The enterprise was a tough one, but the result may be seen to-day in the massive ruins of the old city, a sight for sightseers, buried in the jungle some miles from the present city. For within a few hours the buccaneers attacked and slew its defenders and burned the place with fire, leaving but an empty shell, having robbed it of its treasure, excepting that which an escaping plate ship bore safely from his clutches.
It has been said in extenuation of Morgan's doings here that the place was in reality burned by the Indians and the slaves, who were animated by the most bitter hatred of the Spaniards, and were quite ready to assist the Englishmen.
The isthmus resounded for more than a century with the tramp of mules bearing gold and silver from the Pacific plate ships; the treasures of Peru, of Bolivia, the pearls of Nicoya and the isles, the gold and silver stripped from the Inca temples, the silver bars from Potosi, the silver mountain of the Andes. Along that dreadful trail the mule-trains groaned their way. It was a rough road for horsemen.
The trail became, as time went on, one of the world's greatest trade routes, under the development of the Spanish Colonies. We have seen how the great Nelson hoped to split these colonies in two by establishing a "Gibraltar" on Lake Nicaragua. A toll of human life has been paid upon this rugged path for every human movement over it. Has it not been said that for every sleeper in the first Panama railway a human being died in the terrors of construction? If it is not true, it is true that of the eight hundred Chinamen who left the Flowery Kingdom to build the line—labourers who knew nothing of the horrors that awaited them in this fever death-bed—many committed suicide. Crowds of labouring peasantry from Ireland found here, too, a more emerald grave, and hordes of negroes filled up with their poor bodies any vacant tombs.
Punishment fell upon this railway, for, according to an American writer, it degenerated until its rails "became nothing but two streaks of rust."
Another tale of Darien the fateful: Listen, ye sons of Scotia, to the story of one William Paterson, and his New Edinburgh. Not content with having founded the Bank of England, Paterson must fight the great East India Company, and with another enterprising "interloper" he got over-subscribed, a company with a capital of £600,000, and set sail for the isthmus "amid the tears and prayers" of half Scotland. The new settlement was "to hold the key of the world's commerce." "Universal free trade" with all the world was to be maintained; all differences of race and religion were to be annulled in this Utopia. Death, fever, loss, the attacks of the Spaniards and complete disaster—such was the answer of Fate to their enterprise, and of the two thousand trustful souls who left the Clyde in the closing year of the seventeenth century for this desired haven of the Spanish Main, a few hundreds alone returned to tell the tale.
Paterson's idea was in reality that of a great empire-builder. It was a magnificent scheme, and only lacked the element of success. England might have possessed another India, and in the New World. The Scotch were fully alive to the position, but the English were stupid, and lost an enormous opportunity.
The making of the Panama Canal has greatly appealed to the imagination of the world, although its triumph, in a spectacular sense, was interfered with by the rise of the Great War. Here was a wild isthmus which cut off the Atlantic from the Pacific, Europe from Asia to the west. An isthmus which, whilst it formed a barrier between two oceans, did not, nevertheless, serve as a bridge between two continents: those of North and South America. Its construction is an epic of engineering, and, be it added, of medical skill, for without the latter the former would have been of no avail. What has been picturesquely described as the "Conquest of the mosquito," also the conquest of malaria and yellow fever, enabled this work to be done. Formerly the traveller hurried fearfully from his steamer at Colon by rail across the neck to Panama, and if his journey lay beyond to his steamer at Panama, anxious to leave the deadly region as soon as were possible. Now no such anxiety marks his journey.
The fight against the natural obstacles to the work—those of climate, of inefficient labour, of mountainous cuttings, of floods, of finance and political intrigue, and all else, was brought to an end—or mainly so—in November 1913, four hundred years after Balboa's dramatic discovery of the Pacific from the "Peak in Darien"; when a vast concourse of people witnessed the great explosion that blew up the last barrier, and a small steamer, the little French steamboat Louise, which, twenty-five years before had conveyed de Lesseps to turn the first sod, passed completely, on its own keel, across from Atlantic to Pacific waters—an act of American courtesy to France.
Several lessons were learned by the construction of the Panama Canal. One was that corruption and inertia among officials will ruin all effort, as it did with the French—who, however, did very valuable work on the Canal. Another that, with modern appliances and just methods, even so stupendous a work could be carried to success, even in the face of enormous natural obstacles; that the obstacles raised by Nature are less formidable than those man raises himself.
Another lesson was in the methods of overcoming the dreadful tropical diseases of yellow fever and malaria.
The last lesson was in the treatment of labour, in this case that of the negro; a matter of much importance to all tropical lands, which may justify here a few words.
A great part of the labour employed on the Canal, in fact, the majority of it later, was that of the West Indian negro, largely from Barbadoes. But it was soon found that this labour was very inefficient. The negro would not or could not "put his back" into the work. In 1906 an American commission appointed to investigate conditions, reported upon the impossibility of concluding the job with negro labour. "Not only do they seem to be disqualified by lack of actual vitality, but their disposition to labour seems to be as frail as their bodily strength," ran the report. The negro was, in fact, roundly cursed as a lazy or incapable hound.
But some, wiser than others, thought there must be a cause below this inertia. Such, indeed, was found to be the case. It was shown that the negro either could not afford, or was too idle to prepare, proper food for himself; in short, that he was ill-nourished. A few bananas, and whatever else the difficult conditions of the isthmus afforded, formed his meals. It was then resolved that he must be properly fed and housed. A commissariat was set up, at which the negro was obliged to take his meals, and the bare cost was deducted from his wages. No profit was to be made. The system answered admirably; the actual cost was found to be only thirty cents American money, equal to about one shilling and threepence, for a day's board of good food. The result was that the negro performed entirely satisfactory labour, and he practically built the Canal.
Many writers have sung of the deeds of the Canal building, which must always furnish a thrilling story of the triumph of human genius, and we need not enter upon it here.
The Great War over, the American fleet—which had played a valuable and noble part—accomplished, in July 1919, a spectacular passage of the Canal, which brings us to-day again to realize the strategic value of the waterway. Some two hundred vessels of war, flying the Stars and Stripes, including six Dreadnoughts, embodying the American Pacific fleet, entered the eastern end of the Canal as the sun was rising in the Spanish Main. But before the orb of day had turned its "westering wheel" into the bosom of the Pacific, the great procession had passed through the Canal and was ruffling the waters of that great sea, thus accomplishing in a few hours, a passage which the battleship Oregon, during the American war with Spain in 1898, had taken nearly two weeks to make, around the South American Continent.
The Americans have fortified the Canal, but blockading would be in contravention of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty with England; and indeed it is to be hoped and believed that the United States will prove a conscientious guardian of her charge and creation. Yet the future may have much in store in this region for good or ill.
Enthusiastic descriptions of the possibility of the Canal to commerce have been written, in the shortening of distances, in the "shrinkage of the world," and there is no doubt of its great utility, which it is not, however, needful to exaggerate. Since the project was conceived and executed, the world has learned that more than the passage of armaments and argosies of merchandise are requisite for the stability and progress of mankind.
A glance now at the general life of the people of these States.[6]
In the aggregate the population numbers somewhat over five million