To Panama and back

by Henry T. Byford

Nine inches of rain fell at Limón night before last and carried the muddy water of the river out into the sea for five miles, coloring it a light yellow. As we came here we entered this yellow sea before we sighted Limón, and were in it fully an hour before we arrived in port. Trees, bunches of bananas and other debris are floating about, and although the stream that empties into the sea at Limón was a small one, they say that it is now large enough to float a ship. A portion of the graveyard here was also washed out, the flood carrying tombstones from one grave to another and mixing up the bones. However, as far as the living are concerned this is not a calamity, but a blessing, for the town has received the washing it needed to prevent the development of pestilence. The buried negroes don’t know the difference, nor do the living care. The dead are having a good drying off down below and the living expect to get one.

My fellow passengers, all of whom are bound for San José, will have to wait for a passing ship to take them to Colón, then cross the isthmus by rail to the city of Panama, and wait there for a steamship to take them up the west coast to Punto Arenas where they can wait for a train to San José. Whether they will have to stay there very long or not, depends upon the amount of washing out there has been on the Pacific side. As the steamers make many stops on the Pacific coast and do not run very often, the passengers will be on the way between one and two weeks, according to their luck in catching a boat and a train, instead of making the overland trip of 103 miles in a few hours by rail, as they had expected to do.

As for me I will lose the fine Christmas weather in the mountains and the round of novel entertainments in the Paris of Central America, and be obliged to spend two weeks instead of one in the hot city of Panama, which is at sea level, within eight degrees of the equator, and within two or three degrees of blood heat.

3:30 P. M., Dec. 24, 1904.

We have been ashore. The United Fruit Company sent out a row boat in which we climbed over the swells for about a quarter of a mile as the falcon flies, but over half a mile as the row boat climbed up and coasted down. Getting from the lowered stairway of the ship into the small boat was a test of good jumping, good judgment and good luck. The waves as seen from the deck of the ship did not appear over three feet high from trough to crest, yet the little boat beside the ship sank at least five feet from the step platform and rose up to it again.

The insurance agent had an excess of confidence in himself, as all successful insurance agents must have, and went down the steps first, to show us how. But for once his judgment of risks was poor. As he jumped at the boat, it sank out of reach and moved from under him. Luckily he had a business education, which teaches men never to give up what they have once laid their hands on, and he kept hold of the railing of the stairway. But his big body had acquired momentum and had to go, and he swung suspended by his hands over the water, with his umbrella sticking to him and his coat tails flying, until the boat rose up beside him and he was pulled into it. A man with less physical strength and presence of mind would have splashed down into the waves to frighten sharks and spoil our excursion to Limón. The insurance agent, however, did not even lose his umbrella, which was not insured and which he held up in triumph and exultation as soon as the danger was over. The ladies saw the performance and could not be persuaded to leave the ship, as their lives were not insured. Some one spoke of sharks, and they shuddered.

Upon arriving at the pier we were rowed to the landing place, where again good judgment and gymnastics were required in order to jump on the lower platform before the boat would sink away, and where good luck and agility were necessary to enable one to get up on the pier before the next wave broke over the steps leading up to it.

The first dock hand we saw was a coal-black negro with an Irish brogue which he used freely. It was a precious combination and gave me a new sensation. I was sorry that I could not take the combination with me as a curio. Nearly all of the negroes about the pier were Jamaicans and had a quaint accent and inflection of voice that was musical and pleasant to listen to. One of them had acquired a cockney accent and shocked and instructed us by calling a dollar a “crony” (corona), a highball “a eyeball” and a baked potato “a biked potighto.” I never realized before how characterless and commonplace our United States pronunciation really is. It lacks the bizarrerie of the native London article which has been called by Don G. Seitz “a queer jargon of misplaced aspirates and vowels interspersed with drawls and growls.” We have to invent Americanisms and rhetorical barbarities in order to outdo them.

While ashore we had hot baths in our own perspiration followed by cool shower baths in the rain, the frequent repetition of which finally drove us back to the ship. The rainy season is supposed by the calendar to last from May to November, but the calendar is a theorist, for we have been having rain from one to five or six times a day, varying from brief sun-showers to copious rainfalls. On the Caribbean side it rains both in the rainy and dry seasons, there being only about two months in the year of dry weather. The rain, however, cools the atmosphere and the earth, and renders the lowlands near the coast quite comfortable compared with the Pacific side, where the seasons are more sharply differentiated, and there is more dry weather. Although I have seen many showers I have heard no thunder on the Caribbean. The showers come and go with such rapidity that apparently they have no time to thunder. Possibly the hot air over such warm water is so uniformly laden with moisture that electricity does not easily concentrate except at great heights and is only heard on great occasions. But it is just as well not to hear it, for it is Southern in temperament and revolutionary in its methods, and is apt to radically change the existing order of things.

Limón had an earthquake five days ago at midnight. It frightened everybody and sent people skipping around in their muddy back yards clad in flowing white raiment like angels errant, but it did them no harm. The following lines are copied from the local newspaper: “At midnight on Monday the entire city was thrown into a state of alarm by a severe shock of earthquake, the like of which had never been experienced in Port Limón by the oldest inhabitants. Several private houses and shops suffered, etc.” At present earthquakes are useless generators of energy, but if they could be stored up and used to shake school boys and servant girls out of bed on cold mornings they would become popular.