Men at once became rivals for prompt
service. Here, for the first time, the owners of the weird
mining-machines already described found themselves at a disadvantage,
while those who carried merely the pick, shovel, and small personal
equipment were enabled to make a flying start. On the beach there was
invariably an immense wrangle over the hiring of boats to go up the
river. These were a sort of dug-out with small decks in the bow and in
the stern, and with low roofs of palmetto leaves amidships. The fare to
Cruces was about fifteen dollars a man. Nobody was in a hurry but the
Americans.
Chagres was a collection of cane huts on level ground, with a swamp at
the back. Men and women clad in a single cotton garment lay about
smoking cigars. Naked and pot-bellied children played in the mud. On the
threshold of the doors, in the huts, fish, bullock heads, hides, and
carrion were strewn, all in a state of decomposition, while in the rear
was the jungle and a lake of stagnant water with a delicate bordering of
greasy blue mud. There was but one hotel, called the Crescent City,
which boasted of no floor and no food. The newcomers who were unsupplied
with provisions had to eat what they could pick up. Unlearned as yet in
tropical ways, they wasted a tremendous lot of nervous energy in trying
to get the natives started.
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