CHAPTER XII
HOW THE ISTHMUS WAS MADE HEALTHY
THE New French Canal Company lost no time in accepting the $40,000,000, and its representative on the Isthmus formally turned over possession to the United States on May eighth, 1904. At this time, only about six hundred West Indians were working in the Cut, with a few side-excavators and trains of four-wheeled dump-cars, and an impatient call went up from the American people for their government to "make the dirt fly!" But for the next two and a half years, there was very little digging and a great deal of preparation.
Instead of hurrying thousands of laborers to the Isthmus to have them die there, as they did in the fifties and eighties, of fever and insufficient food, we cleaned house before we moved in. Clearings were made in the jungle, swamps were drained, old French houses were repaired and new ones were built. A line of steamers fitted with cold storage brought food from New York, and hotels or mess-houses served it to the men. The French hospitals at Ancon and Colon were enlarged, and the dirty little cities of Panama and Colon were cleaned and made sanitary. But though the filth was gone the fever remained.
In the same way, Havana and Santiago de Cuba, cities which old shipmasters declared they could smell ten miles
