With
sublime faith in the power of ready cash to ward off dysentery, yellow
fever and cholera, to make water spring up in desert places, and to buy
passage aboard ships already awash with expectant millionaires, the
solid men pored over their maps and convinced themselves that their
very own road was the safest, quickest and most genteel.
The
Panama route attracted another sort of adventurer, in addition to its
proportion of the solid men—gentry more used to relying on their wits
than on their bank accounts—men like the "long, loosely-jointed men"
Bayard Taylor saw come aboard his ship at New Orleans.
"Their
faces were lengthened and deeply sallow, overhung by straggling locks
of straight, black hair, and wore an expression of settled melancholy.
The corners of their mouths curved downwards, the upper lip drawn
slightly over the under one, giving to the lower part of the face that
cast of destructiveness peculiar to the Indian. These men chewed
tobacco at a ruinous rate and spent their time either in dozing at full
length on the deck or going into the fore-cabin for 'drinks.' Each one
of them carried enough arms for a whole company, and breathed defiance
to all foreigners."
On
the way from New York to Chagres, the steamers stopped at Kingston on
the island of Jamaica to fill their coal bunkers. As seen at the right, this could be a long operation, for the porters were native women who carried the baskets of coal on their heads.
