rankness. Fence-posts sprout and become young trees. The stone-ballasted roadbed of the Panama Railroad has to be sprayed twice a month with crude oil to keep down the weeds. On either side of the track for the greater part of the way across the Isthmus stretches unbroken jungle, rising like a wall at the edge of the cuttings, or lying like a great, green sea below the embankments. It is a thoroughly satisfactory jungle, every bit as good as the pictures in the school geographies. High above the rest tower the tall ceiba trees, great soft woods larger than the largest ​oak. Besides these and the native cedars, there are mahogany, lignum-vitæ, coco-bolo, and other hardwoods. Some of these are exported for lumber, others the natives hollow out into canoes, some of which are of incredible size. I have seen a dugout, made from one gigantic tree trunk, so large that it was decked over and rigged as a two-masted schooner.
Under the trees, the ground is clogged with dense masses of tangled undergrowth, bound together with thorny creepers, and the rope-like tendrils of the liana vine. Worst of all to travel through are the mangrove
MAN O' WARSMAN.
swamps near the sea, for the branches of these bushes bend down to the ground and take root, so that it is like trying to walk through a wilderness of croquet wickets. Both here and in the jungle, a path must be cut with the machete, a straight, broad-bladed knife between three and four feet long, that is the great tool and weapon of tropical America. A skilled machatero, or wielder of the machete, can cut a trail through the jungle as fast as he cares to walk down it.
The great tree of Panama is the palm. There are ​
THE FLAT ARCH IN THE RUINS OF SAN DOMINGO CHURCH, PANAMA CITY
​said to be one hundred different species on the Isthmus. Most beautiful of all is the stately royal palm, brought by the French from Cuba to fill the parks and line the avenues. More useful is the native cocoanut palm, that grows everywhere, both in and out of cultivation. Several million cocoanuts are exported from the Isthmus every year. The brown, fuzzy shell of the cocoanut, as we know it in the grocery store at home, is only the innermost husk. As it grows on the tree, the cocoanut is as big as a football, and as smooth and green as an olive. Cut through the thick husk of a green cocoanut with a machete, and you have a pint or more of a thin, milky liquid that is one of the best thirst-quenchers in the world. When the nut is ripe the husk falls off and the milk solidifies into hard, white meat. When this is cut up into small pieces and covered with a little warm water, a thick, rich cream will rise, which cannot be distinguished from the finest cow's cream. Ice cream and custards can be made from this cream, and they will not have the slightest flavor of cocoanut. If, however, this cocoanut cream is churned, it will turn into cocoanut butter, which is good for sunburn, but not for the table. The nuts of the vegetable ivory palm are shipped to the United States to be cut up into imitation ivory collar-buttons.
A native Panamanian will take his machete, cut down and shred a number of palm-branches, and with them thatch the roof of his mud-floored hut, which is built of bamboos bound together with natural cords of liana. Then with the same useful instrument he will scratch the ground and plant a few bananas, plantains—big ​coarse bananas that are eaten fried—and yams—a sort of sweet potato—and they will take care of themselves until he is ready to harvest the crop. He can burn enough charcoal to cook his dinner, and gather and sell enough cocoanuts to buy the few yards of cloth needed to clothe himself and his family, and spend the rest on hound dogs, fighting-cocks, and lottery tickets. He can grow his own tobacco, and distill his own sugar-cane rum. Now that the Americans have put an end to the revolutions, the poor man on the Isthmus has not a care in the world, and is probably the laziest and happiest person on earth.
Besides bananas—which, by the way, grow the other way up from the way they hang by the door of the grocery—many different kinds of fruit are found in Panama. Mangoes and alligator-pears are great favorites with American visitors. On the Island of Taboga, in the Bay of Panama, grow some of the best pineapples in the world; not the little woody things we know in the North, but luscious big lumps of sugary pulp, soft enough to eat with a spoon. You have never tasted a pineapple until you have eaten a "Taboga pine."
Flowers are as abundant as fruit. There are whole trees full of gorgeous blossoms at certain seasons. Roses bloom during the greater part of the year and rare and valuable orchids abound in the jungle. If the Republic of Panama ever adopts a national flower, it should be that strange and beautiful orchid found only on the Isthmus, that the Spaniards called "El Espiritu Santo," the flower of the Holy Ghost. When it blooms, which it does only every other year, the petals fold ​
THE "HOLY GHOST ORCHID."
back, revealing the perfectly formed figure of a tiny dove.
It is true that the flowers on the Isthmus have no perfume, but it does not follow, as is so frequently declared, ​that the birds of Panama have no song. I have often heard them in the mating season, at the beginning of the rains, chirping and twittering as gaily as any birds in the Northern woods. Most conspicuous of all, among the feathered folk of the Isthmus, are the great black buzzards and "men-o' warsmen," so named because they wheel about over the city in large flocks, manœuvering with the precision of a squadron of battleships. Formerly, these birds were the only scavengers, all refuse being thrown out into the street for them to eat. They will soar and circle for many minutes with hardly a beat of their broad wings. When the first aeroplane (a small Moissant monoplane), came to Panama and flew among a flock of buzzards, it was difficult for a man on the ground to tell the machine from the birds. Other large fliers are the pelicans, while tall, dignified blue herons and white cranes walk mincingly through the swamps. Parrots of all sizes abound, from big gaudy macaws, with beaks like tinsmiths' shears, to dainty little green parrakeets, that the engineers call "working-models of parrots." Tiniest and loveliest of all are the bright-colored humming-birds.
There are not many large mammals native to the Isthmus, and most of these have been hunted until they are now hard to find. The last time that a "lion," as the natives call the jaguar—a black or dark-brown member of the cat tribe, as big as a St. Bernard dog—was seen in the city of Panama, it was brought there in a cage and advertised to appear in a ferocious "bull and lion fight," at the bull-ring. When the cage door was opened in the ring, the jaguar jumped over the ​tenfoot barricade into the audience, bounded up the nearest aisle to the top of the grandstand, leaped down, and was last seen heading for the jungle. No one was hurt, for everybody gave him plenty of room. Another much-advertised beast that is seldom seen is the tapir, a fat black grass-eater, that looks like a miniature elephant with a very short trunk. Deer are still fairly abundant, pretty little things, not much bigger than a North American jack-rabbit. Centuries ago there were large numbers of warrees, or wild hogs, and of long-tailed, black-and-white monkeys, "the ugliest I ever saw," wrote Captain Dampier, the bucaneer naturalist. But to shoot either of these to-day, a hunter would have to
ARMADILLO.
go deep into the jungle. Perhaps the most curious-looking animal on the Isthmus is the armadillo, "the little armored one," the Spaniards called him, because of the heavy rings of natural plate-mail that protect him against the teeth and claws of his enemies, as do the quills of the Northern porcupine.
Reptiles are well represented on the Isthmus, though snakes are very much scarcer in the Canal Zone than one would naturally suppose. Only a few small boa-constrictors—eight feet long or so—were killed during the building of the Canal, and there is no case of a laborer having been fatally bitten by a poisonous snake, although both the coral-snake and the fer-de-lance are said to be found in Panama. Old stone ruins, that in the North would be swarming with blacksnakes and ​adders, seem here to be entirely given over to the lizards. Lizards are everywhere, and of all sizes, from three
IGUANA.
inches long to five or six feet. These big fellows are called iguanas, and look remarkably like dragons out of a fairy-book, except that they have no wings and do not breathe fire and smoke. They are quite harmless, and eagerly hunted by the natives, because their flesh, when well stewed, tastes like chicken. One of the old chroniclers speaks of these lizards as "'guanas, which make good broth."
CROCODILE.
BRIDGE AT THE ENTRANCE TO OLD PANAMA
Over three hundred years old.
​is larger and much more ferocious, and has a longer and sharper head. Many a man who has been upset in a canoe on the Chagres, or who has walked too near what looked like a rotting log stranded on the bank, has been caught and eaten by a crocodile. Parties of Americans are often organized to hunt and kill these dangerous reptiles.
Man-eating sharks are found in the waters on either side of the Isthmus, as well as an abundance of Spanish mackerel, and other food fish. Indeed, the name "Panama" means, in the old Indian tongue, "a place abounding in fish." There is not much chance that the different breeds of the two oceans will have a chance to mingle by swimming through the canal, unless they are able to swim uphill through locks and sluices, and through a fresh-water lake. (See page 230.)
Though men and other animals are sluggish and lazy in the tropics, it is there that insects show the greatest vitality and activity. The big black ants go marching about at night in small armies, and negroes are hired to follow them till they find their nests, which they then pour full of an explosive liquid and blow up. Well-defined ant trails, an inch or so wide, run through the jungle, and even at noon they are crowded with hurrying passengers, every fourth or fifth ant carrying a bit of green leaf by way of a parasol. A corner of a cinder tennis court that was built for the officers of the battalion of marines at Camp Elliott blocked one of these ant paths, and the ants kept cutting it down to the former level, no matter how often the soldiers filled it up. Little red ants swarm in all the houses, however well they ​are kept. Sugar, candy, and all other sweet things are only safe on top of inverted tumblers standing in bowls of water, for nothing short of a moat will keep out the ants. But at the same time, this stagnant water may be serving as a breeding-place for mosquitoes. There used to be over forty different kinds of mosquitos on the Isthmus, but nowadays they are very rare.
Another insect pest, however, that has not been abated is the famous "red bug," a tiny tick, smaller than the head of a pin, but big enough to make plenty of trouble. The red bugs live in the grass, and burrow under the skin of human beings and animals and breed there until they are dug out with the point of a knife. Other species of ticks attack horses, cattle and fowls, and are a great pest to farmers in that country. Compared to them the more picturesque and widely feared scorpions and tarantulas do almost no harm. Both the scorpion, who looks like a small lobster with his tail bent up over his head and a sting at the end of it, and the tarantula, a huge spider covered with stiff black hair, are hideously ugly, and their bite or sting is intensely painful. But it is not fatal, as is commonly and erroneously supposed, and for every man that is hurt by a scorpion or tarantula, hundreds of dollars' worth of damage is done by ticks and red bugs.
Before the white men came, there was a large native population on the Isthmus. Some of the Spanish chroniclers place the number of Indians as high as two millions; almost certainly there were more of them than the three hundred and fifty thousand persons, of all races (see page 244), that inhabit that country to-day. The ​life of the early Indian was not unlike that of the poorer Panamanian of the present. He wore less clothing and his women made it of cocoanut fiber instead of imported cotton cloth; instead of a steel machete he used a sort of hardwood sword called a macana, and he hunted and fought with bow and spear instead of firearms. But the
SAN BLAS INDIANS IN VARIOUS COSTUMES.
bohio or thatched hut, the cayuca or dug-out canoe, the rude farming and the fishing, have scarcely changed at all. The Isthmian Indians are very skilful boatmen and fishermen. Their canoes are often seen in Colon harbor, where they come to sell their catch. These Indians belong to the Tule or San Blas tribe, that occupy and rule the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, from about forty miles east of Colon to South America. The Pacific side of this part of Panama is held by another tribe of Indians, ​the Chucunaques. Both pride themselves on keeping their race pure, despise the mongrel, half-breed Panamanians, and forbid white men to settle in their country. People who complain that the San Blas and the Chucunaques are "treacherous," and "inhospitable" forget that they are the survivors of a race once hunted down
SAN BLAS INDIAN SQUAWS.
Sitting with American canal employees on a dug-out canoe in a San Blas coast town. White men are not allowed ashore after sundown.
by the white men with fire and sword and bloodhounds for their gold. In appearance, the San Blas are short, stocky, little fellows, many of them looking remarkably like Japanese.
The narrowest part of the Isthmus is in the San Blas country, and has long been a favorite among the many proposed routes for an interoceanic canal. To give anything like a complete list of the various canal routes would be to review most of the history of the discovery ​
PART OF THE CHARGES RIVER.
Now in the bed of Gatun Lake, with its banks cut down to make a five hundred foot channel.
​and exploration of America. From the Straits of Magellan to Hudson's Bay, the early navigators sought for an open passage between the two oceans. Later, whenever explorers or engineers found a place where the continent was narrow, or broken by large rivers, or lakes, proposals were made for an artificial waterway. From the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, the routes most favored were the five marked by letters on the map on page 33.
A. The Darien or Atrato River route. The distance between the headwaters of the Darien River, flowing into the Gulf of Uraba, and the source of the nearest small river running into the Pacific, is very short. Canoes could be easily carried from one stream to another. There is a story that a village priest, at the end of the eighteenth century, had his parishioners dig a ditch, so that loaded canoes could be floated across the divide, without a portage. Whether or not that is so, it would be impossible for even the smallest modern cargo-boat to steam up a mountain creek, through such a ditch, and down the rock-strewn rapids of the upper Atrato. The divide is too high and the supply of water too scanty at this point for the construction of a ship canal suited for twentieth-century commerce.
B. The San Blas route. Here, where the distance from sea to sea is only about thirty miles, Balboa crossed to the Pacific in 1513. Shortly afterwards, this country was abandoned to the Indians, except for a brief time in 1788, when an attempt was made to establish a line of posts, and a Spanish officer succeeded in crossing to the Pacific, but was not allowed to return. Interest in this ​region was revived by the lying reports of two adventurers, Cullen and Gisborne, who declared that they had easily crossed and recrossed the San Blas country, and found the summit-level of the divide only a hundred and fifty feet high. Induced by these falsehoods (Cullen had never been to the Isthmus, and Gisborne not more than six miles inland), a small expedition under Lieutenant Strain, U.S.N., started from Caledonia Bay, on the Atlantic side, to march to the Gulf of San Miguel on the Pacific, in January, 1854. After suffering fearful hardships and losing one-third of their number from starvation, Lieutenant Strain and the others succeeded in reaching their goal. They were followed, in 1870-1, by several strong and well-equipped naval expeditions, whose surveys proved that the summit-level is at least a thousand feet above the sea. It was then proposed to build a canal there by boring a great tunnel through the mountains; but the rapidly increasing size of ships has made this out of the question.
C. The Panama or Chagres River route. There is no truth in the story that Columbus sailed up the Chagres River and so came within twelve miles of the Pacific; but the Spaniards soon found out that the easiest way across the Isthmus was to pole or paddle up this river, and then go by road to the Pacific. The first proposal for digging a Panama canal: a shallow ditch between the head of navigation on the Chagres and the South Sea, was made as early as 1529. The Emperor Charles V not only opposed this project, but even forbade its being brought forward again, under penalty of death; ostensibly because of the impiety of the idea of joining ​two oceans that God had put asunder, but, really, because such a canal would give the enemies of Spain too easy access to her Pacific colonies. The later history of the Chagres route occupies the greater part of this book.
A Atrato River route.
B San Blas route.
C Panama route. D Nicaragua route.
E Tehuantepec route.
MAP OF FIVE CANAL ROUTES.
D. The Nicaragua route. The broad surface of Lake Nicaragua, and the San Juan River, that flows out of it into the Atlantic, make this seem a most obvious place for an interoceanic canal. Though much dredging of channels and building of breakwaters would be needed ​to make a safe harbor at either end, and expensive locks and dams would have to be built before large steamers could navigate the river and the lake, the same disadvantages had to be overcome at Panama. The greater length of a canal at Nicaragua,—the continent at this point is one hundred and fifty miles wide,—and the closer proximity of more or less active volcanoes, with the greater danger of eruptional earthquakes, would make it inferior to the canal at Panama. The continual revolutions and political disturbances of Nicaragua, which has been so badly governed that no foreign government or private company has been willing to risk the investment of the hundreds of million of dollars needed to build a canal there, finally turned the scale against that country. Nicaragua is probably the only other place, beside Panama, where it would be physically possible to build a modern ship canal across the American continent.
E. The Tehuantepec route. Not long after the Spaniards, under Cortez, had conquered Mexico, they built a road across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which is the narrowest part of that country. Centuries ago, there was more than a little trade by this road, between Spain and Mexico and the Far East, as was proved by the discovery at Vera Cruz of two large bronze cannon bearing the stamp of the old Manila foundry. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is too wide and the summit-level too high, to be pierced by a sea-level canal; and the supply of water is too scanty for a canal with locks. When the French were trying to dig a canal at Panama, an American engineer, Captain Eads, proposed to build across Tehuantepec a "ship-railway": a railroad with a ​very broad gage, on which huge flat-cars would carry the largest vessels of the time from ocean to ocean. Like the Darien ship-tunnel, the increasing size of ships made this ingenious project impossible. The present
CROSS-SECTION OF PROPOSED SHIP TUNNEL, SAN BLAS ROUTE.
Tehuantepec Railroad is a standard gage road, doing a thriving business in carrying transcontinental freight. This has been temporarily, if not permanently, reduced by the opening of the Panama Canal.