Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

CRUCES—A LITTLE TOWN WITH A LONG HISTORY

In a mild way the Chagres may lay claim to being a scenic stream, and perhaps in future days when the excellence of its climate in the winter becomes known in our United States, and the back waters of the lake have made its upper reaches navigable, excursion launches may ply above Cruces and almost to Alhajuela. Near the latter point is a spot which should become a shrine for Progressive Republican pilgrims. A low cliff of white limestone, swept clear of vegetation and polished by the river at high water describes an arc of a circle hollowed out by the swift river which rushes underneath. Springs on the bluff above have sent out little rivulets which trickling down the face of the stone have scarred it with parallel vertical grooves a foot or two apart. Seen from the further side of the stream it bears a startling likeness to a huge human upper jaw with glistening teeth. With a fine sense of the fitness of things the river men have named it “Boca del Roosevelt”—Roosevelt’s mouth.

A NATIVE CHARCOAL BURNER

Some of the fluviograph stations are located far beyond the limits of the Canal Zone, but by the terms of the treaty with the Republic of Panama the Canal Commission has over such headwaters and reaches of the Chagres such jurisdiction as may be necessary for the protection and regulation of Gatun Lake. We went to one of these stations some 20 miles of poling up the Chagres beyond Alhajuela. The keeper was a native of the Canary Islands who had mastered English sufficiently to make his reports over the ’phone. His wife, who greeted us in starched cotton with a pink hair ribbon, pink shoes and a wealth of silver ornaments, was a native, dark of complexion as a Jamaica negress, but her sister who was there on a visit was as white as a Caucasian. Doctors on the Zone say that these curious variations in type in the same family are so common that they can never foretell within several shades, the complexion of a baby about to be born.

The keeper of this station was paid $65.50 monthly and the Commission supplied his house, which was of the native type and cost about $85. Though many children, pickaninnies, little Canaries or whatever clustered about his door, his living expenses were practically nothing. Expense for clothing began only when the youngsters had reached 11 or 12 years of age and thereafter was almost negligible—as indeed were the clothes. The river furnished fish, the jungle iguanas, wild pigs and birds; the little garden patch yams, bananas, mangoes and other fruits. He was far removed from the temptations of Matachin, or other riotous market places and he saved practically all of his pay. His ambition was to get enough to return to his native isles, buy a wine-shop and settle down to a leisurely old age—though no occupation could much outdo for laziness the task of watching for the rising of the Chagres in the dry season.

THE NATIVES’ AFTERNOON TEA

Returning from the upper waters of the Chagres one reaches Gatun Lake at Gamboa where the railway bridge crosses on seven stone piers. A little above is a fluviograph station fitted with a wire cable extending across the stream and carrying a car from which an observer may take measurements of the crest of any flood. Indeed the river is watched and measured to its very sources. It long ago proved itself unfit for trust, and one who has seen it in flood time, 40 feet higher than normal, bearing on its angry, tawny bosom houses, great trees, cayucas stolen from their owners, and dead animals, sweeping away bluffs at bends and rolling great boulders along its banks, will readily understand why the builders of the Canal stationed scouts and spies throughout the Chagres territory to send ample and early warning of its coming wrath.

Leaving the Chagres, turning into Gatun Lake and directing our course away from the dam and toward the Pacific end of the Canal, we traversed a broad and placid body of water interspersed with densely wooded islands, which very soon narrows to the normal width of the Canal. In midsummer, 1913, when the author conducted his inspection, a broad dyke at Bas Obispo cut off Gatun Lake and its waters from the Canal trench, then dry, which here extends in an almost straight line, 300 feet wide, through steadily rising banks to the continental divide at Culebra. The railroad then crossed upon this dyke to the western side of the Canal and passed through several construction towns and villages, abandoned later when the Canal was filled and the railroad moved to the other side. Tourists with an eye for the spectacular used to stand on this dyke and speculate upon the thrilling sight when a huge blast of dynamite should rend the barrier, and in a mighty wave the waters of Gatun Lake should rush down the broad channel betwixt the eternal hills to make at last the long desired waterway from Orient to Occident. But unhappily Col. Goethals and his associates unsentimentally put the picturesque aside for the practical. No dynamite blast, no surging charge of waters through the cut, entered into their program. Instead with mighty siphons the water was to be lifted over the barrier and poured into the Canal for days until the two bodies of water were nearly at a level. Then by the prosaic use of floating dredges the dyke would be removed and the Canal opened from Gatun Locks to the locks at Pedro Miguel.