Feverish Speculation: the Railway Across the Isthmus of Panama

Abstract

The passage above from Theodore Winthrop’s 1863 travel narrative Isthmiana describes the fever that greeted Americans arriving on the Isthmus of Panama en route to gold mines in California. Yellow Fever seemed to float in the air and sleep in the vegetation, but it is the men who have jaundiced sight. Their vision is tinted the colour of both the disease and gold, and the yellow veil of greed prevents them from seeing that they race over a track laid upon the dead bodies of workers struck down by fever. Moreover, the men and women cannot even see the ‘trophy of civilization’, a railroad through a dense jungle, bought for this terrible price. Winthrop’s text was one of a number of travel narratives in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, part of a surge in popular renditions depicting Latin and Central America that defined the public sphere of the day (Frenkel, 1996: 321). His language was typical of these memoirs and journalistic renderings that used the word ‘fever’ to bind together descriptions of a foreign space, an economic cultural milieu, and a physical illness with a common linguistic term and a shared image of excess. In this chapter, I analyse the notion of fever that recurs in narratives about the Panamanian railroad and argue that the pervasive image became a cultural referent that simultaneously suggested both a lived reality of disease and, symbolically, an attitude towards the transformation of the United States.

From the moment of their arrival at Aspinwall an Isthmus fever floats before them tangibly in the air. It hangs a yellow veil before every object. Their sight is jaundiced. They hurry over a railroad, laid, as they have been told, on human sleepers. The rich luxuriance of the forest along its course, now first opened to the eye of man, seems only rank, unwholesome vegetation. Instead of appreciating the almost superhuman enterprise that has placed such a trophy of civilization in the very home of unchanging repose, they growl because the prudent trains do not despatch them speedily enough to the discomforts of the next stage of their journey. (Winthrop, 1863: 306)