The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

From Colón the Panama Railroad ran a regular funeral train out to Monkey Hill each morning. “Over to Panama,” S. W. Plume would recall in his memorable testimony, “it was the same way—bury, bury, bury, running two, three, and four trains a day with dead Jamaica niggers all the time. I never saw anything like it. It did not matter any difference whether they were black or white, to see the way they died there. They die[d] like animals.” The rate of sickness throughout the French operations (as opposed to the mortality rate) would be as impossible to determine accurately from surviving records as the mortality rate; but it was extremely large. A conservative estimate made later by American physicians was not less than a third of the total force at any given time. So in a year such as 1884, with more than nineteen thousand at work, probably six thousand were sick.