by John Easter Mintor
River of Gold
by John Easter Mintor
The Chagres has never gone anywhere, but it has seen
just about everything. It has seen more gold, for instance, than have all the other
rivers of the world combined. Its valley contained so much gold at the beginning of
its recorded history that the Spaniards called Panama "Castilla del Oro" --
Golden Castile. By the time this supply had run low, Peru was discovered; then
across the Chagres the Dons drained the fabulous wealth of the Incas, which was enough to
match all the gold in the commercial channels of Europe. Later the Yankees shipped
out via the isthmus virtually all the gold that was mined in the California days of '49,
which amounted to more than a billion and a half dollars. Today the Chagres carries
the bulk of the world's trade goods -- an even more potent form of gold -- across the hump
from one to the other of the two great oceans.
Our river's first sights were volcanic eruptions, for it was born during an era of
terrestrial upheaval. Soon afterward it watched the migrations of Mongoloid tribes
into South America. Aeons later, its waters bore the landing boats, and its
shores felt the slippered feet, of gentle Christopher Columbus, as he probed the eastern
shore of the American continent in search of his chimerical Westward Passage to the
Orient. It saw Vasco Núñez de Balboa as he slashed through the jungle, his brain
afire with stories of a land to southward where the paupers wore breastplates of gold, and
it mirrored his image as he finally gained a mountaintop above its banks for the first
white man's sight of the blue Pacific. Soon afterward its banks felt the treat of
the lesser Conquistadors, as they walked first in wonderment and then in crazy lust when
the natives showed them their dazzling piles of yellow metal.
Its crocodiles churned the water to foam as they fought over the bodies, brown ones and
white ones, cast there after the battles between invader and native patriot. Its
banks guided Francis Drake and Henry Morgan as they led their Pyrate bands through the
jungle to fall upon the bulging treasure houses of the Spanish king. Its waters
reflected to the night sky of the New World the strange voodoo rites, the bloody orgies of
darkest Africa, brought across the Atlantic in hellish slave ships by unwilling
immigrants.
It carried the bungo boats in which adventurers from young America and old Europe raced
toward California and her gold, and closed quietly over the bodies of those who drew too
late. It watched the labor and the life of colonies of chinese, Hindustanis, and
Malaysians, with their strange dress and their strange rites of obeisance to Oriental
gods, who had been lured to the Chagres country with promises of a month's wages every
day; then it saw them die, almost to a man, of jungle fevers. Finally, after
thousands of lives and millions of dollars had been spent, its banks quivered with the
passing of the world's first transcontinental railroad trains.
It looked on while Count Ferdinand de Lesseps spent money and lives until he had almost
bankrupted the French nation without achieving an interocean waterway. Then, as
Panama broke her political ties with Colombia, our river furnished a face-saving obstacle
to the troops who had come from Bogota to quell the revolt. (The army had to sail
away homeward, unbloodied, in a comic-opera denouement: the soldiers could not persuade a
hard-headed Yanqui passenger agent to extend credit for their railroad tickets to the
proposed scene of battle.)
It helped (and hindered) the American sanitary workers as they transformed the isthmus
from the vilest pesthole in the world to the garden spot of the tropics. Then, when
George Washington Goethals had finished his locks and ditches and dams, the Chagres sent
its waters plunging in, to grow into the lakes, to surge through the turbines, to fills
the locks, to raise and lower ships, to shrink the world by half.
The Chagres is the world's most valuable river.
It is, whether you base your evaluation on a narrow dollars-and-cents tabulation of
material services rendered, either in the total of ships and cargoes carried or in time
and money saved by obviating the voyage around Cape Horn, or whether you weigh its
broader, higher import as a prime weapon in the race-old, unending battle to make of the
the world a better place to live.
Its value by either scale rests on the fact that it is the river that operates the Panama
Canal -- feeds it lakes, fills its locks, generates its electric power, even furnishes its
army of workers with their drinking water and with excellent game fishing for their
holiday sport. It is the bloodstream of the world's greatest transport and
communications center and the fount of power for the greatest machine that mankind ever
built.
from: The Chagres:
River of Westward Passage
by John Easter Minter
Rinehart & Company, New York, 1948
CZBrats
April 25, 1999
