according to one American naval officer, laborers were dying at a rate of about two hundred a month. Still the work went ahead. Travelers crossing by train were amazed by the spectacle. It was true, they wrote; a canal really was being built at Panama. Buildings were going up almost everywhere one looked. Hundreds of acres of jungle were being chopped back to make room for more. Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment was being unloaded at Colón. More and more young French recruits were arriving, more engineers, more doctors, nurses, more boats from Jamaica, their decks solid with black men.
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