CHAPTER II
Sunday at Colón.
Colón’s Architecture—Trying to Procure Information about Ships—The Brighton and the Preston—Had to Give It up—The Cab Ride on the Beach—The Canal Zone—Picturesque Christobal—Cool Breezes—Statue of Columbus—The Entrance to the Canal—Railroad Company’s Hospital—The Turtle Trap—The Bath—The Ladies—The Shark—The Retreat—The Embarrassment—Uncertainty about the Departure of Boats—Crowding a Small Boat—Mistakes and Discomforts—An Unsatisfactory Explanation—Rozhestzensky—Laying in Private Provisions—Off Late—Rough Weather—Bocas del Toro—Almirante Bay and Chiriqui Lagoon—Bocas del Drago and Bocas del Tigre—Proposed Naval Station—The Town and Its Doctors—Plenty of Fruit.
Colón has one piece of architecture, viz., a church, a more or less Protestant one, the Church of England. There is nothing else like it in Colón, which is a city of saloons, not of churches. It stands alone and lonely on the seashore across the street from the Washington Hotel annex or wing, and is thus as far away from the bad people in the town as possible. The congregation is made up largely of Jamaica negroes. I do not remember seeing any other churches in this town, nor any church ruins, although ecclesiastically considered, the whole town was a ruin.
Sunday morning I called at the United Fruit Company’s agency and learned that the Brighton, a re-christened Norwegian steamship with a Norwegian crew, and said to be the smallest boat on the route, would sail Monday; and that the Preston, a larger boat, would arrive Monday and probably sail Tuesday or Wednesday according to the amount of unloading to be done. I went to the wharf and looked at the Brighton and gave her up. To be shaken up in her for a week, like shot in a bottle, would be almost sure death. She had one small room amidships to be used as a combination salon, dining-room and smoking-room, and eight little cabins near the stern, which opened into a narrow passageway about thirty feet long and three feet wide. The cabins had no place for steamer trunks under the berths, and hardly room enough for two persons to stand side by side on the floor. They were originally intended for the officers of the crew, inasmuch as the ship was not built for passenger service. The space over them was used as a passenger deck, and was about thirty feet by fifteen between the life boats, with the center taken up by a skylight. As the deck was uncovered and unprotected at the sides, there was no place on the boat for the passengers to go to in bad weather except to bed, or to the little dining-room which was pretty well filled by the table. So I returned to the hotel, having gained nothing but an appetite. I would have to wait for the Preston.
CHRIST CHURCH AT COLÓN
Seen from a Corner of the Hotel
After the eleven o’clock breakfast Doctors Frank, Newman and I sat on the veranda and gazed at the sea and smoked and talked small talk, and thus managed to kill time and keep cool until three o’clock. Then we hired a Jamaica negro, with a cab that had seen better days, to drive us everywhere, viz., to the mouth of the canal and then along the seashore in the opposite direction as far as the road went, where we were to have a salt-water swim.
We drove through the main street to the Canal Zone at the other end of the town. Here the beach curved out seaward to form a projecting area or tongue of land shaded by a grove of tall cocoa palms which gave it a very picturesque appearance. As we entered the grove we saw large and comparatively elegant-looking frame houses and a Catholic church, all of which Mons. De Lesseps had built, at great expense, for himself and his high-salaried officials and their employees. The settlement was called Christobal, after the discoverer of America, and occupied a most charming and salubrious spot. Like the beach of the Washington Hotel, it was fanned by the prevailing winds and, like it, was apparently much more breezy and much cooler than the intervening town. We drove through the palm grove, past the well-preserved houses, to the other side of the little peninsula where the canal opened into Limón Bay. A statue of Columbus that had been presented to the country by the Empress Eugenie twenty years before, stood on a clear plat of ground near the shore in the attitude of watching or guarding the boca or mouth of the canal. We left the cab and sauntered a short distance along the shore of the bay to the boca, finding the way strewn with fragments of crockery, tin cans and debris of all kinds, and obstructed by old car trucks and parts of machinery. The canal here looked like a river or bayou extending through flat, alluvial land. The bay is now a part of the open sea, but when the United States has invested a few hundred thousand dollars in a breakwater it will be converted into a magnificent, protected harbor.