Panama fever (5 page)

With the conquest of the Incas, the Panama Isthmus became the overland route for the treasure pouring back to Europe, whose value dwarfed anything that could have come from the Indies. Once a year a grand fleet would arrive at the Pacific terminus of the trail and unload the bullion, which would be transferred across the Isthmus to waiting ships at Nombre de Dios. One witness recounted that he saw twelve hundred muleloads of precious metal leave Panama City in 1550. The “Royal Road” was now the most important thoroughfare in the Spanish empire, and the Isthmus the key to the Spanish commercial and defense system in the New World. Panama City quickly became one of the three richest centers in the Americas, outshone only by Lima and Mexico City. At the other end of the trail, Nombre de Dios grew into an important port, and the site of an annual trade fair of dazzling opulence, where European goods were bought for transshipment throughout Spanish America. The experience of visiting the fair was described by a traveling Englishman, Thomas Gage, as highly risky: it was “an unhealthy place … subject to breed fevers … an open grave.” But, he wrote, “I dare boldly say and avouch, that in the world there is no greater fare.”

The great wealth and strategic importance of Panama led to numerous attacks from Spain's enemies. In 1572, Francis Drake carried back to Plymouth an enormous pile of looted silver; he returned twenty years later to attempt to capture the Isthmus for England, only to die of dysentery off Nombre de Dios. The infamous buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan, under orders from the British governor of Jamaica, sacked Panama City in 1671, causing a new city to be built in a more secure location nearby. He reportedly returned to Jamaica with over £70,000 in loot.

Other arrivals came intending to stay. The famous “Darién Disaster,” the calamitous effort at the beginning of the eighteenth century to establish a Scottish colony in Panama, has many parallels with de Lesseps's French adventure nearly two hundred years later. Each was financed by a host of small investors in their own countries and motivated by idealism, patriotism, and naïveté, as well as by the chance to make a fast buck. Both had leaders with more front than particular expertise. William Paterson was born in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, in 1658, and as a young man had traveled, as part missionary, part buccaneer, to the West Indies. Returning to England, he had made his fortune in business and had become a “projector,” a promoter of speculative moneymaking schemes. But ever since his sojourn in the Caribbean, Paterson had been in the grip of a “Great Idea,” the venture to cap everything. He was not the first, nor would he be the last, to fall for the “lure of the Isthmus.” It was so obvious. If ports could be established on both coasts, cargoes could be transferred over the narrow strip of land, saving ships the long and dangerous voyage around Cape Horn. News from British coastal raiders had identified a spot where there was “no mountain range at all” and where “broad, low valleys” extended from coast to coast. It was perfect enough to envisage not just a road, but, in time, a waterway. Paterson, with more than a few ideas before his time, intended to welcome traders from all over the world to the new settlements, regardless of race or creed. It would be a truly global entrepôt, to rival any in the world, and whoever controlled it, proclaimed the Scot, would possess “the Gates to the Pacific and the keys to the Universe.” “Do but open these doors,” said Paterson, “and trade will increase trade, and money will beget money.”

The Scottish Parliament backed the scheme in spite of warnings that Paterson “talks too much and raises people's expectations,” but then money raised in England was withdrawn after pressure from vested interests such as the East India Company. However, a wave of patriotic indignation in Scotland saw money pouring in from all quarters and all levels of society. As for the French public in the 1880s, for Scottish investors the scheme was a means of reestablishing national pride. From 1,400 individuals, including craftsmen and servants, £400,000 was quickly raised, about half the country's available capital. It was a colossal risk for so much of the national silver.

Like so many of the subsequent Panama schemes, it was doomed from the start. As soon as the 1,200 Scotsmen landed in the New World, naming their anchorage Caledonia Bay, fierce protests from English merchants and the Spanish led to an embargo on the colony. For a settlement established as a trading station, it was a fatal blow.

Everything started to unravel. The death rate from fever rose steadily. It soon emerged that far too many of the settlers were “gentlemen,” with neither the inclination nor the strength for the hard labor required for starting the settlement. The “valleys” “extending coast to coast” turned out to be a fiction, and no realistic attempt was made to open up an overland route to the Pacific as planned. The only trading partners were the local Indians, who had no use for the heavy cloth and 1,500 English-language Bibles the settlers had brought with them as their start-up stock. Scarcity of food brought increasing weakness, disease, and demoralization; among the first to die was Paterson's wife. Within six months, nearly four hundred settlers had perished of fever or starvation. The onset of the rainy season in May, and the concurrent further worsening of living conditions, was the final straw.

On June 20, 1699, “Being starved and abandoned by the world,” as one contemporary letter from Panama described it, the Scots abandoned Panama and sailed for New York, en route to Europe. Only half of the weakened settlers were still alive at the end of the journey The survivors, described by an eyewitness in New York as looking “rather like Skelets than men, being starved,” barely numbered enough to fill one ship on the cross-Atlantic voyage back home. Two further expeditions, dispatched from Edinburgh before news had arrived of what had happened, met the same fate, the last being driven away by local Spanish forces.

In all, Paterson's “Great Idea” cost over two thousand lives and the precious savings of an entire nation. As de Lesseps and many others would discover, the Isthmus could be a graveyard of men, dreams, and reputations.

The “Darién Disaster” hastened the coming of the Act of Union that dissolved the Scottish Parliament. Seeing the futility of trying to compete with England, and stripped of capital from the disaster, Scotland was merged into Great Britain in 1707, an early but spectacular casualty of Panama Fever.

egardless of their abandonment of the Scots, the English Navy continued to flex its muscles in the region, and frequent plans were laid to seize the Isthmus. To take Panama, it was believed, would end Spanish rule in the Americas, and open up the Pacific to English trade. In 1739, during a period of official war with Spain, the English admiral Edward Vernon, leading six ships of the line and nearly three thousand men, took the Caribbean port of Portobelo and destroyed its defenses, although he was unable to cross the Isthmus to seize Panama City itself.

Confronted by growing threats on the Caribbean side of the Isthmus, in 1748 the bullion ships abandoned the Panama route and started sailing around Cape Horn. Thus Panama City lost her place as the treasure-house of the New World. Soon afterward, the famous fair declined and ceased. Panama was attached to the viceroyalty of New Granada based in Bogotá, beginning a century and a half of struggle on the part of the Panamanians to regain their autonomy.

During the rest of the eighteenth century Panama, tied to a fast-fading empire, shared her colonial masters’ steep decline. Weakened by incessant European warfare, falling birth rates, and intermittent bankruptcy, Spain gave way to the new aggressive mercantile and maritime powers of northern Europe. However, economic decline on the Isthmus was not matched by a falling off of geopolitical or military importance. Spain's new rivals in the Caribbean, now a key arena of international conflict, were more interested than ever in the strategic value of the Isthmus.

In 1735 the French government had sent an astronomer through Central America on a scientific expedition to investigate the possibility of a trans-Isthmian canal. He had reported back in 1740 to the French Academy of Science advocating a canal at Nicaragua, making use of the San Juan River that flowed from Lake Nicaragua to the Caribbean coast. In the same year, however, the British were establishing control over a section of the Nicaraguan coast through an alliance with the Mosquito Indians, who refused to recognize Spanish sovereignty. It was not a coincidence that this gave the British control over the mouth of the San Juan River, and therefore the Atlantic terminus of any future Nicaraguan canal. But France still made the running—over the next twenty years no fewer than four French trans-Isthmian canal proposals were made.

With the independence of Gran Colombia,
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officially declared on November 28, 1821, the dead hand of Spanish rule was at last removed, and a major barrier to the construction of a canal disappeared at the same time. Furthermore, there was now a new emerging power to the north beginning to take a keen interest in Central American affairs.

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Gran Colombia consisted of modern-day Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. This federation dissolved in 1830, with the latter two becoming independent and the remainder renamed the Republic of New Granada, which became Colombia in 1863.

CHAPTER TWO

RIVALRY AND STALEMATE

Even in the midst of the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, then the United Colonies’ representative in Paris, became gripped by the idea of a trans-Isthmian canal. In 1781 he printed on his own press a pamphlet written by a French peasant called Pierre-André Gargaz, which advocated the cutting of canals at Panama and Suez. This, Gargaz proposed, would bring about world peace through enhanced commerce and communication. When Thomas Jefferson became the U.S. ambassador to France, he, too, became interested in a canal at Panama. Jefferson saw expansion southward as the natural destiny of the United States and was intrigued by rumors, in fact untrue, that there had been recent Spanish surveys of a canal route at Panama. “I am assured… a canal appeared very practicable,” he wrote in 1788 to a fellow U.S. diplomat in Madrid, “and that the idea was suppressed for political reasons.”

Before independence from Spain, revolutionaries in Latin America had looked to the United States and Britain as their natural allies. When freedom from Spanish rule, having been achieved, was subse-quently threatened by the French-led Holy Alliance, British foreign secretary George Canning contacted the leadership of the United States to ask them to make a joint declaration warning of their shared opposition to the reconquest plans. But President Monroe was persuaded to make a statement purely on behalf of the United States. His famous doctrine, delivered in a message to Congress on December 2, 1823, is of huge importance to the Panama Canal story: “The American continents,” he announced, “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European Powers.”

In the meantime, impetus for a trans-Isthmian canal had received a major boost with the publication of “A Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain” in 1811. Its author, the German Alexander von Humboldt, had recently explored the regions of South and Central America on an epic journey that thrilled readers all over the world. Although he never actually visited any of the sites, he identified five possible Central American routes for a trans-Isthmian canal. Going from north to south, they were the narrowing of Mexico at Tehuan-tepec; in Nicaragua, using the giant inland lake; at Panama; and two using the Atrato River in modern-day northern Colombia. Hum-boldt's book was widely read and admired, and can be seen as the inspiration for all the many subsequent surveys of the Isthmus looking for the best route for a canal. The account was full of errors—he calculated the height of the Continental Divide in Panama at three times its correct elevation—but it was a hugely exciting work nonetheless. Humboldt reckoned a canal was possible and, furthermore, “would immortalise a government occupied with the interests of humanity.”