Panama Fever: An Interview with Matthew Parker By Paul Vlitos Matthew Parker, the author of two previous best-selling narrative histories - Monte Cassino and The Battle of Britain - recounts in his latest work the heroic and heartbreaking struggle to build the Panama Canal.
Panama Fever: The Battle to Build the Canal tells this epic story, from the failure of the French attempt to build a sea-level canal in the nineteenth century to the eventual completion of the canal as we know it today by the US in the twentieth century. It is a narrative of ambition, ingenuity and dedication, but also one of danger, suffering and exploitation. It is a story of breathtaking sweep and scale, and in Matthew Parker it finds a chronicler fully capable of doing it justice.
With its simultaneous grasp of the historical, economic and political forces at work in driving the canal project, the astonishing engineering difficulties that had to be overcome, and the experiences of individuals whose lives were bound up in its construction, Panama Fever is an authoritative work of history that grips and moves the reader like a great nineteenth-century novel. I interviewed Matthew Parker to find out what first interested him in the story of the canal, how he came to write Panama Fever and what he’s working on next…
Q: Can I start by asking what first drew you to the subject of the canal?
I suppose this dates me irrevocably, but it was in a November 1978 edition of Look and Learn that I first came across the story. I was eight. I am sure of this, as I still have the originals of the series of articles, vividly, even gruesomely, illustrated, about the appalling carnage that went into building the canal. In the Eighties I lived in Barbados and became fascinated with the region’s history and people. When I discovered that the canal had been built by British West Indians, I was hooked on the story.
Q: One of the astonishing achievements of Panama Fever is the way it takes a huge range of material - including international political and financial skulduggery, the fight against Yellow Fever and Malaria, the complex geology of the canal’s route, the historical and political background to the project, the engineering challenges the builders faced, and the varied responses of those designing, promoting and building the canal - and weaves them into a seamless and compelling narrative. When you first conceived of the book, did you anticipate the scale of what you were attempting? Were you ever daunted by it?
There are so many fascinating aspects to the canal story, and I really enjoyed researching areas new to me - such as nineteenth century Colombian politics or the life-cycle and habits of the Anopheles mosquito! - even if it meant the book took about a year longer to write than I had expected. As a writer, of course, you have to trust that what interests you will interest the reader, but there is so much in the Panama story - finance, political intrigue, geo-politics, medical and technical epics, skulduggery and idealism - that there should be - I hope! - something for everyone. What is at the core of the book, however, and what I hope holds it together, is the personal contemporary accounts of what it was like to actually be there, an ‘ordinary’ person caught up in an extraordinary moment in world history.
Q: You’ve also written books about the Battle for Monte Cassino and about the Battle of Britain. In what ways do related themes run through all your works?
It’s notable how often those involved in the struggle to build the canal compare it to a battle. You’re right, they all do! From President Roosevelt to the lowliest West Indian digger, building the canal is constantly described in military metaphor. With good reason. For one thing, the death toll of twenty-five thousand compares to many great battles. There is also overlap in the recurring themes of national pride and willing sacrifice for the greater good. In Monte Cassino, I tried to write the story ‘from the bottom-up’, from the point of the view of the private or junior soldier, rather than as a debate about the tactics of the generals. So too, in Panama Fever, I wanted the experience of those on the ground to be at the centre of the story, even though I could not resist going into the wider history, and the fascinating mini-stories - such as the Darien Disaster, or the Panama Railroad - that are an adjunct to the main narrative.
Q: Strikingly, Panama Fever allows many of those who actually worked on building the canal to speak for themselves, quoting from their private letters home and later recollections. You focus, extremely effectively, on a number of recurring personalities involved in the project in different ways and at different levels. How did you go about uncovering that kind of eye-witness material, and how difficult was it to find?
While writing Monte Cassino, I could get in my car and go and see a man who was actually there (although, sadly, that would be much more difficult now, four years later). For Panama, this was not going to be possible, although I did interview one 104-year-old gentleman in Colon, who had arrived in Panama from Jamaica in 1921 and could tell me many stories from the West Indian ‘Diggers’. Happily some accounts have from West Indians have been collected, and I was able to interview a number of sons or daughters of the diggers. For the white Americans there are a number of accounts to draw on, and I was lucky to be guided towards some very hard-to-find ones by friendly canal history enthusiasts in Panama and the US. All this, and the West Indian accounts as well, I then checked against the personnel files from the canal companies, which are all held in archives in the US. Best of all, perhaps, was finding the previously unseen and unknown private letters of Claude Mallet, the British consul who was in Panama throughout both the French and American periods. As well as providing a sort of structural backbone, holding the two parts together, his letters give a fascinating, neutral account of the successes and failures of those decades. I found these through a Canadian Mallet, a distant relative of Claude, who put me in touch with his grand-daughter who lives in Somerset in England. For these kind of breaks you have to be prepared to encounter many dead ends along the way, and you have to be lucky!
Q: Did you have any particular literary models in mind when you were writing Panama Fever, either fictional or non-fictional?
I’m not sure I would presume to have ‘literary models’, although I read some fascinating fiction around the subject. There is a great novel called Pueblos Perdidos by Gil Blas Tejeira, which tells the story of the canal from the point of view of the indigenous peoples of the huge area flooded by the Americans. West Indian fiction writers who address the issue of working on the canal include Claude McKay, George Lamming and Eric Walrond. An American viewpoint, written as a gung-ho adventure story is Rex Beach’s The Ne’er Do Well. The novel that, for me, the story kept evoking was Conrad’s masterpiece Nostromo. It has the same extremes, the culture clashes, the strangeness of a very foreign land.
Q: Finally, I was wondering if you could tell us what you’re working on at the moment? I’m sure anyone who has read Panama Fever will be anxious to know what you’ll be writing next.
I am working now on a new history of the British Empire in the Caribbean, from the first planting of sugar in Barbados in the 1640s through to the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. The plan is to tell the story through five or six of the big planter families, whose rise and fall mirrors that of the empire itself – the first generation is the adventurers, buccaneers and entrepreneurs. Their sons and grandsons become fabulously rich and powerful grandees; the fourth and fifth generations invariably ruin the family through extravagance, vice and madness. I’m looking forward to spending as much time in the Caribbean researching as I can get away with! I’m sure all readers of Panama Fever will be awaiting that eagerly.
Thanks, Matthew for talking to donowdo.com. Panama Fever: The Battle to Build the Canal by Matthew Parker is available now, and is published by Hutchinson.
To find out more about Panama Fever and Matthew Parker’s other work, visit www.matthewparker.co.uk