Price of Passage

The Pacific Mail steamer bound south for Panama made good time and by mid-August I was ashore at Panama City, heading for Aspinwall on the Atlantic side. The railroad had begun carrying passengers across the Isthmus, sparing them the long pull up the Chagres River, but it was far from complete. I was glad enough to avoid the Changres for I had been ravaged by the disease that carried its name—and naive enough to think a faster route would be an easy one.

Our party kept to the trail through the Isthmus and before the day was out we’d reached the first of the railroad camps. You could hear it before you saw it—the clang of iron, the thud of picks, overseers shouting in a dozen tongues. Then the jungle broke open and there it was: a clearing hacked out of the green, tents sagging in the rain, smoke drifting low to the ground and men moving like shadows through the steam.

What struck me was the mix of them. I’d heard the Panama Railroad Company hired anyone who could stand and swing a pick, but I hadn’t pictured it, especially seeing Irishmen fresh off the famine ships—thin, hollow-eyed boys in rags who still smelled of salt and grief. They’d left the graveyards of Ireland only to come here and dig their own. Chinese laborers worked in long, quiet lines, their conical hats pale against the dark leaves. Jamaicans sang to keep time with their hammers, their voices the only lively thing in that place. Americans barked orders. Muleteers muttered Spanish. Men from Martinique spoke French Creole, but most of the workers were black. It was Babel with mosquitoes.

The Irish looked no older than apprentices I’d worked beside in the Thomaston shipyard, but the famine had stripped them to bone and sorrow. They coughed until they bled. One lad swung a pick twice, then dropped where he stood. No one even turned. The living were too few to tend the dying and vultures wheeled overhead.

There were graves everywhere. Fresh dirt mounded in long rows, some marked by a stick or a shred of cloth, most unmarked. I was told there was a grave for every railroad tie laid, and looking out across that clearing, I believed it. You could smell death in the heat—sweet, rot-heavy, mixed with stagnant water and creosote from new timbers. Insects thrummed so thick and close they felt like strings drawn across my ears.

A cart rolled past—two oxen dragging a wagon with a canvas thrown over it. The wheels sank deep in mud. No imagination was needed to know what lay beneath the canvas. The boy driving never looked back.

Not far beyond, a trench was being dug—a mass grave by the look of it. A Jamaican foreman wiped sweat from his brow and said, “Dis for de night shift.” I didn’t ask whether he meant the shift that would die or the one that would bury them.

Here and there the trail ran close enough to see the railroad line itself—rails floating above the swamp on timber piles, long trestles driven into black water, the whole structure groaning under its own weight. Men worked neck-deep in muck, passing baskets of gravel and rock to build embankments before the timber rotted out from under them. In places the fill was piled so deep it looked as though they were burying the jungle itself. The creak of the piles and the slosh of water below gave a man the unsettled notion that the whole enterprise might sink back into the swamp as fast as they laid it.

We kept moving. A little farther on, a line of rails stretched ahead on a raised road of dirt and stone that disappeared into the trees. Steam from a small engine rose beyond it, the company testing another length of track. The noise followed as the camp fell behind us—the coughing, the singing, the clanging, the cries of men whose luck had run out on both sides of the world. I’d seen hard labor in my time but nothing like this—worse than any pit in California or the hold of a whaler.

Later someone told me the number—six thousand dead for forty-eight miles of track. A grave every four feet. I didn’t need the tally. I’d seen the proof.

The railroad would be finished, I had no doubt, but it would be built on the bones of men who had buried too much already—Irish and Chinese fleeing famine, Jamaicans chasing wages, Americans chasing gold. The jungle took them all alike and could take me an an instant. I was well aware of that and leary of taking a fever.

Our mules kept us moving. The heat grew heavier, the world greener and closer, but the camp stayed with me—the smell of it, the sound of it, those endless graves—and I knew I’d never forget it as long as I lived.

We boarded the train at Gatun—open coaches and flat cars—that carried us the last seven miles to Aspinwall. We stepped off the cars into a racket of phenomenon. A half-built American town, a Gold-Rush creation that rose out of jungle mud and global ambition. We had already been told not to let it fool us, it was one of the unhealthiest places on earth, but it sat along the lovely Caribbean Sea, a crossroads of nations, money, disease, and desperation—the narrow hinge of the world in those years. The Panama Railroad Company had built it from marsh up and named it for William Henry Aspinwall, the New York merchant whose steamers were carrying half the world to California.

Its streets were laid out like a New York grid—English signs over the stores, American-built docks and warehouses, hotels trying to look respectable. But behind it the jungle pressed close. As fast as the three-year-old town was built, it began to rot. Monkeys chattered in the rafters, the planked-over streets whispered death. It was familiar enough to fool a traveler at first glance—and foreign enough to remind him he was far from home, but thankfully, the emerald Caribbean lay shining beyond it.

From the trains we boarded the steamer SS George Law and headed into the sea toward the isle of Jamaica. A day later the ship reached Kingston. The first visit had been wonder to me—bright dresses, strong coffee, plantains frying in the half-light, the city waking like it meant to lift the whole world with it. This time I came in thin from fever, but steadier in mind.

As the Blue Mountains rose out of the haze, I thought back over the roads and waters that had carried me since leaving Maine in the last days of ’48. I had been to Cuba, crossed Mexico once, sweating over the high ridges from Veracruz to Acapulco. I had taken the Nicaragua trail, at San Juan del Sur that led me to Greytown and back again. And now I had fought my way through Panama—rails rising out of swamps, graves in long rows, the breath of death following a man whether he looked for it or not.

I had never sailed the Horn, or crossed the plains of North America, but I’d seen enough of the world to know that every route had its price. And I was young yet, hopeful my health would return.

Kingston was unchanged—aside from more men heading to California—warm wind off the land, that old smell of spice and sea, and faces bright with laughter. I walked the quay , found hearty fair to settle my hunger, and coffee strong enough to set a man upright. I strolled the streets buying fruit from the same sort of women and boys. Life returned. I felt it in my bones.

Fever had taken its due, and fortune had proven itself fickle. Still, I had done well in California—storekeeping, mining, trading—and there were ships being built back home with room for my name on the ledgers. I had proved myself as a merchant and intended to open a store on the ’Keag, build ships and a business that would last longer than any gold strike. Standing under a Kingston sun, the Atlantic lay ahead, and beyond it a life that might finally settle me.

The run north from Kingston was easy sailing, the kind that lets a man rest after too many weeks of hard travel. The sea was warm, the nights clear, and the steamer George Law steady underfoot. I walked the decks and let my strength return. Most men around me swore they never wanted to see a tropic shore again after the Isthmus—fever, mud, and death enough to haunt a lifetime—but even worn thin as I was, the world still pulled at me. The farther we sailed, the wider the horizon seemed.

When the coast of the Carolinas rose from the mist and the air grew sharper with northern wind, I had resigned myself to having left California and felt comfortable with the idea of going home. We reached New York before the month of August was out.[1]

The harbor was crowded with ships and the city thundered beyond them—the whole place moving as if it had an engine for a heart. I stayed only long enough to send my trunks ahead, buy a few small gifts and catch a steamer for Rockland.

By the time the Camden stage set me down on familiar road, the late-summer wind off the Penobscot Bay felt clean enough to scrub a man’s spirit. I was home—I had store to open on the ‘Keag, goods to order and ships to build and a father and siblings who would be overjoyed to see me.

NOTES

[1] New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820–1957, entry for E.S. Graves, age 28, occupation Merchant, arrived September 27, 1853, on the George Law from Aspinwall, Panama; digital image at Ancestry.com (accessed March 2025); citing National Archives Microfilm Publication M237, Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36, National Archives, Washington, D.C.