The country life of Panama is simple, and it requires little effort to supply the necessities of life. The poorer classes of Panamanians who dwell in the country are a mixture of Spanish, Indians, and negroes—all living a more or less primitive life. Marriages are very rare amongst this class, for the women prefer to remain independent of their mates, dreading the ill treatment which is usually meted out by the lords of creation to wives who cannot escape from their bondage. The more common form of family life is one in which the man and woman form a partnership, which can easily be terminated by mutual agreement, and when a parting occurs a division of the household belongings and assets takes place even down to the children.
Their houses are of the simplest construction, consisting of a few trees stuck into the ground roofed over with palm or other suitable leaves. Some of the huts constructed in this manner have an extra room in the roof, which is approached by a roughly constructed ladder. The sides or walls of the huts are made of bamboo split and woven into a kind of rough matting, although some have walls made of the bamboos placed side by side, the intervening spaces being filled in with clay. Partitions devised in the same way are made inside some of the dwellings. As one would imagine, the furniture contained in most of these houses is of the simplest and most elementary description.
Hammocks are used instead of beds for sleeping in, and stumps of trees serve for tables and chairs. The food consists of frigoles, (a kind of bean), bananas, plantains, and yams—which form the vegetable and fruitarian portion of their repasts, while for meats they have so large a variety to choose from that there is no need for them to complain of the monotony of their fare. Monkeys and the large lizard, the iguana, make favourite dishes. Wild turkeys, ducks, red deer, the wild hog or peccary all find a place on their menus, and they have the art which all countries seem to possess of brewing intoxicating beverages, the kind they make being fermented from the sap of a species of the palm. This custom dates from a very early time, long before the Spaniard first set foot upon these shores. Tobacco has been in use among the Indians of America for ages (the followers of Columbus were astonished to see the natives puffing out clouds of smoke from their mouths), and the leaf of the soothing weed grows around them at every turn. A little skill in hunting and hardly any in cultivating are all that is necessary to maintain existence in this fertile country, and until the native is convinced that there are things in life worth possessing which at present he has not got, he will never see the advantage of toiling and sweating to earn money he knows not how to spend, or to live a life he could not enjoy.
Thus he spends his days in a country that is to him
“A fair Utopian mead
Where his throat is never dusty,
And tobacco grows a weed.”
The negroes from the West Indian Islands have been so long in contact with the higher forms of civilisation that they have acquired some of the habits which belong to the white races, and although there is not in any of the countries which they hail from the compelling force of hunger to make them work, the customs of dress and living which they have acquired induce them to labour, in order to secure the artificial embellishments they have come to consider necessary to existence. The isthmus and the canal work have been a happy hunting ground for the negro who wished to enrich himself; and ever since the French Canal Company started operations, it has been almost a habit with many of the Jamaicans and Barbadians to go there and work for a time to earn high wages.
The negroes on the isthmus noticed with increasing alarm the gradual importation of peons from other countries—Spain and Italy in particular—and felt that they were quickly losing the secure position hitherto occupied. I have watched a group of nigger labourers standing outside the wharves at Colon when five hundred Spanish labourers were disembarking from a Royal Mail steamer, and although their faces were as impassive as statues their conversation betrayed their apprehensions.
The labourers recruited from all parts of Spain have settled down upon the isthmus; many of them are at work in the
A STREET IN THE OLD QUARTERS, PANAMA.