RECOLLECTIONS OF PANAMA.*
THE more facts are brought to light regarding that enormous deception and failure, the Panama Canal, the more surprising it seems that the French public should have been blinded long enough to carry it on so far. This small book is a slight but spirited record of what its author saw on the Isthmus in 1886. It consists of a series of articles contributed lately to the Revue Bleue, and appears to be in no way exaggerated or over-painted. One wonders why such pictures were not given to the world at once, as a warning to intending speculators or emigrants. M. Mimande, indeed, tells us that on his return he described to his enthusiastic friends what he had seen, and suggested the great risks they were running. But they laughed, and told him he was not an engineer, that a blind man might as well talk of colours,—in short, that he had better mind his own business, and not trouble them with his doubts and fears. Bankruptcy! " Ta ta ta Avea vous la pr6tention d'Atre le Grand Francais, par hasard P And possibly M. Mimande may have fought against his own doubts, and tried to believe with the rest of France—in spite of what his own eyes and good sense told him—that the difficulties would be vanquished in time to avert ruin, and Le Grand Francais triumphant once more. Such lingering hopes as these in honest minds, with the ignorance of the shareholders of a state of things which they could hardly imagine without having seen, may help to explain the depths of corruption to which the Company found it possible to descend in its desperate struggle for existence. The little book tells a sickening story, but one which will be eagerly read in France at ;this moment, and which ought, to interest English people too. M. Mimande was an eye- witness of all which is now so painfully discussed ; he was familiar with the outward and inward life of the Isthmus and its towns ; he watched the works, and saw what the great majority could not see, how far more stupendous the under- taking was than M. de Lesseps had led France to believe.
In 1886 the shadows were already beginning to lengthen—at least, for the eyes of those who had any real information on the subject—over the great enterprise of Panama. Unfortu- nately, "le petit render," more deeply concerned than any one, remained in ignorance. Even a visit to Bordeaux might have taught him something, M. Mimande thinks, for there he would have met men just returned from the Paradise of his imagina-
* Souvenirs d'un ishamd de Panama. Par Paul Mimande. Paris; Perrin et
Co. 180. tion, who could have told him that a hundred thousand francs a year would not tempt them back again, that yellow-fever raged perpetually, that, as far as they could see, there was no possibility of fixing a time when the Canal would be finished, and the dividends would begin to flow in. If M. Mimande himself heard many of these dismal sayings, they do not appear to have discouraged him. He sailed in the • Saint-G-ermain' with a company of fellow- passengers, of whom he was the only one who lived to return ; chiefly ignorant men going out as clerks or other employes in the Company's works and offices, tempted by high pay ; one or two South American politicians and journalists ; a mis- sionary and his wife; a couple of Russian Nihilists; and the usual group of mere adventurers going in search of fortune, —hardly any of them hopeful or useful additions to the desperate crowds already gathered at Colon and Panama.
Colon (or Aspinwall), with the exception of the Company's handsome group of buildings, called " Christophe Colomb," -struck the traveller as the most frightful, dirty, and degraded town he had ever seen. The streets were muddy quagmires, in which the houses were rotting away ; dead animals lay where they had fallen, and the vultures were the only scaven- gers; while the population, like that of Port Said—with which it seems that Colon may dispute the palm for degrada- tion—was made up of the scum of all nations. This was not a place to linger in ; and M. Mimande hurried on at once by the railway to Panama, which follows the intended course of the Canal. Wider, he says, than the Suez Canal, "et tout-it- fait majestueux," it opens from Aspinwall Ray. But this fine course ceased very quickly, where the flat plain rose into mountains and forests. Then came the sections of the works, each undertaken by a separate contractor, with its timber- yards, workshops, excavations ; each section, when M. Mimande saw it first, a centre of noisy activity, a village of three or four thousand workmen, chiefly enormous negroes from Jamaica.
The year 18811 was, in truth, the last year of real hope and enthusiastic hard work for this great undertaking. The enormous difficulties were even then hardly realised. We 'know now how far they surpassed those of the Suez Canal, and how little M. de Lesseps was justified in the light-hearted -confidence with which he regarded them. It would absolutely s3eem that at first the engineers did not attach much importance to the fact that the level of the two oceans was not the same, and therefore that a whole series of locks would be required to make the canal navigable at all. Neither did they make much account of such an obstacle as the Culebra, a granite mountain to be perforated, against which all the efforts of men and machinery have as yet spent themselves in vain.
The railway makes its way through a marshy jungle breathing fever; and it has been said, with little exaggeration, that every sleeper laid down on this line may represent the dead body of a workman. Of the climate altogether, M. Mimande gives a truly hideous account. Dead men tell no tales ; but if all the lives laid down in the service of the Panama Company, all those who lie in the cemeteries there, hastily buried, with nothing but an official number on a stone to identify their graves, could rise and speak, the French Chamber and the world ought to be still more deeply thrilled than by hearing of the many millions saved by the un- fortunate "petite rentiers " which have been poured into dishonest hands, or lost in that fatal tract of country between Colon and Panama. M. Miumnde devotes a whole section of his book, La Fiovre ,Taune, to the climate and its effect on Europeans. Youth, health and strength, even sobriety and steadiness, are no protection against Her, as they -call the yellow-fever. She prefers those who have done nothing to attract her, and has also the power of inspiring a panic terror in her victims, which makes one a little wonder that the Isthmus has not been depopulated by flight,
as well as by disease. M. Mimande tells heart-rending stories of the lives he has seen sacrificed to this plague. There was plenty of money at Panama in 1886, and in this town, outwardly perhaps more liveable than Colon, every kind ,of vice and immorality went on unchecked. M. Mimande gives .a vivid description of the "cacophonie bruyante" of those nights at Panama, the barbarous, deafening music, the wild crowds in the stifling heat that crowded round the gaming- tables, their eyes bright with fever. Even steady men, if there were any, found it difficult to save their money at Panama ;
the cost of all necessaries was enormous, and everything was bad. All business was in the hands of the Chinese. There was no such thing as decent society. Even satisfactory work was a difficulty; every department was over-crowded; cheating and corruption reigned throughout ; and the climate made it doubly hard to struggle against the terrible fatigue and ennui of life in such a place, among such surroundings. All this time, in France, speculation was invited. and emigration was encouraged. M. Mitnande asks whether M. de Lesseps really knew what he was doing, and answers, "Je as le mole pas.
Et on lui pardonnera, payee qu'il a beaucoup ignore." Ore doubts, however, whether this ignorance was excusable,
when one remembers the state visit of M. de Lesseps to Panama, of which M. Mimande was a spectator, and of which he gives a lively account. Le Grand Francais was very old, it is true, If his faculties were already dim, then all the more responsibility falls on his son and the others who accom- panied him. They need not have been deceived, if he was, by the cheerful aspect of things, the shouts of the negroes, the industrious puffing of engines, .the chatter of officials and
contractors. A strict account, a few per-centages, might easily, one would think, have been demanded by these leaders of the enterprise. But it was probably too late, even then, to draw back in any direction, and certainly to avert what has almost been a national disgrace. Now that we know all, it is clear that the end has long been inevitable.
Of the present state of the Canal works, many accounts are current. It can hardly be better described in a few words than by M. Mimande himself on the last page of his striking little book :—
"1.7n de mes amis, ofacier do marine, qui faisait, l'annee derni6re, partio de l'escadre du Pacifique, a eu l'occasion d'entrevoir Panama et m's donne des dkails navrants. C"est surtout l'aspoct desole des cbantiers qui l'a frappe. Il semble, ma disait-il, qu'on y alt eta' surpris en plain travail, par une de ces grandee calamites dent parlent lea livres saints at los vieux poMnes : pluies de feu, tremblemonts do terra, &c., at quo lee ouvriors, jetant lours °utile, aient fui avec 6pouvante. Maintanant la brousso a gagne lee remblais ; his Hanes ont enlace, brise do lours bras noueux les machines gisant au has des talus. Chose curieuse : des arbros ont poussA dans les tuyaux des locomotives. Los singes cabriolent de branche on branehe en faisant des grimIces."
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