But the principal cemetery was that located at Mount Hope. This was the cemetery for the city of Colon, and in all the writings of the early days on the Isthmus, it is known as “Monkey Hill.” It has been in use ever since the foundation of Colon, about 1850, and contains a large number of interments. Here sleep most of the men who died during the construction of the Panama Railroad, and many others well known on the Isthmus during the fifty years of the existence of the railroad as a transcontinental route. Dr. Connor, health officer of Colon, gave a great deal of attention and thought to the beautifying of this piece of ground, and it is now as pretty a garden of tropical trees and shrubbery as can be seen anywhere.
At Porto Bello we used the principal fort on the north side of the harbor as a cemetery. This structure, though built of brick some two hundred years before, was in a very good state of preservation. The mountain rose several hundred feet on this side of the harbor, and on the side of this mountain, to the seaward from the old fort, was located our great Porto Bello quarry, from which was obtained the stone for building the Gatun locks and the Colon breakwaters. The fort was a very strong and complete military structure for its time, and it was located at the foot of the mountain, near the water’s edge. When I first visited the ruin, it was completely covered with jungle, to such an extent that it could not be entered or recognized as a structure built by human hands. I reached it and made an entrance by having a native machete-man cut out the jungle enough for me to force my way through behind him. Large trees were growing in all parts of the old structure, some of them six or eight feet in diameter, and more than one hundred feet in height.
The interior of the fort was cleared of jungle and arranged so that it could be used as a cemetery, and here are buried the employees who died at Porto Bello within the six or seven years during which we operated the quarry. I selected it as the cemetery site, because it struck me as being appropriate that this old fort, which had seen so much of war, should finally be used for so peaceful a purpose as the last resting-place of the laborers engaged in the construction of a commercial enterprise like the Panama Canal, for which so much is hoped for the benefit of the whole human race. The old fort had been built by one set of pirates, the old Spaniards, to protect the plunder which they had wrung from the Incas and other natives of America, from that other set of pirates who infested the Spanish main, and were constantly attempting to wrest from the Spaniards this plunder.
CHAPTER XVI
MALARIA WORK AND THE HOSPITAL SYSTEM
In the early years of our construction malaria was very common and gave a great deal of trouble. As I have explained before, malaria is caused by a small animal parasite which lives in the blood of man and feeds upon the red globules. The excretions of this parasite poison man and cause the fever and other symptoms which we know as malarial fever. This parasite is transferred from the sick man to the well man by the bite of the mosquito. Now it is quite evident that if in any way we can kill the parasites as they exist in man, we not only cure the individual man of malarial fever, but at the same time prevent his being a means of infection for other men who have not yet acquired the disease. In a purely empirical manner, some one hundred and fifty years ago a drug was discovered which man could take without injury to himself, and which, when absorbed into the circulating blood was deadly to the malarial parasite there swimming about. It is somewhat singular that this drug should have been discovered not very far from Panama. A Peruvian Catholic priest found that the Indians in certain parts of Peru cured themselves of the fevers native to that country by the use of the bark of a certain forest tree common to that region. Its benefits were so evident that the wife of the Captain-General of Peru became interested in the matter, and spread about a knowledge of the virtue of this wonderful bark, and introduced it into the mother country and other parts of Europe. This lady was the Marchioness of Cinchona. No drug ever discovered has been as useful to mankind as quinin, and it remains up to the present time one of the few specifics known to the medical profession.
Besides curing the malarial patient after he had gotten the parasite into his blood, it was the desire of the Sanitary Department to have the blood of all persons on the Isthmus in such condition that it would not harbor the parasite. We believed that if everybody would take five grains of quinin a day, this quinin would be absorbed into the blood and render the blood so poisonous to the malarial parasite that when the parasite was injected into the blood by the mosquito it could not thrive and develop, but would die.
Distilled Water Cart. Culebra.
Ward at Ancon Hospital.