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In 1850, Dr. Edward Cullen, an Irish physician and member of the Royal Geographical Society,
EDWARD CULLEN?!
When a band of Indians warned him that it was the wrong way, he decided they were deliberately trying to mislead him.
Ok well.
Verging on starvation, his men devoured anything they could lay hands on, including live toads and a variety of palm nut that burned the enamel from their teeth and caused excruciating stomach cramps.
No thank you
of a thousand Chinese coolies, hundreds fell no less rapidly or died any less miserably of disease, and scores of Chinese workers were so stricken by “melancholia,” an aftereffect of malaria, that they had committed suicide by hanging, drowning, or impaling themselves on sharpened bamboo poles.
YIKES but also is that true? Is the melancholia thing fr??
Asked to defend his behavior, he stood motionless and silent, then explained that he wished the court to have a quiet moment to reflect on his beauty.
This is a next level defense. 3D chess
The war ended with the capitulation of Paris in January, after a siege of four months, during which the beleaguered citizens ate pet cats and elephants from the Paris zoo.
:(
The point he does seem to have stressed—the great lesson to be learned from his experience—was that everything, everything, had to be brought to Panama, including the men to do the work. The Panamanians themselves would be of no use.
Ha ha fuck you
As Dr. Gorgas was to write, had the French been consciously trying to propagate malaria and yellow fever, they could not have provided conditions better suited for the purpose.
Welp.
when the news reached Paris, de Lesseps simply promised that there would be no more earthquakes
Oh ok then
A few had brought their wives with them, even children;
Sorry to these wives and children
In fact, the present rate was considerably less than 200,000 cubic meters—146,000 in May, 156,000 in June. There was, moreover, one irrefutable cloud in the sky.
Only? One?
They were a family of avid equestrians and Dingler, who enjoyed a little show, had arranged that each be provided with magnificent mounts brought over from France.
Ugh those poor horses.
On New Year’s Eve, 1884, the last of Jules Dingler’s family, Madame Dingler, died of yellow fever. It is not known how long her agony lasted, but the morning following her death, though so grief-stricken he could barely speak, Dingler was at his desk at the customary hour.
BRUH.
Later, following the funeral, he took all the family’s horses, including his own, up into one of the mountain ravines and shot them.
Not cool.
To inspect the line after the storm, Philippe Bunau-Varilla had to go most of the way by canoe and wrote afterward of gliding past half-drowned trees the tops of which were black with millions of tarantulas.
Fuck right off with this
His large and much publicized retinue included technical advisers, company officials, and special guests (delegates from half a dozen French chambers of commerce, a German engineer, an Italian diplomat, an admiral in the Royal Navy, the Duke of Sutherland), and everyone went at company expense. His wife and children remained in Paris.
Smart.
The proposition was like that of a chain letter: a bonanza only if everyone participates, only so long as no one breaks the spell.
Or…a Ponzi scheme…
A new company would be launched, de Lesseps said, and in late January new stock actually went on sale. The idea never had a chance, of course; of 60,000 shares, all of 9,000 were sold.
Like, who? And like, why?
Dr. Carlos Martínez Silva, the first of three successive Colombian diplomats, had been retired in a state of complete exhaustion and would die a year or so after returning home, a victim apparently of the strain in Washington. His replacement, Dr. José Vicente Concha, suffered a physical and emotional collapse upon resigning his post and reportedly was put on a ship in New York in a straitjacket.
Yeah that’s not great
Cromwell, for example, for all that he would have to say for public consumption, appears to have purposefully created one of the larger gaps in the historical record. For in the otherwise complete file of his business dealings, still in the possession of the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, there is not a paper relating to his Panama operations; all correspondence, cables, documents, expense vouchers, and the like are mysteriously missing.
Super mysterious.
Within hours Amador further learned from José de Obaldía, governor of the Department of Panama, that a force of picked Colombian troops—a detachment of tiradores, or sharpshooters—was on its way to Colón from Barranquilla. Obaldía, another wealthy landowner, had been appointed governor by José Marroquín only the summer before and because Obaldía was known to favor separation from Colombia in the event the canal treaty fell through, the appointment had caused a great stir in Bogotá. He was not involved in the conspiracy, only sympathetic and a close personal friend of Amador’s. In fact, he
...more
Bluff out sharp shooters ok
Choose here, glory and riches; in Bogotá, misery and ingratitude.”
Well this sounds like a bullshit choice
the Colombian gunboat Bogotá opened fire, throwing five or six shells into the city, killing one man—a Chinese shopkeeper who had been asleep in bed—and a donkey.
Well that’s not cool
To the Yale professors who still challenged the legality of his part in the revolution, the Harvard man in the White House responded with another of those spontaneous, eminently quotable retorts for which he had such a gift, wholly avoiding the issue but greatly pleasing the country: “Tell them that I am going to make the dirt fly!”
Sounds exactly like Harvard
By local custom, household drinking water was kept indoors in red earthenware jars, tinajas, within which Stegomyia larvae abounded.
No no no no no no no no
Men who served under him would have nothing particularly derogatory to say about him afterward, nor anything very complimentary.
AND YET! THIS MAN IS IN CHARGE OF SHIT.
In Colón, local undertakers, familiar with previous epidemics, had stacks of coffins standing ready in plain view at the depot.
lol they were like, we’re ready for y’all nbd
For all the deprecating talk of French inefficiency, French failure, for all the proud claims of American know-how and resolve, the United States had performed with less efficiency, less purpose, and markedly less courage than had the French at any time during their ordeal.
I am currently dying from not surprised
Fifty years later in Barbados, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua, Martinique, St. Vincent, old men would remember being herded aboard their first labor train (“ . . . when saying train, I don’t mean passenger train; it was a boxcar train”); or being put directly to work while still wearing their best suit or a new derby purchased especially for the trip.
Fuck this very much thank you
Previous training or trade skills were generally ignored, former schoolteachers, and skilled craftsmen were made messengers and waiters, experienced carpenters were put to work cutting points on the ends of stakes for the engineers.
America still does this though
He was also a chain smoker and he detested fat people—with the one exception of William Howard Taft. Secretary Taft, Goethals was once heard to remark, was the only clean fat man he had ever known.
Ok
As time went on the men became extremely proficient and accidents became comparatively rare considering the volume of explosives being used and the numbers of laborers involved. Still, more men would be killed, and very often, as at Bas Obispo, there would be too little left of them to determine who they were.
Just you know, whatever. It’s just lives.
Gaillard on one occasion grew concerned as a steam shovel appeared to be sinking before his eyes, but looking again he realized it was not that the shovel was descending, but that the ground where he stood was steadily rising—about six feet in five minutes, “and so smoothly and with so little jar as to make the movement scarcely appreciable.”
The fuck
