Three gringos in Venezuela and Central America

by Richard Harding Davis

DREDGES IN THE CANAL

It is like the old Minotaur and his yearly tribute of Greek maidens, with the difference that now it is the lives of men that are sacrificed, and men who are chosen from every nation of the world, speaking every language, believing in every religion; and to-day the end of each is marked by a wooden plank in the Catholic Cemetery, in the Hebrew Cemetery, in the French Cemetery, in the English Cemetery, in the American Cemetery, for there are acres and acres of cemeteries and thousands and thousands of wooden head-stones, to which the evil spirit of the isthmus points mockingly, and says, “These are your failures.”

The fields of Waterloo and Gettysburg saw a sacrifice of life but little greater than these fifty miles of swamp-land between North and South America have seen, and certainly they saw no such inglorious defeats, without a banner flying or a comrade cheering, or the roar of musketry and cannon to inspire the soldiers who fell in the unequal battle. Those who died striving to save the Holy Land from the unspeakable Turk were comforted by the promise of a glorious immortality, and it must have been gratifying in itself to have been described as a Crusader, and to have worn the red cross upon one’s shoulder. And, in any event, a man who would not fight for his religion or his country without promises or pensions is hardly worthy of consideration. But these young soldiers of the transit and sailors of the dredging-scow had no promises or sentiment to inspire them; they were not fighting for the boundaries of their country, but redeeming a bit of No Man’s Land; not doing battle for their God, but merely digging a canal. And it must strike every one that those of them who fell doing their duty in the sickly yellow mist of Panama and along the gloomy stretches of the Chagres River deserve a better monument to their memories than the wooden slabs in the cemeteries.

It is strange that not only nature, but man also, should have selected the same little spot on the earth’s surface in which to show to the world exactly how disagreeable and unpleasant they can make themselves when they choose. It seems almost as though the isthmus were unholy ground, and that there was a curse upon it. Some one should invent a legend to explain this, and tell how one of the priests who came over with Columbus put the ban of the Church upon the land for some affront by its people to the voyagers, and so placed it under a curse forever. For those whom the fever did not kill the canal company robbed, and the ruin that came to the peasants of France was as irredeemable as the ravages of the fever, and the scandal that spattered almost every public man in Paris exposed rottenness and corruption as far advanced as that in the green-coated pools along the Rio Grande.

THE BAY OF PANAMA

Ruins are always interesting, but the ruins of Panama fill one only with melancholy and disgust, and the relics of this gigantic swindle can only inspire you with a contempt for yourself and your fellow-men, and you blush at the evidences of barefaced rascality about you. And even the honest efforts of those who are now in charge, and who are trying to save what remains, and once more to build up confidence in the canal, reminded me of the town councillors of Johnstown who met in a freight depot to decide what was to be done with the town and those of its inhabitants that had not been swept out of existence.

There are forty-eight miles of railroad across the isthmus, stretching from the town of Panama on the Pacific side to that of Colon—or Aspinwall, as it was formerly called—on the Caribbean Sea. The canal starts a little north of the town of Panama, in the mouth of the Rio Grande River, and runs along on one side or the other of the railroad to the port of Colon. The Chagres River starts about the middle of the isthmus, and follows the route of the canal in an easterly direction, until it empties itself into the Caribbean Sea a little north of Colon.

The town of Panama, as you approach it from the bay, reminds you of an Italian seaport, owing to the balconies which overhang the water and the colored house-fronts and projecting red roofs. As seen from the inside, the town is like any other Spanish-American city of the second class. There are fiacres that rattle and roll through the clean but narrow streets behind undersized ponies that always move at a gallop; there are cool, dark shops open to the streets, and hundreds of negroes and Chinese coolies, and a handsome plaza, and some very large municipal buildings of five stories, which appeared to us, after our experience with a dead level of one-story huts, to tower as high as the Auditorium. Panama, as a town, and considered by itself, and not in connection with the canal, reminded me of a Western county-seat after the boom had left it. There appeared to be nothing going forward and nothing to do. The men sat at the cafés during the day and talked of the past, and went to a club at night. We saw nothing of the women, but they seem to have a greater degree of freedom than their sisters in other parts of Spanish America, owing, no doubt, to the cosmopolitan nature of the inhabitants of Panama.