It is a curious fact that in the tropics where one would expect to find cooling rather than heating beverages as a rule the demand is chiefly for the “hard stuff.” The walls of the saloons, the floors of the cantinas, or native drinking places, are covered with bottles or barrels of whisky, rum, brandy and gin. Only in places frequented by the Spanish and Italians are the lighter wines often seen. The Jamaica negro is devoted to the rum of his country, and one sees him continually in the most unexpected places producing a quart bottle from some mysterious hiding place in his scanty clothing, and benevolently treating his crowd. In excess—and that is what he aims at—it makes him quarrelsome and a very fair share of the 7000 annual arrests on the Zone are due to the fortuitous combination of the two chief products of Jamaica—rum and the black. It is doubtful, however, whether the Jamaican could be kept to his work without his tipple, and it was for that reason that the unusual expedient of permitting liquor selling on a government reservation was adopted.
The Commissary branch of the Subsistence Department is a colossal business run by the government for the good of the dwellers on the Zone. It gathers together from the ends of the earth everything needful for these pampered wards of Uncle Sam, and sells its stock practically at cost price. From pins to pianos, from pigs-knuckles to pâté de foie gras you can get every article of use or luxury at the Commissary. At least you can in theory, in fact the statement needs toning down a little, for you will hear plenty of grumbling on the Zone about the scanty satisfaction derived from shopping in “that old Commissary.”
HOW THE NATIVES GATHER COCOANUTS
All the same its activities are amazing. It launders linen at prices that make the tourist who has to pay the charges of the Tivoli Laundry envy the employees their privileges. It bakes bread, cake and pies for the whole 65,000 of the working population, and does it with such nice calculation that there is never an overstock and the bread is always fresh. Everything of course is done by machinery. Kneading dough for bread and mixing cement and gravel to make concrete are merely co-ordinate tasks in the process of building the Canal and both are performed in the way to get the best results in the least time. Everything is done by wholesale, Hamburger steak is much liked on the Isthmus, so the Commissary has a neat machine which makes 500 pounds of it in a batch. That reminds me, of a hostess who preferred to make her own Hamburger steak, and so told her Jamaica cook to mince up a piece of beef. Being disquieted by the noise of chopping, she returned to the kitchen to find the cook diligently performing the appointed task with a hatchet.
Photo by Elliott
LOOKING DOWN MIRAFLORES LOCKS
In the icy depths of the cold storage plant at Cristobal, where the temperature hovers around 14 degrees, while it is averaging 96 outside, you walk through long avenues of dressed beef, broad pergolas hung with frozen chicken, ducks and game, sunken gardens of cabbage, carrots, cauliflower and other vegetable provender. You come to a spot where a light flashes fitfully from an orifice which is presently closed as a man bows his head before it. He straightens up, the light flashes and is again blotted out. You find, on closer approach, two men testing eggs by peering through them at an electric light. Betwixt them they gaze thus into the very soul of this germ of life 30,000 times a day, for thus many eggs do they handle. Yet the odds are that neither has read the answer to the riddle, “did the first hen lay the first egg, or the first egg hatch the first chicken?” Unless relieved by some such philosophical problem to occupy the mind one might think the egg tester’s job would savor of monotony.
