Читать книгу Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose онлайн

53 страница из 85

THE MANGROVES MARCHING ON STILT-LIKE ROOTS

But the swamp and jungle were unrelenting in their toll of human life. Men working all day deep in slimy ooze composed of decaying tropical vegetation, sleeping exposed to the bites of malaria-bearing insects, speedily sickened and too often died. The company took all possible care of its workmen, but even that was not enough. Working men of every nationality were experimented with but none were immune. The historian of the railroad reported that the African resisted longest, next the coolie, then the European, and last the Chinese. The experience of the company with the last named class of labor was tragic in the extreme. Eight hundred were landed on the Isthmus after a voyage on which sixteen had died. Thirty-two fell ill almost at the moment of landing and in less than a week eighty more were prostrated. Strangers in a strange land, unable to express their complaints or make clear their symptoms, they were almost as much the victims of homesickness as of any other ill. The interpreters who accompanied them declared that much of their illness was due to their deprivation of their accustomed opium, and for a time the authorities supplied them, with the result that nearly two-thirds were again up and able to work. Then the exaggerated American moral sense, which is so apt to ignore the customs of other lands and peoples, caused the opium supply to be shut off. Perhaps the fact that the cost of opium daily per Chinaman was 15 cents had something to do with it. At any rate the whole body of Chinamen were soon sick unto death and quite ready for it. They made no effort to cling to the lives that had become hateful. Suicides were a daily occurrence and in all forms. Some with Chinese stolidity would sit upon a rock on the ocean’s bed and wait for the tide to submerge them. Many used their own queues as ropes and hanged themselves. Others persuaded or bribed their fellows to shoot them dead. Some thrust sharpened sticks through their throats, or clutching great stones leaped into the river maintaining their hold until death made the grasp still more rigid. Some starved themselves and others died of mere brooding over their dismal state. In a few weeks but 200 were left alive, and these were sent to Jamaica where they were slowly absorbed by the native population. On the line of the old Panama Railroad, now abandoned and submerged by the waters of Gatun Lake, was a village called Matachin, which local etymologists declare means “dead Chinaman,” and hold that it was the scene of this melancholy sacrifice of oriental life.