NEGRO QUARTERS AT CRISTOBAL
The Jamaica negroes frequently elect to live in the shacks rather than the commission barracks
After all, however, the two big hotels are the least of the tasks imposed on the Subsistence Department. The string of Commission hotels, 18 in all, serve about 200,000 meals monthly. There are also 17 messes for European laborers who pay 40 cents per ration of three meals a day. Sixteen kitchens serve the West India laborers who get three meals for 27 cents. About 100,000 meals of this sort are served monthly. Receipts and expenditures for the line hotels, messes and kitchens are very nicely adjusted. The Official Handbook puts receipts at about $105,000 a month; expenditures, $104,500. The Tivoli Hotel earns a profit, but the Washington Hotel, being newly built, had not at the time of publication of this book made a financial report.
As I have noted, the hotels are not open to all sorts and conditions of men. Those which I have described are established for the use of gold employees only. Different methods had to be adopted in providing lodging and eating places for the more than 30,000 silver employees, most of whom belong to the unskilled labor class. About 25,000 of the silver employees are West Indians, mainly from Jamaica or the Barbados, though some French are found. A very few Chinese are employed. In 1906 Engineer Stevens advertised for 2500 Chinese coolies, and planned to take 15,000 if they offered themselves, but there was no considerable response. Perhaps the story of the unhappy Chinamen who destroyed themselves during the French régime rather than live on the Isthmus may have been told in the Flowery Kingdom and deterred others from coming. But few Japanese laborers are enrolled, which is the more strange when the part they took in railroad building in the Pacific northwest is remembered.
Photo by Underwood & Underwood
LABOR TRAIN AT ANCON
In all forty nationalities and eighty-five geographical subdivisions were noted in the census of 1912. Greenland is missing, but if we amend the hymn to “From Iceland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand,” it will fit the situation. When work was busiest the West Indian laborers were paid 10 cents an hour, for an eight-hour day, except in the case of those doing special work who got 16 and 20 cents. The next higher type of manual labor, largely composed of Spaniards, drew 20 cents. Artisans received from 16 to 44 cents an hour. In figuring the cost of work it was the custom of the engineers to reckon the West Indian labor as only 33 per cent as efficient as American labor. That is to say, $3 paid to a Jamaican produced no greater results than $1 paid to an American. Reckoned by results therefore, the prices paid for native labor were high.
NEGRO SLEEPING QUARTERS
All extra clothing etc., is piled on shelf above. The floor is flushed daily
Quarters and a Commissary service were of course provided for the silver employees. Their quarters were as a rule huge barracks, though many of the natives and West Indians spurn the free quarters provided by the Commission and make their homes in shacks of their own. This is particularly the case with those who are married, or living in the free unions not uncommon among the Jamaica negroes. The visitor who saw first the trim and really attractive houses and bachelor quarters assigned to the gold employees could hardly avoid a certain revulsion of opinion as to the sweetness and light of Isthmian life when he wandered into the negro quarters across the railroad in front of the Tivoli Hotel at Ancon, or in some of the back streets of Empire or Gorgona. The best kept barracks for silver employees were at Cristobal, but even there the restlessness and independence of the Jamaicans were so great that many moved across into the frame rookeries of the native town of Colon.