The first attempt to build the Panama Railroad was made in 1847, when a French company secured a charter from the Government of Colombia for a building of a road across the Isthmus. This company was unable to finance the project and the concession lapsed.
In 1849 William H. Aspinwall, John L. Stevens, and Henry Chauncey, New York capitalists, undertook the construction of the road. The terms of the concession provided that the road would be purchased by the Government at the expiration of 20 years after its completion for $5,000,000. The loss of life in the construction of this road, serious as it was, has been monumentally exaggerated. It is an oft-repeated statement that a man died for every tie laid on the road. This would mean that there were 150,000 deaths in its construction. As a matter of fact, the total number of persons employed during the six years the line was being built did not exceed 6,000. But among these the death rate was very high. Several thousand Chinese were brought over and they died almost like flies. Malaria and yellow fever were the great scourges they had to encounter, although smallpox and other diseases carried away hundreds.
The road was completed in January, 1855. Before the last rail was laid more than $2,000,000 had been taken in for hauling passengers as far as the road extended. The way in which the original 50-cent per mile rate across the Isthmus was established is interesting. The chief engineer encountered much trouble from people who wanted to use the road as far inland as it went from Colon, so he suggested that a 50-cent rate be established, thinking to make it prohibitory. But the people who wanted to cross the Isthmus were willing to pay even 50 cents a mile. Hence for years after the completion of the road the passenger rate continued at $25 for the one-way trip across the Isthmus.
The railroad proved to be such an unexpectedly good investment that the Republic of Colombia began to establish its claim to acquire ownership of the road at the expiration of the 2-year term, which would take place in 1875. It was necessary therefore, that the railroad company should take steps to save the railroad from a forced sale with $5,000,000 as the consideration. Representatives were dispatched to Bogota with instructions to get an extension of the concession under the most favorable terms possible. As it was realized that the Republic of Colombia held the whip hand in the negotiations, the railroad company understood that if it wished to escape selling its great revenue producing road for $5,000,000 it would have to meet any terms Colombia might dictate. The result of this mission was an agreement by the railroad that in consideration of an extension of the concession for a term of 99 years it would pay to the Colombian Government $1,000,000 spot cash and $250,000 a year during the life of the concession. That annual payment was continued as long as the Isthmus remained a part of the Republic of Colombia. Under the terms of the treaty between the United States and the Republic of Panama it was resumed again in 1913, to be paid by the United States to the Republic of Panama throughout all the years that the United States maintains and operates the Panama Canal.
CHAPTER IX
SANITATION
Primarily, the conquest of the Isthmian barrier was the conquest of the mosquito. Not mountains to be leveled, nor wild rivers to be tamed, nor yet titanic machinery to be installed, presented the gravest obstacles to the canal builders. Their most feared enemies were none of these, but the swarms of mosquitoes that bred in myriads in every lake, in every tiny pool, in every clump of weeds on the rain-soaked, steaming, tropical land. For these mosquitoes were the bearers of the dread germs of yellow fever and of malaria; and the conditions that encouraged their multiplication bred also typhoid and all manner of filthy disease. Each mosquito was a potential messenger of death. The buzzing, biting pests had defeated the French in Panama without the French ever having recognized the source of the attack. It was because the Americans, thanks to Great Britain and to Cuba, knew the deadly qualities of the mosquitoes that they were able to plan, under the leadership of Col. W. C. Gorgas, a sanitary campaign of unprecedented success. It achieved two victories. One was that it made of the Canal Zone the most healthful strip of land under tropic skies. The other is the Panama Canal.
When one looks about in an effort to place the credit for these great sanitary achievements he must go back to Cuba, where the yellow fever commission, consisting of Reed, Carroll, Lazear, and Agrimonte, made the remarkable investigations proving that yellow fever is transmissible only through the bite of a mosquito. He must go still further back to Maj. Roland Ross of the British Army, and his epoch-making discovery that malaria is conveyed only by the bite of another kind of mosquito. And, if he is just to all who have contributed to the establishment of the insect-bearing theory of disease, he must not forget Sir Patrick Manson who first proved that any disease could be transmitted by insect bites. It was he who discovered that filariasis is transmissible by this method alone. It was from him that Ross gathered the inspiration that is releasing humanity from one of the most insidious of all the diseases to which mortal flesh is heir. And it was from Ross's malaria discoveries, in turn, that Reed carried forward to successful proof the theory which had persisted in some quarters for generations that yellow fever was transmissible through mosquitoes; a theory already partially proved by Dr. Carlos Finley, of Havana, 20 years earlier.