TO PANAMA
AND BACK

THE RECORD OF AN EXPERIENCE

BY

HENRY T. BYFORD, M. D.

W. B. CONKEY COMPANY

CHICAGO

Copyright, 1908,
BY
Henry T. Byford, M. D.

DEDICATED
to the
Panama Canal Commissioners,
who invited the President of the United States
to run down and see them dig the Canal
while he waited;
and to the President,
who went to the Canal and found them asleep,
and didn’t wait until it was dug.

MAP OF PANAMA
(click image to enlarge)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

When I made up my mind to go to Panama, I could find no guide book. I had to depend for information upon the advertising matter of the United Fruit Company, and upon the experience of a friend who had spent a few days there on business and who had seen nothing but swamps, rusty machinery, polyglot politicians and gesticulating foreigners. I had no conception of what I was coming to, and had to be content with the reflection that he who has no books must learn by experience. On the other hand, it occurred to me that by recording the main facts and mental impressions of my trip, I might take the reader with me in spirit and impart to him such knowledge as would be of use to him if he went there, and of interest if he stayed at home, for he who has no experience must learn from books.

As a physician attending the Pan-American Medical Congress, I felt that I was not competent to give the accurate general information sometimes found in guide books, and that I should be more concerned with climate and disease than the average writer; but on the other hand I hoped that, since my viewpoint would differ somewhat from that of the general run of writers, my impressions might not be unworthy of record, and might contribute in their way to a better understanding of the country and its customs.

Some readers will think that the book is too full of appetizers and nightcaps, of diet and donnerwetter, and they will be right. But this is so because the narrative is honest and describes what was seen and felt instead of what ought to have been, or might have been, seen and felt. The busy majority care more about what was than what ought to have been. What was is truth; what ought to have been is fiction, and the worst kind.

Many readers will conclude to wait until the United States has finished the reconstruction of the climate and country before going there, and will agree with me in saying that traveling in the tropics, like eating and sleeping, should be done at home. Indeed, the absurdity of the notion that it is necessary to leave home in order to study a guide book, should be taught to our travel-stricken public. Quarantine, yellow fever, yellow jaundice, black water fever, white swelling, elephantiasis, ague, anemia, neurasthenia, berri-berri, leprosy, dengue, dropsy, dysentery, drinking habits, and dozens of other dread diseases and denouements lie in wait in the tropics. The romance of these things does not consist in exposing oneself to them, but in letting others do it, and of reading about it afterward.

PART I

TO PANAMA

PANAMA FLAG

Part I

CHAPTER I

Chicago to New Orleans—Principally Chicago

Chicago as a Starting Point and Business Center for Panama—How Food is Manufactured—Chicago Modesty—Report of the Commercial Club’s Commission—Chicago the Center of Culture—The Illinois Central—Southern Surgical and Gynecological Society at Birmingham, the Mushroom City—The Banquet—Southern Hospitality and Wit—Extracts from Letter Home—Insurance Against Railway Accidents—The North Versus the South—Unveiling of a Statue—The Hahnemann Statue at Washington—New Orleans—Loss of Valuables—Over Charge at Hotel—A Machine-made Clerk—An Original Waiter—Southern Service—Southern Hospitality and Conviviality—The Beer Cure—Old English Standard—Comforting Reflection.

Those who wish to go to Panama should start from Chicago, which is the most direct route to Panama. In order to get there all one has to do is to go south; to return all one has to do is to come north. Chicago is at one end, Panama at the other.

But Chicago is not only the natural starting place for Panama, it is the natural business center of the Panama Canal. Chicago sent a Chicago man to build the canal, another Chicago man to boss it, others to plan it and others to provision it; and when the time comes will be ready with schemes to run it. Chicago believes that the canal must be constructed and conducted on a dual plan, the interoceanic and the alimentary—one for water and one for food. And she not only has the courage of her convictions, but the ability to assert them.

Unjust reflections have been cast upon the food which Chicago kills, cures and puts up in cans for the canal, and a word of explanation is necessary. It has been intimated that packing-house boys and butchers sometimes lose their footing and disappear so quickly that they can not be recovered or recognized, or even indicated on the labels. But these facts lack confirmation and the packers deny them. They are things of the past. Indeed, it was a Chicago man who demonstrated to Congress that the food from all parts of the country was fit neither for us nor for Panama. Thanks to his demonstrativeness, everybody now knows that until then pepper berries were made of tapioca kernels colored with lamp black; that preserved cherries were bleached with acid, colored with poisonous aniline, and used to contaminate the cocktails of our fathers and dye the hair and habits of our mothers; that the honey of our childhood was made of dead bees embalmed in sulphurous glucose; that Arabian coffee came from Brazil, and Italian olive oil from Mississippi cotton fields; that fancy liquors were made of ethyl alcohol and a chemical filler; and that breakfast foods were underweight in the package and overweight in the stomach. We now know that there was neither a sneeze in the peppers nor a stomach ache in the berries, and that the only genuine full weight articles were the tin cans and pasteboard boxes. We have learned that lamp black, mineral acids, sulphite of soda, coal tar and other embalmatives were used in the manufacture of our popular delicatessen, that the manufacturers bought them at forty dollars per ton in five-ton lots, and that the United States supports from five to fifty times as many doctors per capita as other countries do. All this has become history, and a Chicago man made it.

And now that Chicago has built her own canal, she is ready to give Uncle Sam the benefit of her unique experience. She has made water flow uphill once, and is ready to do it again. Chicago is always ready. She was ready with Wallace and Shonts. When Bigelow tried to paint the White House red, she was ready with Stevens. But what was the use? Her ways and the ways of Congress were different. Congress and the people who trust Congress have been bent upon finding fault and raising difficulties. Canal dirt and critical difficulties have been raised in equal quantities, but not with equal facility. Well-meaning foreigners, who work for the future and live in the past, advised a sea-level canal, knowing that Americans are good at making money and dirt fly, and that Chicago could use the dirt to fill up Lake Michigan. Chicago has known better all the time. The obviating of difficulties and doubts is a Chicago idea. But Chicago is not as yet appreciated; she must make herself heard. However, she has the modesty of youth, and can wait. She who talks last, talks best. In the meantime she is deepening her own canal, and will soon have navigable water between Chicago and Panama, and the world is bound to know it. Her motto is, Know Thyself!—and she lives up to it.

The following resume of the report of the Commercial Club’s Panama commission appeared about a year ago in the Chicago Tribune:

“The sanitary condition in the canal belt is perfect. The house sanitation is above criticism.

“The work of building the canal is progressing with rapidity.

“The labor is efficient, loyal and plentiful.

“The esprit de corps of the whole force under Engineer Stevens was characterized as ‘superb.’

“Organization of the working force is without a flaw.

“All the climatic dangers have been eliminated by the work of Dr. Gorgas, the sanitary expert.

“Panama has been transformed into as healthful a place to live as any of the Southern states.

“The equipment for digging the canal is of the highest type.

“The only criticism made by the various members of the commission may be summed up as follows:

“There is need for more schools.

“There is need for more amusement for the working force.

“Too much of the food served to the diggers is canned. Not enough fresh vegetables are served.

“Although these were the only criticisms heard, the members of the commission were not unanimous. Several held the belief that the food supply could not be improved. It was pointed out that the government is erecting schools rapidly and that there is now under construction several Y. M. C. A. buildings, which will afford the needed recreation.”

If that was so under Engineer Stevens, it is too bad he did not stay down there to keep it so. I hope that the Commercial Club commission were not mere optimists; that they did not mistake entertainments for attainments; that the equatorial sun did not dazzle their Northern eyes; that nature is not deceiving us by a temporary show. The canal work needs Chicago eyes.

Chicago is already recognized as the center of culture of the United States. Fredr. P. Fish, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Boston man, said at a banquet in Chicago:

“Chicago is on the culture center ...... For all time the Middle West as represented by Chicago will remain the center. We must graft the Western point of view on our Eastern ideas if we are to progress.” Surely a wise man and a prophet has come out of the East.

As Chicago is “the culture center” of the United States, the part she played at the last meeting of the Pan-American Medical Congress is not without significance. She sent the largest number of delegates of any city or nation and, if we may believe the evidence of their senses, ran the Congress. If she chooses she can organize a Pan-American Medical Congress all by herself that will run itself. She can furnish all of the scientific essays and discussions, the banquets and the banqueters, the reputation and the reverberation and, if necessary, the attendance and the talking.

However, to come back to where we started from, the Illinois Central, it was that Chicago railway which provided the chief engineer who cut the red tape and started a revolution in methods. He cut the Gordian knot by cutting the whole business. The Illinois Central was, of course, the best railway for me to take for my trip to Panama, but as I was to attend the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association on my way, my Chicago modesty suggested the patronage of a Southern railway, which to my surprise gave me as good a ride as the Illinois Central gives. The only fault I found with it was that its express trains were too accommodating.

For Doctors Only.

The association met at the interesting and mushroom-growing, mining and manufacturing center, Birmingham, Ala., the “New City of the New South,” where men and money are said to make each other—doing it by modern methods, and in large quantities. In this Chicago of the South I hoped to get some pointers on medical, surgical and social customs and curatives appropriate to Southern climates, preparatory to trusting myself in the deadly tropics, where water is laden with germs, the air full of infection and meat is spoiled before it is fit to eat.

And I was not disappointed in my expectations, for the profession of Birmingham, in return for the heavy feast of science afforded by the visitors, gave us a banquet which put our Northern idealizations and realizations to shame. It was celebrated in the immense square banquet hall of Hotel Hillman. The tables were placed around the room near the walls, leaving a square space in the center about forty feet in diameter decorated to represent the Vale of Cashmere. This space was adorned with immense prostrate mirrors for water, a profusion of tubs of tropical plants for islands, electric flashlights above for twinkling stars, and the expansive toastmaster’s face at one side to represent the rising full moon. The flowers and lights and reflections in the central space, bordered by the ornate and sumptuously provisioned tables, constituted one of the most beautiful and intoxicating sights and experiences of the kind I had ever seen and partaken of, and led to the most exuberant five hours’ flow of wit and humor of which I have any personal knowledge.

The toastmaster was a physician who had developed into a politician and post-prandial celebrity, and who made witty speeches enough to render the occasion memorable, even if no one had responded to his toasts. He infused his political inversion and irresponsibility of speech into the minds of those upon whom he called, so that the most solemn and scientific of our Northern laboratory plodders and surgical experts mixed the most unexpected and absurd exaggeration into their carefully prepared scientific and soporific remarks. They forgot to be instructive and became entertaining.

Even the Irish were outclassed. Hereafter I shall always speak of our Southern wit and humor as the most spontaneous and exuberant in the world. The North is witty because it is partly Irish, the South is wittier because it is entirely American.

For Women Only.

Extract from Letter Home.

Wednesday, Dec. 13, 1904.

My dear ——:

The scientific exercises have just concluded and before dressing for the banquet I will make use of the few moments between the diurnal reading and the nocturnal eating of articles, to inform you that you have lost five thousand dollars. Whenever I have insured my life before trusting my fate to the reckless railway management which this country cultivates, and which costs from one to two lives a day in demonstrating how two trains can occupy the same space at the same time, I have found that my life has been spared and my estate has lost the six thousand dollars of insurance money for which I had contracted and paid. I have survived so often that I am beginning to have faith in the insuring method as a life preserver. I know of nothing else that has protected me from the ax of those public executioners facetiously called railways. If the government would only give attention to the regulation of railway accidents as it does to the regulation of railway rates, some good might be done. Railway rates are simply ruinous; railway recklessness is simply regretable.

I am well, excepting a stiffness and soreness in my left ankle, which reminds me that I got away just in time from the frozen North, where people eat and freeze too much and get rheumatism and appendicitis, to visit the Sunny South, where people eat and drink too much and get rheumatism and appendicitis. In the North we think that the cold makes us healthy and hardy, while in the south people think that appetizers and night-caps keep them healthy and happy. And I am temporarily inclined to think that the Southerners must be half right, for my ankle is getting better already.

After a most interesting session devoted to the discussion of obscure and difficult scientific facts and fancies, the society adjourned to the public park to unveil the statue of the late Wm. Elias Davis, the eminent Birmingham surgeon who founded the Southern Surgical and Gynecological Association. It is the second statue that has been erected to a private individual in Alabama, and is also about the second attempt of the kind by our profession in the United States, the statue of the signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush, at Washington being the first. There is also at Washington a statue of Hahnemann, the originator of the once popular fad, homeopathy, placed there by a few fad fellows before they faded out.

But it is growing dark and the band is playing and the festivities are about to begin. We must eat and drink and get merry, which is the lot of the living.

For Children Only.

Extract from Letter Home.

New Orleans, Saturday, Dec. 17, 1904.

Here I am in “Ne Awleens,” where creoles and crocodiles grow. At least, here is all that is left of me. Umbrella, railroad ticket, handkerchief, necktie fastener, appetite, digestion, etc., were lost on the way. My valise was carried away in my car, which was quietly detached from the train at Montgomery while I was walking about the station hunting for my appetite. However, I inquired and ran about and caught the runaway car and recovered my bag and my appetite, but not my umbrella. An honest umbrella does not exist. Who remembers ever having had a lost one come back, or a found one go back? My return ticket was taken up by the conductor at bedtime but was not returned to me in the morning when I arrived in Birmingham. It was discovered on the floor in the train, and left at the ticket office at New Orleans by a stranger. New Orleans has one more honest man than our other large cities, which are diseased spots on the earth’s surface, where human parasites predominate.

However, the railway officials are not the only absent-minded men in the South. The hotel clerk at Birmingham charged me for four days instead of two. I should merely have considered the hotel a high-priced one had not a friend told me that he had been charged for three days instead of two. But after being corrected, my bill was as much too small as at first it was too large. The clerk was made in Birmingham where everything is done by machinery. To get the best service it was necessary to know how to run him. He was one of those original characters who do everything differently—and indifferently.

When I went to breakfast the morning after the banquet, I ordered nothing but coffee and rolls. The negro waiter, who was another original, evidently had also been up late the night before, for when I gave my order he gaped frightfully, and I dodged. He filled it (not his mouth) correctly, but took it to a fat man at the next table, who had ordered a real American breakfast and who scorned to accept mere coffee and rolls, although he looked as if he needed much less breakfast than I did. I then ordered a glass of water without any ice in it, and this was also taken to the large gentleman, who was an ice drinker and refused it. When I had drunk my coffee, glanced at my rolls and paid my bill, my change also went to the stranger; but it also was not enough for him. If I had ordered a large breakfast and had thus made the waiter work, or if I had carried a pistol within sight, he would probably have brought things to me when he forgot to whom they belonged. He bore me no ill-will, however. He was a good waiter, as are all Southern waiters, if only one knows how to keep them awake and interested, and excuse mistakes. I think we will have to send some of our colored waiters from the North down there.

The Southerners are, however, far ahead of us in hospitality, and it is in keeping with this virtue that they drink too often. I do not think that they drink for the sake of drinking, as often as do many of our Northern indulgers, nor do they often drink to get drunk. They drink to be hospitable and encourage one another and whet their appetite. Whether they are thus socially farther advanced than we, and we will follow them, or whether the comparatively large percentage of abstainers in the North is an advance, and they will follow us, is a conundrum. I suppose that they really drink out of conservatism. To abstain would be too radical a change. If liquor could have been emancipated with the slaves and sent over the border to Canada, where they use it to warm their toes and melt their tongues, it would have been better for the South and for us. Perhaps the increase in the consumption of beer in the United States may become our salvation. It means less alcohol and less drunkenness, more gemütlichkeit and less strenuous conviviality, more hobnob livers and fewer concrete kidneys.

There is hope, however, for Southerner and Northerner and Canadian if we may credit an observation of Sydney Smith, made in England a hundred years ago. While speaking of the improvements he had observed during his lifetime he said:

“I forgot to add ... that even in the best society one third of the gentlemen at least were always drunk.”

The following quotation of Edward Eggleston is taken from an editorial in American Medicine, January 27, 1906:

“It was estimated early in the eighteenth century that about one building in every ten in Philadelphia was used in some way for the sale of rum, and in Massachusetts, Governor Belcher was afraid that the colony would ‘be deluged with spirituous liquors.’”

How comforting for us to know that our ancestors, from a temperance standpoint, were worse than we are, and that our children in the natural course of events will be better than we are.

CHAPTER II

Getting Off

The United Fruit Company’s Ships—Delay—Brushing up in Spanish—Getting off—The Musical Engineer—Spilling Soup—Threatened Arson—A Resolve Never to Take Too Much Liquor Again—The Pilot—Four Miles in Two Hours—The Captain’s Wink—Chicago as a Joke—The Jetty—Unexhilarating Speed—The Zigzag Habit.

From New Orleans the United Fruit Company sends a steamer every week to Colón and Bocas del Toro, in Panama, and one to Port Limón, in Costa Rica. Most of the boats are small and better adapted to the accommodation and comfort of bananas than of human beings. However, those who are poor sailors can, by arranging dates and taking one of the large (?) ships, get to Panama almost as comfortably as from New York, and in a little over half the time. If one is a good equilibrist and loves solitude, there is even an advantage in taking one of the smaller fruit boats, for they ordinarily have so few passengers that one has almost the whole boat to oneself—and needs it. Mr. M. J. Dempsey, the traffic manager at New Orleans of the United Fruit Company, was very accommodating and painstaking, both in corresponding with me and in placing me after I arrived at New Orleans. The company is better than its boats.

Having missed the Friday boat for Colón, I made the best of my misfortune by feasting on fresh oysters, French café-au-lait and French water-rolls. In fact, I was benefited by the short delay, as the S. S. Limón, the newest and largest in the service, sailed on Monday morning directly for Port Limón, offering me an opportunity of visiting San José, the capital of Costa Rica, the so-called Paris of Central America, and of avoiding the crowd of doctors who were going later. In this case I was particularly anxious to avoid the otherwise congenial crowd, because I wanted to get away from English-speaking people during the four or five days on the water. Thus I would have a chance to brush up my Spanish by being forced to speak it to the Central American passengers, the officers, steward, sailors, etc. I would then be better prepared to converse with the South American doctors. But when I went aboard I found that the S. S. Limón was an old Glasgow ship with a new name, and had a Canadian captain and Jamaican crew. The passengers were all Americans and English, and I was the only one on board who could speak, or cared to speak, a word of Spanish. I was, therefore, obliged to brush up my Spanish without a brush.

We got off at 11 A. M. There were several passengers standing about on deck gazing listlessly at the negroes on the dock,—but not a friend of any of us could be seen, not a smile or wave of hand or flutter of handkerchief. It seemed quite doleful not even to see a friend or relative of some one else.

The only incident that varied the monotony came near being an accident. It was the arrival of one of the engineers, who was a man of unusually refined features for one in his station of life, but who was in such a happy state of mind that had it not been for the assistance of his peers he would have walked off the gangplank into the water, for he took two steps and stoops sideways to every one forward. He was softly singing, “For to-night we’ll merry, merry be; to-morrow we’ll be shober.” I felt relieved when I saw that he was safely aboard where liquor was not sold, and I realized for the first time what a great blessing ships were to sailors. As soon as he was safely over the gangplank he straightened up and said, “I’m the besht eng’neer aboard. I can run an engine better’n I can walk a plank. I’ve been drinking like the —— but I’m not drunk. I’m a Christian scientist, I am. I only think I’m drunk (hic).”

About an hour afterward as I was wandering about exploring the ship, I came across him balancing himself along on his way from the kitchen to the mess room, carrying a big iron pot of greasy soup and spilling it liberally. Upon seeing me, he smiled blandly and said:

“Good shoup this, ain’t it?”

“Yes, I see it is. If you can eat that you’re all right.”

“Oh, I’m aw right (hic)!” he said, as he allowed about a pint of the soup to spill upon the deck. “It’s the shoup that’s gone wrong. It’s half seas over awready.”

After a moment’s pause he began again: “Is this your firsht trip to the tropics?”

“Yes, I want to see them before I die.”

“Better wait till you die. It’s a —ll of a place for a live man. I’m going to set the ship on fire at five o’clock. I’ve been drinking, but I’m as shober as blue blazes now, and I’m going to shelebrate—she-(hic)elebrate.”

Seeing my chance to do some missionary work, I asked him why he didn’t join a temperance club, and thus relieve himself of all temptation to drink.

“No club for me, sir. Had enough clubbing when I’s a boy. Rather be hit by a cocktail. W’iskey’s the life of temper’nce clubs. Keeps ’em going (hic). W’iskey causes more good resolutions than bad ones—makes people wish to be better. An’ what’s better’n that?”

He stopped talking and stood grinning at me as I moved slowly away and faintly returned his smile. I then and there resolved never to take too much liquor again in any form. All men should sign the pledge before they die, as I expect to do. But as it was, I feared I might never have a chance to drink anything but Mississippi River water after five o’clock, when the ship was to burn. However, I calculated that since we would not be out of the river and away from land until six or seven o’clock, which would be from one to two hours after the fire, we could all save ourselves with life-preservers. So I went to my stateroom and finding that my life-preservers had real cork in them, instead of old-fashioned pig-iron, tied one to my valise and two to my trunk. Then I went back on deck and, being prepared for the danger, soon forgot all about it.

After speeding around many river-bends for two hours we went down to lunch, and the pilot, who ate with us, told us among other things that we were just four miles from New Orleans, across country. I told him not to hurry so, but to remember that “the more haste the less speed;” that on the Chicago River we would have traveled many miles in two hours, and that in Chicago we could walk faster than this boat ran; we could walk four miles in one hour. The pilot thought that I was in earnest and winked at the captain, who was of English descent and knew that a wink meant a joke. So he winked at both of us, and asked no questions. I afterward learned that the mention of Chicago was the joke they meant.

Although it was the third week of December, the shores were green and the scenery was interesting all the way, and the weather was warm enough to enable us to enjoy it. The delta presented the appearance of numerous small lakes with strips of meadow land between them, instead of branching streams as marked on the maps. We saw some fine plantations and a fine herd of cattle. Indeed, the district appeared to be an ideal one for raising cattle, as grass and water were plentiful, shelter unnecessary and fences superfluous.

Soon after six o’clock we came to the outlet which was indicated by a jetty on our left and the open sea ahead. The jetty was a pier built where the current could strike it and hollow out its own channel, the same as it does all along the river when it strikes the banks at the bends. A lighthouse and searchlight were, of course, on the end of the pier, which was a much smaller and simpler structure than I had considered necessary. The simple device was, as usual, the successful one.

The pilot got off here, but stopped and shook hands with me, and asked if I had enjoyed the ride. He told me that we had made one of the quickest runs to the mouth of the river on record for a fruit boat. I said: “As far as I’ve got I can’t conscientiously say that I am exhilarated by the speed. Bananas that want to ripen while they ride can’t complain, however. The river takes two dips sideways to every one forward like the best engineer who came aboard half seas over, and I can’t comprehend how a man as sober and steady as you seem to be can keep the ship going that way without forgetting himself at times and letting it take a straight and proper step or two occasionally and run into the shore.”

“Well, it’s this way,” he answered. “We become so accustomed to the zigzag course that zigzagging becomes a habit, and we find it hard to keep straight.”

“Yes,” I said, “and the engineers are acquiring the zigzag habit, too.”

As I did not bring in Chicago he didn’t see any joke.

CHAPTER III

At Sea

The Weather—Packing the Stomach—A Diatribe on Cooks and Cooking—Uncooked Food as a Diet—Survival of the Fittest—New England Diet—First Impressions and Facts—The Passengers—The Englishman—A Phantom Laugh—The Stewardess—Beef Tea—A Recreation Famine—The Universal Enjoyment—An Old English Table d’Hôte—White Ducks and Rain—Highballs and High Life—Bad Effects of Water—A Temperate Captain and Crew—Scenery and Poetry—How People Get What They Want—The Southern Cross and Others—Advice.

From Diary.

Tuesday, December 20th.—Smooth sea. Weather cool but pleasant. The temperature at New Orleans was about twenty degrees Fahrenheit warmer than at Chicago, and this afternoon is nearly ten degrees warmer than it was at New Orleans yesterday. We are headed almost due south and expect soon to breathe the balmy air of the Caribbean Sea. It is so far a pleasant winter experience to wake up each morning and find the air about ten degrees warmer than on the day before.

What a change from busy Chicago life it is to have nothing to do all day long but read novels and talk small talk, and linger leisurely over one’s meals with strangers gathered together from various parts of Anglo-Saxondom. We lingered over the food to-day until we had eaten enough for two dinners. It was not that we felt the need of a double dinner, but largely out of a subconscious imitation of each other. When among eaters do as eaters do, is the philosophy of it. There is no place where people enjoy and understand the packing and filling up of their adjustable and dilatable stomachs better than on shipboard. When they pack their trunks and bags they do not overload them, for they know that there is danger of straining or bursting them, and they do not wet and soak things down in their trunks in order to make them pack tighter, as they do in their stomachs. They know that the stomach, which was not made by hands, will not burst.

But eating can not unfortunately be made to fill in the whole of our time, even on shipboard and with saltwater appetites. If we had four stomachs, like a cow, and could devote all of our time either to eating, or the chewing of cuds, how simple life would become for many of us. Idle men would be kept from mischief and idle women from worry. Our enjoyment would be simple and continual, sanitary and convivial. However, our mode of living and the economy of our functions are such that we can not utilize much bulky nourishment, as do our bovine models, whose heads and limbs are mere appendages to their stomachs; and our methods of preparing food are such that we do not have to do the work with our teeth. We thus lose much of the benefit as well as harmless pleasure that animals derive from the preparation of their own meals. Our lips are shrinking and our jaws degenerating for want of work.

There is much to be said in favor of doing your cooking in your own mouth. Mouths are often the most unclean of cavities, yet who would not rather trust his own mouth than the methods of the average kitchen blunderer with her germ-laden, all-invading hands, tasting spoons, wandering hairs, dusty dishes, coughs, colds, salt rheums, etc. No one has seen the cook drinking out of the water bottle, tasting the food, and handling the salt, the dough, the waste-pail, the dish cloth, the berries and the bread with fingers that are licked instead of being washed every time she handles these things and her hair, but would wish to possess the jaw and juices of an animal to enable him to save the wages, waste and culinary wantonness of a cook; and avoid the appendicitis, gastric ulcer, fermentation, diabetes, Bright’s disease, entero-colitis and acid fermentation that have developed with the development of the art of eating. Modern cooking is a bold and unscrupulous attempt to create, by means of variously flavored, complicated mixtures, a desire for artificial food, instead of depending upon a natural appetite for a few simple articles, such as exists throughout the animal kingdom where irresponsible cooks have not interfered.

It is an open question whether the human system is not adapted to the consumption of much more uncooked food than is at present allowed, and whether the cooking in many instances does not destroy ferments that aid digestion, and does not thus render the digestion of foods more difficult or imperfect. Fresh raw milk is more nourishing and more easily digested by normal digestive organs than cooked milk, and this is true of eggs, oysters, beef, cheese, tomatoes, butter, etc. Celery, radishes, cucumbers, cresses, parsley, asparagus, onions, honey, fresh and dried fruits, nuts, aromatics, ripe olives, olive oil, smoked and dried meats, besides many other herbs and fruits that are habitually eaten raw in warm and tropical countries, ought to enter more extensively into our diet and be made to greatly reduce the amount of kitchen mixtures that now tempts us toward an overfed anemia, dyspeptic insomnia, toxic obesity and premature death. The above mentioned foods constitute an ample dietary for the average individual. By cooking we aim to facilitate and quicken the digestion of food, and render it more complete, forgetting that a larger amount of undigested debris might maintain a more normal action of the intestines.

Food kept for consumption in the winter time in cold climates, or in arid districts far away from its production, would in part require cooking, but that made of grains could be prepared at laboratories in a dry, unchangeable, sterile form, while some of the animal and fatty foods could be partly predigested and preserved for invalids. In fact, a diet could be planned that would render the kitchen unnecessary except as a place to make ready a hot drink or to warm food already prepared and preserved according to the dictates of science instead of by the art of uneducated, uncultured, unclean, bad-tempered, hap-hazard cooks.

The political crime of 1890 was the putting of sugar on the free list. It was a covert attack upon the women and children of the country by rendering it easier for them to slowly poison themselves i. e., to sweeten themselves to death. A relish for sweets has been given man to lead him to eat fruits and to chew his starchy food until it develops that sweet taste which indicates beginning digestion. It is this relish for sweet that leads herbivorous animals to chew their food so thoroughly. That a taste for sweets is not intended to lead people to eat artificial sweets is evident from the fact that, excepting honey, which is meant for bees, there is no such concentrated sweet as sugar to be found in nature. But man began to extract the sugar from the sugar cane, the beet and the grape and eat it in large quantities in its concentrated, unnatural form, and to put it in food that, without it, would not be relished, and which, therefore, should not be eaten until hunger gave its relish. As a consequence he has become the victim of salt rheums, pimples, hives and other agonies of itching and ugliness.

Sugar is the devil conjured by man to entertain his sweetheart or wife, and keep his children quiet. Sugar is the serpent of a civilized Eden. He corrupts the human body before it is developed, and after. He squanders the pocket money and perverts the appetite of the fairer half of humanity, until it thinks that it would starve without his support, and refuses to nourish itself without his aid. Let him be banished from the public view and be locked up again in the cane and the beet where he can be enjoyed only in harmless attenuations and in digestible quantities. A little of the devil goes a great way. Too much of him breeds disease and doctors to condemn and conduct us to the grave.

But the self-denial of such a return to nature and abandonment of the pleasure of eating a variety of complicated, fancifully flavored and abnormally tempting food mixtures is hardly to be expected of a gastronomically perverted humanity. Humanity knows enough to tempt itself, and it will do so. The rapidly multiplying wealthy class has the means of over-indulging itself, and will make use of them, and the common lot will follow suit. Deterioration, degeneration and individual extinction will be the logical result. Survival of the fittest thus becomes a matter of appetite. To kill oneself by degrees within the three-score-and-ten is becoming the easiest and most agreeable of occupations; much easier and more enjoyable than slowly dieting oneself to death, as Luigi Cornaro did at the age of 103 years. He ate but little here below, but ate that little long.

There are many who believe that what is generally adopted as a custom by the mass of the people must be right, and that since we have been eating as we now do for a long time, and are longer lived than formerly, we should continue doing so. Apropos of this I will quote from the writings of Volney, a Frenchman who traveled in the United States seventy years ago:

“I will venture to say that if a prize were proposed for the scheme of a regimen most calculated to injure the stomach, the teeth and the health in general, no better could be invented than that of Americans. In the morning at breakfast, they deluge their stomach with a quart of hot water, impregnated with tea, or slightly so with coffee, that is mere colored water; and they swallow, almost without chewing, hot bread, half-baked toast soaked in butter, cheese of the fattest kind, slices of salt or hung beef, ham, etc., all of which are nearly insoluble. At dinner, they have boiled pastes under the name of puddings, and the fattest are esteemed the most delicious; all their sauces, even for roasted beef, are melted butter; their turnips and potatoes swim in lard, butter, or fat; under the name of pumpkin pie their pastry is nothing but a greasy paste, never sufficiently baked; to digest these substances they take tea almost instantly after dinner, making it so strong that it is absolutely bitter to the taste, in which state it affects the nerves so powerfully that even the English find it brings on more obstinate restlessness than coffee. Supper again introduces salt meats or oysters. As Chastelux says, the whole day passes in heaping indigestions on one another; and to give tone to the poor, relaxed and wearied stomach, they drink Madeira rum, French brandy, gin or malt spirits, which complete the ruin of the nervous system.”

Man seems to be the only animal that doesn’t know how to eat. But as we have apparently eaten without knowing how, and have been dyspeptic for the seventy years since Volney wrote, and probably for seventy years before that, why not eat in this way and remain dyspeptic for the next seventy years? We have been dyspeptic so long that proper food and normal function might prove a disastrous change of environment to our stomachs. Innovations are apt to prove dangerous. Let us be conservative, and do right with caution. This precocious, overgrown, youthful country needs above all to be conservative, and above all wants conserves.

But since the agreeable gustatory occupation of doing the cooking in nature’s individual kitchen is denied us, we passengers are at the mercy of the ship’s cook. I wonder how clean he and his materials are. And as the process of swallowing and washing down his mixtures can not be made to occupy all of our waking hours, we will have to sandwich in a few games of cards, a few cotillions, cigars, siestas and, at appropriate times, a few turns of mal-de-mer.

Wednesday, December 21st.—How different strangers often are from the first impression they make upon us. If we revealed ourselves upon first sight just as we really are in this democratic country, in which the poor are rich and the rich poor, according to the mutations of the markets, and where we can not always distinguish a Brahmin from a blowhard, we would be quickly divided into social castes, and would find new levels. Even in traditional monarchies a large proportion of the nobility are Brahmins by birth only. The fabric of society is woven out of lies, for lies are not words pronounced but impressions produced. In fact, all the world’s a lie, and men and women play their parts therein. The word falsehood is merely the name for a feminine fabric which conceals the hair that nature made to conceal the head. Our customs encourage false hoods, false hair, false teeth and false modesty, for who would marry a person without hood, hair, teeth or modesty? Better dead than without them. Better to have lived and lied than not to have lied at all.

All of the passengers of the S. S. Limón are first-class liars, I mean first-impression liars, like the rest of the world. I have constructed two descriptive columns to show the impression they produced upon me at the first meal and the facts as I have since learned them.

We also have at the table a young American who is a clerk in the offices of the United Fruit Company at Port Limón, the second mate and the purser. The English couple and the insurance agent have been in the tropics before and have learned not to drink ship water or Central American water, and keep the two waiters busy bringing beer, wine, highballs, Apollinaris water and ginger ale, somewhat to the inconvenience of the rest of us who have to await the return of the waiters with these articles before we can be served with our food.

The Englishman sits in a corner of the smoking-room and smokes a pipe after each meal. While smoking these three pipefuls, which seem to be his daily allowance, he studies American history out of Winston Churchill’s novel, “The Crossing.” He is one of those practical Englishmen who believe that he who laughs last laughs best. He asked me this morning why the United States did not keep Cuba when she first had her; and I could not convince him that it was neither expedient nor honorable to annex the island at that time. In fact, before we got through with our discussion I felt like apologizing to him for our honorable action in the matter, for doing our duty as we saw it. The English believe in our duty as they see it. He considered our dealings with Cuba as a huge American joke, a subject for the pen of a Mark Twain or a W. W. Jacobs, and that a keener sense of humor would have saved us from the mistake.

Thursday, December 22nd.—We have three flesh and blood visible ladies aboard, and a stewardess. A stewardess usually passes for flesh and blood also. This one, however, is a sort of phantom lady who is always heard, but seldom seen. Until this morning she was nothing but a laugh. She had not, to my personal knowledge, been seen on deck. She, however, had frequently made herself known by her laugh which every once in a while would ring out, or rather up, from below like a chime of tiny bells started by the wind, and making melody because they couldn’t help it. When we feel well we are stirred up by the laugh and feel like joining in, but when the waves are swinging our heads around, it sounds unnatural and phantom-like, and strikes an unsympathetic chord in our pneumogastric nerve fibers. I had heard the laugh many times and had enjoyed it until this morning, when I was lying back in my steamer chair practicing Christian Science without any comfort. Every few moments the ship would give a lurch, and so nearly turn over that it seemed as if it could not right up, and the ladies would say o-oh! and the phantom laugh would be heard coming up from below. I took to shutting my dizzy eyes and saying mentally: “Go over, if you wish, old banana box! If only my stomach will keep right side out until we go down and I become unconscious!—Laugh on, young lady! It’s all right for an invisible stewardess who hasn’t any nerves in her stomach (if she has one) and nothing but haw-haws in her brain (if she has one) to laugh, for I can’t help it. But even Solomon said that there was a time to laugh and a time not to laugh.”

While I was thus moralizing the laugh suddenly appeared on deck in coiffe and corset, smiling and balancing airily while the ship tried to dump it overboard. It was a white-aproned, pink-skinned, flaxen-haired, pleb-featured apparition, as plump and un-phantom-like as flesh and blood with a cockney accent could be. It was searching for sick women, and immediately spied me. It stopped and said:

“’Ave you ’ad any breakfast, sir?”

“Yes,” I said, “I have had breakfast all of my life, thank you.”

“Won’t you ’ave a cup of beef tea, sir? It works like a charm.”

“No, thank you. I don’t want anything that will work. You give us plenty to eat, but you don’t keep it down. Dieting is the best thing for ship food. I was told to diet several years ago, and I wish I’d done it. The opportunity has come now.”

It smiled at me as if I was a spoiled child, and balanced about among the ladies in a way that made my head swim, until finally it disappeared.

In a little while it sent up a cup of beef tea by the shuffling, cross-eyed, colorless, albino-haired, cockney steward. The stuff looked good, however, and I braced up and drank the health of the flower of the English meadows that had blossomed on the beautiful land and now bloomed on the blooming sea, and felt better. The beef tea suffered no harm, and I no longer wished to be thrown overboard. In fact, within two hours afterward I went down to the dining-room and ate leather and doepaste, and drank luke-warm mud-decoction with a favorable termination.

Friday, December 23rd.—We arrive at Port Limón to-morrow morning, and so far no Spanish lessons, no cotillions, no cake-walks, no negro minstrels, no shuffle-board, no music, not even poker or pools on the daily run; nothing doing but the moonlight tête-a-têtes of the United Fruit Company’s clerk from Limón and the lady’s maid from London. He evidently regards her as edible. Watching them with parental interest and sympathetic reminiscence is the only recreation we have had except eating at odd meals when Neptune happened to be napping. Perhaps it is youth rather than opportunity that we lack, for as people grow older they lose the cleverness and skill as well as the illusions necessary for the enjoyment of the recreations of their youth, except in eating. The enjoyment of eating, illusions and all, belongs to all ages and all animals. It constitutes the first evidence of our animal intelligence and the last senile flourish of our physical nature. When all other incentives to enjoyment and hilarity are gone forever, people can laugh and joke over their food like children. Having consumed the spirits of youth they resort to the spirits of wine, and the result is a brilliant flicker.

It is interesting to watch a small party of English people of uncertain age and social station at a Continental table d’hote dinner, as I once had the pleasure of doing:—

At soup a fortified and funereal quiet and, to the young and frivolous table-d’hoters about them, an apparently reproachful demeanor, a social asceticism. Such dignity and decorum as is found only among the English, whose recreations and social functions are formal duties.

Over the fish, occasional premeditated remarks such as courtesy demands, and a solemn sipping of wine at appropriate intervals.

Over the third course, slight relaxation of features and small bits of conversation, interspersed with more frequent and informal sipping of wine.

Over the fourth course, much less modulation of voice and considerable talking, with an occasional easily comprehended joke followed by generous applause. General emptying of bottles and drinking of toasts. A touch of nature makes the whole room grin.

Over dessert, frequent flashing of fire-cracker jokes extinguished in laughter. A leaning over cordiality and unrestrained communicativeness regardless of appearances. An astonishing climax of gayety. The tables are turned. Foreigners grow silent and look on with wonder.

Disappearance of ladies and retirement of the men to the smoking-room or porches for a congenial exchange of confidences and a forgetfulness of cares and responsibilities. Social mellowness slowly hardening back into desiccated conversation.

The elders have had their daily round of recreation, the only kind they still excel at, and are again models of dignity and decorum for the younger generation to respect, but not to emulate.

Such an insular touch of nature I have not, of course, observed on our boat. The above was merely one of those observations of former times that come to my mind during the long hours of sitting and gazing at the tireless sea. Continental table-d’hoters become demonstrative over their wine, but do not taper on and taper off like the English. One expects foreigners to gesticulate and be undignified from first to last.

We are in the Caribbean Sea “alright,” with trade winds to tame us, choppy seas to chafe us, and sudden showers to shift us. The officers and the militia captain are parading in dazzling white duck suits, in which they are obliged to run under cover every little while from the rain. A mist appears over the horizon and in a few minutes overtakes us in the form of a drenching rain, causing the officers on duty to put on their raincoats, and those off duty to come in and be treated to highballs. This is their high life, and makes them accept with thankfulness and thanks whatever and whichever comes. Water is man’s greatest enemy as well as friend in the Caribbean. It drives through the canvas awnings, steals into the staterooms, rusts steel buttons and umbrella frames, ruins clothing, spoils cigars and gives men a taste for liquor.

The captain, however, is temperate and has none of the sailors’ vices, as no man who lives with the bottom of the sea constantly under his feet should have. This nautical peculiarity of the captain has a good effect upon the crew, and is a recommendation to the United Fruit Company. It enables him to drink with impunity when alone with the passengers. He believes that only temperance men should be allowed to drink. He believes that, being temperate, drink does him no harm, and that he who thinks like a gentleman will drink like a gentleman. The “besht” engineer is also temperate, for the captain sees to it that drink does not harm him either. The poor fellow has had nothing alcoholic since we left New Orleans. But he will get his bottle of beer with his Christmas dinner to remind him of the cause of all the happiness he has ever had. Our captain is so opposed to intemperance that he will not keep a man in the crew who is addicted to drink. The fate of the best engineer is therefore settled, and he is taking his last voyage on the S. S. Limón. But he has not had his last good time off the S. S. Limón by any means.

We have beautiful sunsets and sunrises, although they are not very different from those in Illinois except that the colors are more crude and garish. The softened, hazy, fumigated, terra cotta hues of the Chicago sunsets are unknown here. It is necessary to go to Chicago to see them. On bright and clear days the Caribbean sky and water have an intense blue color that we seldom see in Northern latitudes, but when the wind blows and the sky is overcast, the water is of a bright, seasick green color, known to poets although not to poetry.

We have moonlight nights that are worth taking a five-day boat ride to see. At times the sky and sea are bathed in silver sheens and shimmers that equal those in some of the paintings and poems, and which are worthy the pen of a Scott or Shelley. At other times the firmament is caverned with jasper clouds, and the water mottled with mysterious isles of shadow. As Shelley says:

The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut

By darkest barriers of enormous cloud,

Like mountain over mountain huddled—but

Growing and moving upward in a crowd,

And over it a space of watery blue

Which the keen evening star is shining through.

How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh

Which vernal zephyrs breathe in evening’s ear

Were discord to the speaking quietude

That wraps this moveless scene. Heaven’s ebon vault

Studded with stars unutterably bright,

Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls,

Seems like a canopy that love has spread

To curtain her sleeping world.

This is about as I would have written except that I should also have put the Fruit Company’s clerk and the English lady’s maid in the scene to emphasize the moonlight and add that human interest which the lines do not express. The difference between Shelley’s lines and mine would have been that Shelley’s contain more poetry than truth, while mine would have contained more truth than poetry. Truth is better than poetry.

I have given Shelley’s description because people are seldom satisfied with the naked truth. They prefer something in costume, and labeled with a name. For instance, when they ask for medicine they get something with a name; when they want Christian Science they get nothing, with a name; when they want lies they get the real thing. Those who can no longer be deceived are ready for another world, but not for a better one.

Every one who visits the torrid zone takes a look at the Southern Cross. So did I. On the Caribbean it arises very late at night, and comes out about the time civilized banqueters are going home. I had to get up after midnight to obtain a view of it. There were several crosses visible and I looked at them all, and thus saw the Southern one. But I was unable to say which one was the one, for I had no compass. However, that did not matter, since I could say I had seen it. The one that travelers see and talk about is a crooked one. It does not stand straight in the heavens, and has its beams warped. I would not advise any one to travel down here in a banana boat, that becomes inebriated and intolerable every time a zephyr blows, in order to stay awake to see a little, crooked, imperfect cross that wouldn’t be looked at in Chicago. One can stay at home and hunt up a better and bigger one before midnight, not to mention our glorious Orion, our beautiful Milky Way and many other interesting and historic constellations. In fact, how many Northern people who know of and have seen, and have acted silly about, the Southern Cross, know of all and have seen all and have acted silly about all of our Northern constellations? We should know something about our own heaven before we devote our attention to that of others.

CHAPTER IV

Port Limón

Christmas Eve—Heat as a Stimulant—Essentials to a Good Sleeper—Sheltering Reefs—Flying-Fish—Port Limón—View of the Island and Town from the Ship—A Sailing Vessel—The Piers—Fruits—Sharks—Christmas Festivities of San José—The Great Flood—Accidents on the Railway—The Graveyard Washout—Two Weeks of Travel to go a Hundred Miles—Ashore—Almost an Accident—Difficult Landing—A Negro with an Irish Brogue—Other Negroes—A Cockney Accent—U. S. Accent—Sun Baths and Shower Baths—The Rainy Season—No Thunder—An Earthquake—Its Wasted Energy—Population of Limón—-The Fruit Company—The Stores and Business Houses—San Joséans Caught at Limón by the Washout—Boarding the Boat—Freight-ship Luxury—Arrival of the Italian Ship—Christmas Dinner on Board—Government Piers—The Warehouse of the United Fruit Company—Other Houses—Clean Streets—The Colored Inhabitants—The Race Problem—Vultures—The Cockpit—The Cock Fight—A Used-up Victor—The Market—Tough Meat—Saloons—The Hotel and Garden—A Cockatoo—Highballs—Dear S. S. Limón—Escape from Malaria, Mosquitoes and Yellow Fever.

Extracts From Letters.

Off Port Limón, on S. S. Limón.
10:30 A. M. Saturday, Dec. 24, 1904.

This is Christmas eve, or will be when it is. It required quite a little will power for me to come into the smoking-room where there is no breeze, in order to write and swelter, and swelter and write, and thus do two things at the same time on the same day. I feel like one bird being killed by two stones.

You, of course, can have no conception of the effect of this tropical heat upon the nervous energies, for heat is a stimulant, and therefore not in your line. I formerly imagined that it was a pleasant experience to be under the influence of a stimulant, but now know that it is not. It does not make it a bit easier to do what you do not wish to do. I wonder if science is really correct in calling heat a stimulant, or if the idea is merely an opinion of scientists who, like women, are forever changing their minds, and who have but little experience or sympathy with stimulants?

By night my head is weary from thinking about how happy people are who live on land, so I promptly fall asleep and stay asleep for seven or eight hours. The three essentials to a good sleeper are present, viz., a relaxed mind, a comfortable stomach and warm feet. The combination is not to be had at home where the brain, stomach and feet can not get together.

We were all day Monday from 10:30 A. M. to 6 P. M. in getting out of the Mississippi River (120 miles or thereabouts) and had smooth sailing on Tuesday, giving every one a chance to eat three times. On Wednesday we all dieted three times, being tossed by a troublesome trade-wind which was to last a week. But it is the unexpected that is always happening. By noon we ran behind some sheltering reefs off Yucatan and were suffering only from hunger—which is more easily cured than seasickness.

The sun was shining and innumerable flying-fish were sporting about the boat. Instead of sailing through the air as I had seen them represented in books, they seemed to keep their winglike fins in a constant flutter, like the wings of hummingbirds, and shone brightly in the sunlight as they sped over the waves for forty or fifty feet. When they shot up out of the water they reached a height of two or three feet, went ahead for a short distance, and gradually sank nearer and nearer to the water until buried in a rising wave. After gaining the height acquired by the first impulse as they emerged, they did not seem able to rise any higher, but occasionally one would strike the crest of a wave at the end of its flight and give itself an upward turn, and would thus get a fresh start and take another flight, somewhat shorter than the first. The large number of them, and their liveliness and apparently intense enjoyment of the air and sun bath, produced a decidedly exhilarating effect upon us and added to the joy of not being seasick. But alas! Great happiness never lasts. The next morning, Thursday, we were in the open sea again among the swells.

And the swells still continue on the sea as well as in Port Limón, where we have been anchored since yesterday afternoon. The coast line is straight and there are no breakwaters for the protection of ships, except an island by the name of Uvita, which is situated about a quarter of a mile from the shore. Our ship, two freight steamers and a sailing vessel are anchored behind it. The island appears oval in shape and has, I should say, a surface of about six acres. There are reefs at either end upon which foamy breakers are constantly curling and which, with the dense tropical forest that covers it, constitute an animated and pleasing picture. From the ship the town also looks beautiful, nestling among the cocoa palms and other trees that line the shore, and forming a pretty fringe to the densely wooded, rising background.

The sailing vessel, which is a large schooner, came in shortly after we did, and it was an interesting experience to see her handled by three or four men. She came toward us riding at full speed before the wind with all sails set. She let down some of them as she came near us, swung slowly around our stern, let down more sail, pointed up toward the wind, then let down all sail and dropped anchor just as she got into position beside us at a conveniently safe distance. The quickness with which so few men executed these numerous details at the right moment, and the accuracy with which the ship was maneuvered, with nothing but the wind as a motor, caused me to realize that there was as much nicety in managing a ship as in removing an appendix.

If there is no bay at Limón there are at least fine piers. The ships remain at anchor until the sea is calm, then move up beside the piers and take on their loads. Coffee and bananas seem to be the principal exports, although about all kinds of tropical fruits are, or can be, raised in Costa Rica. Oranges and pineapples are plentiful, but our Northern apple, which has almost as great a variety of flavors as all of the tropical fruits put together, is an exotic and a luxury.

We saw a shark foraging about the ship this morning. Usually nothing but the back fin came in sight as he swam along the surface, although occasionally he would show his nose. The sailors are fishing for him, but so far have not had a bite, and I am deprived of an exciting description. But few in my place would allow the opportunity to pass, bite or no bite. The captain says that the popular notion that sharks turn on the back or side when they bite or take anything into the mouth is a mistaken one. He and others have seen them grab things without turning. They do not always take time to turn on the side. Like other animals they bite at things in any old way. But if a shark wishes to seize a large object that is floating on the surface, he may, if in no hurry, turn sidewise in order not to have to lift his head out of water over the object. Or if he wishes to bite a man’s leg he must turn sidewise in order not to bump his nose against the leg and thus prevent the mouth, which is quite a distance behind the nose, getting here. But that he habitually turns on his back or side, like a playful kitten, in order to eat or commit murder is one of those romantic notions that people who like to be deceived like to believe. Information that is novel or absurd attracts attention and spreads widely, and is slow to be corrected by reason and accurate observation. Natural science still has many entertaining absurdities to eliminate from its teachings.

But now that I am within sight and touch of the land of promise, the beautiful Costa Rica, I find myself in a sad plight. I can not get in. I sailed from New Orleans a week earlier than the other delegates in order to spend the holiday week at San José, the capital of Costa Rica and the Paris of Central America, and practice my Spanish and participate in the revelry. The beautiful city is located up in the highlands nearly 4,000 feet above the sea level and has a mean yearly temperature of 68 degrees F., the extremes being 50 and 80 degrees. Although it has neither a good troupe of actors nor of singers, it has the finest theater on the continent. It therefore imports an operatic company from Spain every year for the Christmas holidays, and has a season of operatic and theatrical performances, mimic bull-fights, genuine cock-fights, noisy merry-go-rounds, harmless football and all sorts of Spanish celebrations. All business is suspended and the people give themselves up to a season of carnival such as Latin nations delight in. But the wind blew, the rain came, the earth quaked and the mountains started down toward the sea, carrying away and burying miles of the only railroad track that led from the Caribbean sea to the capital. This occurred four days ago, and two feet of water is still running over the great railroad bridge, which is 620 feet long and 220 feet above the bed of the well-named Reventazon River (Big Buster River). The wind and rain did about the same thing last year and, finding that it was easy, repeated its performance this year, only in a more thorough manner.

The last train that came down from San José had to run through water that reached almost to the firebox of the engine, and stop occasionally to chop up huge tree trunks that overlay the track. A train taking up the imported actors and singers engaged for the Christmas festivities at San José has not been heard from, and as all telegraphic communication between the port and the capital is interrupted, it is not known whether the players are now acting for a living or swimming for their lives. A trainful of workmen, sent up to see what could be done to clear the track, was caught in a land slide and buried, engine, men and all.

Nine inches of rain fell at Limón night before last and carried the muddy water of the river out into the sea for five miles, coloring it a light yellow. As we came here we entered this yellow sea before we sighted Limón, and were in it fully an hour before we arrived in port. Trees, bunches of bananas and other debris are floating about, and although the stream that empties into the sea at Limón was a small one, they say that it is now large enough to float a ship. A portion of the graveyard here was also washed out, the flood carrying tombstones from one grave to another and mixing up the bones. However, as far as the living are concerned this is not a calamity, but a blessing, for the town has received the washing it needed to prevent the development of pestilence. The buried negroes don’t know the difference, nor do the living care. The dead are having a good drying off down below and the living expect to get one.

My fellow passengers, all of whom are bound for San José, will have to wait for a passing ship to take them to Colón, then cross the isthmus by rail to the city of Panama, and wait there for a steamship to take them up the west coast to Punto Arenas where they can wait for a train to San José. Whether they will have to stay there very long or not, depends upon the amount of washing out there has been on the Pacific side. As the steamers make many stops on the Pacific coast and do not run very often, the passengers will be on the way between one and two weeks, according to their luck in catching a boat and a train, instead of making the overland trip of 103 miles in a few hours by rail, as they had expected to do.

As for me I will lose the fine Christmas weather in the mountains and the round of novel entertainments in the Paris of Central America, and be obliged to spend two weeks instead of one in the hot city of Panama, which is at sea level, within eight degrees of the equator, and within two or three degrees of blood heat.

3:30 P. M., Dec. 24, 1904.

We have been ashore. The United Fruit Company sent out a row boat in which we climbed over the swells for about a quarter of a mile as the falcon flies, but over half a mile as the row boat climbed up and coasted down. Getting from the lowered stairway of the ship into the small boat was a test of good jumping, good judgment and good luck. The waves as seen from the deck of the ship did not appear over three feet high from trough to crest, yet the little boat beside the ship sank at least five feet from the step platform and rose up to it again.

The insurance agent had an excess of confidence in himself, as all successful insurance agents must have, and went down the steps first, to show us how. But for once his judgment of risks was poor. As he jumped at the boat, it sank out of reach and moved from under him. Luckily he had a business education, which teaches men never to give up what they have once laid their hands on, and he kept hold of the railing of the stairway. But his big body had acquired momentum and had to go, and he swung suspended by his hands over the water, with his umbrella sticking to him and his coat tails flying, until the boat rose up beside him and he was pulled into it. A man with less physical strength and presence of mind would have splashed down into the waves to frighten sharks and spoil our excursion to Limón. The insurance agent, however, did not even lose his umbrella, which was not insured and which he held up in triumph and exultation as soon as the danger was over. The ladies saw the performance and could not be persuaded to leave the ship, as their lives were not insured. Some one spoke of sharks, and they shuddered.

Upon arriving at the pier we were rowed to the landing place, where again good judgment and gymnastics were required in order to jump on the lower platform before the boat would sink away, and where good luck and agility were necessary to enable one to get up on the pier before the next wave broke over the steps leading up to it.

The first dock hand we saw was a coal-black negro with an Irish brogue which he used freely. It was a precious combination and gave me a new sensation. I was sorry that I could not take the combination with me as a curio. Nearly all of the negroes about the pier were Jamaicans and had a quaint accent and inflection of voice that was musical and pleasant to listen to. One of them had acquired a cockney accent and shocked and instructed us by calling a dollar a “crony” (corona), a highball “a eyeball” and a baked potato “a biked potighto.” I never realized before how characterless and commonplace our United States pronunciation really is. It lacks the bizarrerie of the native London article which has been called by Don G. Seitz “a queer jargon of misplaced aspirates and vowels interspersed with drawls and growls.” We have to invent Americanisms and rhetorical barbarities in order to outdo them.

While ashore we had hot baths in our own perspiration followed by cool shower baths in the rain, the frequent repetition of which finally drove us back to the ship. The rainy season is supposed by the calendar to last from May to November, but the calendar is a theorist, for we have been having rain from one to five or six times a day, varying from brief sun-showers to copious rainfalls. On the Caribbean side it rains both in the rainy and dry seasons, there being only about two months in the year of dry weather. The rain, however, cools the atmosphere and the earth, and renders the lowlands near the coast quite comfortable compared with the Pacific side, where the seasons are more sharply differentiated, and there is more dry weather. Although I have seen many showers I have heard no thunder on the Caribbean. The showers come and go with such rapidity that apparently they have no time to thunder. Possibly the hot air over such warm water is so uniformly laden with moisture that electricity does not easily concentrate except at great heights and is only heard on great occasions. But it is just as well not to hear it, for it is Southern in temperament and revolutionary in its methods, and is apt to radically change the existing order of things.

Limón had an earthquake five days ago at midnight. It frightened everybody and sent people skipping around in their muddy back yards clad in flowing white raiment like angels errant, but it did them no harm. The following lines are copied from the local newspaper: “At midnight on Monday the entire city was thrown into a state of alarm by a severe shock of earthquake, the like of which had never been experienced in Port Limón by the oldest inhabitants. Several private houses and shops suffered, etc.” At present earthquakes are useless generators of energy, but if they could be stored up and used to shake school boys and servant girls out of bed on cold mornings they would become popular.

Limón has about 3,000 inhabitants, largely negroes from Jamaica, and is the only Costa Rican port of entry on the Atlantic side. It is practically a North American town, however, being supported by the banana business of the United Fruit Company. Near the wharves is the main building of the company containing the offices and stores. Here merchandise of all kinds can be bought, from that which is put into the stomach to that which is worn on the back. The greater part of the goods, however, come from the United States and, as the Costa Rican duties are high, one pays about double our retail price at home. The town has a good-sized hotel, a bank, a well-stocked drug store, two or three steamboat agencies, a few small stores for the negroes, and numerous saloons of high and low degree. The large stores and agencies, as well as all things that pertain to politics, are conducted by Costa Ricans, many of whom live at San José and come down to Limón frequently to look after their interests. Several San Joséans came down just before the washout to attend to business for a day or two, and will now be obliged to wait here two or three months or make the trip down to Panama and up the Pacific coast with some of our S. S. Limón passengers—a just punishment for neglecting the holidays for business.

If I had arrived several days earlier and had gone to San José before the washout, I should have had to return by way of the Pacific coast, missing the Medical Congress and arriving home about two weeks after the end of my journey. Thus the storm saved me, and was a fortunate occurrence after all.

It is also fortunate that the floods have almost stopped the moving of bananas from the plantations down to the shore, and that the sea is too rough for the ships to take on their loads. The S. S. Limón will thus be obliged to remain at anchor behind the island for a day or two, and the captain will be able to keep us as boarders until Monday when a big Italian passenger ship arrives. We have hitherto been longing for dry land, but now that we are liable to be put on it to live in the town where the nights are hot, muggy and mosquito-ry, where there is a complete ice famine, much malaria and a few cases of yellow fever, we are content to remain on the steamer. The captain says that the sea is the only place to live on, and from the tropical, semi-infernal standpoint his view is the right one. Freight-ship accommodations have become a luxury, which proves that luxury is merely a point of view. Everything is luxury to some, nothing is luxury to others.

7 A. M., Dec. 26, 1904.

The Italian steamship, our friend in need that is to take us to Colón, has arrived and will depart this afternoon.

Yesterday we had an enjoyable Christmas dinner which was seasoned by the fact that we had gone through the hollowing out process of getting into the tropics by sea, and by the fear that we had more emptiness to endure before another opportunity for indulgence would present itself. I often think that the well-known and often-sought sea-appetite is largely due to a making up for missed and lost meals. We had barley soup, fish, roast turkey, cold meats, canned peas, canned corn, sliced tomatoes, strawberry preserves, plum pudding, Washington pie, cheese, fancy cake, oranges, apples, nuts, raisins, grapes and champagne. After we had filled the available space in our bodies with this conventional conglomeration, to whose noxious influence the custom of ages has rendered the human family more or less immune, the captain took the insurance agent and myself on shore to see the Christmas festivities.

While climbing the waves in the row boat on the way to the landing I noticed how well the government piers were built, the posts being protected by copper sheeting and the edge of the platform surrounded by heavy iron girders. These iron girders were, however, a sad trial to the ship captains, for in bad weather they injured the sides of the ships, and made it almost necessary to wait for a calm sea in order to move up for a load. The Costa Ricans, of course, put these girders on their piers to make them last longer and, having a monopoly of the business, found it profitable to accommodate themselves instead of their customers.

The warehouse of the United Fruit Company, which stands near the shore, is a handsome two-story rectangular building composed of windows and verandas, the upper story being fitted up as lodgings and lounging quarters for the employees. The principal streets have been filled in and macadamized, and were washed entirely free of loose dirt and gravel by the recent rains, with the result that the surface looks like rough concrete, and is as clean as if it had been scrubbed with scrubbing brushes by a corps of housemaids. All of the houses except two or three of the five or six business buildings are one and two-story frame skeletons, and are thus practically earthquake proof. They could be rocked like dry-goods boxes without being harmed or rendered more dilapidated; and if they were rocked over they and their inhabitants could be replaced at but little expense.

The negroes here are much blacker than those in the United States, many of them having skin as black and lusterless as soot. Their complexions are seldom spoiled by white blood. They are the real thing. They are better natured, more manageable and more interesting than our mulattos, who are neither one thing nor the other, although in the United States they claim that they are both things and have in them the best blood of both races. Slavery was the crime of the South, but it was perhaps a pardonable one in all except one feature, viz., the mixing of the races. That act was the sin, and the result is our race problem—a curse. The white blood of the mulatto longs for its own, and the black blood of the genuine negro is taught to long for what is not its own.

Vultures hopped about the back yards and perched upon the housetops ready to eat up the garbage as fast as thrown out. Stagnant water and dirt abounded, but it seemed to agree as well with the natives as with the big birds. The sun’s heat reminded us of the heat of some of our Northern steam-heated houses, and our handkerchiefs were kept busy drying our faces and necks. So when we found a score of negroes gathered in the shade about a cockpit we went into the shade to cool off.

The cockpit was a round space about ten feet in diameter surrounded by six slender wooden posts supporting the roof and forming a part of a low wall about three feet high—high enough to keep the fighting cocks within, but not to obstruct the view of the sports. The surrounding space was shaded by large trees but not enclosed, being merely a back yard to which a wide passage between two houses led. There was no admission fee, the spectators or “betters” standing around the pit betting on their favorites.

In the fight we saw a medium-sized Spanish rooster, belonging to the establishment, disable a large one of the same breed with the second stroke, and kill it with the third. The entertainment was short, but not sweet. A lance about two and one-half inches long had been fastened to one of the legs of each bird, the lances being about as wide and long as the small blade of a large penknife, slightly curved and acutely pointed. At the second jump the lance of the small rooster pierced the body of the larger one, who immediately turned sidewise and sank down. The victor seemed to understand the action of the wounded bird and was inclined to leave it alone, but the owners set them at it again. The wounded bird made another great effort, but his abdomen was this time pierced by the penetrating lance of the victor, which stuck fast and held him down beside his prostrate victim. The owner pulled them apart, upon which the wounded bird jerked his leg and wing convulsively two or three times and expired.

I think that it was an easy death for a fighting cock, although not as easy as having his neck wrung. He certainly had a much easier time than the victor of the previous fight, in which artificial spurs had not been used. The hero stood on a pile of boards nearby without a feather on his head, neck and thighs, and with his bared skin swollen and as red as raw beef. He had conquered in a long fight, but in the process had undoubtedly had a half hour of the most severe and exhausting punishment. Yet he stood up and looked proudly about him, like a fighting cock still, unconscious of his loss of beauty and of usefulness—too naked to fight and too tough to be eaten.

Having seen enough to satisfy our barbarous instincts, and cool off our enthusiasm but not our bodies, we continued our walk and soon came to a large centrally located market such as exists in nearly all Southern towns. Here we saw negroes carrying in freshly killed beef to be sold the next morning at daybreak, for, on account of the scarcity of ice, the butchers have to sell their meat almost as soon as killed. This probably accounts for the unseasoned toughness which is the chief distinguishing characteristic of tropical beef, although tough beef is sometimes found in the temperate zones. We afterwards passed several saloons in which the white young men of the town were playing cards, and stopped in one of them and drank nauseating luke-warm orangeades. Even the saloons and the hospitals were out of ice. Our last stop was at the hotel, a good-sized frame building that backed up to the seashore and was delightfully cooled by the sea breeze. The front garden of about three acres was the most beautiful mass of foliage I have ever seen. Excepting the wide paths, it was almost a solid mass of loaded orange trees, towering royal palms, foliage plants eight feet high, flowering trees, and other plants of the richest green, yellow, orange and variegated coloring.

We passed through the hall into the back yard, which bordered on the seashore, and sat for a while on the wide porch enjoying the sea breeze and watching a tame cockatoo; a red, yellow, orange, green, black and blue parrot, fully a yard in length from the tip of his yellow beak to the end of his blue and cardinal colored tail. I often wonder if we Americans are not descendants of the beautiful and loquacious parrot instead of the gibbering monkey, for our women are so ornamental, and swearing comes so natural to our men.

While sitting and chatting we had to do the appropriate thing and take a couple of highballs, for we were joined by some real Costa Ricans, who take whiskey and White Rock at stated intervals for their health, particularly when they come down to visit these hot lower regions. When the time came to go we drank another highball. I left out the whiskey, for I knew that I had to climb into the boat; but the others, including the temperate captain, took the universal poison as the Scotch dispense it. They had the advantage of long practise and experience. My book knowledge did not help me in practice.

After exercising a great deal of sober good judgment and juvenile agility, we got safely in and out of the row boat and finally on board our dear S. S. Limón. We were glad to be again on the boat, which was clean, cool and provided with ice and icebox meat, and were fortunate in not being obliged to spend the night in the old dilapidated worm-eaten hotel, which was full of mosquitoes and hot air, and had undoubtedly sheltered and shrouded many a case of yellow fever in the past.

CHAPTER V

Colón and the Panama Railway

Getting Aboard the Italian Steamship—A Life on the Ocean Wave—W. J. Bryan’s Opinion—The Steerage—A Many-tongued Englishman and Champagne Cider—The S. S. Limonians and Dinner—A Polyglot Conversation—Steamer Chairs for Beds—Night Sounds and Nauseous Smells—Fresh Air a Magic Remedy—Colón—The Formalities of Landing in the Canal Zone—Passed Through by the Linguistic Englishman—Circular No. 13—Hotel Washington and Its Discomforts—Attractive Grounds—Impossible Lodgings—Sudden Departure—Paying Double—Expensive Transportation—Aristocratic Beer—Getting Something for Nothing—Suffocated by Handbaggage—The Champagne-Cider-Englishman Again—Across the Isthmus by Railroad—Buried Treasures—U. S. Marines—Rhine Scenery—Cutting a Mountain Ridge in Two—Arrival at Panama—Farewell to S. S. Limonians—Parting without Sorrow—Traveling Friendship—Wise Cab-men and Cheap Transportation—Two and a half Cab Rides for a Glass of Beer—Doing as the Wild Beasts do.

The Italian steamship, which shall be nameless, was a large, fine-looking one when compared with banana boats, and was to arrive and depart on Sunday. It did so on Monday, and thus was keeping excellent time for Central American sea travel. It had done it mañana, and every one was full of passive praise.[*]

[*] Please see Transcriber’s note.

In order to avoid having our luggage examined, and being taxed by the thrifty Costa Rican custom officers, we arranged to have it put aboard the Italian steamer without being landed. This was easy for us but difficult for the sailors. They took it to the seaward side of the ship in a large row boat which held off about six feet and bobbed up and down like a cork. At an apparent risk of being thrown into the sea by each rising wave, the sailors made a noose in a heavy, stiff rope and placed it around half a dozen trunks and bags at a time. Then the derrick swung the things out over the side of the small boat and up on the ship in a way that frightened us, for it seemed almost a miracle that the loosely bound trunks and bags did not slip out and drop into the deep water. The sailors, however, seemed quite as cool and unconcerned about the chances of the trunks as about their own.

But how to transfer the ladies was a more difficult problem for us. It was proposed that they be sent the same way as the luggage, but the gallant captain vetoed the proposition and swore that we should have to get them in and out of the row boats, and put them ashore, where they could board the steamship as became their sex. And, in fact, after many an “oh” and “no” and “I can’t,” and plenty of shoving and pulling and catching, we finally got them safely on mother earth. The promenade from one pier to the other, including a walk through the gorgeous garden of the gangrenous hotel, and the final boarding of the ship, which lay alongside the pier, brought our task however to a most agreeable ending.

As a large number of the San Joséans who had been trapped in Limón by the washout were going with us, the steamship was quite crowded. It had come from Italian and Spanish ports and was making a tour of the Caribbean Sea, stopping at Limón, Colón and several South American ports, and had all kinds and conditions of men, women, children and animals on board. Sounds of many languages, English, Spanish, Italian, French, canine and gallinine, chased one another through the air in lively competition. We were a sort of Tower of Babel crowd. The European passengers looked the worse for wear, and their appearance, actions and words convinced me that “A Life on the Ocean Wave” was a poetical expression for Englishmen and Americans only. The song has never been translated that I know of, hence other nations know nothing of the poetry of such a life; and I had the proof of it right there before me and all about me. Wm. J. Bryan is said to be responsible for the following sentence:[1] “There is rest in an ocean voyage. The receding shores shut out the hum of the busy world; the expanse of water soothes the eye by its vastness; the breaking of the waves is music to the ear and there is medicine for the nerves in the salt sea breezes that invite to sleep.” How eloquent must be the man who can talk or write like that on shipboard.

[1] Chicago Daily News, Jan. 13, 1906.

The steerage was crammed with men, women, children, dogs and chickens; the dogs and chickens in coops and the humans huddled quite as closely together on their deck space. The latter were much worse off because they had a little more intelligence than the chickens, and realized their situation and sufferings more fully. Some of the men stood up and some sat on boxes, bundles, sky-lights and parts of the rigging, staring blankly and stupidly about them; others loitered about the narrow gangways, or reclined on the dirty deck, playing cards. Women and girls sat in out-of-the-way places with plates of unbuttered bread and dry boiled potatoes in their laps, eating with ravenous content and looking and acting as if they had not eaten before for a fortnight. As the voyage had been a long and stormy one, the appearances probably were not at great variance with the facts.

When finally we steamed out into the open sea the big boat, which sat high out of the water, rocked almost if not quite as badly as had the S. S. Limón. Many of the saloon (so-called first-class) passengers amused themselves watching and criticising the sea-weary crowd on the steerage deck below them, and laughed loudly whenever one of the sufferers would give way to a paroxysm of sickness. But some of those heartless laugh-promoters got their deserts, for the night turned out to be quite stormy and they themselves did what seemed so amusing when others did it.

The Port Limón passengers were quite gay for people who were traveling over a thousand miles by sea, and over a hundred by land, in order to get to a place that had been only a hundred miles distant before the great flood of the Reventazon or Big Buster River. I was particularly interested in an English resident of San José who had traveled extensively in Europe and Central America and spoke French, Italian, Spanish and English quite fluently and frequently. He spoke to every one in his own language and was “hail-fellow-well-met” with all. Before the ship left the pier he treated and was treated by the Limonians who came to see him off, and after we got off he did the same to his friends on board. In order to save his head he drank a great deal of champagne cider, a temperance drink which limits its ravages mainly to the stomach. We put out to sea at four-thirty, and by five-thirty his stomach weighed a ton and had to be lightened by throwing a part of its cargo overboard. By dinner time he was a changed man and acted as small as before he had acted big. When he sat down at the table he put on a brave and cheerful look. But I could see that his bravura and cheerfulness were only skin deep, for there was no confirmatory luster in his eyes and no pleasant word on his tongue. While the soup was being eaten he began to look at us with that unmistakable, conquered expression of a seasick man. He stared at us as if asking us if we noticed his plight, and when the second course came on he had to capitulate. He suddenly stood up and said meekly, “I think I must go,” and left the table, quickening his step as he neared the door.

The dinner was quite elaborate, but the foods were mostly Italian mixtures and so greasy that although the motion of the boat did not affect me, my stomach felt, after I had finished, as if it had done something wrong. Grease and sauce blend the flavors of food mixtures into a greasy and saucy harmony and, since the taste of fat is agreeable to the hungry stomach, often make the mess taste good. This is one of the secrets of economical cooking, which is so extensively cultivated abroad. The mixtures, although not attractive to the pampered American palate, are much more healthful than mince and pumpkin pie, doughnuts, baked beans, gingerbread, boiled corn beef and cabbage, devil cake and other devil dishes of Yankee invention. Our Pilgrim Fathers renounced the devil in all but eating. But the secret of the enjoyment of our dinner was the fact that we S. S. Limonians, who had become good friends and good sailors during the mutual and varied experiences of our voyage, all sat at the same table and took pleasure in each other’s company—the more so because all around us were strangers with whom we had nothing in common either social or ancestral. They were gesticulating and talking incessantly, rolling their R’s like ratchets and becoming more noisy, if possible, with every glass of wine they swallowed. The ship provided, gratis, plenty of cheap red and white wine, quite enough to inebriate all of us if we had been able to drink enough of it. Our Englishman and our insurance agent tasted it and promptly ordered some good wine at their own expense. But about the time we were half through eating and the passengers had drunk about all they wanted, some excellent wine was brought in and served free. It was better than what either of our men had ordered and drunk, but came too late for them to enjoy it. Not having indulged in any before, I took a little and relished it. It seemed to affiliate with the grease that was growling inside of me, and made it feel more contented to remain where it was. If our New England had only provided an antidote or palliative for the sweet and sodden mixtures with which she tempts us! But she finishes the destruction of digestion by slaking and cementing them in the stomach with hard cider.

After dinner I made the acquaintance of the Italian ship doctor, who spoke Italian and French; and Doctor Echeverría from Limón, who spoke Spanish, French and English; and a physician from Austria, who spoke Italian, Spanish, French, English and German. And as I attempted to palm off on them a kind of English, German, Spanish, Italian and French confusion, we had a dizzy and delightful time together. Sometimes two languages were spoken at once. But even when the conversation became general among us the language was apt to be changed with each speaker, who often could express himself better in a language other than that of the previous speaker. The comforting part of it was that even when the language changed with each speaker, most of us could understand what was said, and only became a little bit dazed and stuttery when we got to gesticulating and talking too fast. It was delightful, but it was strenuous. It would have been more congruous to have adopted French, the only language which we all spoke, as a common medium, but as none of us was French no one volunteered.

After our polyglot jugglery had exhausted our energies and our interest we separated, and I lay down on a bench and rested my brain. I remained there until quite late, for down among the staterooms there was so much noise and bad air and so many roaches, that the cool quiet fresh air on deck was not to be exchanged for that below except for the purpose of obtaining the needed sleep.

When I finally concluded that it was necessary to go to bed, I noticed some passengers preparing to spend the night in their steamer chairs. I did not wonder at their choice of lodgings, but wondered how many shower baths they would get before morning. To have no place to sleep more comfortable than a reclining chair with wobbly wooden legs and arms, is one of those sidelights of travel that books seldom tell about and tourists never look forward to. Down below I found the portholes on my side of the ship closed in order to keep the waves and fresh air outside where they belonged. I sighed and climbed up into the upper berth near the ceiling, for the lower one was occupied by dingy sheets and pillow cases. The person who had a right to sleep there had given it up, and was probably outside on a steamer chair where he could breathe better.

The walls or partitions between the staterooms reached only to within a foot of the ceiling, which was a provision for diffusing the bad air and odors equally and impartially among the passengers. I did no eavesdropping nor had I any desire to pry into my neighbors’ private affairs, nevertheless I heard doleful groans and desperate whoops that were intended to be kept secret. The genial English linguist who had kept sober on champagne cider was in the room next to mine doing penance. Even after the general noises had subsided he occasionally broke the silence and started desultory responses and imitations down the corridor. Finally the forced contemplation of misery became monotonous and wearisome and I fell asleep and slept until the morning noises and noisomeness began to come over the partitions and awake my ears and nostrils to a renewed sense of the situation.

I descended from my elevated couch, hurried into my clothes and went on deck to let the close air out of my air passages. The effect of the fresh air was hypnotic, and purgatory was forgotten. In a short time life became worth living, and I descended to the dining room where the odors were agreeable, and fortified myself with a water roll and two cups of café-au-lait. It seemed to me that the half of seasickness consisted in being stowed away in poorly ventilated and malodorous covey holes.

We arrived at Colón between eight and nine o’clock. The town has a good but exposed harbor with large covered piers. Only two or three other steamships were at the piers, and during the time I was in the town I never saw more than four there at a time. Although quite a number of ships stopped, but few stayed long, which was possibly due in part to the fact that the harbor afforded but little protection from the terrible “Northers” that occasionally visited it.

As we moved up to the pier, its edge was crowded with gesticulating negroes asking in Spanish and broken English to carry our baggage but who, when we finally called to them, told us to wait. This useless calling made the crowded landing place seem lively and busy, although nothing was being done but waiting. The health officer came aboard and vaccinated a few obstinate steerage passengers who had resisted the efforts of the ship surgeon, but now had to be vaccinated or be sent back home. He then ordered the cabin passengers all into the dining-room, glanced at us and talked with the ship surgeon. Then the custom officer called us into the parlor and made us sign a declaration of our baggage. Finally, after about an hour of fruitless formality they allowed us to step on the pier, but held us there to have our baggage rummaged. At the opportune moment the linguistic San José Englishman who the day before had drunk champagne cider to everybody’s health but his own, and to whom the habit not only of talking to everybody in his or her native language but of giving assistance and information to everybody, either was an inherited instinct or had become second nature by cultivation and habit, appeared suddenly, as if by magic and from nowhere, and made the custom officer ashamed to examine my trunk. He was not acquainted with the young officer, but he was as expert with strangers as an insurance agent, and had an extra traveling experience as well as a compelling touch of nature. One became his friend at the second word he uttered. His mouth was so full of words that they came out spontaneously and seemed to enjoy themselves on their way out. Although he had never heard of me elsewhere, he introduced me as a delegate to the Medical Congress and guest of the Republic of Panama, and made me out so important and distinguished that the officer touched his hat apologetically and hastily closed and marked my trunk.

Sanitary circular No. 13 was handed to every one who landed at Colón. It contained instructions as to the best way of avoiding malaria and yellow fever. I have preserved mine, but it has become so badly torn and soiled and wrinkled from much handling and stuffing away in a crowded steamer trunk that it is almost illegible. For the benefit of those who stay at home, but wish to know how to avoid these maladies, I reproduce it here. I was unable to smooth out the wrinkles, however, and think that it must have become slightly altered by my typewriter.

WAR DEPORTMENT.

ISTHMAN CANAL COMMOTION.

OFFICE OF THE CHIEF SAN TOY OFFICER.

Ann Cone, Isthman Canal Zoo,
November 28th, 1904.

Circular No. 13.

This circular is handed to each new rival upon the Isthmuss for the purpose of instruction as to how to void the disease most prevalent in Panama and the Canal Zoo—MALE-ARIA. Its cause is now well-known and each one with a little care can do a great deal toward keeping few from the disease.

It has been proven that male-aria is only given to man by the bite of a female musk-eater of a certain species (Anna Pholes). This female musk-eater must always bite some man-being who is suffering from male-aria and, in the blood thus drawn, she takes in the male-arian parachute. Within a few days, this parachute infects the musk-eater herself, and when she next bites a well parson she injects her hospital into the beating place. In this hospital the male-arian parachute is injected, and thus the wealthy parson contracts the disease.

Now if every man would use a musk-eater-bar, so arranged that the musk-eaters could not get into the bar-room at night, much protection would be procured from the disease, for while it may be contracted during the day time, it is not lovely to be. Probably nine tenths of the male-arian cusses contract the disease during sleep, because the male-arian musk-eater is a night biter, and the parson is quiet at this time.

Absolute protection from musk-eater bites is impossible, but it is known that Queen-Anne is a deadly person to the male-arial parachute after she gets into the blood of a humming bee. If therefore every drone would shake three grins at Queen-Anne once a day, any male-arial parachute that has been introduced to him during the day would almost certainly be heeled. The best time probably to shake Queen-Anne is before going to bed at night.

W. C. Gorgas,
Colonel, Medical Cops, U. S. A.
Chief San Toy Officer.

Colonel Gorgas is said to be a clear-headed, responsible man, but after reading his circular as restored I will not consider him responsible.

I had heard so much about Hotel Washington and its delightful situation on the cool tradewindy side of the town that my first endeavor upon landing was to get there and secure comfortable quarters. As there were no carriages, omnibuses, horse cars, dog carts or elevated trains visible on the streets (only steam engines and freight trains), and as the hotel was only a five-minute walk from the wharf, I walked the distance and hired a negro boy to carry my trunk. It was only ten o’clock in the morning but the heat was such that when I arrived I was perspiring most healthfully, and so was the negro boy with my trunk on his shoulder. I asked him to allow me to help him carry the trunk, or hire a helper, but he refused saying that it kept the sun off of his back.

The hotel had an aged and careworn look and seemed to be more in need of the mild climate and salubrious surroundings than any of the guests who were lounging in its shadows. It was two stories high, and consisted of a long row of rooms, below and above, which extended in single file parallel with the beach and about a hundred feet from it on one side, and along a back street on the other side. Which was the front side, I could not tell. Wide verandas bordered each floor in front and rear, the rear (or front) ones serving as outdoor sitting-rooms and the front (or rear) ones as passageways from the rooms to the stairway outside. Thus each room had a back (or front) door and window facing the sea and a front (or back) door and window facing the town. At the end of the building on the right there was a large bath-house with several cold rain-water shower baths but no tubs. From the bath-house a wing extended toward the sea, forming with the main building an L-shaped structure. In the wing the rooms did not extend through from veranda to veranda and therefore possessed a door and windows on one side only; a poor arrangement for tropical dormitories, in which through and through draughts of air are necessary for health and comfort.

The grounds consisted of a well-kept lawn in the rear (or front) bounded, near the water’s edge, by a shell road and a fine row of lofty cocoa palms, the conventional ornaments of inhabited tropical shores. On the back (or front) verandas one could sit and contemplate the ever youthful charms of nature, enjoying the constant fanning of the cool sea breeze and forgetting the hollow-eyed and unattractive, double faced appearance of the building. The only indoor lounging place was a small combination sitting-room and barroom; but as there ought to be no indoors in the tropics except for protection from night-biting insects and beasts, this defect was apparent only.

I found the manager busy at his desk in a little office about ten feet square, that opened on one side into the hotel barroom and on the other into his grocery and provision store, from which he bought provisions of himself for his hotel. After finishing his business with the clerk, who had the right-of-way, he greeted me passively, and informed me that there was not an empty room in the house, but that by night he might be able to put me in a room with another occupant or two. In the meantime he had my trunk and bag put in a room in the wing of the house. The room contained three single iron beds, two old water-worn wooden washstands, worth $2.00 each, if any one could be found willing to buy them, a center table two by three feet in diameter, worth $1.50, and two chairs worth nothing. It had neither a closet nor a wardrobe, and the two windows and the door were on the same side, and that side was not toward the sea. For three to sleep under mosquito bars in one room without an opportunity for a breeze to blow through it, would have been existing but not living. I did not then know that in the tropics people sleep with doors as well as windows wide open, utterly indifferent to the presence or proximity of others, and that they subordinate all other comforts and callings to that of keeping cool. Seclusion is, according to tropical standards, an over-refinement of our Northern modesty. In the tropics strangers eat, talk and sleep in common and in public in spite of the tedium of small talk all day and the annoyance of snoring and snorting all night; in the North we eat, think, sleep and weep as privately as possible, annoying our friends and relatives only. But I was not born in the tropics nor for the tropics, and longed for the comforts and privacy I had endured on the S. S. Limón. I wished I was on my way back to the States. Freezing and its accessories were not so bad after all and I would in the future cultivate them, and try to see their bright side. I was completely discouraged, and could not reconcile myself to a communistic life of this kind; so I resolved to keep on the move until I found a place where I could live in a civilized manner even if I did not stop moving until I arrived home.

I asked about trains and was told that the morning train had gone and no other would go until afternoon. But I went to the railroad station and learned that a special train would leave in about an hour. It was organized to take the passengers of our Italian boat across the isthmus to catch a Pacific Mail S. S. I therefore returned to the hotel and hired a negro to take my trunk back to the station. This negro produced a tiny dray-cart, drawn by a tiny four-legged skeleton of a tropical horse and offered to haul both myself and my trunk. If an able-bodied man had been harnessed to it, I should have accepted; but I had pity on the skeleton and walked to the station, allowing the trunk to ride. I was soon booked and baggaged for Panama, and was happy again at having escaped the annoyance and discomforts of rooming with strangers in a strange land, and at having the certainty of arriving in three hours at my long journey’s end—at Panama, the oldest city on the continent. Quaint old, cute old, historic old Panama! where picturesque revolutionists were as plentiful as commonplace millionaires in New York. Panama meant rest, clean clothes, baths, sight-seeing and siestas; and it could not be much hotter than Colón. I felt like one of the world’s elect, for although many go to a hotter place, but few get to Panama.

I had paid each of the negroes who had carried my trunk the fifty cents which they demanded. But I learned afterward that they meant Central American silver, which is worth only half as much as gold. Hence I paid each of them the equivalent of a dollar in their money, or double the amount they asked. However, I would recommend this double method of paying tropical negroes, as it secures good service and doesn’t bankrupt anybody. My second negro was very attentive and had my baggage weighed for me, and thus enabled me to pay $2.50 for it without any trouble. When, however, I had finally settled at the rate of three cents a pound for my baggage and about that much a rod for my fare, I discovered that the delegates to the Medical Congress were entitled to free transportation for themselves and baggage. The negro had thus cost me $11.50 more than I should have paid. He was literally a born blackleg and I was a natural born greenhorn, but we were both innocent, and doing the best we knew how, and no harm had been done.

After my great disappointment with the hotel and all of the activity involved, I felt faint, for I had breakfasted at break of day on the conventional nothing, viz., a dry roll and coffee. So I stepped into a combination saloon and restaurant to get an appetizer to prepare me for a real breakfast, for in Central America, as in France, they rightly call their first meal coffee and their second meal breakfast. When I had drunk my beer the bar-tender asked fifty cents for it. “This is too much,” I thought. “If they charge fifty cents for beer, they must charge about a dollar and a half for a highball and five dollars for a beefsteak. I had better get back home where I can afford to eat and drink.” I handed the bartender a silver half dollar and to my surprise he handed me a silver half dollar back. Thinking that he had made a mistake, I gave it back to him. He took the coin, looked at it and again returned it to me. Then I also looked at it and saw that it was a Columbian half dollar, equal to our quarter dollar. I felt greatly relieved—my glass of beer had only cost a quarter. So I drank another and made him keep the money, and he apologized for having tried to make me take the money instead of another beer. I learned that beer was one of the most expensive drinks on the isthmus. It was an exotic from Milwaukee. It had to be brought a great distance in bottles, and instead of costing two thirds as much as a highball it cost nearly twice as much. The regular price for ordinary drinks at the bar, excepting beer, was only fifteen cents in U. S. money, which was consoling. I should be able to drink even if I could not afford to eat.

After getting some real breakfast at half price I felt better as well as wiser, and went to the station and found the officials still weighing baggage. The extra train was proving profitable and would probably be crowded. Hence I hurried into the cars to secure a seat, and was glad I had done so, for pretty soon they were filled until there was hardly breathing space. It was not that the passengers were too numerous, but they had brought countless bags, bundles, blankets and other unperfumed traveling furniture all done up in hand packages, and had piled them up on and between the seats. They could take them thus without paying for them. We had first-class tickets, but were transported like emigrants and were nearly two hours late in getting off. But I did not mind that, for the other S. S. Limonians were there, and we were enjoying each other’s company and the privilege of commenting freely upon our strange surroundings.

We were hardly out of the station, when the genial champagne-cider-Englishman from San José, who had telegraphed to the Pacific Mail S. S. Company to hold their boat for his party, and who had been mainly instrumental in getting the extra train put on, came down the aisle with a bottle of that most wine-like whiskey, called “Scotch,” and our S. S. Limonian Englishman produced three bottles of that most wine-like water called “White Rock” out of one of his dozen traveling bags. So we had a Scotch treat. Pretty soon nearly every person in the car had reverted to his atavistic emigrant nature, and was eating out of his hand and drinking out of his bottle. It was quite an enjoyable picknicky experience, only I could not eat. I had taken a hearty meat breakfast before starting, instead of waiting for this sociable lunch.

HUTS ON LINE OF PANAMA ROAD

The journey of two hours was a delightful transformation from our long siege of Caribbean discomfort. The cars had no glass in the windows, and the breeze caused by our motion kept us comfortably cool without bringing in any dust. The inhabitants we saw along the road were as black and curious looking as imps, and the foliage so dense in places as to appear almost solid; and the frequent views of portions of the incomplete canal and of the picturesque rivers that intersected and mirrored the tangled foliage, lent a fascinating wildness and weirdness to the landscape, that reminded us of oriental tales and occult apparitions.

But all is not gold that glitters, nor passion that paints, nor poetry that poses. Commerce and greed, poverty and death, profit and loss, had left their trails. In places we saw ruined machinery sticking out of the underbrush. Indeed, whole workshops were covered and all but concealed by the rank growth of vegetation. At Bas Matachin a machine shop with an equipment worth at least a quarter of a million of dollars and covering six acres was overgrown; and near it several acres of car wheels and steel rails had already been dug out. After being put in order the shop was going to develop a capacity for turning out fifteen locomotives and 115 cars per month. Other warehouses contained a million dollars’ worth of pumps, dredges and machine tools. Hundreds of superfluous letter presses and six tons of rusty steel pens were found among them. At Culebra they were repairing 1,000 cars, thirty locomotives and seven excavators, besides many antiquated steam shovels, all of which were to be utilized to keep men busy until more modern machinery could be imported. Costly chicken-coops, a horse bath-tub 15x75 feet in area, and a pig pen 100x200 feet (the latter made of concrete with iron supports and a galvanized roof, and capable of holding 200 hogs) were discovered in the jungle. Surely Panama until just recently contained the greatest amount of accessible buried treasures of any country in the world. In the basement of the administration building at Panama are French printing presses and lithographic presses, and a carload of drawing sheets, which is, according to the investigation of Frank C. Carpenter, from whose writings the above astonishing items of information are taken, thousands of dollars’ worth more than can be used in all of the work of the canal.

During the last half hour of the journey across the isthmus the scenery was hilly, and the view less impeded by crowding vegetation. The barracks of the U. S. marines at Empire, nestling in the foliage on the side of the mountain, made a romantic picture as seen from the train, something like Rhine scenery without the Rhine. And I think that the luxuriance of the tropical foliage in the valley made an acceptable substitute for the Rhine at that point. Better to have Rhine scenery without the Rhine than the Rhine without any scenery, since we can’t have everything in Panama. It is easier to imagine a river than to imagine the scenery. But when the canal is finished we will also have to imagine the scenery, for the present railroad and many of the villages we were looking at will be at the bottom of a lake, and ships will be passing over them.

ABANDONED MACHINERY OF THE FRENCH

We rode through the Culebra cut, where they are cutting through a mountain ridge 300 feet high. Three hundred feet high seems pretty low for a mountain ridge until one attempts to dig through it and carry the rocky debris twenty-three miles up the Atlantic coast whence it can not be borne back by the torrents of the rainy season. Its accomplishment would make a fit subject for an Arabian Night story. But Uncle Sam finds it easy. He is going to build the canal over the mountain, and make his cement out of the debris.

Suddenly, long before I expected or even desired it, we stopped at the city of Panama, the Mecca of my pilgrimage. I bade farewell to the S. S. Limonians, who were taken by the train to the mouth of the canal where the pier was located and where the Pacific Mail steamer was waiting for them, and started for Hotel Centrál. One of the most agreeable features about steamship friends is that there is no pain at parting. We enjoy them, and leave them rejoicing, and readily find substitutes wherever we go. If we meet them again soon, we greet them as vociferously as if they were old cronies; if we never meet them again we forget them as if they had been changes in the weather.

I found cabmen in abundance, all native negroes. They were unlike any other cabmen I had ever met. In a way they were saints, gentlemen and business men, and didn’t “let on.” Instead of taking advantage of the facts that the weather at Panama was always either hot or rainy, the distance too great to be walked, and that there were no street cars, to charge a dollar for the long ride to the hotel at the other end of the town, they charged ten cents. Pah! In Chicago the cabfare from the railway stations to my house is two dollars and a half. But by keeping their price down to ten cents the Panama cabmen not only have killed street car competition, but they get more jobs without doing any more work. Their horses do the work while they merely take rides, and are kept cool by the motion and entertained by their customers. It is a wonder that with such successful and moral business models so near them, the Colón negroes can be so mercenary and shortsighted.

I like a cheap ride, but when it is as cheap as that it seems like something not worth having. One can take two and a half rides for their price of a glass of beer. It is preposterous. While in Panama I did refuse to ride once, and walked to the station from the hotel—but only once. The ride was worth the price of two and a half schooners of beer. The distance was composed of cobblestones and animated by heat, and grew upon acquaintance. Walking at night in the tropics is pleasurable and healthy, but by day it is impossible. In the tropics one should do as the wild beasts do, viz., keep out of the sun and let beer alone.

ALONG PANAMA RAILROAD

CHAPTER VI

Panama

Origin of the Name Panama—Suggestions for Change of Name—Enlightening a Cab Driver—Scalping in the United States—A Cure for Obesity—Shirking—Description of Road from the Railroad Station to the Hotel Centrál—Plaza Centrál—Tips—The Negro in the North and South—Dr. Frank’s Opinion—How the Tropical Negro’s Wants Are Satisfied—Opportunities for Negroes and Mulattoes in the Tropics—Solution of the Race Problem.

We are told that Panama is the Indian name for good fishing place, or place abounding in fish. Judging from the hotel fare this might be so, for when we did not have canned fish, we had fresh. But this explanation is regarded by archæologists as a fish story and lacks anthropologic evidence. As to etymology, the name sounds and looks more like Greek, Latin or Spanish than Indian. Panamahaha would sound more like an Indian name and would express more.

One enthusiastic writer says the name Panama was given to the city because it is the oldest city on the continent, the Pa and Ma of American cities. The simplicity of the explanation gives it weight. Simplicity and truth are twins, and simplicity was born first.

A Spanish scientist asserts that the original name was Panima from Pa ni Ma, which means neither father nor mother. He claims that as the first city of America, it had neither father nor mother. This is simpler still.

A Scandinavian historian thinks that the original name was Panamerica, which is Swedish. Eric was cut out later, and Panama was left.

A celebrated English captain, whose name has been forgotten, thinks that the real name was Panamaniac, because the inhabitants were unlike the English, and refers to the capture of Panama by Morgan the pirate as proof. The inhabitants who went forth to fight insanely allowed themselves to be scattered and driven back by their own horses and cows. He says that the English do not fear these animals.

Sportsmen say that the name is Indian and that it refers to the method of fishing formerly in vogue by the natives. The fisherman leans over the water and agitates it with his beard and lips, whereupon the fish, who can not distinguish a dark colored face above the surface of the water from a tree trunk, takes the agitation of the water for that made by bugs, darts at the place and lands between the Indian’s teeth, and is caught.

I myself am inclined to cut the Gordian knot by proposing a new name. With a temperature of 90 to 100 degrees F. in the shade on Christmas and New Year’s days, the town should be called Infero in Esperanto, Inferno in Italian, Enfer in French, Hoelle in German, Lugar Endiablado in Spanish and Vamick in Volapuk. I suggested this explanation to our Englishman of the S. S. Limón as we were parting at the Panama railroad station, and he said, “Go to Panama.”

I chartered a ten-cent cab at the station and entered into conversation with the driver, who, with his vast fund of knowledge concerning Spanish words and Panama city geography, taught me many things. He was one of the few Panama cabmen who spoke English.

In order to give him some information in return, I told him that I came from one of the youngest and largest cities in the United States, a city in which we had a river whose water ran backward toward its source, that the city had also built a canal that carried the waters from Lake Michigan uphill on its way down to the Gulf of Mexico, and had constructed a pump that would have pumped the Niagara Falls into the Mississippi River had not the rest of the country objected and interfered. I told him that some of us remembered when Chicago was the center of the greatest Indian scalping district of the world.

He stared at me with the whites of his eyes while I was talking, and then wanted to know if I had ever seen any one scalped. I told him that I had myself been scalped five times and was now growing my sixth head of hair; that the hair of many of our women turned golden yellow instead of gray as they grew older; that hairgrowing was one of our industries, and our horticulturists made it grow on wax figures faster than it grows on babies’ heads, just as our builders put roofs on houses before building the walls, and in his hot country would leave off the walls altogether.

“Do they ever begin at the roof and build downward?” he asked, dryly.

“Not as a rule, but we often begin the new building before the old one is torn down, and put in the new foundation and supports while the old building is still inhabited.”

He did not seem to know that I was telling the truth, for he began to lose interest and whipped up his emaciated horse to keep it from falling down, and apart. So I changed the subject.

“Your horse seems to be getting very thin from your efforts. Or perhaps it is from its own efforts. It is tired carrying its age, which, of course, is growing greater and heavier every day. It ought to be wired and connected with a power-house. In my country we put up better frameworks and run them by gasoline vapor. How do you feed it?”

“I don’t feed him.”

“I beg pardon. I meant to ask how you diet him?”

“He works and fasts until six in the evening, when I then turn him loose and let him nibble. I lay off once a week to spend my week’s earnings, and turn him out to grass for the day, when he fills up.”

“I have it at last,” I exclaimed so suddenly that he gave a little start. “I have been seeking a cure for obesity for years, and you have found it and demonstrated it. I’ll make my fat patients fast and work all day, let them nibble after 6 P. M. and once a week turn them out to golf, which includes both the grass and the filling up.”

“What a queer country yours is,” he said, “I should think that people would make fun of each other all of the time.”

“They do. Scheming for each other’s money and then making fun of the losers, keep them busy and happy. But why do you tire yourself beating your horse?”

“I’m working, or being worked, I hardly know which.”

“And what is the horse doing? If he could only take the whip!”

“He’s shirking, sir. I’m giving him the whip.”

“Well, it’s about time for him to shirk. He probably wants to do it once more, and has no time to lose. If the poor brute could only talk, as we do.”

“That’s one bad quality he doesn’t share with us, sir.”

IN PANAMA CITY
Store and Residence of the Poorer Quarter

After we had thus driven about a mile, the houses, which near the station were dilapidated one and two-story frame structures, teeming with Chinese and negroes, began to improve in quality, and we came to the Plaza and Church of Santa Ana. Here we found ourselves to all appearances in an old Spanish town, as full of medieval inconveniences as New York or Chicago of modern improvements. Spanish houses, churches, streets, plazas and people—everything quaint, curious and comfortless—dirty, diseased and dead. We passed many hotels, but the buildings were small, old, dingy and uninviting in appearance. They looked more like homes for microbes and macrobes rather than doñas and hidalgos.

The next half or three-quarter mile was through the best business part of the city where whites predominated. The houses were Spanish in style, two or three stories high, nearly all having stores on the ground floor and living apartments above. They formed a solid front of masonry, slightly varied, and were built in little blocks that measured about 100 by 200 feet. The cross streets were too narrow for two persons to walk abreast, so that the only way for pedestrians to pass one another was to step off into the street, and the only way for vehicles to pass one another was to make use of the sidewalks. However, that didn’t matter. Vehicles did not frequent the side streets, although plenty of cabs were rattling back and forth on the main thoroughfare which led us from the railroad station to Plaza Centrál, the principal public square and park of the town. It was square in shape and about 250 feet in diameter, and was occupied by the Parque de la Catedrál (Cathedral Park), all except a twenty-foot strip of street extending around the outer edges. The street was also paved with those sounding cobble-stones for carriages and horses to rattle upon and murder sleep. The foliage in the park was thick but, as the dry season had already set in, it had not the luxuriance and brilliancy of that on the other side of the isthmus. The garden of the hotel at Limón, Costa Rica, was still the most gorgeous bit of vegetation I had seen.

THE CATHEDRAL OF PANAMA AND CORNER OF
THE PARK

On the west side of the square stood the Cathedral. Its high square Spanish towers were crusted over with pearly shells, and adorned with delicate, tree-like shrubs which grew upon their venerable walls. On the same side of the square was a small department store. On the north side were, besides the business houses, the Pacific Steam Navigation Company and the Panama Lottery, the latter being the lower floor of the bishop’s house. On the south side was a book store and the United States government official building. On the east side flourished a German saloon, a money changer, two business houses and Hotel Centrál. In the hotel building, and flanking the main entrance or corridor on either side, were an immense barroom and a small barber shop, each apparently doing a rushing business. Next to the hotel on the second floor, over a store, was a Spanish club where cards were played after dark and before dawn.

I tipped the cabman with a nickel, equal to fifty per cent. of his pay for the ride, and received a polite bow and “Gracias, Señor.”

I was told afterward that the tipping of cabmen was not customary. The cabmen of Panama are so honest and disinterested that a pleasant word is as good as a tip. If only our American negroes, who believe that one good tip deserves another, would all go to Panama and do as the Panama negroes do, they would learn to be tolerant of the whites, who wish only to be served and left alone.

I do not suppose that all of my Northern readers take enough interest in their negro brothers to study the race question. Some think they do not have to. For the enlightenment of such as do not study, I will quote from a recent popular novel that was being printed in this country while I was in Panama, and has since been dramatized. The quotation represents a Southern physician, Doctor Cameron, telling a statesman named Stoneman how the negroes maltreated the whites in South Carolina after having voted themselves into complete political control of the state.

“‘The negro is the master of our state, county, city and town governments. Every school, college, hospital, asylum and poorhouse is his prey. What you have seen is but a sample. Negro insolence grows beyond endurance. Their women are taught to insult their old mistresses and mock their poverty as they pass in their old, faded dresses. Yesterday a black driver struck a white child of six with his whip, and when the mother protested, she was arrested by a negro policeman, taken before a negro magistrate, and fined ten dollars for ”insulting a freedman.’”