Man, it is said, differs from all other animals, in being ‘a tool and a road-making animal,’ the truth of which was well exemplified in the curious assemblage of products collected from all parts of the world, and stowed in this huge house, brought by man’s ocean highways, and awaiting removal by his iron roads and horses.
Ceroons of cochineal and indigo from Guatemala and San Salvador, cocoa from Eçuador, sarsaparilla from Nicaragua, coffee from Costa Rica, hides from the North and South Pacific coasts, copper-ore from Bolivia, linen goods from the French and English markets, beef, pork, hard bread, cheese from the States, and silks from China.
The town of Colon, as everybody perhaps does not know, stands on a small island called Manzanilla, cut off from the mainland by a narrow frith; the entire island being about one square mile in extent, composed of coral reefs, and only raised a few feet above highwater-level. It has no supply of fresh water but what is obtained during the heavy rains; this, collected in immense iron tanks, that hold over four thousand gallons, supplies the inhabitants during the dry seasons.
The most conspicuous objects one meets with in this dismal place are flocks of turkey-buzzards (useful inspectors or nuisances, as they do their own work of removal), pigs, naked dirty little children in legions, blear-eyed mangy curs that do nothing but growl and sleep; together with peddling darkies, bummers, and loafers (I know no other names so expressive of this species of idler as these Transatlantic ones), that employ their time much in the same fashion as the curs. A line of shops faces the sea, and at a little distance is the ‘mingillo,’ or native marketplace, a spot no one would be disposed to linger in or visit a second time, unless the nose could be dispensed with. ‘Noses have they but they smell not,’ must surely apply to the dwellers in the marketplace; the air is literally (and not in figure of speech only) laden with the mingled fragrance of past and present victims, an odour far more potent than pleasant. Surely ladies never go to market in Colon!
The train was by this time ready to take us to Panama, and, with a parting scream, the iron horse rushed into the tropical wilderness. On leaving Colon, the line winds its way through a deep cutting across a morass, and along the right bank of the Rio Chagres; glimpses are caught of the river from amidst the tangled and twisted foliage that shuts it in on either side like dense walls. From out this leafy chaos rise the gaunt trunks of the mango, cocoanut, plane, cieba, and stately palm. Plantains, too, spread their green succulent leaves—sunshades of nature’s own contriving—to protect the tender growths that love to live beneath them. Every tree seemed strangling in the coils of trailing vines and climbers; real ropes, pendents, and streamers of brilliant blossoms, fit resting-places for the birds and butterflies, themselves like living flowers. Wondrous orchids, grotesque in form and colouring, grew everywhere, springing alike from the living and the dead; for amidst this flood of vegetable life, decay and beauty, like twin sisters, walk hand-in-hand.
We stopped at Gatun for a short time, the station being close to the little village of bamboo huts thatched with palmetto-leaves, and only remarkable as being the place where the ‘bongoes’ (or native boats) used to stop for the travellers to refresh themselves ere the railroad was. From here the line skirts the bases of an irregular series of hills to cross the Rio Gatun, tributary to the Rio Chagres, on a well-made truss girder-bridge of seventy feet span; passed Frijoli, where the fields of golden maize were decked with what looked, at a distance, like immense bouquets of scarlet flowers; and along the banks of the Rio Chagres, which are here very deep, to cross it at Barbacous on a wrought-iron bridge, six hundred and twenty-five feet in length, eighteen in breadth, and forty feet above the surface of the water. There are six spans, each over a hundred feet; iron floor girders, three feet apart, support the rails—the entire structure resting on five piers and two abutments.
After crossing the river, the country becomes open, and large patches of rich land are seen under a rude kind of cultivation, until the native town of Gorgona is reached, where, in old days, boats were exchanged for horses and mules, on the overland route.
Leaving the course of the river, the line passes through deep clay banks and rocky cuttings, suddenly emerging on the green meadowlands surrounding Matuchin. I never gazed on a more exquisite panorama. Dotting the foreground was a pretty native village; to the left the Chagres, and its tributary the Rio Obispo; on the right a group of conical hills, so clothed with vegetation that it was impossible to imagine what the land would look like if the trees were cut away. During our stay at this station we were regularly beset; numerous vendors of native merchandise crowded into and round about the open van; grey-haired old men, and women, pushed trays under our very noses, covered with filthy pastry, gingerbread, sweetstuff, and other like abominations; whilst little black urchins sat like imps on the rails of the truck, each with some live captive for sale—monkey, squirrel, parrot, or other bright-plumaged bird.
Following the valley of the Obispo, which river is crossed twice within a mile on iron bridges, we ascend gradually (the gradient being about sixty feet in the mile) to reach the watershed, over which the descent commences to the Pacific. About a mile from the summit the line winds through a huge pile of basaltic columns, that look as if some Titan force had hurled them into the air, and let them fall again one over the other, like a mass of driftwood piles itself in a North American river. Below, the Rio Grande may be seen, a mere brawling burn; a short distance through thick woods, and we are at Paraiso; as unlike one’s ideal of paradise as Cremorne Gardens or Ratcliff Highway. Again we reach the swampy lowlands with their dense growths; ahead, and looming high in the glowing atmosphere, stands Mount Ancon, whose southern base is bathed by the blue waters of the Pacific; on the left, Cerro-de-los-Buccaneros, or the Hill of the Buccaneers, from whose summit the terrible Morgan first looked on old Panama in the year 1670. We rattle past San Pedro Miguel and Caimitillo, small tidal tributaries to the Rio Grande, scream through the Rio Grande Station, sweep round the base of Mount Ancon; and before us are the tall spires of the cathedral, the long metal roofing of the terminus, and the quiet waters of the Pacific.
Captain Harvey, R.N., then in command of Her Majesty’s ship ‘Havannah,’ met us at the terminus; the ship’s boats were in waiting to take both men and baggage on board, so that I saw but little of Panama. My old foes (that waged war against me at Colon), the gold-seekers, were assembled on the wharf, awaiting the small tugboat to take them off to the larger steamer anchored in the offing. To judge from appearances, there were amongst them a goodly sprinkling that would have deemed lynching or riddling a Britisher, a capital joke.