HOSPITAL AT BOCAS
Out of the railroad yards at Cristobal at 3:45 every morning starts the Commissary train, usually of 21 cars, 11 of which are refrigerated. Its business is to deliver to all the consumers along the 47 miles of Canal villages and camps the supplies for the day. Nineteen stores, and as many kitchens, messes and hotels, must be supplied. Ice must be delivered to each household by eight in the morning. Ice is one of the things that the employees do not get free, but though nature has no share in making it, they get it cheaper than our own people, for whom nature manufactures it gratis and a few men monopolize the supply.
Photo by Underwood & Underwood
NEW AMERICAN DOCKS AT CRISTOBAL
If one is fond of big figures the records of the Commissary Department furnish them. The bakery for example puts forth over 6,000,000 loaves of bread, 651,844 rolls and 114,134 pounds of cake annually. Panama is a clean country. Every tourist exclaims at the multitudinous companies of native women perpetually washing at the river’s brink and in the interior I never saw a native hut without quantities of wash spread out to dry. But the Commissary laundry beats native industry with a record in one year of 3,581,923 pieces laundered—and it isn’t much of a climate for “biled” shirts and starched collars either. There is a really enterprising proposition under consideration for the retention of this laundry. A ship going west would land all its laundry work at Cristobal and by the time it had made the passage of the Canal—10 hours—all would be delivered clean at Balboa via the railroad. East bound ships would send their laundry from Balboa by rail. It is an amazing climate for ice cream, however, and the Commissary supplied 110,208 gallons of that. Some other annual figures that help to complete the picture of mere size are butter, 429,267 pounds; eggs, 792,043 dozen; poultry, 560,000 pounds; flour, 320,491 pounds.
OX METHOD OF TRANSPORTATION
As I said before, the population of the Zone, fed mainly through the Commissary, numbers about 65,000. When one reads of the quantity of food needed one wonders at the skill and energy that must have been employed in our Civil War to keep armies of 300,000 and more in the field. However, in those days perhaps eggs and ice cream did not figure in the Commissariat, and we have no statistics as to poultry, though the poet laureate of Sherman’s army referred feelingly to “how the turkeys gobbled that our Commissaries found.”
