Count Ferdinand de Lesseps
Front Street
DeLesseps comes to Colón
The Lafayette steamed into Limon Bay under a scorching sun, and with all passengers crowding her rail, on the afternoon of December 30, 1879. On the Pacific Mail wharf a little brass band was playing mightily.
The welcoming ceremonies were held in the ship's salon, moments after she tied up. It was proclaimed an occasion second only to the arrival of Columbus in Limon Bay.
After dark the town blazed with Japanese lanterns, and when the final burst of a fireworks display
fell into the bay, De Lesseps came down the gangplank. Accompanied by a few friends and a small, noisy
crowd - mostly ragged black children - he walked a while along Front Street, Colón's sole thoroughfare.
The following morning he was up in time to see the tropical dawn that comes all at once. With Madame
de Lesseps he set off on an "inspection tour," their children, thrilled to be on solid ground again,
racing ahead, climbing posts and stanchions. De Lesseps, fresh in a white linen suit,
talked incessantly, concluding one remark after another with the assertinn, "The canal will be made."
The upper Chagres would be turned into the Pacific, thus ending floods in the lower valley. "The canal
will be made." At the great cut at the summit, the work of many thousands of men would be handled by
modern explosives. "The canal will be made." He was overjoyed by the morning air. Colón was a delightful
place. "The canal will be made."
Stone Church
Yet it is hard to conceive of his being anything but terribly disappointed by Colón. Seen from a
distance, from an inbound ship, the town appeared to float on the bay as if by magic. White walls and red
roofs stood out against blue water and flaming green foothills. But close up, it was a squalid shantytown
set on stilts, paint peeling. There was a stone church that the railroad's guidebook made much of but that
would have been of little interest anywhere else. A variety of saloons and stores lined the east side of
Front Street, facing the harbor. There were an icehouse, a railroad office, a large stone freight depot,
two or three seedy hotels, and the "tolerable" Washington House, a galleried white-frame affair, which,
like virtually everything else in sight, belonged to the railroad company, The railroad itself ran down
the middle of Front Street, and in a park, or what passed for a park, in front of the Washington House,
stood an ugly red-granite monument to the railroad's founders, Aspinwall, Chauncey, and Stephens. In a
nearby railroad yard there was also a bronze statue of Columbus, an Indian maiden at his side, which had
been a gift from the Empress Eugenie years before. But that was the sum total of Colón's landmarks.
Streets, barely above tide level, were unpaved and strewn from end to end with garbage, bits of broken furniture, dead animals. (One French visitor would write of walking ankle-deep in "les immondices imaginables.") Enormous dark buzzards circled interminably overhead, and the human populace, most of which was black - Jamaicans, by and large, who had been brought in to build the railroad - lived in appalling squalor. Disease and poverty, hopeless, bedrock poverty as bad as any to be seen in the Caribbean, seemed to hang in the air of back streets, heavy as the atmosphere.
Compared to Colón, wrote one French journalist, the ghettos of White Russia, the slums of Toulon or Naples, would appear models of cleanliness. There were still no proper sewers in Colón, no bathrooms. Garbage and dead cats and horses were dumped into the streets and the entire place was overrun with rats of phenomenal size. And since yellow fever was understood to be a filth disease, Colón was looked upon as its prime breeding ground.
The entire town reeked of putrefaction. There was nothing to do. It was as if a western mining camp
had been slapped together willy-nilly in the middle of an equatorial swamp, then left to molder and die.
Once, at the height of the gold rush, there had been a kind of redeeming zest to the place, and old-timers
talked of such celebrated establishments of the day as the Maison du Vieux Carré, which specialized in
French girls. Now travelers disembarking to take the train dreaded spending an hour more than necessary.
There was, however, one quite pleasant section of the town, at the northern end of the island, near a
tremendous iron lighthouse that could be seen from ten miles at sea. There the houses faced onto a white
coral beach. Neat and freshly painted, with green lawns and surrounding palms, they were the quarters
reserved for the white Americans who ran the railroad, and it was to one of them, the home of Tracy
Robinson, that de Lesseps and his family were conducted, to judge for themselves the supposed privation
of life in the American tropics. Robinson, a personable and intelligent man, had spent twenty years in
Panama. He was fascinated by the country, liked the people and the life, and he was certain, as he told
de Lesseps, that the great future of mankind was in the tropics.
French Engineers arrive in Colón
With the coming of the French, flush times began again on the Isthmus and the golden flood poured most
into Colón, as the Canal diggers made their main base of operations there, unlike the Americans who struck
at nature's fortifications all along the line, making their headquarters at Culebra about the center of
the Isthmus. But though the French failed to dig the Canal they did win popularity on the Isthmus, and
there were regretful and uncomplimentary comparisons drawn in the cafes and other meeting-places between
the thrift and calculation of the Americans, and the lavish prodigality of the French. Everything they
bought was at mining-camp prices and they adopted no such plan as the commissary system to save their
workers from the rapacity of native shopkeepers of all sorts.
Mr. Tracy Robinson, a charming chronicler of the events of a lifetime on the Isthmus, says of this
period:
"From the time that operations were well under way until the end, the state of things was like the
life at 'Red Hoss Mountain' described by Eugene Field:
'When the money flowed like likker....
With the joints all throwed wide open,
and no sheriff to demur.
'Vice flourished. Gambling of every kind and every other form of wickedness were common day and night.
The blush of shame became practically unknown."
In the United States especially, the death toll among the French would be attributed largely to moral decadence. One of the American railroad contractors, for example, would tell a congressional committee of seeing with his own eyes piles of discarded wine bottles in Colón that were as high or higher than a two-story house. Joseph Buckin Bishop, a prim New York newspaperman who was to spend a decade in Panama, wrote that the French years had been a "genunie bacchanalian orgy." Colón was a "veritable sink of iniquity....Champagne, especially, was comparatively so low in price that it 'flowed like water,' and ... the consequences were as deplorable as they were inevitable."
The most frequently quoted summation was by James Anthony Froude, the reigning English historian and biographer of the day, who declared that "in all the world there is not, perhaps, now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villany, so much foul disease, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of ninteenth-century engineering." According to Froude the place was overrun with cardsharpers and "doubtful ladies." "Everything which imagination can conceive that is ghastly and loathsome seems to be gathered into that locality...."
As to the consumption of wine there is little doubt. It was phenomenal - and for understandable reasons. The French were accustomed to wine with meals and wine happened also to be a great deal safer to drink than the local water. The bottle dumps at Colón were every bit as high as a house. The foul alley behind Front Street was actually paved with wine bottles turned bottom-side up and became famous as "Bottle Alley." Nearly a hundred years later construction workers and amateur archaeologists would be turning up French wine bottles.
Gambling was widespread, and prostitution appears to have flourished from the start. The three most
thriving industries were gambling houses, brothels, and coffin manufacturing.
Where the French did have control, the contrast was striking. Their town of Cristhope-Colomb, side by side
with Colón, was neat and clean, as different as if separated by a hundred miles. The "cottages" for white technicians
were as comfortable and as well constructed as conditions would allow. They were built near the water, along the
eastern shoreline in what was to be a new community called Christophe-Colomb (later renamed Cristobal). They were
one-story buildings, all very much alike, white with green shutters, each enclosed by verandas, and generally
there was a Yucatan hammock slung at one corner of the front veranda. Everything considered, the location was
ideal. At night, with a full moon flooding the white beach and a breeze coming in off the water, a young
newly arrived French engineer might well find Panama all that he had dreamed.
Without an architectural adornment worthy of the name, with streets of shanties, and rows of shops in
which the cheap and shoddy were the rule, the town of Colón did have a certain fascination to the idle
stroller. That arose from the throngs of its picturesque and parti-colored people who were always on the
streets. At one point you would encounter a group of children, among whom even the casual observer would
detect Spanish, Chinese, Indian and negro types pure, and varying amalgamations of all playing together in
the childish good fellowship which obliterates all racial hostilities. The Chinese were the chief business
people of the town and though they intermarried but little with the few families of the old Spanish
strain, their unions both legalized and free, with the mulattoes or negroes were innumerable. You could
see on the streets many children whose negro complexion and kinky hair combined but comically with the
almond eyes of the celestial.
Public characters thronged in Colón. A town with but sixty years of history naturally abounded in
early inhabitants. It is almost as bad as Chicago was a few years ago when citizens who had reached the
"anecdotage" would halt you at the Lake Front and pointing to that smoke-bedimmed cradle of the city's
dreamed-of future beauty would assure you that they could have bought it all for a pair of boots - but
didn't have the boots. One of the figures long pointed out on the streets of Colón was an old colored
man - an "ole nigger" in the local phrase - who had been there from the days of the alligators and the
monkeys. He worked for the Panama Railroad surveyors, the road when completed, the French and the American
Canal builders. A sense of long and veteran public service had invested him with an air of dignity rather
out of harmony with his raiment. "John Aspinwall" they called him, because Aspinwall was for a time the
name of the most regal significance on the island. The Poet of Panama immortalized him in verse thus:
"Oh, a quaint old moke, is John Aspinwall,
Who lives by the Dead House gate,
And quaint are his thoughts,
if thoughts at all
Ever lurk in his woolly pate,
For he's old as the hills is this coal-black man,
Thrice doubled with age is he,
And the days when his wanderings first began
Are shrouded in mystery."
The Americans Take Over
"It is all unspeakably loathsome," concluded a New York reporter who was among the earliest to arrive at Colón. Colón was troubling. The Negroes lived in the most appalling fashion in rotting shanties propped on stilts in a swamp, "a morass, a vast expanse of black water covered with green scum," There was no plumbing, not one sewer. The stench was like nothing in his experience; the nights were made "hideous" by the interminable din of thousands of frogs.
He described the poisonous mists rising over the Chagres River, mists quite visible from Colón in the early morning; and not wishing to appear ignorant of advanced medical theory, he wrote also of the mosquitoes. What conceivable chance, he asked, was there to make so vile a place safe for white men?
In Marie Gorgas' published reminiscences we find some of the earliest first impressions of Panama: Colón
was "unspeakably dirty," swarming with naked children, ugly, dilapidated, and terribly depressing.
Colonel William C. Gorgas
Street Before
Street After
A Short Video of
Dr. Gorgas in Colón
But conditions changed rapidly with the arrival of the Canal Commission. Colonel William C. Gorgas, in charge of sanitation during the canal construction, gave it a new system of waterworks and sewerage and drained the surrounding swamps. The City of Colón was raised, drained, sanitated; large areas raised, streets paved, the morass in the heart of the city filled in and converted into a park. Since then it never has lost nor will it lose a true international importance.
Willis J. Abbot described the town as it was in 1913:
We reach Colón where lie the docks of the Royal Mail in the early morning. To the right as we steam into Limon Bay is the long breakwater of Toro Point extending three miles into the Caribbean, the very first Atlantic outpost of the canal. For it was necessary to create here a largely articial harbor, as Limon Bay affords no safe anchorage when the fierce northers sweep gown along the coast. ln the early days of Colón, when it was the starting point of the gold seekers' trail to Panama, ships in its harbor were compelled to cut and run for the safer, though now abandoned, harbor of Porto Bello some twenty miles down the coast. That condition the great breakwater corrects.
From the ship one sees a line af low hills forming the horizon with no break or indentation to suggest that here man is cutting the narrow gate between the oceans for the commerce of the nations to pass. The town at a distance is not unprepossessing. White houses with red roofs cluster together on a flat island scarcely above the water, and along the sea front lines of cocoanut palms bend before the breeze. No other tree seems so fitly to blend with a white beach and blue sea as this palm. Its natural curves are graceful and characteristic and in a stiff breeze it bows and sways and rustles with a grace and a music all its own.
But the picturesqueness of Colón does not long survive a closer approach. The white houses are seen to be mere frame buildings of the lightest
construction which along the seafront stand out, over the water on stilts. No building of any distinction meets the eye, undess it be the new Washington Hotel, a good bit of Moorish architecture, owned and conducted by the Panama Railroad which in turn is owned by the United States. The activities of Uncle Sam as a hotel keeper on the Isthmus will be worth further attention.
The town which greets the voyager emerging from the cool recesses of the steamship freight house looks
something like the landward side of Atlantic City's famous board walk with the upper stories of the hotels sliced off. The buildings are almost without exception wood, two stories high, and with wooden galleries reaching to the curb and there supported by slender posts. It does not look foreign - merely
cheap and tawdry. Block after block the lines of business follow each other in almost unvarying sequence. A. saloon, a Chinese shop selling dry goods and curios, a kodak shop with curios, a saloon, a lottery agency, another saloon, a money-changer's booth, another saloon and so on for what seems about the hottest and smelliest half mile one ever walked. There is no "other side" to the street, for there run the tracks of the Panama rail-road, beyond them the bay, and further along lies the American town of Cristobal where there are no stores, but only the residences and work shops of Canal workers.
Between Cristobal and tinder box Colón is a wide space kept clear of houses as a fire guard. Colón's population is as mixed as the conplexions of its people. It must be admitted with regret that pure American names are most in evidence on the sideboards of its saloons, and well-equipped students of the social life of the town remark that. the American vernacular is the one usually proceeding from the lips of the professional gamblers. Merchandising is in the main in the hands of the Chinese, who compel one's admiration in the tropics by the intelligent way in which they have taken advantage of the laziness of the natives to capture for themselves the best places in the business community.
Most of the people in Colón live over their stores and other places of business, though back from the, business section are a few comfortable looking residences, and I noticed others being built on made land, as though the.beginnings of a mild "boom", were apparent. The newer houses are of concrete, as is the municipal building and chief public school. The Panama Railroad owns most of the land on
which the town stands, and to which it is practically limited, and the road is said to be encouraging the use of cement or concrete by builders - an exceedingly wise policy, as the town has suffered from repeated fires, in one of which, in 1911, ten blocks were swept away and 1200 people left homeless. The Isthmian Canal Commission maintains excellent fire-fighting forces both in Cristobal and Ancon, and when the local fire departments proved impotent to cope with the flames both of these forces were called into play, the Ancon engines and men being rushed by special train over the forty-five miles of railroad. Of course the fire was in foreign territory, but the Republic of Panama did not resent the invasion. Since that day many of the new buildings have been of concrete, but the prevailing type of architecture may be described as a modified renaissance of the mining shack.
In March, 1913, the author spent some time in Colón. Excellent meals were enjoyed in a somewhat old-fashioned frame
hotel, while directly across the way the finishing touches were being put to a new hotel, of reinforced concrete which for architectural taste and beauty of position compares well with any seashore house in the world. At the docks were ships of every nation; cables kept us in communication with all civilized capitals. Not an insect of any sort was seen, and to discover an alligator a considerable journey was necessary. The completed Panama Railroad would carry us in three hours to the Pacific, where the great water routes spread out again like a fan. In half a century man had wrought this change, and with his great canal will doubtless do more marvelous deeds in the time to come.
De Lesseps Palace
At Cristobal you would be gravely taken to see the De Lesseps Palace, a huge frame house with two wings,
now in the last stages of decrepitude and decay, but which you learn cost fabulous sums, was furnished
and decorated like a royal chateau and was the scene of bacchanalian feasts that vied with those of the
Romans in the days of Heliogabalus. At least the native Panamanian would tell you this, and if you happen
to enjoy his reminiscences in the environment of a cafe you will conclude that in starting the Canal the
French consumed enough champagne to fill it.
Statue of Columbus
The De Lesseps house stood at what was the most picturesque point in the American town of Cristobal. Before it stood a really admirable work of art, Columbus in the attitude of a protector , his extended right hand pointing toward the ocean; his other hand surrounding the waist of a young and beautiful Indian woman, who symbolized America. After the fashion of a world largely indifferent to art the nameof the sculptor has been lost, but the statue was cast in Turin, for Empress Eugenie, who gave it to the Republic of Colombia when the French took up the Canal work.
Buffeted from site to site, standing for awhile betwixt the tracks in a railroad freight yard,
the spot on which it stands is sentimentally ideal, for it overlooks the entrance to the Canal and under
the eyes of the Great Navigator, done in bronze, the ships of all the world will pass and repass as they
enter or leave the artificial strait which gives substance to the Spaniard's dream.
At one time the quarters of the Canal employees - the gold employees as those above the grade of day
laborers are called - were in one of the most beautiful streets imaginable. In a long sweeping curve from
the border line between the two towns, they extended in an unbroken row facing the restless blue waters of
the Caribbean. A broad white drive and a row of swaying cocoanut trees separated the houses from the water.
The sea here is always restless, surging in long billows and breaking in white foam upon the shore, unlike
the Pacific which is usually calm. Unlike the Pacific, too, the tide is inconsiderable. At Panama it rises
and falls from seventeen to twenty feet, and, retiring, leaves long expanses of unsightly mud flats, but
the Caribbean always plays its part in the landscape well.
Cristobal was at that time the site of the great cold storage plant of the Canal Zone, the shops of the Panama
Railroad and the storage warehouses in which were kept the supplies for the commissary stores at the
different villages along the line of the Canal. It possessed a fine fire fighting force, a Y. M. C. A.
club, a commissary hotel, and along the water front of Colón proper, were the hospital buildings erected
by the French but still maintained. Many of the edifices extended out over the water and the constant
breeze ever blowing through their wide netted balconies would seem to be the most efficient of allies in
the fight against disease, There was less distinct separation between the native and the American towns at
this end of the railroad than at Panama-Ancon. This was largely due to the fact that a great part of the
site of Colón was owned by the Panama Railroad, which in turn was owned by the United States, so that the
activities of the United States government extend into the native town more than at Panama. In the latter
city the hotel, the hospital and the commissary were all on American or Canal Zone soil - at Colón they
were within the sovereignty of the Republic of Panama.
