The Miraculous Fever-Tree by Fiammetta Rocco

Author:Fiammetta Rocco [Rocco, Fiammetta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007392797
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Of all the grand civil engineering projects of the nineteenth century, none was more ambitious than the two canals dreamed up by the French at Suez and in Panama. More than 5500 Frenchmen, along with another seventeen thousand workers from other countries, died in Panama between 1881 and 1889, during Ferdinand de Lesseps’ ultimately ill-fated attempt to dig a canal across Central America. Because the Panamanians hold the French to blame for the fact that the canal belonged for nearly a hundred years to the United States of America, there is little to commemorate the work that de Lesseps and his compatriots were able to complete. Most of the bodies of the dead – other than those that were repatriated at great expense by their families – lie beneath the dark waters of the canal itself, along with more than seventy railway locomotives and thousands of tonnes of machinery and dredging equipment.

The main municipal cemetery of Panama City is in Chorillo, once one of the poorest quarters of the capital, where cinder-block public housing has now replaced the old wooden shacks of the canal workers. Within it rises one of the few remaining monuments to the period when the French were attempting to build the canal. The ‘Recordación Perpetua a los Gloriosos Franceses Zapadores del Canal de Panamá’ records the names of twenty-seven men who died working for Ferdinand de Lesseps. They were born variously in Paris, Marseilles, Haute Savoie, Bresse, Tarn, Fontainebleau and, memorably, given the connection with de Lesseps, ‘au barrage du Nil (Egypte)’. They stand for thousands of others listed in the French records as ‘décédé à Panama’. Of the twenty-seven names, there is not one who was not a graduate of one of France’s best engineering schools. Only two had reached the age of thirty. And they all died within weeks of arriving in Central America, in the winter of 1884–85, when the isthmus was swept by the worst epidemic it had ever known of yellow fever and malaria. Medicine was in short supply, and thousands of workers died. The Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique, for whom they worked, was so terrified of what was happening that it forbade its employees from disclosing the conditions under which they lived. One anxious French shareholder who wrote to the company to ask about the reports of excessive numbers of deaths, was soothed with the words: ‘We know you have confidence in us … If we say there is no illness on the isthmus, this is because there is none, and anyone who asserts the contrary is a gossipmonger who is merely trying to undermine your confidence so that he can take over himself.’ Telling outright lies, the company decided, was preferable to admitting the truth.

Philippe Bunau-Varilla, my great-grandfather, knew nothing about the epidemic when he sailed on the steamship Washington from St Nazaire to the Panamanian port of Colón in October 1884, although he made the crossing of the Atlantic in the company of the Chief Engineer of the canal project, Jules Dingler, and his family.

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