SANITARY OFFICE, BOCAS DEL TORO
This Yankee enterprise has erected and maintains at its own expense many of the lighthouses which serve its own great fleet and the ships of all the world. It has dredged new channels and marked them with buoys. It has installed along the Central and South American coasts a wireless telegraph service of the highest power and efficiency. It has constructed hundreds of miles of public roads, maintains public schools, and in other ways renders at its own expense the services which are presumed to fall on governments. The American financiers associated with it are now pushing to completion the Pan-American railroad which soon will connect New York with Panama by an all-rail route, and thus realize what once was esteemed an impractical dream.
But it is the United Fruit Company’s activities in Panama only that are pertinent to this book. They demonstrate strikingly how readily one natural opportunity afforded by this land responded to the call of systematic effort, and there are a dozen products beside the banana which might thus be exploited.
A PILE OF REJECTED BANANAS
The fruit is thrown out by the company’s inspectors for scarcely visible flaws
On the Atlantic coast, only a night’s sail from Colon, is the port of Bocas del Toro (The Mouths of the Bull), a town of about 9000 inhabitants, built and largely maintained by the banana trade. Here is the largest and most beautiful natural harbor in the American tropics, and here some day will be established a winter resort to which will flock people from all parts of the world. Almirante Bay and the Chiriqui Lagoon extend thirty or forty miles, dotted with thousands of islands decked with tropical verdure, and flanked to the north and west by superb mountain ranges with peaks of from seven to ten thousand feet in height.
A PERFECT BUNCH OF BANANAS
The towns of Bocas del Toro and Almirante are maintained almost entirely by the banana trade. Other companies than the United Fruit raise and buy bananas here, but it was the initiative of the leading company which by systematic work put the prosperity of this section on a firm basis. Lands that a few years ago were miasmatic swamps are now improved and planted with bananas. Over 4,000,000 bunches were exported from this plantation in 1911, and 35,000 acres are under cultivation there. A narrow gauge railway carries bananas exclusively. The great white steamships sail almost daily carrying away little except bananas. The money spent over the counters of the stores in Bocas del Toro comes from natives who have no way of getting money except by raising bananas and selling them, mostly to the United Fruit Company. It has its competitors, but it invented the business and has brought it to its highest development. At this Panama town, and for that matter in the other territories it controls, the company has established and enforces the sanitary reforms which Col. Gorgas applied so effectively in Colon and Panama. Its officials proudly claim that they were the pioneers in inventing and applying the methods which have conquered tropical diseases. At Bocas del Toro the company maintains a hospital which lacks nothing of the equipment of the Ancon Hospital, though of course not so large. It has successfully adopted the commissary system established on the Canal Zone. Labor has always been the troublesome factor in industrial enterprises in Central America. The Fruit Company has joined with the Isthmian Commission in the systematic endeavor to keep labor contented and therefore efficient.