CHAPTER XIX
PANAMA NEW AND OLD
The Panama which Sharp and his men approached in their bobbing little canoes after that memorable trip across Darien, was the same city which still looks forth across the Pacific from the shadow of Ancon Hill. But it has altered greatly since the time when the pirates, knives in teeth, swarmed over the taffrails of the Spanish ships and in hand-to-hand battle won the day. And yet in many ways the description given of the town by Ringrose would serve as well for the present town. He says:
It stands in a deep bay and in form is round, excepting only that part where it runs along the sea side. Formerly it stood four miles to the east where it was taken by Sir Henry Morgan but then being burnt they removed it to the place where it now stands. This new city of which I speak is much bigger than the old one and is built for the most part of brick, the rest being of stone and tiled. The churches (not yet finished) are eight in number, whereof the chief is called Santa Maria. The extent of the city comprehends better than a mile in breadth and a mile and a half in length. The houses for the most part are three stories high. It is well walled round about with two gates belonging [[333]]thereto, excepting only where a creek comes into the city, the which, at high water, lets in barks, to furnish the inhabitants with all sorts of necessities.… Round about the city for the space of seven leagues, more or less, all the country is savanna. Only here and there is to be seen a spot of woody land.
There the similarity of Ringrose’s description to the present city ceases, for he goes on to say:
The ground whereon the city stands is very damp and moist, which renders the place of bad repute for the concern of health. The water is also very full of worms. Here, one night after our arrival, we found worms three quarters of an inch in length both in our bed clothes and other apparel.
Of very “bad repute” for the “concern of health” was Panama, not only in the buccaneers’ days, but up to the time when Yankee engineers and Yankee energy and brains took charge and transformed the place from a pest-hole into a clean and sanitary city, wherein the death-rate is now as low as in the best of Northern cities. But no one except Ringrose has ever called attention to the “worms,” though no doubt even to-day he or any one else would find numerous other detestable creatures both in his “bed clothes and other apparel” after a night spent in a native Panamanian hotel or on a Panamanian ship in the offing.
Unquestionably, could Ringrose and his comrades [[334]]look upon Panama from the sea to-day they would recognize it, and could point out many a familiar landmark, for outwardly the town has altered little. The walls “round about” have disappeared in places, the “creek” is now dry land, and where it was are buildings and streets; and the eight churches, and more, have been finished, and many of them have crumbled to ruin in the long years since Sharp’s literary pilot wrote his description. But the town is still “round” except where it “runs along the sea side.” Its houses are still mainly of brick and stone and tiles, and are mostly two or three stories in height, and about it still stretch the savannas with their spots of “woody land.”
But if the meticulous Ringrose could but step into Panama to-day he would find it a very different city from the one he knew. Along the smooth asphalt streets pass scores of jitneys, motor-cars, and rumbling trolley-cars. Busy shops and great stores line the narrow sidewalks, electric lights blaze everywhere at night, people of every color and nationality throng the thoroughfares; motor-driven fire-engines, glorious in red and gold, dash clangingly to infrequent fires. There are ice-plants and breweries, great power-plants and saw-mills, [[335]]cabarets and motion-picture theaters; a splendid, white concrete railway station and even electric signs. In other words, Panama to-day is thoroughly up-to-date, a modern, clean, busy, and attractive town, externally unaltered but internally completely transformed, while even more modern and typically American, in sharp contrast to the typically Spanish Panama, Ancon and Balboa rise upon the slopes of the hills behind the old city that Ringrose and Sharp looked upon. But despite its modernity in innumerable ways, Panama is still a bit of the Old World, a bit of old Spain, a city of Spanish architecture and Spanish plazas, with many a narrow, quaintly steep, and out-of-the-way street, where the jutting balconies and grilled windows almost meet above one’s head; with many a spot where time seems to have stood still while the rest of the city went on, and with many a relic, many a survival of the Panama of three centuries ago.