Panama to Patagonia

by Charles M. Pepper

But none of this agricultural growth can precede the building of roads. These are totally lacking in the interior. The Panama government made sensible provision out of its first revenues for this form of internal improvement, and the policy may be looked upon as a continuous one. The railroad line of development will be from Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic slope to David on the Pacific coast. Bocas del Toro will reach the Canal Zone by a railway through the banana-producing lands, and David in time may be connected with Panama.

In the general sense the prosperity of the Isthmus for many years depends more on the excavation work and on the international commerce than on its internal resources. It is this which will swell the trade of $2,000,000 or $2,500,000 annually to greater figures. Yet the waterway is the sure harbinger of the exploitation of the productive founts. The Canal community and the Canal construction are the potent economic factors.

When all is said, the Zone is the thing. The laws administered may not in their entirety be American laws, but they are such in spirit. Actually, the Canal Zone is a semi-military camp. It must continue such for purposes of sanitation and law and order during the entire period of Canal construction. What follows is the establishment of a colony within the Republic of Panama, yet not of it. This colony, which includes laborers, civilian officials, occasional detachments of marines, and a police force, is not apt at any time greatly to exceed 25,000 persons. The early estimates of the very large number of laborers who would be required were reduced when the engineers began to make closer study of the degree to which improved machinery could be used in the excavation and other work. It will be a conglomerate mass,—Jamaican and other West Indian negroes, Chinese coolies, Mexican and Central American peons, possibly a few American blacks, Italian railway workers, and similar elements. In spite of all scepticism and detraction, the Jamaica and Barbadoes negroes will do the bulk of the work on the Canal. They did the most of what was accomplished by the French company. They built the railroads along the unhealthy coast of Costa Rica. They have shown the greatest adaptability to the climate and the best capacity for hard labor. The Panama Canal will be the monumental contribution of the despised black race to civilization.

Panama Natives from the Swamp Country

Panama Natives from the Mountains

Aside from determining the engineering conditions of the Canal, which I have no purpose of discussing in this volume, the most important functions of the United States on the Isthmus are in regulating sanitation and hygiene. This regulation could not be restricted merely to the inhabitants of the Canal Zone, for to guard them against epidemics Colon and Panama had to be protected.

I never shared the enthusiasm over the rose-colored comparisons of the region lying between Colon and Panama with Havana and Cuba. Measures of hygiene, public sanitation, and even individual cleanliness will be secured on the Canal Zone and in the seaport cities. This will be valuable in decreasing the danger from yellow fever, bubonic plague, or other epidemics. And it also may be assumed that the strict supervision given by the medical officers will in a measure serve as a preventive against dysentery and enteric diseases, which are common to the tropics and especially so to the moist lands. But the Canal Zone topographically is vastly different from the island of Cuba. The Atlantic Ocean sweeps across Cuba. Every day of the year a healthful breeze is felt in the great central belt of that island. This not only purifies the northern coast, but it also invigorates the interior region, and its effect is felt even on the south coast. But in the Canal belt are the dead calms of the Pacific on one side and the limited area of the Caribbean winds on the other side. The Atlantic breezes are lost in the marshes before they reach the ridge of the Cordillera, while the zephyr which sometimes springs up in the Bay of Panama rarely extends as far as the Culebra Cut. When the Canal is completed, it will not serve as a tube through which the breezes of one ocean will whistle to the other ocean.

I write these opinions without the purpose of opening a controversy with enthusiastic scientists, medical officers, or meteorologists, but merely as a statement of climatic conditions which cannot be changed by the agency of man. There is the peculiar configuration of the Cordillera that causes the moist blankets to hang over the Isthmus and precipitates the enormous quantities of rain. Cuba has its wet season during certain months, but these rains are normal phenomena and are not supercharged with disease.