Panama fever (17 page)

The party went ashore, and at the railway station were met by Gaston Blanchet. “He was tall,” writes Cermoise, “with an energetic look about him.” He seemed straightforward and kind. Blanchet had a list of his new arrivals, but when he went through it he found that most of the men were not what he had been expecting. Either through bureaucratic mix-ups, or because those applying to work in Panama had lied about their qualifications, Cermoise and a friend he had made on the voyage called Montcenaux turned out to be the only two qualified engineers in the entire group. Blanchet was furious.

Nonetheless, squeezed in amidst sacks of rice and other provisions, the group traveled on the train to Panama City. Cermoise describes the low-lying marshy land behind Colón, continuing through Gatún, Bohío Soldado, and Buena-Vista, native villages along the line made up of huts “built of bamboos thatched with palms or oleanders.” After Gorgona there was a gradual rise up to Matachín, where the short, limp vegetation gave way to a taller and more solid mass of green. The railroad was single track, and at Matachín they had to wait on a siding for the train coming in the opposite direction to pass. They had time to disembark, and were offered an array of provisions including water that was “twenty-five degrees [centigrade] in the shade,” and hard-boiled lizard and iguana eggs. Even more daunting was their first look at the jungle close up. The forest here reached right to the edge of the line. It seemed utterly impenetrable, a “horrifying tangle of trees, a wall of creepers.” At last on the move again, they climbed further, to the top of the Continental Divide. At Emperador they saw a gang drilling for rock samples, the first signs of canal work in progress. Then they descended, the railtrack taking alarmingly tight curves down the slope to the Río Grande Valley and Panama City. That evening Cermoise was introduced to Armand Reclus. To Cermoise he was already a legend, having been involved in the canal project from the earliest surveying days. The
Agent Supérieur
welcomed him warmly.

Reclus's first priority in these early months was to secure sufficient roofs to protect workers and machinery from the rains, due at the beginning of May. Time was of the essence. Within a week of the arrival of the first French engineers, Colón had been transformed into a busy port. A new wharf was speedily constructed, and ships started docking every day carrying prefabricated wooden buildings from New Orleans and countless railway sleepers and rails. At the same time, all sorts of machinery started arriving from the United States and Europe: drills, locomotives, wagons of all types, dredges, barges, steam shovels, and cranes. All were transported in bits and had to be reassembled.

Louis Verbrugghe was now in charge of recruitment, a job in which he had local experience running his family's plantations in Colombia. The initial workers were from nearby—from Darién, Cartagena, or from the Jamaican community left over from the construction of the railroad. They were set to work expanding Colón's port facilities and assembling buildings—machine shops, a sawmill, wooden cottages for the white technicians and larger barracks for the workers. The Grand Hotel in Panama City was purchased by the Company and refurbished as its headquarters. Along the line of the railway the scattering of native villages were to be transformed. At Emperador a huge clearing was made for a work camp. Outside Gatún on the Chagres a new settlement, grandly called Lesseps City, was to be established.

After a week or so to acclimatize, Henri Cermoise reported to Blanchet to start work. Blanchet outlined the progress so far. The initial party of engineers, he said, had found much of the proposed canal line covered by impenetrable virgin forest. While the general route was known—which valleys the canal would follow—details such as where the axis of the canal passed from one valley to another were still to be determined. In addition there was much drilling to be done to discover the type of rock or soil that would have to be removed. Therefore all of the engineers were to be employed either in surveying and taking soundings along the axis of the canal, or in the central office collating the reports as they came in from the field. Blanchet offered Cermoise the choice of work: “I hadn't come to Panama to be stuck in a study again,” he wrote. “The idea of the virgin forest, with tigers, crocodiles swirled round in my head; the life of a pioneer, penetrating into the unexplored depths of this isthmus was an irresistible temptation.” The next day, still with his friend from the boat over, Montcenaux, he set off for Gamboa.

This is where the Chagres River, what Cermoise called the “implacable enemy of our great enterprise,” met the line of the canal at right angles. From Gamboa through to Barbacoas, the river followed the same route as the planned waterway. While other work parties set about clearing a 50-meter-wide strip along the line of the canal and began to take detailed measurements, it fell to Cermoise and Montcenaux to survey the site of the huge dam planned to regulate the flow of the river at Gamboa. Leaving the train at Matachín, the two men were punted upriver in a hollowed-out canoe. Twenty minutes later they arrived at Gamboa and took possession of the two huts, one for “chiefs” and one for the thirty or so workers, which constituted the camp already established. There they met a Belgian, Blasert, a veteran of the North American West, who was acting as quartermaster and administrator of the work camp. Cermoise found him an impressive figure. “He laughed at the climate, the snakes and at Yellow Fever … he considered himself invulnerable.” Blasert had even brought his wife and ten-year-old daughter with him to the camp. The latter “passed her days à
vagabonder
barefoot and bare-headed” around the camp.

It was immediately apparent to Cermoise that this work would have “nothing in common with what one does in Europe … When we saw the thick forest which covered the mountains we were thoroughly daunted.” The first task was to begin clearing pathways through the jungle toward those summits that seemed the highest. The plan was for the crucial dam to be constructed between two hills, each about 250 meters high, and some 500 meters apart. In Europe, comments Cermoise, both could have been surveyed in a morning. But here in the tropical jungle it was another matter altogether. The jungle was so thickly matted that one could see only a few yards in any direction, hopeless for taking measurements. The heat and humidity, like “a steam bath,” sapped the strength, making legs and arms as heavy as stone. The narrow pathways gradually cleared in the jungle were “suffocating [as] the high branches met each other overhead, forming a vault which kept out the light and the air.”

Most of the workers were local mulattoes, who were instinctively hostile toward Europeans, and to taking commands, often replying, Cermoise notes, with the declaration, “I am a free man.” They had to be handled with great tact, and at one point the Europeans, fearing a mutiny, took to carrying arms and guarding their hut by night. On the whole, however, Cermoise is generous in his praise for his workers. “In spite of the faults, the Colombians… did us great service with the clearing.” They knew the forest, and were experts with their machetes. “Bamboos, creepers, even trees fell before them like hail.” Sometimes, however, the party would meet a colossal tree that, because of the hardness of its wood, would take a whole day to cut down by ax. Progress was slow.

Few animals, apart from the odd parrot, were encountered in the jungle. However, there were plenty of snakes. More than a hundred had been killed during the clearing of the space for the camp alone. The locals seemed to be adept at dispatching them with a single machete blow, but the clearing still required constant alertness as huge specimens could fall on the men from branches above their heads. Most feared were the coral snake and the
mapana
, otherwise known as a bushmaster. The coral snake is quite small, some twenty-four inches long, and brightly colored with black, yellow, and red bands. It was most usually encountered in the early morning or at dusk. Its bite contains a neurotoxic venom that attacks the nervous system and is frequently fatal. The bushmaster is much larger, up to ten feet long, with enormous fangs that cling to the victim the better to inject its venom, which is hemotoxic, killing by destroying red blood cells, causing internal bleeding and rapid tissue and organ degeneration.

These snakes soon became attracted to the camp, or more exactly to the vermin that attacked the party's stores and feasted on their waste. Great care had to be taken by the quartermaster, Blasert, when fetching provisions from their storehouse. The Blasert family shared the single officers’ hut with Cermoise, Montcenaux, and a Colombian translator, Jeronimo. All slept in hammocks suspended in the corners. Madame Blasert was heavily pregnant, and the Frenchmen urged her to return to Panama City, but she and her husband insisted there was plenty of time. Soon after Cermoise's arrival, however, she went into labor. With the assistance of an “ancient black crone,” she successfully gave birth in the tiny hut to a second daughter. All the while the two young French engineers tried to sleep in their hammocks, “smoking cigarettes when the din became too loud.”

The team of Europeans became very close, and Cermoise enjoyed the challenges of the work, despite the privations. Everyone got stomach illnesses from drinking the river water, and fevers came and went regularly. For the Europeans, this could prostrate them for days, although, Cermoise notes, the locals, while just as susceptible, seemed to be able to recover after only a few hours. Vampire bats and tarantulas, which took to climbing down the ropes of their hammocks, tormented them at night. The jungle also teemed with ticks and
niguas
, small insects that would burrow under the skin to lay their eggs, threatening to cause gangrene. Evenings would be spent digging them out of each other.

At night, the jungle came to life. “Above all, there was an invasion of insects,” Cermoise wrote. “With each step, one's foot crushed hundreds of them; with each movement of the hand, one picked up a fistful, and with each nod, one's face brushed swirls of them flying in the darkness. One breathed them in, as one went along! Moreover, the flame of a lamp was extinguished within minutes under the heaps of their small corpses … a monstrous buzzing filled the forest and rose all the way to the sky, while in this clear tropical night the huge trees… flamed with millions of fireflies.”

t the end of April, just before the rains were due, Reclus carried out a tour of inspection. At Colón, he was pleased to see a great deal of activity. Jamaican workers were busy creating new port space by filling in the marshes to the southwest of town. Nevertheless, such was the volume of material being unloaded daily that there was considerable confusion. Just outside Colón at Monkey Hill could be seen the first actual excavation in progress, where rocks and earth were being dug out to provide the filler for the marshes below. This had generated great excitement, and was the destination for American visitors curious to see the French actually at work on their great project. At Gatún, Lesseps City was well established, with wharves for unloading from the river, and adequate shelters for the workers. Reclus inspected other work camps at Emperador and Culebra, and at La Boca, the Pacific terminus of the canal, new wharves had been constructed and a railway line laid to nearby Panama City.

But, as he explained in his report to the Company in Paris, there were great difficulties as well, many of which, indeed, would also be encountered in the early years of the American project. The first criticism that Reclus made was leveled at the choice of men. The executives and technicians chosen and sent from Europe by Couvreux were, he said, both insufficient in number and, above all, mediocre in quality. On April 30, Reclus wrote from the Grand Hotel to Charles de Lesseps in Paris that the contractors seemed to be sending over men who “would be accepted nowhere—people who have dabbled all over and have never done anything well—nutters, drunks, incompetents etc. They send us traveling salesmen for mechanics, for blacksmiths men who've never been behind a forge.” Cermoise's group, it seems, had been pretty typical. In the terminal cities and the camps, Reclus wrote in the same report, he had seen far too much liquor, both purchased and homemade, as well as endemic gambling with dice and cards. All combined to produce frequent violent disputes.