Through the Panama Canal
Chapter VII From Atlantic to Pacific, and the Strange Happenings That Intervened
“Look out for the Caribbean Sea toward December,” was another axiom of our five-masted-schooner friend at Las Palmas, but he proved no less fallible over the passage from Barbados to Colon than he had concerning the Atlantic. In fact, I am thinking of in future asking advice of weather prophets in order to anticipate the reverse.
A spanking wind on the quarter, with mainsail and squaresail set, and a mighty following sea that flung the dream ship before it in a series of exhilarating swoops, brought us within sight of land in seven days, a distance of twelve hundred miles. But what land? For a time we were at a loss. Comparing it with the chart and descriptions in “sailing directions” revealed nothing. It was a low-lying, mist-enshrouded, sinister-looking land, and we sailed along its coast for a day and a night before we could tell whether we had passed Colon or hit the coast to the eastward.
Ultimately, a lighthouse gave us the clue, and we found that owing to a current that has the unpleasant knack of running at anything from a half to three knots we were still fifty miles from our objective, so we headed for sea and hove to until daylight.
All night as we lay rolling in a heavy swell steamers passed us by, floating palaces of light, and with the dawn we joined the procession of giants making for the Panama Canal.
We wished to go through the canal? Very well; a measurer would be sent off to decide our tonnage, and we must be ready to take the pilot aboard at five o’clock the next morning.
That, in effect, is what the canal authorities said, and I answered it with a smile that I trust was sufficiently engaging to hide the fact that I was not at all sure we had enough money between us to pay the tolls. It must be an expensive business, this passing from Atlantic to Pacific. I had never thought of that. There was quite a lot I had not thought about. What if the charges were altogether beyond us? It would mean Cape Horn! Cape Horn or the abandonment of the dream! Which was worse for one who, after sixty below zero on the Canadian prairie, four below zero in France and Belgium, and something far worse in coalless London, had taken a solemn oath never again to leave the forties of latitude!
These terrifying reflections were cut short by a voice.
“I can’t make it more than twelve tons.”
“Twelve tons?”
The canal official deigned to exhibit surprise by a slight elevation of the eyebrows, then smiled.
“The measurer has been aboard,” he told me, “and you are twelve tons net. The tolls will be fifteen dollars. Will you pay now, or at the other end?”
Such was my relief that I paid on the spot, thereby reducing our united capital to £20—or, at the then-prevailing rate of exchange, seventy-eight dollars.
This brief interview with officialdom is typical of Panama Canal methods. Speed, silence, efficiency; nothing else “goes” in “the Zone.” Things are done in a few seconds and utter silence here that would take hours and pandemonium elsewhere. The entire miracle of passing a ten-thousand-ton liner from Atlantic to Pacific through seven locks and forty miles of tortuous, ever-threatening channels has been performed in six and a half hours, and with a lack of fuss that is almost uncanny.
But the dream ship was twelve tons, and not ten thousand, and for that reason it is probable that she gave more trouble than any craft since the canal was opened. Yet on every hand we received the utmost courtesy and kindness. Such treatment made us feel like pestiferous mosquitoes being politely conducted to the door instead of squashed flat on the spot as we deserved. But you shall see.
Punctually at five A.M., the pilot came aboard in his immaculate white drill uniform and, without a smile at his surroundings, including ourselves in variegated costume, took up his position in the bows. I went below, and after a ten-minutes’ wrestle with the auxiliary, contrived to make three out of the four cylinders “go” sufficiently to propel us at the dignified speed of three knots in the direction of the canal.
“Is that the best she can do?” enquired the pilot.
I lifted an apologetic, perspiring, and begrimed face to him and admitted that it was. Moreover, that we were very lucky to be doing that.
“Ah, well, the day is young,” he commented, cheerfully. “What about an awning? We shall be baked alive before we’ve done.”
Did I tell him that the reason we had not rigged an awning was that I was more than half expecting the engine to break down, and that we should have to hoist sail? I did not. Whoever heard of sailing through the Panama Canal? An awning was rigged, and we entered Gatun Lock in style, followed by two more liners.
The giant gates closed. There was an eruption of water seemingly under our stern that caused the tiller to fly over and extract a groan of anguish from Steve as it crushed him against the cock-pit wall; the aft warp snapped, and the dream ship commenced to rise, more like an elevator than a ship in a lock, until the blank, greasy wall ended, and above it appeared a row of grinning faces.
“That’s that,” said the pilot; and it was.
By some miracle the engine carried us to the next lock, where the same performance was gone through, with such slight variations as the loss of a hat, three fenders, and the remainder of the port covering-board.
We passed out into Gatun Lake, a fairy place of verdure-clad islets and mist-enshrouded reaches, where cranes flew low over the water, and strange, wild cries came out of the bush.
It was also the place where our engine refused its office peremptorily, irrevocably. I was engineer of the dream ship, probably the worst on earth, but still, the engineer, and for an agonized hour I wrestled with lifeless scrap-iron. How the profession of marine motor engineering ever attracts adherents it is beyond me to imagine. I know one man it has sent to an asylum, and many others who to this day bear the marks of having trifled with it—finger-nails that nothing short of cutting to the quick and gouging with a shovel will render clean; hands, clothes, and for some unknown reason face ingrained with ineradicable grime; a permanently furrowed brow; and a wistful expression that goes to the heart of the beholder.
In order to avoid such a fate I have made it a practice to try hard for one solid hour and, failing to gain a response from the atrocity, leave the matter in other, and perhaps more capable, hands. I communicated this information to the pilot, and there and then the man’s more human side came to the surface. It was raining as it knows how to rain on the Isthmus, he was soaked to the hide, his natty uniform resembled nothing more closely than a dish rag, yet he smiled, and proceeded to remove his jacket.
“Guess we’d better sail,” he said.
Behold once more the dream ship sailing through the Panama Canal; alternately scudding before rain squalls, lying becalmed, and making tacks of fifty yards and less, a passage surely unique in the annals of “the Zone.” The pilot said he enjoyed it, and by the way he swigged on halyards and gave us an old-time chanty to work by, I am inclined to believe him. We were lucky in our pilot.
Toward evening, and during a stark calm, Steve dived overboard and made us fast to a light-buoy, his jaw dropping perhaps half an inch, and a thoughtful expression coming into his eyes, when a little later a log on the muddy shore was suddenly imbued with life, and slipped into the water with a whisk of a horny tail.
So it was that we had afternoon tea in comfort, some alleged music on piano and clarionet, and a pleasant chat with the pilot concerning the older and better days of the wind-jammer, while dainty egrettes watched us from a tree fern, ungainly pelicans swooped and dived, and somewhere ten-thousand-ton liners were being hustled through the Panama Canal.
We had no wireless, that was why it was impossible to summon a tug to take us on our way, but finally a monstrous steamer passed so close that it was possible to hail her, and a few hours later we were taken in tow by an apparition of noiseless engines, shining varnish, and gleaming brass.
It would cost us six dollars an hour, the pilot told us, and I sat back to figure out just how long seventy-eight dollars would last under such an onslaught. The result was alarming. We held a board meeting about it in the bows, and decided there was nothing for it but to go on, and keep going on, until we stopped. We had hoped to reach lands where money was of secondary importance, but we were not there yet, that was evident.
So we continued to race through the canal at the rate of six dollars an hour until we reached the approaches to Pedro Miguel lock, where the apparition tied us up and steamed off, still at six dollars an hour.
Something happened to us that night at Pedro Miguel. Looking back on it all I can hardly persuade myself that it was not a dream. We met some canal officials, tall, sun-burned youths with the mark of efficiency upon them yet with a merry twinkle in the eye. We asked them aboard, and they came and marvelled at what they saw. Their verdict was, as far as I remember: “Some novelty!” Then they asked us ashore, and it was our turn to marvel. One of our hosts was the chief operator of a lock, and we saw the miracle of the Isthmus of Panama from behind. Futility overwhelms me at the thought of trying to describe what we saw that night, over the lock, under the lock, at the sides of the lock; besides, you will find it all reduced to cold figures in technical journals if you are that way inclined. It was the spirit of the thing that took hold of me: a pigmy man sitting at a lever! What was not possible after this?
We returned to the ship almost stupefied. One feels much the same when he attempts to think in Westminster Abbey. We were in the process of turning in when a cheerful head appeared through the skylight.
“We await your pleasure,” quoth a voice.
I explained that the owner of the head was no doubt unconsciously violating, but still violating, the sanctity of my sister’s bedroom. It made no difference. I protested that at that moment my sister’s costume consisted of a pair of ill-fitting pyjamas and a kimono; that Steve and I had nothing to our backs but what we had worn all day—an undershirt and a pair of football shorts; that we were all tired to death and literally ached for our pillows; that his kindness was overwhelming but that—— Nothing made any difference.
Somehow we found ourselves in a car, the chief operator’s first car that he had learnt to drive during the dinner hour the previous day. Out into the moonlight we sped, or rather zigzagged, at the rate of forty, while between Peter and myself a youth named Bill—I shall never forget Bill—kept up a running flow of informative rhetoric: “On the left we have the famous Isthmus of Panama, intersected by the still more famous canal, a miracle of modern engineering, as it has been aptly termed. Fear not, lady!” [this in an aside to Peter] “the man at the wheel values his life as much as yours, perhaps more. And now we approach the historic city of Panama, passing on our left the Union Club, otherwise known as the Onion Club, frequented solely by the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, hence our exclusion. And on the right——”
On the right was the blazing portico of a cabaret, and the car had come to a jarring full stop.
In vain we pleaded our costume, the hour of night the utter degradation of exposing ourselves to the public gaze in such a condition. We literally found ourselves at a table drinking imitation lager beer and grape juice, and listening to raucous-voiced imported ladies rendering washy ballads to the accompaniment of tinkling ice and tobacco smoke.
It all sounds sordid enough, but it was vastly amusing to sea-weary wanderers, and will remain with us a memory of kindness and good-fellowship.
So, at last, we lay at anchor off Balboa on the Pacific Ocean. We had come far adown the vista of our dream, and hoped to go a great deal farther. To do so, we came to the conclusion that it would be necessary to make some money. How? Well, we had a dream ship, a group of pearling islands lay thirty miles to the eastward, and——
A strange life, my masters, but one that I would not exchange with any man on earth.