Naturalist at Large: Panama

1

I THINK nine friends out of ten, if asked to speculate on the best job I had ever done in my life, would agree that the help I was able to give the Barro Colorado Island Laboratory ranks first.

The story is not without drama. It began in a drab, bickering meeting of scientists in Washington, and was followed by the organization of an “Institute” which existed only on paper and which apparently was unlikely ever to serve a useful purpose. Then, with the flooding of Gatun Lake in Panama, came the realization that an island was created out of what had once been a tropical hilltop. James Zetek, Richard Strong, and William Morton Wheeler persuaded Governor Morrow to set the island aside for scientific purposes, and thus in 1923 imaginations began to kindle. This letter of Dr. Wheeler’s tells its own story: —

WASHINGTON, D. C.
July 7, 1923
MY DEAR FAIRCHILD: -
I have just returned from Woods Hole where I had a long talk with Dr. Schramm in regard to the Barro Colorado laboratory. On my return to Boston I also talked over the matter with Dr. Barbour. Both of these gentlemen feel, and I heartily agree with them, that it would be advisable for the Tropical Plant Research Foundation to incorporate and take this laboratory under its wing as one of the places in which researches in tropical botany and zoology could be carried on. We also feel strongly that you ought to take over the supervision of this laboratory and probably other tropical laboratories, such as the new marine laboratory which President Porras is founding in Panama City, and let us help you in developing them. . . .
I take it that students of plant diseases and the economic entomologists would be glad to have a number of stations in which they could carry on investigations under different conditions in the American tropics. The zoologists have usually taken the lead in the development of marine stations but have always made room for the botanists who desire to carry on investigations in these institutions. Since botany and zoology can no longer be separated, I believe it would be admirable if the botanists could take these various tropical laboratories under their wings and let the zoologists come in to help them. This seems to me to be the more proper because the plant life of the tropics is such a tremendous and basic affair and so essential to the development of all animal life in those regions. . . .
I do hope that you will think favorably of this matter, which I should like very much to present to you in greater detail. This would be best accomplished in conversation. I am so glad to learn that you are enthusiastic about the Barro Colorado proposition. We can get Mr. Zetek to look after the laboratory when no investigators are there. I contemplate going to Panama during the summer of 1924 with one or two of my students, and was delighted to hear that you are thinking of being there with your son. Dr. Barbour and I have arranged with Zetek to have one of the Canal Zone buildings taken down and put up on the island, so that, probably within a few months the station will be open for work. Even at the present time Mr. Shannon of the Bureau of Entomology in Washington is living in a shack on the island and doing work on mosquitoes for Dr. Dyar. We may say that the laboratory is actually operating. It is now up to you and the Tropical Plant Research Foundation to give it a good boost.
With kindest greetings to yourself and Mrs. Fairchild, I remain
Yours sincerely,
W. M. WHEELER

The fact that Wheeler planned to be in Panama the summer of 1924 meant that, if any building was to be done, then was the time. I was in Panama that spring and James Zetek and I put our heads together. The idea that this marvelous stand of virgin forest, nearly eight square miles in area, might be made permanently available for biological studies fired us both.

There was no appropriation, but gifts of cash came in from David Fairchild, Barbour Lathrop, and others. For my part, the building was made possible by the fact that I was particularly flush in 1923. In those days, if you were willing to speculate you could make money, and I had quite a lot on hand at the time — enough to buy out the settlers who had homesteaded and started to grow bananas on the island, and also to put up the buildings, lay a track, and set up a hoisting engine to carry supplies up the 362 steps from the lake shore to the Laboratory at the crest. A tremendous amount of credit goes to Zetek for his ingeniousness and foresight. He and I bought an amount of material from the Panama Canal’s obsolete stores. The begging and borrowing we did from the Army and Navy as well as the Canal officials — borrowing especially in the shape of brains — put us in debt to many people.

The question in the beginning was how we were to receive the Federal recognition which was necessary if we were to operate efficiently in the Canal Zone. Someone remembered the paper “Institute for Research in Tropical America,” and the Barro Colorado Island Laboratory was tossed into its lap. From then on, the annual reports were made to and circulated by the National Research Council, and to all intents and purposes the Laboratory was the Institute.

This arrangement made it possible for us to give visiting scientists commissary privileges, hospital facilities, railroad passes, free entry through the customs, and the right of residence in the Canal Zone. It also made possible the purchase of ice and all other supplies and their delivery at the Frijoles Station of the Panama Railroad by the Commissary Department of the Panama Canal. If it had not been possible to devise this quick tie-up, the whole development of the Laboratory would have been long delayed.

2

The Laboratory and its work have now become widely known. Thousands of people have read My Tropical Air Castle by Frank Chapman, the great ornithologist. My pride in having built the castle is very deep, not because it provided the setting for Chapman’s matchless stories, nor because at least four hundred scientific papers have been based on studies made there, but for an entirely different reason. The building of the Laboratory has made it possible for the teacher of biology with a small salary to have the thrill of Wallace, Bates, or Spruce when they first set foot in the Amazon jungle.

Our incomparable forest, within a hundred feet of the Laboratory door, is as fine as anything to be seen in Brazil. The great espavé trees tower up almost out of gunshot to where their side branches stretch out and interlace with those of other trees, each branch as large as a giant white oak and covered with a garden of ferns, orchids, and bromeliads. Near the spot which I have in mind there is a giant bombacopsis tree, its trunk supported by natural flying buttresses, making stalls where one could stable elephants.

To see these trees and to walk our carefully marked trails provides all the illusion of exploration, but with this great difference: we have pure drinking water. By carefully testing the blood of our employees, we can keep malaria off the island so that students can walk our trails at night with a headlight. If one is ill, our launch crosses the Canal in forty minutes to Frijoles Station on the Panama Railroad; there is a hospital car on every train, and less than an hour’s ride is Gorgas Hospital at Ancón, as fine as any in the world. Our establishment provides comfort but not luxuries. Our food is simple, hence served at a small cost. A high school teacher of biology who had saved up $250 before the war could go and live in the midst of the jungle, with monkeys, parrots and toucans, trogons, motmots, and innumerable other denizens of the lowland tropical rain forest easily observed on every hand.

Strictly speaking, the Canal Zone of Panama is not a possession of the United States. It is, however, a perpetual leasehold, and differs from all other American interests in the tropics in that it is on the mainland. There are two bits of mainland tropical rain forest in the possession of the United States: one is Barro Colorado Island and the other is the forest reserve which I persuaded Governor Harry Burgess to set aside along that stretch of the road from Summit to Madden Dam which is within the Canal Zone. The rest has been cut down to provide room for cultivation. The climate at Summit is somewhat drier than it is on the island, and the two spots of forest are quite different, botanically and faunally.

Until a year ago the Laboratory was supported by table fees, small sums paid by ten or a dozen institutions to enable officers and students serving them to stay at the Laboratory at special rates. The Governor of the Panama Canal allowed us railroad passes, the right to purchase at the commissaries, and hospital privileges. But a year or more ago the island was taken over by the government and renamed the Canal Zone Biological Area. The Institute is now an independent entity like the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution.

We are no longer tenants at will who could be ousted by an unsympathetic governor, and we have a permissive appropriation of $10,000 a year which Congress quite characteristically fails to appropriate. Now, of course, the institutions, being eager to save a dollar wherever possible, have tried to welsh out of paying their table fees, on the ground that we are on Easy Street financially. Just the reverse is true, and it looks as if the old familiar pastime of making up deficits might continue. The island is now governed by a board consisting of the Secretaries of War, the Interior, and Agriculture, and three naturalists, with the President of the National Academy of Sciences as chairman of the board. If it were not for the amazing wizardry with which Paul Brockett weaves his way through the intricate maze of Washington red tape and the equal skill with which James Zetek treads the same path in the Canal Zone, my unpaid job as the Executive Officer of the Canal Zone Biological Area would be a far more arduous pastime than it now is.

3

I was in the Canal Zone two or three times a year between 1916 and 1936 and was often included when parties were made up to visit the Chilibrillo Caves on the headwaters of the little stream of the same name. These caverns were the objective of many a pleasant picnic. I went several times with Meriwether Walker and his wife, Edith, when he was Governor of the Canal. We assembled at Gamboa, took a police launch, went up the Chagres River, then the Chili bre, and so into the Chilibrillo and to the caves.

My hosts allowed me to wear old clothes, and I collected in the caves while the picnic luncheon was being prepared. Of course on those excursions I had first-class electric lights, one on a headband and one portable. The unbelievably large bat population in these caves was extraordinary, not only for the number of individuals but for the tremendous variety of species. In fact, on every visit I found a bat or two that had not been taken previously.

The caves were unbelievably noisome and hot, and I was certainly a mess at the end of each sortie. I recall that one day I rode back on top of the launch because I was in no wise fit company for the ladies inside. The Governor joined me on the roof, and we sat looking at the scene of exquisite beauty which unfolded itself as we passed bend after bend of the Chagres River. The little clearings were not conspicuous, and great stretches of apparently untouched tropical forest billowed away on either hand. The guayacan trees were in bloom and the whole scene looked as if some giant had passed over it with an overflowing bucket of molten gold, big blobs representing giant forest trees and little spatters the lesser trees poking their heads up through the roof of the jungle. This is one of the most spectacular shows staged by nature anywhere in the world. It is a pity the bloom lasts only a few days.

Looking out at this scene, the Governor said to me, “If only this country were not cursed with malaria.” That remark set me thinking. There we were, riding on the river whose very name is synonymous with pestilence. I suppose there must be thousands of people who have heard of Chagres fever but who have never heard of the Chagres River.

If only malaria had not come to America, how different everything would have been. Is it not a fair assumption that when Alexander’s army brought it from India to Greece the light of Greece waned? Is it unreasonable to suppose that the same thing happened with Rome? Whether it reached America with Columbus or not is very doubtful. I am not a medical historian, but it is quite obvious that Cortez, equipped as he was and with the number of followers that he had, could never have marched from Mexico City to where Trujillo in Honduras is now, if malaria had stalked abroad in the land.

No other disease in the world causes so much suffering and incapacity as does this one; and for the untold number with whom quinine does not agree, the use of this drug, either as a prophylactic or as a curative agent, means suffering almost as bad as that of the disease.

One dreads the temptation which some day is going to come to many people to motor over the Pan-American Highway when it is completed. They little realize the misery which will be theirs from carelessness or lack of knowledge in warding off this disease. It can be done, but it cannot be done easily.

4

Probably the fault is entirely mine, but the published reasons that moved the Peabody Museum to excavate at the Sitio Conte in Coclé, Panama, are not correctly set forth in the Memoirs describing the finds. The matter is not important, but it illustrates in a peculiar degree how chance governs all sorts of things besides our digestion. My family and I were in Panama in August, 1928. Rosamond and I were house guests of Meriwether and Edith Walker. I remember the question of shopping came up one morning at the breakfast table, and I said to Rosamond and Edith that I hoped they would stay out of shops in the congested center of Panama City because there was an epidemic of severe influenza running riot at the time.

Fortunately they paid no attention whatever to my advice and, poking about, they went into the funny little rat’s nest of a curio shop kept by an old German named Peter Hauck. It was the most slovenly, messiest little hole in the wall that anyone ever saw. But Peter Hauck, for all his squalor, was a shrewd, intelligent person. They bought a few objects as ornaments. I recall an interesting little stone figure which Rosamond gave to Edith as a memento of our visit. At noontime I admired this and asked where it had come from. I was told, and Rosamond added that she had seen an extraordinary little stone pelican, partially ensheathed in gold, which looked utterly unlike the gold figures which are frequently dug up in the Province of Chiriqui and are even more frequently faked for sale to tourists. She said that Hauck had a number of other things from the same locality, but that he would sell them only to a museum and that he did not want the collection dispersed.

Well, I could not wait to get to Peter Hauck’s shop after luncheon was over. I found that he quite obviously was securing material from a region that promised to be a rich treasury. I bought the collection and had it shipped to Cambridge. My address being given in care of a museum, he was entirely willing to dispose of it at a quite reasonable figure.

When the specimens arrived and were examined, considerable correspondence ensued with Mr. Karl Curtis, an ardent amateur of archaeology and an old employee of the Panama Canal, a warm and sterling friend of us all. He it was who found that the floods of 1927 had washed deeply into the sides of the river in the pastures of Don Miguel Conte, near Penonomé in the Province of Coclé. Dr. Edward Reynolds, then Director of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, persuaded Professor Tozzer and Professor Hooton to go to Panama, to visit the Conte family and to draw up a contract allowing the Peabody Museum to carry on explorations. These excavations produced vast stores of pre-Columbian objects in pottery, stone, gold, and even emeralds — and the whole discovery was the result of not taking my advice about Panama City and the influenza epidemic. I may add, also, that no one got influenza.

The Laboratory is now closed, maintained by a skeleton crew in charge of Mr. Zetek. The tropical forest is so intolerant of the invasion of its realms by man that all vestiges of our occupation would disappear in a short time if we did not keep a crew there. Even our “graveyard” would soon disappear. This consists of stumps of wood prepared with all sorts of materials supposedly or actually useful in protecting the wood against the ravages of termites, the greatest scourge affecting wooden buildings in the tropics. These test sticks, planted in the ground at exactly the same depth, under the same conditions, and carefully watched, are now, after fifteen years of Mr. Zetek’s penetrating observation, beginning to produce information of great value.

I don’t know whether I shall ever see Barro Colorado again, but I certainly hope that I may, if only to sail by it through the Canal in the month of March, when the guayacan trees lift their lofty heads above the forest top, each as glittering as a golden dome, while the purple jacarandas, the pale pink almendros, and the palo santo with flowers as crimson as arterial blood make a scene of incomparable splendor.