RUINS OF THE SANTO DOMINGO CHURCH
Across from these human and divine rooms were little dingy shops that looked like small square masonry cells, relics of the days of the old church. Large double doors constituted almost their entire front, and were kept open for light and air. On account of their smallness, the almost complete emptiness of visible merchandise in most of them, the absence of customers, and the miserable appearance of the inmates, I asked the doctor if they were not disreputable places. He assured me that they were not, but that as it was already nine o’clock, the business of the day had been about all transacted. The owners dealt mostly in perishable provisions which were sold early in the morning, and there was but little left for them to do but lounge about until the next morning. Thus poverty and leisure and content often go together in the tropical zone, just as riches and leisure and discontent so often do in the temperate and intemperate zones.
I noticed that most officials and business agents in Panama had office or business hours in the forenoon and afternoon, which were often marked on the doors or windows. This enabled them to enjoy their siestas and cigarets between business hours without being disturbed, and also made it practicable for them to finish their work early in the day. The comparatively small amount of work done by business men in the afternoon would lead one to suppose that but little was done, yet the best work is done in the early morning, at a time when Northern customers are not astir. In the tropics the early birds catch the worms. In the North the proverb speaks of only one early bird.
I had given up hunting after baths. I could not hear of any tub baths, and had been frightened out of the notion of taking shower baths by a visiting Central American doctor who was waiting to attend the Medical Congress. He told me that next to his seventy-five cigarets a day he enjoyed his daily cold shower bath at the house of a relative who was a druggist. The water that was used in the drug store to wash bottles and things with was run into a reservoir under the floor and used for shower baths in the basement. As the Panama wells were drying up and plain drinking water was bringing a price, it occurred to me that to make shower baths pay, it might be necessary in bathing establishments, where the dishwater and waste water would, of course, be insufficient to supply shower baths for all of the customers, to collect also the waste water from the baths, pump or carry it up into the tank and use it over again. When the water became soapy enough from the multitude of baths, to look dirty, it could be allowed to flow away and a new series of baths be started on the same economical plan. Having a dread of beri-beri, dengue, leprosy, elephantiasis, tropical ulcers, and other prevalent ailments of more or less contagious nature which had their habitat in Panama, I did not allow myself to deviate from my previously formed opinion that cold private sponge baths were not only more cleansing than the public shower baths, but were more available, reliable, convenient, comfortable and manageable.
After wandering about considerably among the streets and studying the business facilities, I came to the conclusion that Plaza Centrál was a good place for a residence district, but that, being at the wrong end of the town from the railroad station, it would soon be an out-of-the-way place for the agencies and business houses at present located in or near it. When the volume of business would become greater, the main thoroughfare would have to be made wider, or the business centered nearer to the station or transferred to the mouth of the canal, for nothing ever stays but dirt and nothing ever lasts but time.
Chief Engineer Wallace had, I believe, spoken of a plan, which carried to its extreme, would mean tearing down entire blocks of houses for long distances and enlarging the city area by building a sea wall out at the edge of the water at low tide, and filling in with the earth excavated from the canal. But Mr. Wallace was too modern and reconstructive. I suppose that a gradual change of the business center will be the most probable solution of the economic problem, leaving the old city as a residence district, for which it would be well located. A Chicago real estate dealer would make a beautiful suburb of it.
CHAPTER XII
The Past and the Present Panama
A Visit Planned and Given Up—Difficulties—Buccaneer Henry Morgan and President Don Juan Perez de Guzman—Story of Morgan’s Expedition against Panama—Prayers Versus Prowess—Starvation—Waiting Ambuscaders—Leather Soup—The Miraculous Feeding—Breakfast Food for Those Who Could not Walk—Making a New Road—Repulse of Don Juan’s Cavalry—Repulse of the Cattle—Flanking Movement—Victory—Fire—Booty—The Filibusters Filibustered by Morgan—Great Britain and Captain Dampier—Chances for the Poet, Tourist, Artist, Antiquarian and Lover—Something New—Panama has Changed Hands—But for Uncle Sam There’d be Something Doing in Panama.
Doctor Echeverría and Señor Arango had planned a trip to the old city of Panama, the old-gold city, founded in 1518 by Don Pedro d’Avila, sacked in 1673 by Sir Henry Morgan, the buccaneer, and rebuilt on its present semi-peninsular site, where it is inaccessible to buccaneers and inconvenient for business. But it was a whole day’s trip and there was no hotel to serve us with a déjeuné à-la-fourchette and a siesta. Besides, we would have to find a guide to keep us from falling into cellars and holes overgrown and concealed by such profusion of vegetation as only the tropics can produce in two hundred years. The doctor, rather than trust to a guide, thought it better to trust in God only and stay away, for it was a God-forsaken place.