A Man, An Alp, Napalm, No Llamas, Calamity (The Darien Gap Part 2)
Categories: History , Travel , Outdoors & Nature
I learned just a few years ago that you can't drive your car all the way from Alaska to the bottom of South America, and I found this unsettling in the same way I found it unsettling as a child to learn that Baja, California, is actually a part of Mexico.
The problem is the Darien Gap, an area of about 30,000 square acres of swampy, mountainous, and otherwise difficult geological features between Colombia and Panama, that has been breaking hearts and ruining lives for centuries, even before Colombian paramilitary groups got into the act. The Gap now refers to the uncompleted stretch of the Pan-American Highway. Centuries earlier, the Gap referred to a possible break in the mountains, sort of like the Cumberland Gap, that would allow the building of a canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. An Englishman named Dr. Edward Cullen claimed to have found just such a gap.
Well, we all know what happened with that idea.
The Darien seemed like a good place to build a canal, since there was so much water there already. The problem was the two huge mountain ranges--extensions of the Andes--at each side of the isthmus. Just as explorers of North America could hardly believe that a usable Northwest Passage didn't exist--with all these rivers, wouldn't at least some of them meet up and run from ocean to ocean?--tropical explorers could hardly believe that there wasn't some kind of reasonable way either to get across Central America via the Darien.
In 1854, English and American exploration parties separately attempted excursions from the Atlantic to the Pacific. (Weirdly, unknown to the parties on the Atlantic or to anyone else, the crew of another English ship was heading east from the Pacific on an unofficial exploration at the same time.)
In the same way that there is a Northwest Passage, sort of, if you have an ice breaker, it is humanly possible to cross the Darien. In 1854, only one party makes it all the way, and I'm not going to say which one.
I read two books about these expeditions; one the 1854 Journal of Lionel Gisbourne, the British engineer who attempted to survey the Darien; and Todd Balf's 2003 The Darkest Jungle, about the American attempt to cross the isthmus. Over 100 years earlier, Scotland had tried to found a colony in the jungle. No European had spent much time in the Darien since, but the cruelty of the Spanish conquestors remained a part of the native people's memories.
None of the trips went smoothly. Dr. Cullen, the putative discoverer of the gap, was supposed to meet Gisbourne on the Atlantic side to guide him across the isthmus, but he did not show up when expected. This was a wise move, since in fact Cullen had never made it even halfway across the Darien. Then some Kuna Indians drove Gisbourne back to his ship and watched as the ship departed (although actually they made landfall again not far away). The Americans fared much worse, and Balf questions why Gisbourne and his crew did not come to their assistance more quickly. Balf claims it was Gisbourne's professional jealousy and seems quite pleased to report the trouble Gisbourne gets into later.
At first I thought I was going to love Gisbourne's book in the same way that I've loved Mark Twain's travel books. For example, soon after Gisbourne's ship departs England, a baby is born on it, and Gisbourne expresses surprise that human babies open their eyes at birth--he had assumed their eyes were shut for the first eight or nine days of life, as are puppies' and kittens'. There's something charming about this naive admission. Soon, however, Gisbourne's racism makes it very clear why this book, like many other 19th-century adventure stories, was never republished.
Not everyone makes it out of the jungle. Some of those who do never really recover. The Darkest Jungle describes the men's suffering in detail, extrapolating the horrors of slow (and then fast) starvation from the Americans' journals. Those who made it back had to refute rumors that they had cannibalized the bodies of those who died.
And yet, what European or European-American could resist the lure of a country full of native peoples to subjugate? (Gisbourne regrets that the Indians' nomadic habits made them difficult to tax.) Well, Henry David Thoreau, for one, who wrote in "Life Without Principle" (also in 1854):
The last resource of our energy has been the robbing of graveyards on the Isthmus of Darien, an enterprise which appears to be but in its infancy; for, according to late accounts, an act has passed its second reading in the legislature of New Granada, regulating this kind of mining; and a correspondent of the "Tribune" writes: — "In the dry season, when the weather will permit of the country being properly prospected, no doubt other rich 'Guacas' [that is, graveyards] will be found." To emigrants he says: — "do not come before December; take the Isthmus route in preference to the Boca del Toro one; bring no useless baggage, and do not cumber yourself with a tent; but a good pair of blankets will be necessary; a pick, shovel, and axe of good material will be almost all that is required": advice which might have been taken from the "Burker's Guide." And he concludes with this line in Italics and small capitals: "If you are doing well at home, STAY THERE," which may fairly be interpreted to mean, "If you are getting a good living by robbing graveyards at home, stay there."
