One of the many who did was the painter Paul Gauguin, whose entrance and exit date from a later time, but whose feelings about the experience were no doubt shared by hundreds of others. Gauguin came out from France with another young painter, Charles Laval, in 1887. It was Gauguin’s first attempt to escape the atmosphere of Europe. The dream was to buy some land on Taboga and live “on fish and fruit for nothing . . . without anxiety for the day or for the morrow,” as he wrote. But he was broke by the time he reached Colón, and so like countless other drifters who wound up on the
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