BUILDING A RAILROAD IN A TROPICAL COUNTRY Tropicality and the Panama Railroad construction (1850-1855 (original) (raw)

Letters from the Tropic: The Panama Railroad building (1850-1855). Camilo CLEVES camilocleves@hotmail.com Panama’s Railroad, built between 1850 and 1855, was the first one that allowed the traffic from the Atlantic to the Pacific in few hours. Notions of the tropics found in travel diaries, engineers and medicines writings show us how Panama was defined as a space to liberate of the jungle, of the lack of civilization and morality, a metaphor is done between a supposed pristine nature and a primitive world where the development of the civilization would not be possible. They explained the conditions of work in the railroad, as well as the Panamanian society in racial and environmental terms to legitimize the exploitation of the territory and the workers. This perception allowed saying also that the territory had not been transformed by the local people and that the north-American engineers had to fight for transform for the first times the territory way to be opened. In the 19th Century for the European “The Tropics” was a notion that signified an “imaginary geography”. It was imaginary, not in the sense that it was utterly false, but rather because it was a cultural construction of nature. As interest and interaction with “the Tropics” grew, a series of representations began to play a central role in the ways that people thought about these places. These ideas, based both in reality and imagination, developed into a chain of interacting discourses that played an important role in how Europeans envisioned and, more importantly, interacted with “The Tropics” on economic, scientific, moral, and aesthetic levels . The power of these discourses for interpreting the tropical world solidified with the advent of natural history, human and race sciences, the professionalization of certain fields of study about the tropical milieu, such as tropical medicine and geography SOURCES • Newspapers El Panameño. 1849-1856 The New York Times 1851-1855 The Panama Star and Herald 1853-1855 The Weekle Star 1850-1852 • Travelers' diaries Abrams, William Penn. MS Diary, Feb., 1849-May, 1850. Written on a journey to California by the Chagres Route and items in the Southern Mines. Recounts seeing Yosemite Valle. Bancroft Libr. October 18, 1849. Barona, Guido; Dominguez, Camilo; Figueroa, Apolinar, Gómez, Augusto, editores. El Estado del Istmo de Panamá, Provincias de Chiriquí, Veraguas, Azuero y Panamá en Geografía Física y Política de la Confederación Granadina Volumen 1 Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad del Cauca. 2002. Capron, Elisha. History of California from its discovery to the present times. John P. Jewett plus Company, Ohio 1854. Chauncey, Griswold. The Isthmus of Panama, and what I saw there, Dewitt and Daveport, New York. 1852. Cullen, Edward. On The Isthmus of Darien and the Ship Canal. Journal of the Society of Engineers. London, 1869. Cullen, Edward. The Panama Railroad. Journal of the Society of Engineers. London, 1869. Elisé Reclus Voyage á la Sierra Nevada de Sainte-Marthe; Paysages de la Nature Tropicale, 1861. Otis, Fessenden. Illustrated History of the Panama Railroad and its connections with Europe, the United Estates, the North and South Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, China, Australia and Japan, by Sail and Steam, Second Edition, Nueva York, Harper & Brothers, 1869. Gisborne, Lionel. The Isthmus of Darien in 1852: Journal of the Expedition of Inquiry for the Junction of the Atlantic and PacificOceans. Saunders and Stanford. London 1853. Miguel María Lisboa, Relación de un Viaje Caracas. Instituto Histórico y Geográfico Brasileño, Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República de Venezuela, 1954. Robert Tomes, Panama in 1855: An Account of the Panama Railroad, of the Cities of Panama and Aspinwall, With Sketches of Life and Character on the Isthmus. Harper and Brothers, New York, 1855. Taylor, Bayard.El Dorado: or, Adventures in the path of empire: comprising a voyage to California, via Panama; life in San Francisco and Monterey; pictures of the gold region, and experiences of Mexican travel(1850). Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library 2005. Weir, Hugh. The conquest of the Isthmus; the men who are building the Panama canal--their daily lives, perils, and adventures. G. P. Putnam's sons, New York and London, 1909. • Letters Arosemena, Justo: Nuestros Intereses Materiales, 29 November 1846 in Escritos, 27. Francisco de Fábrega to Secretario del Estado del Despacho de Relaciones Exterires, June 21, 1856, ANP, PC, Tomo 2166 Hoadley, David to Messrs. R. & Co., 9 September 1854, Panama Railroad Company Letterbooks, vol. 7, 491. Juan Garciato Manuel Echeverría, 9 Oct. 1851, Archivo Nacional de Panamá, Periodo Colombiano, Cajón 849, Tomo 2145. Totten Letters, USNA, RG 185, Vol. I.