Panama fever: the epic story of one of the greatest human achievements of all time--the building of the Panama Canal by Matthew Parker

Author:Matthew Parker [Parker, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, History, United States, History - General History, Technology & Engineering, Panama Canal (Panama), Central, Central America, United States - 20th Century (1900-1945), Civil, Civil Engineering (General), Americas (North, History: World, Panama Canal (Panama) - History, Latin America, Central America - History, West Indies), Latin America - Central America, South
ISBN: 9780385515344
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2007-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

ever-thickening

blizzard of paper, orders became

duplicated or lost. Alternatively

they were pared down or simply

filed away. When Walker left his

job the following year, over 160

requisitions were found stuffed into

drawers in his desk, some many

months old. Those on the Isthmus

responded by attempting to predict

their needs far into the future or

simply bumped up their orders,

expecting them to be adjusted

downward.

On

one

occasion,

Wallace's

chief

architect,

his

twenty-nine-year-old nephew O. M.

Johnson, calculated that he would

eventually require 15,000 doors, for

which he needed 15,000 pairs of

hinges. He might have expected to

receive a fraction of that, but

somewhere in the paper storm in the

Washington office the order took on

monstrous proportions and, soon

after, 240,000 perfectly made

hinges turned up at Colón.

The architect's office was one of

the many bottlenecks in the initial

organization. There was a great

deal of work involved in repairing

the French quarters, let alone

designing

and

building

new

accommodations. But it was a

chicken-and-egg

situation.

As

Wallace

complained,

“Suitable

quarters and accommodations could

not

be

provided

without

organization, supervision, plans and

material, which of course, rendered

a large force necessary almost at the

commencement of the work, which

had to be provided with suitable

quarters and accommodation.”

Demand for labor was acute

while

the

need

for

quarters

massively outstripped the available

supply. Cities of tents were created

on the slopes of Ancón Hill and

elsewhere, but these were soon full

as the workforce expanded to thirty-

five hundred by November 1904.

To “make the dirt fly,” the

Washington office was sending

hundreds of men to the Isthmus

every week, “before there was any

way to care for them properly, or

any tools or material to work with,”

as Frank Maltby complained.

Soon

after

her

husband's

departure for the canal project,

Rose van Hardeveld received her

first letter from Jan, who had given

up his post on the Union Pacific

Railroad to accept a job with the

Commission and thus become part

of Teddy Roosevelt's “great march

of progress.” Having sailed from

San Deigo, van Hardeveld arrived

at Panama City and made his way to

Culebra. “A heavy suitcase in each

hand, no light anywhere, the sweat

rolling down my face, I stumbled

along the wet slippery track, which

I had been told to follow until I

found a place to turn off,” he wrote.

“I could sense that the water was on

both sides. If my foot slipped from

the ties, it landed in soft mud. In the

deep darkness I seemed to have

walked miles, and I never dreamed

there could be such unearthly noises

as came to my ears from all around.

Thick croaking, hoarse bellowing,

and strange squeaks and whines

leaped at me from the blackness. I

have learned since that these swamp

noises are made by lizards, frogs

and alligators, but to me they

sounded like the howling of

demons. Well, I decided that turning

back looked almost as hard as going

on, so here I am.” As she read the

letter, remembered Rose, “tears

stood in my eyes… My Jan was not

a man to contemplate turning back

from any goal he had elected to

pursue—unless obstacles loomed

virtually insurmountable.”

His accommodation turned out to

be “a big bare lumber barn, not

quite so well constructed as the

horse stables on the ranches at

home,” divided into cubicles just

big enough for two men to share. A

week later another letter arrived.

“The food is awful,” Jan wrote,

“and cooked in such a way that no

civilized white man can stand it for

more than a week or two … Almost

all the food is fried. They feed us

fried green bananas, boiled rice,

and foul-smelling salt fish. It rains

so much that

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