Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

CHAPTER XI
GATUN LAKE AND THE CHAGRES RIVER

That section of the Canal, which for the convenience of engineering records and directions is known as the Central Division, comprises within its boundaries two of the great spectacular features of the Isthmus—Gatun Lake and the Culebra Cut. I have already described the scenic characteristics of this lake, but some discussion of the part it plays in the economy of the Canal will not be out of place.

In the first place the creation of the lake depended on the type of canal to be selected. A sea-level canal could not exist with the lake; a lock canal could not have been built without it. The meanderings of the Chagres, crossing and recrossing the only practicable line for the Canal, and its passionate outbursts in the rainy season made it an impossible obstacle to a sea-level canal, and all the plans for a canal of that type contemplated damming the stream at some point above Gatun—at Bohio, Gamboa or Alhajuela—and diverting its outflow into the Pacific. On the other hand the lock canal could not be built without some great reservoir of water to repeatedly fill its locks, and to supply the waterpower whereby to operate them. Hence Gatun Lake was essential to the type of canal we adopted.

The lay reader will probably be surprised when he hears how carefully the area of the Chagres watershed and the average rainfall were studied, and the height of the dam and the spillway adjusted to make certain a sufficient supply of water for the locks. The only locks with which these could be compared are those at the “Soo”, or outlet of Lake Superior. That canal, the busiest one in the world for eight months in the year, averaged 39 lockages a day during that period on the American side and a smaller number through the Canadian locks. The water in Gatun Lake will be sufficient for 41 passages, if the full length of the locks is used or 58 if only the partial length is used, which will be the case with steamships of less than 15,000 tons—and in ships of this class the bulk of the world’s trade is conducted. If the limit of 41 lockages seems low, it must be remembered that time is quite as much a factor in the case as is the water supply. It will take an hour and a half to put a ship through the locks. That time therefore technically constitutes a “passage”. In the 24 hours there would be 36 passages possible, and under the circumstances that would draw most heavily on the lake there will be water enough for 41.

THE CHAGRES, SHOWING OBSERVER’S CAR
From the swinging car the observer measures the crest of the flood and rapidity of the current

For the creation of this lake our engineers found the Chagres River available. It had dug the valley in which would be stored the vast volume of water needed, and the unfailing flow from its broad watershed could be relied upon at all seasons—though indeed in the rainy season its contribution is sometimes embarrassingly lavish.

FLUVIOGRAPH AT BOHIO, NOW SUBMERGED

AUTOMATIC FLUVIOGRAPH ON GATUN LAKE

Every land comes to be judged largely by its rivers. Speak of Egypt and you think of the Nile; India suggests the Ganges; England the Thames; and France the Seine. The Chagres is as truly Panamanian as the Rhine is German and there have been watches on the Chagres, too, when buccaneers and revolutionists urged their cayucas along its tortuous highway. It was the highway by which the despoilers of Peru carried their loot to the Atlantic on the way to Spain, and along its tide drifted the later argonauts who sought the golden fleece in California in the days of ’49. The poet too has sung it, but not in words of praise. Listen to its most famous lyric from the pen of James Henry Gilbert, Panama’s most famous bard and most cruel critic.

“Beyond the Chagres River
Are the paths that lead to death—
To the fever’s deadly breezes,
To malaria’s poisonous breath!
Beyond the tropic foliage,
Where the alligator waits,
Are the mansions of the Devil—
His original estates.

“Beyond the Chagres River
Are the paths fore’er unknown,
With a spider ’neath each pebble
A scorpion ’neath each stone.
’Tis here the boa-constrictor
His fatal banquet holds,
And to his slimy bosom
His hapless guest enfolds!

“Beyond the Chagres River
’Tis said—the story’s old—
Are paths that lead to mountains
Of purest virgin gold;
But ’tis my firm conviction,
Whatever tales they tell,
That beyond the Chagres River
All paths lead straight to Hell”!

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

THE VILLAGE OF BOHIO, NOW SUBMERGED

A much maligned stream is the River Chagres. Pioneers, pirates, prospectors and poets have vied with each other in applying the vocabulary of contumely and abuse to it, and the practitioners of medicine have attached its name to a peculiarly depressing and virulent type of tropical fever. But the humble native loves it dearly and his homes, either villages of from ten to forty family huts, or mere isolated cabins cling to its shores all the way from Fort Lorenzo to the head waters far beyond the boundary of the Canal Zone. The native too has something of an eye for the picturesque. Always his huts are erected on a bluff of from 15 to 40 feet rise from the river, with the ground cleared before them to give an unblocked view of the stream. Whether by accident or because of a real art instinct he is very apt to choose a point at a bend in the river with a view both up and down the stream. Possibly however art had less to do with his choice than an instinct of self-defense, for in the days of Isthmian turbulence, or for that matter today, the rivers were the chief highways and it was well to be on guard for hostile forces coming from either direction.

STEPS LEADING TO FLUVIOGRAPH STATION AT ALHAJUELA
This is one of the more distant stations, being ten or more miles outside the Canal Zone

A LIGHT HOUSE IN THE JUNGLE

A LIGHT HOUSE IN THE JUNGLE

I saw the upper Chagres in the last days of its existence as a swirling stream full of rapids, rushing along a narrow channel between banks sometimes rising in limestone cliffs 60 feet high and capped by dense tropical foliage ascending perhaps as much higher into the blue tropical sky. The river was at its best and most picturesque as at the opening of the dry season we poled our way up from Matachin towards its source. Then Matachin was a hamlet of canal workers, and a weekly market for the natives who brought thither boat loads of oranges, bananas, yams and plantains. Sometimes they carried stranger cargoes. I heard a commission given one native to fetch down a young tiger for somebody who wanted to emulate Sarah Bernhardt in the choice of pets. Iguanas, the great edible lizard of Panama, young deer, and cages of parrots or paroquets occasionally appear. But as a market Matachin is doomed, for it is to be submerged. With it will go an interesting discussion of the etymology of its name, one party holding that it signifies “dead Chinamen” as being the spot where imported Chinese coolies died in throngs of homesickness during the construction of the Panama Railroad. But the word also means “butcher” in Spanish and some think it commemorates some massacre of the early days. However sanguinary its origin there will presently be water enough to wash out all the stains of blood. In 1913 the place was one of the principal zone villages, with large machine shops and a labor colony exceeding 1500 in number. All vanishes before the rising lake, which will be here a mile wide.

The native craft by which alone the Chagres could be navigated prior to the creation of the lake are long, slender canoes fashioned usually from the trunks of the espevé tree, hollowed out by fire and shaped within and without with the indispensable machete. It is said that occasionally one is hewn from a mahogany log, for the native has little idea of the comparative value of the different kinds of timber. Mahogany and rosewood logs worth thousands of dollars in New York are doing humble service in native huts in Panama. But the native has a very clear understanding of the comparative labor involved in hewing out a hardwood log, and the cayucas are therefore mainly of the softer espevé, a compact wood with but little grain which does not crack or splinter when dragged roughly over the rocks of the innumerable rapids. The river cayuca is about 25 feet along with an extreme beam of about 2¹⁄₂ feet and a draft of 6 to 10 inches. Naturally it is crank and can tip a white man into the stream with singular celerity, usually righting itself and speeding swiftly away with the rushing current. But the natives tread it as confidently as though it were a scow. For upstream propulsion long poles are used, there being usually two men to a boat, though one man standing in the stern of a 30-foot loaded cayuca and thrusting it merrily up stream, through rocky rapids and swirling whirlpools is no uncommon sight.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

THE RIVERSIDE MARKET AT MATACHIN

Our craft was longer—35 feet in all, and in the official service of the Canal commission had risen to the dignity of a coat of green paint besides having a captain and a crew of two men. Our captain, though but in his nineteenth year, was a person of some dignity, conveying his orders to the crew in tones of command, though not averse to joining in the lively badinage with which they greeted passing boatmen, or rallied maidens, washing linen in the streams, upon their slightly concealed charms. The corrupt Spanish they spoke made it difficult to do more than catch the general import of these playful interchanges. Curiously enough the native peasant has no desire to learn English, and frequently conceals that accomplishment, if he has attained it, as though it were a thing of which to be ashamed. This attitude is the more perplexing in view of the fact that the commission pays more to English speaking natives.

“This boy Manuel”, said my host to me in low tones, “understands English and can speak it after a fashion, but rarely does so. I entrapped him once in a brief conversation and said to him, ‘Manuel, why don’t you speak English and get on the roll of English speaking employees? You are getting $62.50 gold a month now; then you’d get $75 at least’.

“Manuel dropped his English at once. ‘No quiero aprender a hablar ingles’, said he, ‘Para mi basta el español’”. (I don’t care. Spanish good enough for me.)

RAILROAD BRIDGE OVER THE CHAGRES AT GAMBOA
River is at low water. For picture showing it at flood, see page 141

Manuel indeed was the son of the alcalde of his village, and the alcalde is a person of much power and of grandeur proportionate to the number of thatched huts in his domain. The son bore himself as one of high lineage and his face indeed, Caucasian in all save color, showed that Spanish blood predominated over the universal admixture of negro. He saved his money, spending less than $10 a month and investing the rest in horses.

A QUIET BEACH ON THE CHAGRES

From Matachin up to Cruces the river is comparatively commonplace, spanned at one point by the Gamboa bridge up at which the voyager looks reflectively from below as he hears that when the spillway is closed and the lake filled up there will be but 15 feet headway above the river’s crest, where at the moment there is more than 60. Higher up are the towers, housing the machinery for recording the river’s rise, one of them a relic of the French régime, while a slender wire spanning the stream carries the pendulous car in which observers will go out at flood time to measure the height of the tide’s crest and the speed of the current. A stream of many moods is the Chagres, sometimes rising 40 feet in 24 hours. Accordingly along its banks and those of its principal tributaries are fluviographic stations whence watchers may telephone to the keepers of the flood gates of the dam warnings of the coming of any sudden freshet.

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT

THE RIVER AND VILLAGE OF CHAGRES
The little hamlet of rude thatched huts with a frame Catholic church in the middle has seen history in its time. The Spanish fortress of San Lorenzo on the hill was taken by Sir Henry Morgan’s buccaneers and later by the British under Admiral Vernon after hard fighting.

In the matter of conserving the waters of the Chagres, estimating the total capacity of the watershed and in providing for swift forwarding of information concerning sudden rises we shall always be under great obligations to the French. Their hydrographic observations and records are invaluable, and their stations established before we assumed control are still used, with much of their machinery. Stations are maintained far up the valleys of the Chagres and tributary rivulets, and all are connected with the central control at Gatun dam by telephone. Some of the stations are equipped with automatic machinery which, in the event of a rise during the night summons the keeper by ringing an alarm bell. The life of the keeper of a fluviograph station, miles perhaps of jungle isolating him from the nearest human habitation, is lonesome enough. Yet its monotony is sometimes relieved by lively incident. The irascible Chagres, for example, once caught the keeper at Alhajuela with a sudden rise, and compelled him to camp out a night and day in a tree top and see his house, pigs and poultry swept away on the rushing tide. There was a fair chance that the tree would follow.

POLING UP THE RAPIDS

Photo by S. H. Elliott

CONSTRUCTION WORK ON THE SPILLWAY

On our way up the river to visit some of the fluviographs we landed at Cruces, went a brief space into the jungle and cleared away with machetes the tangled vegetation until the old trail, or Royal Road to Panama, was laid bare. Three to four feet wide or thereabouts it was, and at points rudely paved with cobble stones. The nature and dimensions of the trail show that it was not intended for wheeled carriages, and indeed a native vehicle is a rarity on the Isthmus today, except in the towns. Time came when with the growing power and cruelty of the Spaniards this Camina Reale, or King’s Highway, was watered with the blood of Indian slaves, bearing often their own possessions stolen from them by the Spaniard who plied on their bent backs his bloody lash. It may have been over this trail that Balboa carried, with incredible labor, the frames of three ships or caravels, which he afterwards erected and launched in the Pacific. Several years ago there were found in the jungle near Cruces two heavy anchors, with 14-foot shafts and weighing about 600 pounds which had been carried thus far on the way to the Pacific and there dropped and left to the kindly burial of the tropical jungle. When they were discovered a too loyal graduate of our military academy at West Point in charge of some engineering work on the Isthmus, thought it would be a fine thing to send them up there and have them preserved on the parade ground of the academy. Without announcing his intention he had them removed from the spot where they were found and had taken them as far as the steamship wharf at Colon when Col. Goethals—who has a habit of hearing of things that are not announced—quietly interfered. The anchors were removed to some safe spot and in due time will form part of the historic decorations of the new city of Balboa.

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

WATER GATES IN LOCK WALL
Through these gates the water is admitted to the great conduit in the center wall of the lock

Photo by Underwood & Underwood

THE LAKE ABOVE GATUN

Doubtless by the standards of these days the wealth that was carried back and forth along the Royal Road by men crushed low like termite ants beneath their heavy burdens, was not great. Yet one gets some idea of the volume of the trade from Bancroft’s statement that in the year 1624, just four years after the landing of the Mayflower, goods to the amount of 1,446,346 pesos d’oro (practically an equal number of dollars), were registered at the Casa, or custom house, while probably 7¹⁄₂ millions of dollars’ worth of goods were smuggled through. There were great warehouses then and a stone church with a neighboring monastery to which it was customary to send the children of the richer people at Nombre de Dios to be kept until they had attained their seventh year. For that piously named town was almost a plague spot and its miasmatic atmosphere was fatal to tender infants.

The paved trail echoes no more with the muleteer’s cry, or the clatter of hoofs, nor are there wine shops to tempt the traveler, for there are none to be tempted. But even in its palmiest days Cruces could have been but a dismal spot. Gage, a soldier of fortune and an itinerant preacher, visited the village in 1638 and left us this record:

“Before ten of the clock we got to Venta de Cruces where lived none but mulattoes and blackmores who belong unto the flat boates that merchandize to Portobel. There I had much good entertainment by the people who desired me to preach unto them the next Sabbath day and gave me twenty crownes for my sermon and procession. After five days of my abode there, the boats set out, which were much stopped in their passage down the river, for in some places we found the water very low, so that the boats ran upon the gravel; from whence with poles and the strength of the blackmores they were to be lifted off again”.

After the lapse of almost four centuries we found the shallows still there and the blackmores—or their descendants—ready to carry our boat past their fall. But the people who paid the early traveler twenty crowns for a sermon had vanished as irrevocably as the city’s public edifices, and no descendants of like piety remain. Morgan’s fierce raiders swept through the village in 1670, and its downfall may have begun then, for the stout Protestantism of the buccaneers manifested itself in burning Catholic churches and monasteries in intervals of the less pious, but more pleasing, occupation of robbing the Spaniards or torturing them to extort confessions of the hiding places of their wealth.

HOW THEY GATHER AT THE RIVER

Sir Henry Morgan, however, was not the only famous man of battles to pass through Cruces. In 1852 a very quiet young captain in the army of the United States, one Ulysses S. Grant, was there in command of a company of the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, U. S. A., proceeding from New York to San Francisco. Cholera broke out among the men and the loss while on the Isthmus was heavy. At Cruces the men were detained for days, the roster of the sick growing daily, while rascally contractors who had agreed to furnish mules to the army sold them at higher prices to private parties eager to get away from the pest hole. According to the surgeon’s report the situation was saved by Grant, who made a new contract and enforced it—the latter being a practice that grew on him in later days.

WASHERWOMEN’S SHELTERS BY THE RIVER
For protection against the burning sun they erect small shanties of palms

For a brief space in the days of the gold rush to California in 1848-’54, Cruces bade fair to regain its early importance. Once the half-way place on the trail of Spaniards marching to steal gold from the Peruvians, and Englishmen following to rob and murder the robbers in turn, it became the meeting place of prospectors going out to California full of hope, and of miners returning, some laden with gold but more bowed with disappointment. Again Cruces became the point at which people and freights were transferred from the river to the trail, or vice versa. But another trail reached the river’s bank at Gorgona and this village became a considerable rival to the older and larger place higher up stream. Here were several rambling wooden houses dignified by the name of hotels of which no trace remains today. The whole village, a considerable one in the spring of 1913, with a population of at least 3,000, is to be abandoned to the rising tide of Gatun Lake, and such portions of it as escape submergence by the water will be overwhelmed by the equally irresistible jungle.

A FERRY ON THE UPPER CHAGRES

Charles T. Bidwell, an English traveler who crossed the Isthmus in 1853 by way of the Gorgona route, says of the pleasures of a sojourn in that town, “The place contained a few stores and more drinking saloons, most of which were kept by the ‘enterprising Yankee’. The Gorgona road to Panama was just then open, it being passable only in the dry season, and it was estimated that 2,000 persons had passed through this place on their way to or from California. * * * We decided to take the Gorgona road and arranged to have saddle mules ready in the morning to convey us to Panama for $20 each and to pay 16¹⁄₂ cents a pound additional for the conveyance of our luggage”. (The distance now by rail, which closely follows the old trail is 16 miles, the fare 80 cents.) “We then went to inspect ‘a free ball’ which had been got up with all available splendor in honor of some feast, and here we had a rare opportunity of seeing assembled many shades of color in the human face divine; a gorgeous display of native jewelry and not the most happy mixture of bright colors in the toilettes of those who claimed to be the ‘fair sex’. Dancing however, and drinking too, seemed to be kept up with no lack of spirit and energy to the inharmonious combination of a fiddle and a drum; and those of the assembly whose tastes led them to quieter pursuits had the opportunity of losing at adjoining gaming tables the dollars they had so easily and quickly extracted from the travelers who had had occasion to avail themselves of their services. These tables too were kept by the enterprising Yankee. Having seen all this, and smoked out our cigars, we sought our beds, when we found for each a shelf or bunk in a room which our host boasted had at a push contained twenty-five or thirty people. * * * On awakening at daylight I found a basin and a pail of water set out in the open air on an old pianoforte, which some traveler had probably been tempted to bring thus far on the road”.

Photo by W. T. Beyer

THE MUCH PRIZED IGUANA
This lizard, which attains a length of five feet, is esteemed a delicacy in Panama

The writer goes on to say that it took a little over two days to traverse the distance to Panama, the guides having stolen the mules they had rented and made off during the night.

Above Cruces the banks of the Chagres begin to rise in perpendicular limestone cliffs, perhaps 60 or 70 feet high while from their crests the giant tropic trees, the wild fig, the Panama, the Ceiba and the sentinel rise yet another one hundred feet into the bright blue sky. Amongst them flash back and forth bright colored parrots and paroquets, kingfishers like those of our northern states, only gaudier, and swallows innumerable. Up and down the river fly heavy cormorants disturbed by the clank of the poles among the stones of the river bottom, but not too shy to come within 50 feet or so of our boat where, much to my satisfaction, there is no gun. White and blue herons stand statuesque in the shallows with now and then an aigret. Of life other than feathered one sees but little here. A few fish leaped, but though the river was crystalline and my guide assured me it was full of fish I saw none lurking in either deeps or shallows. Yet he must have been right for the natives make much of fish as an article of diet, catching them chiefly by night lines or the unsportsmanlike practice of dynamiting the stream, which has been prohibited by the Panama authorities, although the prohibition is but little enforced.

Now and then an alligator slips lazily from the shore into the stream but they are not as plentiful here as in the tidal waters of the lower river. Occasionally, too, a shrill cry from one of our boatmen, taken up by the other two at once, turns attention to the underbrush on the bank, where the ungainly form of an iguana is seen scuttling for safety. Ugliest of beasts is the iguana, a greenish, bulbous, pop-eyed crocodile, he serves as the best possible model for a dragon to be slain by some St. George. The Gila monster of Arizona is a veritable Venus of reptiles in comparison to him, and the devil fish could give him no lessons in repulsiveness. Yet the Panamanian loves him dearly as a dish. Let one scurry across the road, or, dropping from a bough, walk on the surface of a river—as they literally do—and every dark-skinned native in sight will set up such a shout as we may fancy rose from oldtime revellers when the boar’s head was brought in for the Yuletide feast. Not more does the Mississippi darkey love his possum an’ sweet ’taters, the Chinaman his bird’s nest soup and watermelon seeds, the Frenchman his absinthe or the German his beer than does the Panamanian his iguana.

CRUCES—A LITTLE TOWN WITH A LONG HISTORY

In a mild way the Chagres may lay claim to being a scenic stream, and perhaps in future days when the excellence of its climate in the winter becomes known in our United States, and the back waters of the lake have made its upper reaches navigable, excursion launches may ply above Cruces and almost to Alhajuela. Near the latter point is a spot which should become a shrine for Progressive Republican pilgrims. A low cliff of white limestone, swept clear of vegetation and polished by the river at high water describes an arc of a circle hollowed out by the swift river which rushes underneath. Springs on the bluff above have sent out little rivulets which trickling down the face of the stone have scarred it with parallel vertical grooves a foot or two apart. Seen from the further side of the stream it bears a startling likeness to a huge human upper jaw with glistening teeth. With a fine sense of the fitness of things the river men have named it “Boca del Roosevelt”—Roosevelt’s mouth.

A NATIVE CHARCOAL BURNER

Some of the fluviograph stations are located far beyond the limits of the Canal Zone, but by the terms of the treaty with the Republic of Panama the Canal Commission has over such headwaters and reaches of the Chagres such jurisdiction as may be necessary for the protection and regulation of Gatun Lake. We went to one of these stations some 20 miles of poling up the Chagres beyond Alhajuela. The keeper was a native of the Canary Islands who had mastered English sufficiently to make his reports over the ’phone. His wife, who greeted us in starched cotton with a pink hair ribbon, pink shoes and a wealth of silver ornaments, was a native, dark of complexion as a Jamaica negress, but her sister who was there on a visit was as white as a Caucasian. Doctors on the Zone say that these curious variations in type in the same family are so common that they can never foretell within several shades, the complexion of a baby about to be born.

The keeper of this station was paid $65.50 monthly and the Commission supplied his house, which was of the native type and cost about $85. Though many children, pickaninnies, little Canaries or whatever clustered about his door, his living expenses were practically nothing. Expense for clothing began only when the youngsters had reached 11 or 12 years of age and thereafter was almost negligible—as indeed were the clothes. The river furnished fish, the jungle iguanas, wild pigs and birds; the little garden patch yams, bananas, mangoes and other fruits. He was far removed from the temptations of Matachin, or other riotous market places and he saved practically all of his pay. His ambition was to get enough to return to his native isles, buy a wine-shop and settle down to a leisurely old age—though no occupation could much outdo for laziness the task of watching for the rising of the Chagres in the dry season.

THE NATIVES’ AFTERNOON TEA

Returning from the upper waters of the Chagres one reaches Gatun Lake at Gamboa where the railway bridge crosses on seven stone piers. A little above is a fluviograph station fitted with a wire cable extending across the stream and carrying a car from which an observer may take measurements of the crest of any flood. Indeed the river is watched and measured to its very sources. It long ago proved itself unfit for trust, and one who has seen it in flood time, 40 feet higher than normal, bearing on its angry, tawny bosom houses, great trees, cayucas stolen from their owners, and dead animals, sweeping away bluffs at bends and rolling great boulders along its banks, will readily understand why the builders of the Canal stationed scouts and spies throughout the Chagres territory to send ample and early warning of its coming wrath.

Leaving the Chagres, turning into Gatun Lake and directing our course away from the dam and toward the Pacific end of the Canal, we traversed a broad and placid body of water interspersed with densely wooded islands, which very soon narrows to the normal width of the Canal. In midsummer, 1913, when the author conducted his inspection, a broad dyke at Bas Obispo cut off Gatun Lake and its waters from the Canal trench, then dry, which here extends in an almost straight line, 300 feet wide, through steadily rising banks to the continental divide at Culebra. The railroad then crossed upon this dyke to the western side of the Canal and passed through several construction towns and villages, abandoned later when the Canal was filled and the railroad moved to the other side. Tourists with an eye for the spectacular used to stand on this dyke and speculate upon the thrilling sight when a huge blast of dynamite should rend the barrier, and in a mighty wave the waters of Gatun Lake should rush down the broad channel betwixt the eternal hills to make at last the long desired waterway from Orient to Occident. But unhappily Col. Goethals and his associates unsentimentally put the picturesque aside for the practical. No dynamite blast, no surging charge of waters through the cut, entered into their program. Instead with mighty siphons the water was to be lifted over the barrier and poured into the Canal for days until the two bodies of water were nearly at a level. Then by the prosaic use of floating dredges the dyke would be removed and the Canal opened from Gatun Locks to the locks at Pedro Miguel.

PIERS OF THE ABANDONED PANAMA RAILWAY

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