Among others, a lot of blacks from the West Indies worked for both the French and the American Canal efforts. There's a book about the Panama Canal called "The Path Between the Seas," by David McCulloch, which has the greatest surveyor's tale I ever read in it: this one seventeen man French survey party went out to topo the isthmus jungle; after three months the one survivor came back with the field notes; then he too died. I used to love to tell my crew that story when they'd complain. These quotes are copied out of that book:
...One extremely dangerous task in the last years of the work, for
example, was the demolition of the giant trees that stood in what
was to be the main channel through Gatun Lake. After the trees
were cut down, dynamite crews - hundreds of West Indians - chopped
holes in the huge trunks, sometimes as many as fifteen holes in a
single tree. Two or three sticks of dynamite were put in each hole,
with cap and fuse, then plastered over with mud. The blasting began
once the work day had ended and the area was clear, just as dark
came on.
"After the 5:15 passenger train pass for Panama, we start lighting,"
remembered Edgar Simmons, another Barbadian. "Some of us has up to
65 to 72 holes to light and find our way out. So...you can judge
the situation...." Each man, torches in both hands, dashed from
tree to tree, lighting fuses as fast as possible, then ran for
cover. "Then it's like Hell. Excuse me of this assertion, but
it's a fact...it was something to watch and see the pieces of
trees flying in the air."
During the French years the workers, both black and white, died like flies of malaria and yellow fever. But Dr. Gorgas, the U.S. medical chief, had worked under Walter Reed during the American invasion of Cuba, where they discovered the means by which yellow fever was transmitted:
In mid-September, while placing mosquitoes on patients in a fever
ward, (Dr. Jesse W.) Lazear saw a free mosquito of undetermined
species land on his hand and he also purposefully allowed the insect
to take his feed of blood. Five days later Lazear had what Gorgas
described as one of the most violent cases of yellow fever he had
ever attended. On September 25, the day Lazear died, he was in such
wild delirium that it took two men to hold him in bed.
Armed with that new knowledge, the engineers attacked the mosquitoes, with sanitary sewers and storm water drainage and the elimination of mosquito-breeding pools and puddles, and with screened windows in the houses to fend off disease-carrying mosquitoes...at least the white American workers got window screens:
The death rate among all white employees from the United States was
actually a mere 2.06 per thousand (per year), an almost unbelievably
low figure and deserving all the acclaim that ensued, but the death
rate among black workers was 8.23...Had the black labor force been
housed in screened quarters comparable to those provided the white
employees, in areas where the sanitation officers exercised control,
malaria might possibly have been eradicated, as had yellow fever...
Yours WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net