The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  RED, WHITE, AND BLUE YELLOW FEVER

  I arrived in Guayaquil and took a walk along the Guayas River. Ecuador is South America’s westernmost country, and Guayaquil, due south of Miami, is its westernmost major port. Coastal traders always docked here, luring sailors, fortune seekers, pirates, and diplomats in their wake. In 1824, when Guayaquil was almost three centuries old, and a year after President James Monroe issued his doctrine warning European powers to stay out of the Americas, the State Department opened up a consulate here. It became the oldest continuously occupied United States post in South America.

  William Wheelright, a New England sea captain in his twenties, filled the first consular spot. His tenure proved uneventful, but as a tireless promoter of steam-powered engines he greatly influenced nineteenth-century South America. When two of his steamships docked on the Chilean coast, the Valparaíso newspaper marveled at the “ponderous ships which moved without sail or oar.” His Pacific Steam Navigation Company dominated coastal trade for decades. In 1850 he built South America’s first railroad, a twenty-four-mile freight train through Chile’s copper country.

  United States representatives have always had strong feelings about Ecuador. The first United States chargé d’affaires in Quito, Delazon Smith, reported that he “witnessed little else than ignorance, indolence, wretchedness, dishonesty, and misery, on the part of the great mass of the people and selfishness, low cunning, sordid ambition, avarice, and blood-thirsty revenge on that of those who either lead or force the unconscious unthinking multitude. The country, too, is nearly as miserable as those who inhabit it. . . . They are so weak and defenseless, that three-thousand well-disciplined soldiers from the United States would march through their republic, conquering, taking and possessing every Town, City, and Province.”

  More agreeable was Matthew Palmer Game, who became consul in the 1850s when Panama hat exports reached unprecedented volume. An adventurer who had left his Philadelphia home at age seventeen, Game joined Simón Bolívar’s revolutionary navy in Venezuela and eventually adopted Ecuador as his home. During his term, Nantucket whalers robbed Ecuador’s prized Galápagos and their strategic importance was such that he suggested the United States annex the islands as a coaling station. Although nothing came of the idea, it became the first of many informal proposals between the two countries concerning ownership of the Archipiélago de Colón, as it is formally called. Most of Game’s official time was spent dealing with troublesome sea captains, sailors, and traders from the United States. Descendants of his two Ecuadoran families—one legitimate, the other less so—form the Game Family Association, which each year still visits his grave on the Island of Puná in the Gulf of Guayaquil.

  United States consular positions in Guayaquil, whether filled by career diplomats or merchants already living there, were less than enviable. Judging from their communiqués to Washington and elsewhere, they were subjected to filthy living conditions, painfully slow communications with the outside world, and a country whose government seemed to change with alarming alacrity. Yellow jack, as the dread yellow fever was known, was only one of many plagues that thrived. Ships carrying mail and supplies from abroad simply avoided Guayaquil during seasonal epidemics. On the political front, sometimes two or more military factions in different parts of the country claimed supremacy, and diplomats simply had to wait until the dust settled to determine with whom they should deal. Meanwhile, they spent an inordinate amount of time requesting the Stars and Stripes to wave above the consulate door on the Malecón.

  • “I beg respectfully to inform the State Department that this consulate is in pressing need of a new large sized flag; the one sent last spring was so rotten that it was torn by the wind after a month’s usage.” Louis V. Prevost, November 1862.

  • “[T]his city is, and has been for fifteen days past in a constant state of alarm and excitement. The revolutionists in this government . . . are organizing for an attack upon Guayaquil. They have already taken possession of a small steamer . . . being owned by an American citizen carrying the American flag. . . . I consider it of absolute necessity that there should be a vessel of war in and about our Port for the protection of American property and interest.” Prevost, to U.S. Navy Commander in Peru, August 1864.

  • Flag request repeated, Prevost, February 1866.

  • Flag request approved, June 1866.

  • Another flag requested. Charles Weile, September 1872.

  • Request made again. Weile, June 1873.

  • “The startling intelligence has just been received . . . of an attempt to assassinate President García Moreno. . . . The wounds inflicted are reported to be of a very serious nature and, it is feared, will prove fatal. . . . The political situation is grave and in the struggle for power . . . civil strife will be an inevitable result.” Weile, August 1875.

  • “This consulate has no large flag, the one now in use being old and worn out.” Phanor M. Eder, April 1878.

  • “[T]he salary is insufficient and the climate incompatible with good health. I have had the fever here twice . . . and my family have all been afflicted.” Alexander McLean, May 1880.

  • “My wife and four boys have suffered from the fever, and when scarcely more than convalescent one of my boys contracted small pox, and my wife fell victim to it nursing the boy.” McLean, four months later.

  • “I unfortunately met there the yellow fever . . .” Eder, in his second tenure, 1881.

  • Ecuador exports 281,616 toquilla straw hats this year. Consular report, 1881.

  • “Finding no one in Ecuador appearing to clearly hold the title of president or other title indicating Supreme head of the Government to whom I can present my credentials . . .” Martin Reinberg, explaining why he presented his diplomatic credentials to the local Collector of Customs, August 1883.

  • “The flag . . . is getting ragged, and a new one should be sent—one sixteen feet in length.” Horatio N. Beach, June 1885.

  • “I have to state that the furniture . . . is old, worm eaten, and in a most delapidated and disreputable state.” William B. Sorsby, July 1891.

  • “For several weeks I have suffered from the effects of a fever and my physician now advises a change of climate.” Sorsby, February 1893.

  • “Lives and interests of American citizens endangered. Naval force absolutely required. Presidential elections fixed 28 to 31 May. Telegraph wires to Quito cut.” Reinberg again, May 1895.

  • “I have long since learned to be surprised at nothing either absurd or indecent the average Guayaquil paper publishes.” Perry M. De Leon, August 1901.

  • “I am anxious to leave Ecuador. I am very tired of this country and the people, and like and respect them less. . . . The natives, of whom I believe ninety-five percent are Indian or of mixed blood, are generally ignorant and too indolent to improve their condition. The so-called better class have as a rule become equally distasteful to me and, barring a few, I now have as little to do with them as possible in a social way.” De Leon, three days later.

  De Leon got his wish during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who decided to fill the consular spot with Thomas Nast, the famed political cartoonist. Nast’s crusade against corruption and his drawings of the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant had established him in the forefront of modern political cartoonists. Aware that Nast, then sixty-two years old, had fallen on hard times, Roosevelt wrote, “It seems to me it is a national duty to do something for the gallant old fellow.” His secretary of state contracted Nast about the post: “The President would like to put it at your disposition, but if you think it too far away and too little amusing to a man with the soul of an artist, please say so frankly. . . .” Nast accepted.

  Soon he sent the secretary of state a sketch of himself, satchel and golf clubs in hand. “Say the word and I am off,” read the caption. His farewell cartoon in the New York Herald showed him arriving on the equator as the volcano Cotopaxi erupts, alligat
ors and dinosaurs prowl about, and, in the sweltering heat, the skull of death emerges from a box labeled YELLOW JACK.

  Before Nast presented himself in July 1902, according to his biographer Albert Bigalow Paine, the local press had suggested that its readers rise up against the people sent by the United States. Nast won them over with a series of friendly cartoons run on the front page of La Nación, an afternoon daily. One showed him holding up the United States flag outside the consulate on October 9, Guayaquil’s independence day, and shouting, “Viva el Nueve de Octubre!” Another mocked the coronation of King Edward VII of Great Britain. A third celebrated the first run of the railroad to the country’s interior.

  Nast wrote home to his wife of the conditions he saw around him. “Mice, rats, mosquitos, fleas, spiders and dirt all thrive. Water scarce,” went one letter. “I hope I will live to die in some other place. Things are bad enough without my being buried here,” another read. “The so-called ‘best people’ have made their exits on account of Yellow Fever. The steamers do not stop here. They go on south. That alarms the people here even more.” Nast passed his time reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica and drawing. He looked out his door to see dogs “dirty, starved, wild.” With his letters he sent sketches of street vendors selling Panama hats. As for the coffee, Nast proclaimed it “vile. The nearer one gets to the place it grows, the worse it is made.” A week later, he added, “hot water is unknown here, except in coffee that is nearly all water.” Another week passed: “Well, I had to get a coffee pot. Worse and worse. Could not stand it any longer. Alcohol lamp does the boiling.”

  In late November he complained, “my limbs get stiff and crampy.” At the end of the month nausea set it. On December 7, 1902, less than five months after he arrived, yellow fever claimed the great political cartoonist thousands of miles from home. His effects included a painting of industrialist J. P. Morgan, an equestrian outfit, three Panama hats, and a revolver.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALFARO LIVES

  Thomas Nast’s short tenure took place during the sweeping reforms of Eloy Alfaro’s Liberal Revolution. Although temporarily out of office, the general from Montecristi greatly influenced the changes being wrought upon his country. His time was spent shuffling from Quito, where he had installed Leonidas Plaza Gutiérrez as president, to Guayaquil, his base of support, and Central America, where he still maintained business operations. He sent his son, Olmedo, to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but Cadet Private Alfaro dropped out after a year and set sail for Europe. In Guayaquil, Eloy often stayed at his married daughter’s home in Las Peñas, a small neighborhood so close to the Guayas River that eddies lap up against the back wall of each house. Eloy Avilés Alfaro, grandson of the revolutionary hero, still lives in that same house on Numa Pompillo Llona Street.

  The home of Eloy Alfaro’s bachelor grandson is full of memories and mementos. Nearing seventy years old, he maintains the house much as it was when the general himself stayed there. He greeted me at the door in an undershirt. Tall, with a freckled bald head, Eloy seated me in a parlor twenty feet high, looking across the river. He recited family history at the drop of a hat.

  “My grandfather was in love with a Panamanian woman, so he kept returning there to sell sombreros de paja toquilla, but also to see her. My mother lived in different countries in Central America, wherever the family happened to be living in exile. When he became president, my grandfather moved the whole family back here. The room we’re sitting in now was the living room and the library. The dining room was downstairs and the servants lived in the attic. Now I rent out the top and bottom floors. We have a few things left that are of historic or intrinsic value, like photographs, but anything worth money has been stolen.” El nieto, the grandson, pulled a military jacket and hat out of a closet. “All the silver has disappeared. Only the jacket remains. This furniture here”—he rapped on an old cabinet—“came from my grandfather. And up here”—he reached above the cabinet—“are his sword and his cane. The cane appears in all the formal photographs. Once when my grandfather repaid a loan made by another country, they sent him a kickback. It was traditional. He returned it, so they sent him this sterling silver tea set instead.” He motioned me over to look at some elegant flatware designed with the country’s coat of arms and his grandmother Ana’s initials.

  We talked more about his grandfather and the Liberal Revolution that transformed his homeland. “The Catholic Church said my grandfather was an atheist. At the time if you were not a Catholic you couldn’t be a citizen. Period. But you can tell that an atheist would never act the way my grandfather did. He was simply against priests who used the Church to fight their own battles for their own convenience.” General Alfaro was assassinated by a Papist mob after he had been arrested and sent to the main jail in Quito. “They got into the prison and dragged him through the streets. His body was tossed in an hoguera bárbara,” a barbarous bonfire.

  “My mother always used her father as an example. Hardly a day went by without mention of him around the house. On Good Friday he would always invite twelve poor people to dinner. My mother carried on that tradition. Because they were so poor and old, some were not very clean and we didn’t want to serve them. But my mother said we have to thank God we can share our food. You must be humble and serve them, because one of these days the situation may be reversed. Now I carry on the same tradition.”

  This seemed an opportune time to present my cockamamy theory about Panama hats and the Liberal Revolution. I would never again get so close to the source. If el nieto supports it, I thought, I’ll have made my contribution to Ecuador’s history. If not, I’ll discard it for good, as so many people had already counseled. “And so it seems clear to me,” I said, leaning forward, “that Panama hats are responsible for the great Liberal Revolution that your illustrious grandfather led.” (In Latin America, always speak in superlatives of successful revolutions and dead grandfathers.) “Right?”

  Eloy Avilés Alfaro paused. I had diverted the flow of a conversation that he must have taken part in hundreds and hundreds of times over the years. “Well, yes,” he finally said. “It’s true he made a fortune selling Montecristi hats in Panama, and he did spend it all on the Revolution, financing ships and making other arrangements. So, yes”—he broke into an odd grin—“you are right. I’ve never thought of it that way.”

  El nieto poured some drinks. “In 1896 we had the big fire. This town used to be like a tinderbox for six months of the year, and every twenty or thirty years the whole place would burn down. After the fire of 1896, Guayaquil was rebuilt with the same architecture. At the time the buildings were very colonial, with stone streets in front. Wild vegetation used to grow right next to Las Peñas—medicinal plants and herbs, and quinine trees. One tubercular man improved himself so much with the herbs here that people started coming to him for help. He became a famous curandero,” a healer, “and he set up beds to attend to the sick. People from town built houses here for the rainy season, when the yellow fever epidemics were most severe. It was cooler than in the middle of town.”

  Yellow fever, malaria, hookworm, dysentery, bubonic plague, typhoid fever, and other diseases visited Guayaquil regularly. A lack of gutters, sewers, pavement, and fresh water helped spread the sickness; many streets remained under a foot of green, slimy water half the year. Mosquito netting was mandatory. Rats ran through the best of homes with impunity, often carrying off lighted candles to munch on in their lairs. As construction progressed on the canal in Panama, the United States applied diplomatic and economic pressure upon Ecuador to force a sanitation campaign in Guayaquil. If you don’t act now and do it our way, the veiled threat implied, transcanal ships will be quarantined from our port. General Alfaro called for cooperation with the United States effort, but not until a private medical team from the Rockefeller Foundation arrived was the volatile issue of having United States government doctors cleaning up an Ecuadoran city averted.

  “When my older brother Colón
was consul to San Francisco, I went there and took classes at Berkeley,” Avilés continued. “I worked in a cannery for a couple of years. When I came back I went into the export-import business and worked for the Union Oil Company of California. In World War II, I returned to the States to train as a pilot with the Army Air Force.”

  Sr. Avilés took off his bifocals and asked me to read a letter in English from a European researcher that had arrived the previous day. It had been addressed to “Grandson of Eloy Alfaro, Guayaquil, Ecuador.” “You know, the Alfaro name doesn’t belong to the family anymore. It belongs to the country. It’s used by political parties, liquor stores, and schools. I supported the Radical Alfaro Front candidate in the last presidential election. I spoke at the opening of a housing cooperative bearing the family name, and I said if this project ends up corrupt like all the rest, I’ll petition to have the name changed.” A nascent guerrilla group believing that the goals of the Liberal Revolution have been betrayed by decades of oligarchies has also appropriated the family name: “Alfaro Vive Carajo,” which loosely translates to “Alfaro lives, you sonuvabitch.”

  El nieto went to change into his evening clothes, leaving me to look out the window. A gentle breeze blew off the Guayas, and the sound of the river rubbing the lower wall cast a spell of serenity. “My mother said that she used to see pirate boats from that window,” Avilés called out from the next room. “We used to see passenger ships and oil tankers on the river. Cargo ships would haul molasses from inland farmers. The river was about their only form of transportation. From the balcony there you can see swallows and flocks of little parrots. On clear afternoons Mount Chimborazo is visible for twenty minutes or so. The snow peaks have touches of red and yellow from the sun. During the rainy season we can see the shadows of the Andes.”