Panama to Patagonia

by Charles M. Pepper

The cocoanut grove in front of the hotel, facing the Caribbean, is a pretty bit of landscape, and the statue erected to William H. Aspinwall, John L. Stephens, and Henry Chauncey, associates in the building of the Panama Railroad, if not a monument of taste, at least serves a praiseworthy purpose as a tribute to indomitable American enterprise. Ornate homes, tropical in the extreme, line the sea-front, but the residence district is a very limited one and will remain so until the swamp is filled in and the marshes cleared away. Colon may be regarded as in the process of hygienic architectural transition, and its lack of attractiveness need not be deplored. The work of reconstruction would be immensely facilitated if another fire could sweep across the marshes and leave nothing but the brownstone church, the hotel, and the wharves.

Caribbean Cocoa Palms

Colon is the most typically cosmopolitan place upon the Isthmus, and will continue so until the world’s commerce begins to flow through the waterway. Then the city of Panama will share with it in this respect. But Panama does not have in so full a degree the European mixture as Colon, for the crews of the transatlantic vessels seldom get across to the Pacific port. In all the mingling of tongues in Colon—German, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, dialect Indian, Greek, Swedish, and many varieties of English—nothing is so mellow and so distressing in whining intonation as the broad cockney accent of the Jamaica blacks.

The work accomplished by the Panama Railroad Company, hygienically and otherwise, serves as a basis for the physical regeneration of Colon which must accompany the Canal construction. Its provisions for its employees, its hospitals, and its general sanitary regulations were so well conceived and carried out that their value as an example and a precedent is very great. The engineering problem is comparatively simple. It is to raise the level of the island of Manzanillo, and then to provide sanitary conveniences and enforce hygienic principles both for the community and for the individual. The question of water supply is one of gathering the plentiful showers of heaven in cisterns and distilling them. A system of waterworks which will bring pure water from the springs of the Cordillera is not impracticable.

Colon is hot and humid. Its climate cannot be modified by artificial devices. During the dry season, which is from April to July, the mean temperature is nearly 90° Fahrenheit in the shade, while in the sun it is 110°. The humidity is about 77 per cent. In the rainy season the mean temperature is 85°, and the humidity varies from 86 per cent to complete saturation. The annual rainfall is seldom less than 125 inches. A man six feet in stature standing on the shoulders of another man of equal height, would just about be able to keep his shoulders above water if the two were placed in a reservoir which would catch and hold the entire rainfall of the year. But in spite of heat and humidity and precipitated moisture, existence can be made passably comfortable.

As the traveller takes his way across the Isthmus, he may wish also to view in retrospect the waterways that have been conceived in the brains of men who were ahead of their times, and the paths of trade and travel that have been followed; for now, in the presence of actual construction along a determined course, these pioneer routes quickly fade into oblivion.

The projects have been many. They were to unlock the key of the universe and to throw open a gateway to the Pacific. Columbus explored the Mosquito coast in search of the passage to the Indies, and thought he had found another Ganges, though the strait which he sought was obstinate in hiding itself. He planned colonies at the Gulf of Uraba, or Darien. Balboa and his companions, among whom was Pizarro, from near the same place, 200 miles east of the Chagres, hewed their way through tropical forest jungle and over mountains till they reached the summit of Piuri, from which they saw the Pacific and named the ocean inlet San Miguel Bay in honor of St. Michael. A few years later Balboa had “the little boats” carried over this path from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Long afterward, more than a century and a half, Sir John Morgan led his loyal buccaneers in Balboa’s footprints to the bloody sacking of the opulent city of Panama.

But the early Spaniards found a shorter route for their traffic. At different periods the Chagres was followed from its mouth till within twenty miles of Panama, and then the jungle was pierced by paths. Yet this was not the camino real, or king’s highway. That royal road was a cobble-paved mule trail from Portobello, twenty miles east of what is now Colon, to Santes on the upper Chagres, and thence to Panama. This is the route over which the traffic passed for two centuries. The land trails could be tested. The canal courses could only be dreamed or projected in the imagination.

Of the three interoceanic routes which have become historic, the early explorers, Spanish and Portuguese, thought most of the Darien or Caledonian cross-cut channel. It was to start north of the Gulf of Darien, near the bay which afterward became known as Caledonian Bay, and follow a general direction southwest to the Pacific. Señor Don Angel Savedro, one of the first petitioners to Charles V for an interoceanic waterway, had this general direction in his mind. This was the route advocated by the Scotch banker, William Patterson, in his broad scheme for Great Britain to save control of the Antilles, by seizing Havana, acquiring the Isthmus, and constructing an isthmian canal in order to carry the blessings of commerce and civilization to the Sandwich Islands.