The villages between Gatun and Matachin will be covered by the water of Gatun Lake. They have never been important in the sense of size, or as the center of any peculiar type of life. In fact they are little more than jungle hamlets, yet they have a distinct place in American history, because they were known to European civilization many years before Jamestown was settled or Massachusetts Bay was an English colony. In The Canal Record, November 29, 1911, there was republished a letter in which attention was called to the fact that the names of some of these villages appeared on the map published with Esquemeling's narrative of the Buccaneers in 1678. Most of them antedate that time, for they were not named by the English who plundered with Morgan, but are spoken of in Esquemeling's book as places already known, and invariably they bear Spanish names. It is probable that most of them date from the early days of navigation on the Chagres River, when it was one of the most-used routes for commerce across the Isthmus. Among these are Ahorca Lagarto, Barbacoas, Caimito, Matachin, Bailamonos, Santa Cruz de Juan Gallego, and Cruces (Venta Cruz). The River As early as 1530 Spanish ships sailed down the coast from Nombre de Dios and entered the Chagres, whence their goods were transferred to canoes and taken up the river as far as Cruces, a distance of 36 miles from the river mouth, near the point where Culebra Cut begins. From Cruces they were taken overland to Panama. At times of high water, when the stream could be navigated readily by shallow boats, this was the easiest route across the Isthmus, although the trails from Nombre de Dios and, after 1586, from Porto Bello, were kept open and were much used by pack trains. The harbor at the mouth is not so safe as those at Nombre de Dios and Porto Bello, and yet that the trade by this route was not inconsiderable is attested by the fact that the entrance to the Chagres was guarded by a fort (San Lorenzo). The river hamlets were of the type of the settlements that grew up along the highways during the days of travel by coach and saddle, and their people probably subsisted as much by the trade they drove with travelers as by the products of their own fields. Yet Esquemeling speaks of cultivated fields, so there was undoubtedly some farming along with the travel trade. The river trade became steadily less after the reign of Philip II, because Spain's monopoly was gone, and the all-water route to Peru by the Strait of Magellan was found less dangerous. But this was because the trade itself was less, for the Chagres route continued in use up to the time of the completion of the Panama Railroad in 1855. Since then the villages in the lake region have been "way stations," with two brief periods of prosperity-one when the French were working near them, and the other when the Americans were carrying on their operations. (See reference to abandonment of Isthmian route, page 119.) The region in which these lake settlements are situated will probably not be under water before August, 1912, but the railroad track was torn up in February, and therefore the native hamlets and American canal settlements are being moved, the houses torn down to be erected again elsewhere, or in the case of shacks merely abandoned in the jungle. It is difficult to persuade some of the nhabitants that the inundation will ever ta ke place. One old bush settler, after receiving repeated warnings heedlessly, ventured it as his opinion that the Lord had promised never again to flood the earth. Such people as these will be assisted in their moving, because the present hamlets will be isolated when the railroad is torn up and in case of a sudden rise in the river, with the backing up of water after the Gatun spillway dam is raised, it would be difficult to rescue them. In this blotting out of the river hamlets and of one of the world's historic trade routes, nothing of value will disappear-only a few shabby hamlets, and a hundred or more isolated huts in the junglewhile the river route will give way to the canal, and the railroad to a straighter and better line outside the lake area above all danger of flood. Jungle Hamlets. In the hamlets and the jungle there are three distinct types of buildings, in addition to the quarters for Canal employes. Of these the most picturesque and primitive is the open hut in the jungle, which consists of a palm thatch raised about eight feet above the ground on bamboo poles. Here a bush family has its incongruous being, for this jungle home is often within sight of the railroad trains, and within it one sees plantain being fried in a modern kettle over a modern brazier, while the drinking water is dipped with a gourd from a square, 5-gallon-capacity oil-can. A little more advanced type of dwelling is the pretty hut made of closely set bamboo sticks, sometimes plastered with mud, and with the broad overhanging thatched roof, in which lizards and bugs rustle about day and night. There are none of the more substantial native huts, found in some of the villages in the interior of Panama, built of clay blocks and covered with overhanging pantile roofs. The third type of house, although more modern, can scarcely be considered an advance on the bamboo hut. It is built of lumber and covered with a corrugated-iron roof. Old residents of the Isthmus say that this type is due to the easy pilfering of lumber and roofing iron, left in storehouses and on isolated buildings by the French canal builders, and that it was unknown before 1885. Usually these buildings have been arrested in dissolution by patches of soap boxes or tin flattened out from old cans, which gives them a motley look. The village stores are little better than this latter type of dwelling. Here and there one sees in a settlement of such nondescript houses, the trim little cottages built by the French and more recently used by the Americans; and the more airy and well screened quarters of the American canal period. These, however, are late additions. The original villages were jungle settlements existing because of the isthmian transit. Bohio. The next settlement of any importance up the river from Gatun is Bohio. Between these two villages are three hamlets-Lion Hill, Tiger Hill, and Ahorca Lagarto-none of them numbering over half a dozen huts and without any apparent reason for existing except that some bush negroes or natives happened to settle there. The two first mentioned are essentially railroad camps that have existed since 1851, when they were successively the terminus of the road. Ahorca Lagarto, however, is on a bend in the river, and may well have been a resting place for the cramped travelers in canoes. Of the origin of its name Otis says: "Ahorca Lagarto, 'to hang the lizard,' deriving its name from a landing-place on the Chagres near by; this again, named from having, years back, been pitched upon as an encampment by a body of government troops, who suspended from a tree their banner, on which was a lizard, the insignia of the Order of Santiago." In 1908 it had sixty-two inhabitants, of whom three were white, two yellow, and the balance negro. Bohio appears to have been another bush hamlet in 1862 when Otis wrote. Until recently it has been called Bohio Soldado (Soldier's Home.) The French made it the site of one of their district headquarters in 1882, erected a machine shop on the west bank of the river and did considerable work there under the old sea-level plan for a canal, which was excavated to this place to a sufficient depth for light draft boats. Here as well as at any place can be seen today the plan of the sea-level canal, which included the main channel and two large diversions or drainage ditches one on each side of the canal proper. Under the French plan for a lock canal; Bohio was the site for the first dam, and the excavation for the locks at this point can be seen in one of the hills on the opposite side of the river from the railroad. As it has existed during the American regime the village has been a relic from the French period. Such surveys, investigations, and excavation as were necessary here were done by men occupying the French houses. In recent years Bohio has been the center of a small local trade in vegetables, brought in from the jungle by canoe and pack animals, in exchange for groceries and liquors sold in the Chinese and native shops. At the time of the official census in 1908, it had 526 inhabitants, of whom 447 were colored and native, 69 white, and 10 Chinese. At Bohio the Americans carried on investigations in 1904 and 1905 to determine whether that location would be used for locks and a dam, and in 1909 excavation by hand and with steamshovel was carried on to remove a small hill and part of a dump made by the French, which stood in the canal prism. Across the river, where the machine shops were situated in the French days, and where they carried on work for the lock emplacement, the edge of a hill is now being removed by a contractor. The work at this point is typical of all that between Gatun and Culebra Cut, consisting as it does of the excavation of small elevations in the canal channel and the toes of the hills that project into the prism. Near Bohio are the hamlets of Peñas Blancas and Buena Vista' both on the river, and each merely a collection of huts of various descriptions. Frijoles (beans) is the next railway Frijoles. station, a village of 784 inhabitants in 1908, of about a thousand when it became a center for relocation work on the Panama Railroad, now being rapidly deserted. Here for many years an old Frenchman ran a distillery in which he made rum of such good quality that he boasted that it was sold in Colon to rectifiers who made it into "genuine French cognac.' One of the familiar sights of this hamlet is the village washing-place, a pool near the railroad tracks, formed by the swirling of the water in the Frijolita River at a point where it is turned at right angles to its previous course by the interposition of a bank of clay and rock. The method of washing clothes among_the lower-class natives and West Indians can be observed here. This also is locally known as the place where one may buy bananas of peculiarly delicious flavor. Frijoles is mentioned in Otis' guide book published in 1862, but the next village, Tabernilla (little tavern), although it appears on the Harrison-Arosemena map, is not. It was one Tabernilla. of the centers of the French works, and there was a small field repair shop at this point, with a few buildings that served as quarters for the working force. During the American occupation it became a village of over two thousand inhabitants (2,079 in 1908), because here is situated the largest dumping ground on the canal work. The location was chosen in 1906 because it is on the main line of the railroad, outside of the canal prism and afforded a plot of ground two miles long and almost as wide for wasting of spoil. In all about sixteen million cubic yards of material were wasted here, all of which will be below the level of the lake. The dump was abandoned at the close of 1910, and immediately the village population decreased, the people remaining there being largely employes with families who could not procure quarters elsewhere. These are now being moved because the demolition of the place is under way. Barbacoas Between Tabernilla and San Pablo the railroad crosses the Chagres River at Barbacoas. The original bridge was built of wood, but early in the history of the railroad it was replaced by a bridge of six wrought-iron through-plate-girder spans ranging from 101 to 109 feet in length, supported upon seven masonry piers. This bridge is mentioned by Otis in 1862, and is said to have been one of the first of its type ever constructed. It was not built however to carry such heavy rolling stock as that placed on the road by the Americans, and so the three channel spans were replaced in 1908 by heavier girders, while the floor system of the three remaining spans of the old bridge were reinforced. San Pablo (St. Paul) was originally a plantation worked by Catholic priests. It was a railroad station in 1862, was a laborer's San Pablo. camp in the French days, and during the American occupation has been a small canal village. It also is being demolished, and the last excavation in the lake region is now in progress there. Across the Chagres River from San Pablo is Caimito, one of the names found on Esquemeling's map. It was a canal labor camp in the French time and also under the Americans until the work at that point was finished Of this class, also, is Mamei, likewise a railroad station in 1862, and little more than that today, although it was the location of several quarters for Canal workers a few years ago. Gorgona bears the name given by Pizarro to an island off the coast of Colombia, near Buenaventura, because he found around it such treacherous currents. It may be that this name Gorgona.* was adopted arbitrarily, or that the Chagres River travelers found in the river at this place some eddies that reminded them of the currents at Gorgona Island. Of this place Otis says: "The native town of Gorgona was noted in the earlier days of the river travel as the place where the wet and jaded traveler was accustomed to worry out the night on a rawhide, exposed to the insects and the rain, and in the morning if he was fortunate regale *Gorgona means sea-fan. The island off Colombia was named after the zoophyte. The whirlpool took its name from the island which it is near. For Balboa Hill see page 207. himself on jerked beef and plantains. In the French time large shops were situated here, at the point where the American shops now are, known as Bas Matachin. Gorgona should not be classed with Gatun and Bohio as a purely jungle hamlet, because it appears to have been a settlement of some size long before the railroad was built. It was one of the places at which the river travelers stopped for the night, and all about it were cultivated farms. At the time of the first Canal Zone census in 1908 its inhabitants numbered 1,065 whites, 1,646 blacks, and 39 Chinese a total of 2,750. The population has increased owing to the expansion of work in the shops. The site of the shops and the lower parts of the village will be covered by the water of Gatun Lake, and therefore, the shops will be moved in about a year to the site reserved for the permanent marine shops at Balboa. Matachin. This is the Spanish word for butcher, and this village, or the site of it, also appears on Esquemeling's map. Therefore the current Isthmian-folk etymology that it is a combination of the words "matar," to kill, and "Chino," signifying a wholesale death among Chinese laborers engaged in the construction of the Panama Railroad, is erroneous. For years this was the point at which trains from Panama to Colon passed those going the other way, and it had some local importance on that account, because the wait here often ran as high as half an hour. In the time of the first French company it was a labor camp, excavation was carried on here, and a few miles below, at the point they called Bas Matachin, the shops were situated. These shops have since |