Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

SALIENT ANGLE OF LANDWARD WALL

Indeed what remains of the walls of Panama is impressive to American eyes that, accustomed to the peace and newness of our own towns, always rejoice in seeing the relics of the time when every city was a walled camp. Ruins and the remnants of by-gone days of battle are now and will become increasingly objects of human interest. For in the centuries to come our present edifices of iron sheathed with slabs of stone or brick will disintegrate into rust and clay, while as for the scenes of our most glorious battles they remain even today as barely discernible lines of earthworks. Gone is the day of turreted castles, frowning walls, bastions, ravelins and donjon keeps.

It is little wonder that even the remnants of Panama’s wall are impressive. The new city was decreed by the Queen of Spain in 1672, or about a year after Morgan had despoiled and destroyed Old Panama. The site was chosen largely because of the opportunity it afforded for defense, and the good Bishop had scarcely selected the site for the Cathedral when the military officials began staking out the line of the walls. Though almost 250 years have since passed a great part of these fortifications is still intact, and the plan of the whole is still easily traceable amid the narrow streets of the crowded little city. Most notable of the sections still standing is the sea wall, sometimes called Las Bovedas, from which on the one hand one looks down on the inmates of the flowery little Chiriqui Prison, and on the other out to sea—past the shallow harbor with its army of pelicans, past the tossing little native fishing and market boats, past the long Balboa fill where the Canal builders have thrown a mountain into the sea and made a vast plain, and so on to the three little islands, rising craggy from the ocean where the Great Republic of the North is mounting the cannon that shall guard the entrance of the Canal from any invader. Very different from the old Spanish fort of the 17th century are these military works of the 20th and not nearly so picturesque. Such as they are must be left to the imagination, for the military authorities rigidly bar the camera from the post.

Photo by Gause

BOYS SKATING ON SEA WALL

The original city stood on a peninsula, and three sides of this were bounded by the sea wall, rising from about high water mark to a height of from twenty to thirty feet. About half way between the present plazas of the Cathedral and Santa Ana the wall turned inward with a great frowning bastion at each corner and crossed the Isthmus. A moat was dug on its landward side, shutting off all communication with the mainland save over the drawbridge and through the sally-port on the line of the Avenida Centrale. With drawbridge up and sally-port closed the old town was effectually shut off from attack by land, while its guns on the landward wall effectually commanded the broad plain on which now stands the upper part of the town, and the declivities of Ancon Hill where now are the buildings of the Zone hospital and the Tivoli Hotel.

VAULTS IN THE PANAMA CEMETERY
The small sepulchres are rented for a specified time, usually three years. Unless the lease is then renewed the bones of the tenant are cast out into a common pile.

A good bit of construction and of military engineering was the wall of Panama—our own engineers on the Canal have done no better. Round the corner from La Mercedes Church a salient bastion crops out among fragile frame tenements and jerry-built structures. The angle is as sharp as though the storms of two and a half centuries had not broken over it. Climb it and you will find the top level, grassy, and broad enough for a tennis court full thirty feet above the level of the town. The construction was not unlike that of the center walls of the locks designed by the best American engineers. Two parallel walls of masonry were built, about forty to fifty feet apart and the space between filled in with dirt, packed solidly. On this part of the wall were no bomb proofs, chambers or dungeons. The guns were mounted en barbette, on the very top of the wall and discharged through embrasures in the parapet. Rather let it be said that they were to have been fired, for the new Panama was built after the plague of the pirates had passed and the bane of the buccaneers was abated. No foe ever assaulted the city from its landward side. In the frequent revolutions the contending parties were already within the town and did their fighting in its streets, the old walls serving no more useful purpose than the ropes which define a prize ring. Only the sea-wall has heard the thunder of cannon in deadly conflict. There during the brief revolution which gave the United States the whip hand in Panama a Colombian gunboat did indeed make a pretense of shelling the city, but was driven away by machine guns mounted on the wall.