[74]. In Havana I more than once saw mothers or nurses driving about in cabs, with children entirely naked save that they wore shoes and socks! A curious inversion of European custom.
[75]. “To create an intermediate classification as in Jamaica, and to divide the population into ‘white,’ ‘negro,’ and ‘coloured’ is but to increase the confusions and complexities of the problem ... the irritation between the coloured and negro classes being often quite as great as that between the negro and the white.”—E. G. Murphy, “The Basis of Ascendancy,” p. 43.
IV
THE PANAMA CANAL
When, in New York, I was handed a sailing-list of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s boats, I observed that their first port of call, after Jamaica, was Colon. In vain I hurriedly searched the map of the Caribbean Sea, hoping to disguise my ignorance. I had to pocket my pride, and inquire, “Where is Colon?” Afterwards I discovered that Colon was a place of which I had often heard under its earlier name of Aspinwall; for my father, one of the Californian Argonauts, had twice crossed the Isthmus of Darien in the old days.
Under no conceivable name would Colon be an attractive place. It is situated on flat ground (formerly an island) at the bottom of a little bag of a bay; it consists of the ordinary jerry-built two-storey houses of a more or less improvised tropical sea-port; its fringe of palms is meagre and mangy; and it is backed by low and featureless wooded hills.
But, as we steam slowly up to the jetty, what is this cluster of some twenty or thirty neat new houses, under a grove of palm-trees away to the right? There is something odd about them, something dark and blind-looking; they seem to have neither windows nor doors. After a little searching of spirit, I realize what they suggest to me—they are like a row of giant meat-safes.
And there, at the point of the spit of land, is a statue—a group of two figures. Now I know where I am, for I have been reading things up a little. This must be the statue of Columbus embracing an Indian maiden, presented by the Empress Eugénie in the palmy days of French ambition regarding the Isthmus; and the houses behind it must be those of the American officials in the settlement of Cristobal, a suburb of Colon.
One soon learns to appreciate the “screened” houses of the Canal Zone, with their verandahs enclosed in an impervious veil of wire gauze. But outwardly, and especially at a distance, they are not things of beauty.
Three minutes in the broiling streets of Colon were quite enough for me. I have seen frontier settlements before now; and Colon, though it has a sort of a history, is at present, to all intents and purposes, a frontier settlement. “Do you know Port Said?” a resident said to me; “Well, this place is just about 50 per cent. wickeder.” I think the resident (with pardonable partiality) exaggerated a little; but the aspect of Colon, even by day, was quite sufficiently sinister.