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From stereograph, copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York

THE CITY OF PANAMA, CAPITAL OF THE NEW REPUBLIC AND ITS HARBOUR, LOOKING SOUTH-EAST
OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN

CHAPTER XIV

PANAMA—FEVER-HAUNTED ISTHMUS OF THE DEAD

Like stout Cortez when with eagle eye
He stared at the Pacific; and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surprise,
Silent upon a peak in Darien.

-Keats.

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ACCORDING to tradition, von Moltke was aroused from a sound sleep in the middle of the night to be told that France had declared war on Germany. "In the right hand top drawer of the middle cabinet,' the great strategist remarked, as he turned over and finished his sleep, and his informant went to the place indicated and found all the plans for the invasion of France. When Secretary Hay was told that the revolution had broken out in Panama, all he did was to go to the proper cabinet and draw out the portfolio labelled "Panama" and tell his subordinates to read carefully and follow instructions. I have no sympathy for Colombia. The clique at Bogotà, the capital of the state, who controlled affairs, were out for "graft," to make all they could out of the canal concessions. Colombia in the game held the winning hand, but Uncle Sam, covering the lady with a six-shooter, cleaned the table, and that's the whole case in a nutshell.

The morning I arrived in Panama the temperature was that of a forcing-house, 93° in the shade.

Built on a low-lying neck of land, baked on the surface during the dry season by a sun whose vertical rays are scorching beams of heat, and deluged in the rainy season by downfalls of torrid liquid, Panama is the most unattractive city I have ever entered. The streets are narrow and unclean, lined with small houses made of infinitely light material, built for a mockery of coolness and shade, and about them, over them, and around them everywhere are growing banks of green, the most verdant, dense and rank green the eye ever beheld. Of sanitary arrangements there seemed to be none. Dirt of every kind lies about freely, to be swept away or left to putrify as fate may direct. The town has between twenty-five and thirty thousand people, and is never free from pestilence or plague of some kind. It is shunned by cooling breezes and its atmosphere is charged with the dense, overpowering vapour of tropical vegetation. Thousands of people, men and women, are moping about from morning till night, drinking, dying, always drinking and dying, and there seems to be no help for it.

In the days of old it was famous for wealth and was sacked by Morgan, the buccaneer, and by Daniels, the pirate, and in those days was an asylum for cut-throats, freebooters, pirates, and black, brown and white criminals who fled here for a safe anchorage. Panama City, from its earliest settlement, has been, and is, the dark and noisesome sepulchre of all ambition and heroism, the Nemesis of De Lesseps, and its canal will be the

toughest, roughest, and rankest proposition ever undertaken by the Washington government since the Civil War. The houses and gardens of the better class are to the north of the city. Here the streets are broader and are planted with trees for shade, each house having a garden of its own with palms and creepers and a profusion of tropical flowers. Many of them are cool, airy habitations with open doors and windows, overhanging porticos and rooms into which a stray breeze may enter, but no sun. The lawns are planted in mangoes, oranges, papaws, and bread-fruit-trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. The borders of one of these lawns was blazing with varieties of the single hibiscus, crimson, pink and fawn colour, the largest I had ever seen.

I came overland from Colon on the Atlantic to this city by the Panama railroad. The iron road bridging the isthmus is forty-seven miles in length, with twenty-four stations and signal platforms. The fare for the forty-seven miles is ten dollars, and an excess of forty pounds of baggage is paid for at the rate of ten cents a pound. The Panama road is a bonanza, and its shares are so valuable that they are not listed on the market.

At Panama the company has constructed a huge dock, which, with its warehouses, cost three hundred thousand dollars. The road was begun in 1851, and it is a common saying in this city and Colon that for every sleeper or tie on the road a human life was sacrificed. This, no doubt, is an exagger

ation, but one thing is certain, the company never published a list of the number who perished in the construction of the road. The Irish labourers, more exposed by reason of their exuberance of spirit and the richness of their blood, were almost exterminated, till the agents of the company at New York and New Orleans refused to forward Irish or Scottish labourers to the isthmus. Then negroes were imported in thousands from the West Indies, but though immune to yellow fever, they fell victims to the putrid water and the blazing sun. Then Chinese coolies were tried, and they died as fish die out of water. Many of them committed suicide, others died in paroxysms of chagres fever, and the rest, frightened, broken in spirit, and discouraged, returned home. The line of the railway, and Panama in particular, is a huge cemetery.

Here

This city is teeming with weird romance. the pirates sold their plunder, exacted tribute, fought desperate duels and squandered the robber gains in riot and gambling. I passed over the plazuela where Johnny-crows picked the pirates' bones, and where to-day little children with chocolate-coloured faces and dark brown eyes stare timidly and curiously at the blue-eyed and fair-haired intruder from beyond the sea. To all young Canadians who may be tempted by alluring promises to come here when the Americans begin work on the canal, I say, stay away; but if you must come, engage in the best business the place affords start a coffin factory,

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