This is a transcription of Panama: Jump Back, What’s That Sound?
David: Hello. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place.
Melissa: In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other place on Earth.
David: Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.
Melissa: I’m Melissa Joulwan.
David: I’m David Humphreys.
David: We’re going around the world one great read at a time. Thanks for joining us.
[cheerful music]
David: Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about Panama. In Two Truths and a Lie, we’ll talk about the Google search that brought down a con-man. Then we’ll talk about five books we love. I’ve got a really well-written swashbuckler. Pirates and princesses and bounty hunters. And it’s true. But first, Mel’s going to bring us up to speed with the Panama 101.
Melissa: Let’s get oriented! Panama is in Central America. It’s part of the land bridge that connects North America to South America. It’s around the same size as North Carolina or the Czech Republic — but it’s long and narrow. Kind of like an S lying on its side, stretched out in the sun. At its narrowest point, Panama is just 37 miles or 60 km wide.
Melissa: The S is lying between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Because of its unique position, you could stand on top of Panama’s highest mountain — it’s a volcano… Volcán Barú. From the top, you can watch the sun rise over both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans! However… it’s known as one of the world’s toughest hikes. You start at 11:00 p.m. and hike around six hours through the night to reach the top by sunrise. It takes Volcán Barú is also home to the best and most expensive coffee in the world, so I guess you can have an awesome cappuccino when you’re done.
Melissa: The capital of Panama is Panama City. It sits in the bottom curve of the S on the Pacific side. According to ‘The Rough Guide to Panama’, it’s Central America’s ‘most ebullient capital city.’ So cheerful! The old town — called Casco Viejo — has red-brick streets lined with lush palm trees, white colonial buildings that look like cakes, and a baroque church with a very shiny golden altar inside. Along the sea front, you can walk on a stone sea wall that’s now a nice place to have a sit, but used to be a prison and the last defense against pirates!
Melissa: Let’s talk about history a little bit.
Melissa: People have been living in the Panamanian jungles, and, I can only assume, enjoying the lovely beaches, for at least 11,000 years. But then in the 16th century, the Spanish showed up! That little strip of land was a pretty sweet transit point for the gold, silver, and other goodies the conquistadors needed to transport back to Spain. They established Panama City in 1519 and loaded up their galleons with precious cargo.
Melissa: Then the pirates showed up!
Melissa: Remember when we talked about Henry Morgan in our Jamaica episode? [DAVE] He was the lieutenant governor of Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1674. He was a busy boy! In 1671, before he drank rum in Jamaica, he gathered up 1200 of the best privateers, English corsairs, and pirates to attack the Spanish. They started on the Caribbean side of Panama, and trekked overland through the jungle to Panama City. They plundered and looted and, probably, sang Yo Ho Ho — and in less than two hours, they’d destroyed the Spanish fleet. There’s a very well-reviewed book called ‘The Sack of Panamá’ if you want to go deep into this swashbuckling story.
Melissa: About 150 years later, Panama broke up with Spain and instead joined forces with Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela to form the Republic of Gran Colombia. Then, in 1903, with the backing of the United States, Panama split from Colombia and signed a treaty with the US. That eventually led to the building of the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914. I know we’re both going to talk about the Canal when we get to our books, so we’ll come back to that.
Melissa: Panama does seem to attract bossy troublemakers. From 1983 until 1989, Manuel Noriega was its de facto ruler. His regime was defined by human rights abuses, corruption, and drug trafficking. In 1989, the US invaded, arrested Noriega, and tossed him in a US prison. Democracy was restored. Ten years later, two significant things happened: Panama regained ownership of the Canal, and the country’s first woman president was elected. Her name was Mireya Moscoso and she served until 2004.
Melissa: Two other things to mention before we move on to why you might want to visit Panama. First, the official currency is the balboa. But its exchange rate has always been tied to the US dollar. One balboa equals one dollar. Panama doesn’t print paper money, so they use US dollars and balboa coins.
Melissa: Second, the official language is Spanish. Even though the US has been very present in Panama, only about 14% of the population speaks English. You can make a good impression by saying ‘beunas’ to everyone you meet — even people who don’t know each other say ‘buenas’ as a greeting.
Melissa: OK! Let’s talk about fun stuff.
Melissa: As you might expect of a Central American country, around half of Panama is covered with rainforests and cloud forests. If you like animals, there’s a lot to love there. The rainforests are home to fluorescent frogs and the Panamanian golden frog which is bright yellow with black spots and is only about as big as an adult human’s thumbnail.
Melissa: There are howler monkeys and squirrel monkeys and sloths of both the brown-throated and three-toed variety. There are also six species of wild cats, including jaguars and pumas. And more than 1000 bird species, including the quetzal — that’s a bright red and green bird with very long, graceful tail feathers. Like Gertrude McFuzz from Dr. Seuss, only elegant.
Melissa: The national bird of Panama is the harpy eagle, and I got a little obsessed. They’re black, white, and gray and look remarkably like a person in a bird suit or the muppet - you know… Sam the eagle. Even though they look puppety, they’re very fierce. The aforementioned sloths and monkeys and other cute, cuddly mammmals of the rainforest are not safe when harpies are around. Which makes sense: The eagles are named for the harpies of Greek mythology — half-human, half-birds that were the spirits of sudden, sharp gusts of wind.
Melissa: Harpy eagles are quite big: The females can weigh up to 20 pounds (9kg) with a wingspan of 6 1/2 feet (or 2 meters). They’re also monogamous and can mate for life. They live very high up in rainforest canopy in nests that are about six feet across and one foot deep. Their nests are like a small couch! Once they’ve built the nest from around 300 sticks, they use it year after year, remodeling as necessary. I love the idea of an old harpy couple redecorating their nest every season. ‘I’m just going to add a few more seedpods and maybe a bit of opossum fur over here.’
Melissa: If you’re a beach person, Panama is there for you. Every beach photo is like: palm trees. Check! Soft white sand? Si! Turquoise blue water? Of course. The crystal clear water is paradise for diving and snorkeling — on both sides of the country. There are also prime swells if surfing is your thing.
Melissa: In my research, I found a few experiences that would merit the once-in-a-lifetime, only-in-Panama label.These go from vaguely adventurous to ‘I’m a full-on I’m an explorer now.’
Melissa: First up: a rustic tropical island paradise. To run away to an almost deserted island, you can stay at ARTLODGE. It’s combination art gallery, hostel, and house on Island Gobernadora. The retreat was started by a French artist in 2005. The island is on the Pacific side of Panama and has about 200 residents, mostly fisherman. There are also tropical birds, butterflies, and marine life. The website says in bold, ‘There are no venemous, dangerous animals.’ As a guest, you can stay in thatched bungalows or an open campsite. There’s a shared space with a kitchen and dining room, and an open-air living room with hammocks and cushions and rugs for hanging out. There’s a strong emphasis on making and enjoying art, and you can go on excursions to go fishing, snorkeling, or walking in a mangrove forest. It all looks pretty idyllic.
Melissa: Second option, slightly more adventurous: If you love animals and want to make an impact, you can volunteer with Panama Wildlife Conservation to protect jaguars, sea turtles, and other animals. The excursion lasts for a month and costs $1200. In exchange, you get all your meals, accommodations, and transport while you work on an animal conservation project in the Cerra Hoya National Park. You don’t need previous experience, but the website says that good candidates ‘Need to be practical & content to live in tropical and remote areas.’ I’ll put a link to the application and to videos from their camera traps in show notes.
Melissa: Finally, if you want to see what life is like among an indigenous culture, you can stay in a village with the Emberá (em-bear-AH) people. They live in the dense jungle of the Darien rainforest. Their territory has about 12,000 residents who have kept their language and customs alive. You can visit for the day or stay overnight in a village with a population of around 130. To get there, you ride up the river in a dugout canoe, then join in a communal lunch. After eating, you can buy handicrafts made by the villagers and watch a dance ceremony. If you stay overnight, you get to swim in the river with the kiddos and then help make dinner. After hanging out by the fire with the villagers, you sleep in a hut that’s raised above the ground, with open sides and a thatched roof. There’s also an ‘adventure’ version of that tour that includes a 3-5 hour hike in the jungle. The village and the tours were featured in the National Geographic documentary show ‘The Story of Us,’ hosted by Morgan Freeman. I’ll put a link in the show notes.
Melissa: If your ideal vacation involves wearing a bathing suit for days on end and eating fish pulled fresh from the sea, Panama might be your next dream holiday. That’s the 101.
David: I’m about to say three statements. Two of them are true. Mel doesn’t know which one is the lie. Statement one: ‘A con-man visiting Panama was brought to justice with a google search — of just three short words.’
David: The average toll for the Panama Canal is currently $54 thousand dollars. The highest ever paid was just north of 375 thousand dollars. Here’s the statement: ‘The lowest fare ever paid to use the canal was 36 cents.’
David: And three: According to scientists, there’s a species of sloths in Panama — an entire species — that are drunk 100% of the time.
David: Let’s take them one at a time. First statement: ‘A con-man visiting Panama was brought to justice with a google search — of just three short words.’ It’s true! This is the story of two deeply horrible people, John and Anne Darwin. When the story starts, they were husband and wife living in North East England. He was a prison guard. She ran a business renting what the English call bedsits. That’s a room in a building; typically renters have a single bedroom and a shared bathroom.
David: Back in 2000, John was about 50. The Darwins had purchased a couple of houses as an investment. That went poorly, they were in debt. So John decided to do the only thing that he can think of: he’s going to fake his own death. He’s going to fake his own death and they’re going to cash in on the insurance. What could possibly go wrong?
David: One day in March of 2002, he put out to sea in a canoe. He ditches the canoe, gets a ride back to his house, presumably with his wife Anne. Anne reports him missing. There’s a search, and they find the canoe, but — no John Darwin. He’s declared dead. She collects the insurance. It’s 250 thousand pounds — about 600 thousand dollars now.
David: John lives in one of the bedsits Anne manages. He even ran into someone who recognized him. ‘Hey, aren’t you supposed to be dead?’
David: These two criminal masterminds get bored sitting around the house. They decide they want to get out and travel a little. John applies for a passport. He uses his home address and the name John Jones. He gets a UK passport with a fake name. … Over the next couple of years, they visit Greece and the US. — And then they get the idea to go to Panama.
David: Panama’s nice. It’s really nice. Wouldn’t it be great if we could live here? They get the idea to sell the house back in England, and buy a hotel in Panama. Love this for us. — There’s only one hitch. And the hitch is that John’s not sure that his “John Jones” passport is going to stand up to Panama’s visa laws. They’re going to want a birth certificate and medical records and such.
David: So. He does the only thing he can think of. In December of 2007, John Darwin flies back to England, marches into the West End Central police station in London, and announces that he has total amnesia. No memory of what’s happened for the last five years. The police contact his wife Anne, drop the news, and she’s all: WHAT? HOLY MOLY GUACAMOLE! — HE’S ALIVE? IT’S A MIRACLE.
David: The police are all, ‘oh come on? Really? We gotta spend time building a case against these two?’ But the final nail in the coffin for these two comes quickly. A newspaper picks up the story: man alive after five year search. Wife had already sold the house to move to Panama. Some rando in the reading public — bored at work, I’m guessing — types in ‘John’, ‘Anne’,’ and ‘Panama’ into Google images. Up comes a picture of the two of them, together, a year earlier, talking with a real estate agent in Panama. That image was in the paper the next day. John and Anne were both convicted of fraud, did six years, and later divorced.
David: But I haven’t told you what makes them truly horrible people yet. When this whole thing started, in 2000, John and Anne had two grown sons. And between 2002 and 2007, those boys thought their father was dead. Anne never told them. She knew the lie, she saw them often. Later they testified against her. That is not quality parenting.
David: Let’s move on!
David: ‘The lowest fare ever paid to use the canal was 36 cents.’ That’s true! I have to tell you about Richard Halliburton. I think you’re going to enjoy hearing about him. He was born in Tennessee in 1900. He was a bit of a sickly kid: spent months in bed because of a rapid heartbeat. He met John Harvey Kellogg, the man behind the cereal company, because Halliburton went to Kellogg’s sanitarium in Michigan for treatment.
David: Halliburton was also a smart kid. He was smart enough to get into Princeton. While he was there, he started to travel a bit. He saw London and Paris. His father was not entirely supportive of his adventures. Dad said that Richard should get the wanderlust out of his system, and return to Memphis and adopt a life — quote — “with an even tenor.”
David: An even tenor. That didn’t sit well with Richard. He wrote back:
‘I hatethat expression — and as far as I am able I intend to avoid that condition. When impulse and spontaneity fail to make my way uneven then I shall sit up nights inventing means of making my life as conglomerate and vivid as possible…. And when my time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.’
David: Halliburton went on to be a travel writer. And not just any travel writer — but a stunt journalist. He retraced Ulysses’ trip through Greece. He did the same with Cortes and his path through Mexico. He allowed himself to be stranded on an island. He flew around the world in an open cockpit biplane. That took 18 months, and he stopped in 34 countries. On that trip, he took the first aerial photos of Mount Everest. He climbed the Matterhorn and Mount Fuji. He snuck into the Taj Mahal.
David: Relevant to this episode, in 1928, Halliburton swum the length of the Panama Canal. It’s a 48-mile swim. He did it in waves. He was protected by a small staff on a boat, including a man with a rifle. The canal official charged him based on his weight and size, and came up with a fee of 36 cents.
David: In his day, Halliburton became quite famous. He was a solid writer, but he was an even better speaker. He had a high-pitched voice, but he had so much enthusiasm about travel and seeing the world. And his stories. — Walter Cronkite heard him speak in the mid-30s, and credited Halliburton with steering him into journalism.
David: Richard Halliburton was spared a stupid, common death in bed. He had an idea to sail a Chinese junk across the Pacific Ocean and arrive in San Francisco for the Golden Gate International Exposition. He left Hong Kong with the boat and a small crew on March 4, 1939. They were never seen again. He was 39.
David: If you’re curious, Halliburton’s work is still available, and he’s inspired a few biographies. We’ll point to them in the show notes.
David: - According to scientists, there’s a species of sloths in Panama — an entire species — that are drunk 100% of the time. That is a lie. They aren’t drunk. They’re stoned.
David: There’s a species of dwarf sloth that’s been marooned on an island off of Panama for the last 9,000 years. That’s a sentence that I never thought I’d say. The sloths are very cute, because they’re small — about the size of a small cat, maybe. And there aren’t very many of them. They’re critically endangered.
David: On that island, the sloths eat nothing but mangrove leaves. Mangrove leaves have a chemical that appears to be very similar to the chemical that we use for Valium. So the assumption by some scientists is that these cute little fuzzy creatures are probably baked out of their gourd all of the time.
David: While I was doing the research for this, I found a sloth expert. Her name is Lucy Cooke. She is charming and lovely, and she did a Ted talk about her relationship with the sloths there. We’ll put a link in show notes. She also runs an organization she calls ‘The Sloth Appreciation Society.’ You can find her at slothville.com. We’ll also put a link to that in the show notes.
David: That’s two truths and a lie.
Melissa: My first recommendation is ‘Seducing the Spirits’ by Louise Young. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to run away to the jungle, and you’re not ready to commit to visiting the Emberá village, this book is the next best thing.
Melissa: The main character is Jenny. She’s a 25-year-old grad student studying songbirds in Panama. But she’s made a classic mistake: She had an affair with her supervisor. Now she’s been banished to a remote jungle village to gather data on nesting habits of the harpy eagle.
Melissa: Jenny will be living near — but not with — the indigenous Kuna people. She’ll essentially be on her own in the rainforest. The only advice her older and supposedly wiser ex-lover-slash-professor has for her? ‘Don’t tick anyone off.’
Melissa: The Kuna community is a real indigenous people that lives on a cluster of small islands off the coast of Panama. They still practice a very traditional lifestyle, subsisting off the land. Each day, the men leave the island to fish or work in agriculture on the mainland. The women stay on the island to tend to the children and make colorful textiles called mola that they can sell.
Melissa: Prior to Jenny’s arrival, the bird researchers had all been men. But here’s Jenny: young, blonde, pretty, and tall — she towers over the relatively petite Kuna. As you might expect, the locals are not sure what to make of her at first.
Melissa: And she is way out of her depth. Her job should be pretty simple: Live in a tent on the mainland, sit in a blind in the forest, make notes about the harpy eagle family, and every Saturday, paddle 1200 meters to the Kuna’s island to attend the tribe’s community meeting.
Melissa: But nothing is simple for a white lady in the jungle. She gets caught in the jungle after dark. She’s terribly ignorant about the animals and bugs that are her neighbors. She almost drowns paddling to the Kuna meeting. And because she doesn’t really know how to cook, she’s been subsisting on bananas and baked beans eaten cold from the can.
Melissa: This book doesn’t have a ton of plot but the pace is nice and brisk. There’s a bit of mystery regarding the harpy eagles — a visiting missionary stirs up a lot of drama. There’s some infighting among the Kuna and lots of flirting and sexual politics. But this is mostly the story of Jenny and the Kuna getting to know each other. She’s eventually invited into the community. We watch as she becomes friends with a handful of well-drawn characters and is fully immersed in the local way of life.
Melissa: The author Louise Young is an anthropologist. She spent almost 20 years working with the Kuna in Panama, so the details about their language and customs are grounded in her personal experience. The bits about the everyday routine were fascinating to me — how the cooking gets done, how the women interact with each other, the male-female roles.
Melissa: This book made me understand how seductive the beauty and wonder of the jungle can be. Everyday life is deeply connected to the rhythm of the weather and the seasons. Cute sloths hang out in the trees, and the sound of birdcalls is constantly in the air. There are tiny translucent frogs and bright blue morpho butterflies as big as a basketball player’s hand.
Melissa: But danger is always there, too. There are jaguars and snakes called the fer-de-lance. Do you know this one? They’re the largest pit vipers, about 4 to 7 feet long (that’s about 2 meters). They’re brown with black spots and hypnotic golden eyes. And they’re known as the ‘twenty breath snake’ because once they bite, you’ll only draw 20 breaths before you die. I found a short documentary on YouTube called ‘The Deadliest Snake I’ve Ever Seen.’ I’ll put a link in show notes.
Melissa: Some of this book stressed me out so much. At one point in the story, Jenny realizes her boots are making her too clompy in the rainforest and decides to go barefoot like the Kuna. She regularly bathes in the river. And because it’s so hot, she’s naked as much as possible. In the jungle.
Melissa: This is exactly the kind of book I want for Strong Sense of Place. It took me somewhere I will most likely never go in real life and described it so vividly, I could see every detail in my imagination. If you want to know what it’s like to live in a rain forest for a while, this is the book for you. It’s ‘Seducing the Spirits’ by Louise Young.
David: My first book is ‘Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal’ by Matthew Parker. In 1513, a Spanish explorer, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, led a team across the Panamanian isthmus. At one point on that trip, he climbed a hill. If he looked one way, Balboa could see the Pacific Ocean, and if he looked the other, the Atlantic Ocean.
David: I’m guessing that on a clear day, from the top of the hill in the middle of Panama, you feel like you can touch the two. They’re right there. How hard could it be to connect one with the other? For 400 years, ‘we should build a canal across Panama’ was easy to say. For one, Benjamin Franklin was a proponent. It sounds like a good idea.
David: The benefits are so obvious! Ships can go right through! They won’t have to take that nasty, dangerous trip down to the tip of South America. Every single ship would save a 2-month journey. Think of the trade! Think of the military advantages! And we’re going to make so, so much money. What could possibly stop us?
David: Here’s an incomplete list of five things that made building the canal challenging.
David: First, there’s the land itself. Over the 60 miles of canal, there was jungle, mountains, and swamps. It’s one of the most inhospitable places on earth. To this day, you can’t drive straight through from Alaska to Argentina, and the reason you can’t is because of 60 miles in Panama. There’s a spot called the Darien Gap. In the last century, we’ve built roads in dangerous, out-of-the-way places, but not Panama. Not there. The canal engineers had to split the continental divide — they had to bring down a mountain — to install the canal.
David: Two: There’s the local wildlife. That part of the world is home to jaguars, venomous snakes, caiman — which are alligator-adjacent — and bugs that like to burrow into human flesh to lay their eggs. All of those animals will happily eat you. But the most dangerous animal is the mosquito. First, there are dense swarms of them. Which: no. But more importantly to human life, they carry yellow fever. Yellow fever shuts down your organs, particularly your liver, which gives you a yellow color — hence the name. It is so dangerous that, in 1665, yellow fever hit a group of 1500 soldiers on an island in the Caribbean. A month later, there were 89 survivors. That was 350 years ago, and we still don’t have a cure. The medical recommendation is: don’t get yellow fever.
David: Three: there’s the relentless rain. For eight months of the year, there’s almost continual rain. It’s one of the wettest places on earth. Sometimes they get two inches of rain in an hour. As a result, landslides are common.
David: Four: where will you find people who want to work in Panama? It wasn’t a secret that it was life-threatening, back-breaking work. How are you going to attract people? How are you going to keep them safe and healthy? How are you going to keep morale up?
David: And five: there’s the politics. Everybody knows that when you finish that canal, there will be money. Where’s mine? Also, local politics. Maybe we don’t want your dumb canal cutting through our lush jungle. What if it jacks up the water supply?
David: All of that is before you get to the relatively modern problems of environmental impact and cross-contamination of species.
David: There were three attempts by Europeans to control trade in Panama. The Scotts tried to colonize there at the beginning of the eighteenth century. That went so poorly that it wiped out the Scottish economy and led, in part, to them merging into Great Britain. … The French gave it a go in the late 1800s. We built the Suez Canal! That was 120 miles! How hard can the Panama Canal be? 60 miles! That’s half what we did in Egypt. … Their effort ended in mismanagement, scandal, and ruin. 20,000 workers died before they pulled out of the project eight years later.
David: Finally, the US effort started in 1904. Along with the usual business, the US government got involved in liberating Panama from Colombia. Depending on what side you were on there, that word “liberating” might be doing a lot of work. And then, for many decades, the US governed the canal zone — just that thin strip. The relationship between the US and Panama shaped the economics and politics of Central America to this day.
David: I bring all of this up to say that the canal story is a really good story. A lot of interesting stuff happened, and it still reverberates today. ‘Panama Fever’ is a book about the drama of building the Panama Canal. And there is plenty of drama. The author is British. I think the UK title of this book is better. The UK title is ‘Hell’s Gorge: The Battle to Build the Panama Canal’ — which makes it sound more like a war story or a thriller. And it is.
David: The book — I think intentionally — walked me back and forth between thinking that ‘It is truly astonishing that this ever got done. This is a monumental piece of engineering.’ There’s that one one side, and, on the other — why men? What ego, what pride. So, this is a great story, told well. It’s only about 350 pages and – for me – solidly engaging throughout. It’s ‘Panama Fever: The Epic Story of the Building of the Panama Canal’ by Matthew Parker.
Melissa: My second recommendation is ‘Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal’ by Margarita Engle. This is a YA historical novel told in verse. You can read it in about an hour. But what it lacks in length, it more than makes up for in storytelling heft.
Melissa: The chapters alternate points of view, and you meet a handful of people who worked on building the canal. Immigrants who sleep en masse in barracks and do backbreaking labor. American overseers who are, at best, more concerned about progress than people, and at worst: racist. There’s an artist and anarchists, a geologist from Puerto Rico, a laborer from Jamaica, and a local girl who sells herbs. Some real historical figures also make an appearance, including Theodore Roosevelt, a travel writer named Harry Franck, and a handful of American engineers who oversaw the building of the canal.
Melissa: The author Margarita Engle is a Newbery Honor winner and was the Young People’s Poet Laureate. She’s so good at sketching vivid characters with just a few lines of carefully-crafted verse.
Melissa: The story revolves around a 14-year-old Cuban boy named Mateo. These are his first words:
furious fists.
Melissa: He lies about his age to the Americans recruiting workers for the Panama Canal and sets out on a dangerous adventure that includes a treacherous three-day sea voyage, extreme hunger, language barriers, homesickness, and first love.
Melissa: Workers for the Canal were recruited from 100 countries around the globe. When Mateo’s ship arrives in Panama, the workers are ordered to line up according to country. Mateo says:
Melissa: That’s true, by the way. So many men died building the canal — the estimate is between 12,000 and 25,000 depending on who you ask — upon arrival, they were pulled aside and measured for coffins.
Melissa: Later, Mateo learns he and his fellow workers have also been divided into gold and silver. The Americans and northern Europeans are gold. Olive- and brown-skinned men are silver. They live segregated lives with different jobs, different rules, different treatment, and different pay. The silver people make half the hourly of gold. BTW, that discriminatory payroll system lasted until 1955.
Melissa: The silver men, including Mateo and his friends, sleep in train cars converted into barracks, 12 to a car. Their accommodations look nothing like the photos the recruiters showed them. Pictures of nice houses with dining rooms and tables draped with tablecloths. Instead, they eat their dinner outside, a meal of mushy potatoes and stringy meat.
Melissa: The work is dull and dangerous. They dig and carry, manually moving train tracks, cutting back trees, and hauling rock to create what they called the Serpent Cut. The gash that will eventually become the Canal.
Melissa: Amid all of the rainforest dangers we’ve already talked about, there were also enormous cockroaches, landslides, malaria, cholera, and racism. One verse says that when the men heard the eerie howls of the monkeys in the trees, they howled along with them. As the indignities of their lives pile up, the workers’ anguish turns to anger, and the situation in the jungle becomes even more dangerous.
Melissa: It’s not all grim, though. Eventually, Mateo meets Anita, a local girl with an indomitable spirit. One of her poems says, ‘I know I’m too young to really flit, but sometimes I do enjoy talking to the cubano boy instead of working.’ In addition to her adding some much-needed female energy to the story, she brings the perspective of the locals. Their lives were essentially invaded by men from all over the world.
Melissa: There are also passages told from nature’s point of view. Some of them are whimsical, some of them are quite melancholy. We hear from the glass frogs — they like to sing — and the blue morpho butterflies who soar in the sky. The trees talk about how they’re solidly rooted in the ground, and a three-toed sloth says, ‘Time is my friend: I can wait for weeks.’ I thought the verses from a tree viper and a jaguar were particularly clever and very good, but I don’t want to ruin the fun. You’ll have to read them for yourself.
Melissa: One of the things I really enjoyed about this book is that it creates vivid snapshots with just a few words, then leaves room for your imagination to fill in the rest. The power is in the spaces, like when a band does a percussive break, and it feels like everyone in the audience takes a breath at the same time.
Melissa: This is a coming-of-age story, history lesson, immigrant story, adventure tale, and workplace drama all packed into a small, super-concentrated package. It’s great on its own and would be a fantastic read-along with any other book set in Panama.
Melissa: It’s ‘Silver People: Voices from the Panama Canal’ by Margarita Engle.
David: My second book is ‘Born to Be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune’ by Keith Thomson. As you may have gathered from the title, this is a non-fiction pirate story.
David: It starts in 1680 when a bunch of pirates, mostly English, are approached by the leader of a tribe from the Darien province in Panama. He tells the pirates that the Spanish colonizers have kidnapped his granddaughter — his beautiful granddaughter, the light of his life.
David: He says that he will lead the men through the jungles of Panama to the Spanish garrison. They’re in a small fort next to a gold mine. Together, the pirates and the tribe will take the fort and rescue the girl. The grandfather and his men keep the girl. The pirates can have all the gold in the camp. There is estimated to be between 18,000 and 22,000 pounds of gold.
David: That’s enough gold so that every man in the company, all 366 of them, would be set for life. They could each buy a plantation. Or a two-hundred-ton Dutch ship and still have half the gold left. They agree to do it. And there’s our start.
David: The book tells the story of the pirates through this adventure and its fallout over the next two years. Thomson follows them all over Central and South America, through raids, treasure hunts, and parlays with the colonies and the local tribes.
David: Now, the pirates grabbed me, but how the story was told kept me coming back.
David: This book has a very modern vibe. It just came out in 2022, and the author had previously written some thrillers. So, he’s got that going for him: he knows how to put together an action scene and that comes across here.
David: But he’s also telling history like a storyteller.
David: The pirates have names and character. They’re motivated. One of the things that helps Thomson is that seven of the pirates kept journals that we still have. So we know why the pirate Basil Ringnose is in Panama in the first place. These characters have agency. I’m going to read you a paragraph. This is from immediately after the chief offers the pirates the job. You should know that the ‘Santa Maria expedition’ is the one where the pirates go to rescue the kidnapped princess.
‘BASIL RINGROSE NOW had three choices. First, he could join the Santa Maria expedition. Second, he could opt out in favor of a saner venture; it would be only a matter of time before he caught on with another of the buccaneer crews that routinely stopped in the San Blas Islands for provisions and ship maintenance. Third was the sensible option, the one that took into account his nascent awareness of this band of buccaneers’ utter disregard for risk—perhaps even a pathological affinity for danger: he could write off his brief involvement with them and return home to London. Although he frequently committed hundreds of words at a time to his journal, he wrote nothing about his decision. That was also typical of him: he was his own least favorite topic. Among the most intimate personal revelations in his journal were that he had been to Calais once, that he could speak Latin, and that he liked strawberries.’
David: I love this kind of history. Tell me about the pirate who likes strawberries. It makes it so much easier to visualize what they’re doing and how high the stakes are for these men. When I know the bit about the strawberries, now I’m worried that he’s going to get shot, or drown, or find himself eaten by an anaconda. Before the strawberries, he’s another pirate. After the strawberries, now we’ve got a character.
David: And there’s a lot of that here.
David: We learn that one of the pirates — William Dampier — took notes that would eventually be credited in the Oxford English Dictionary. He would introduce more than a thousand words into English, including avocado, barbecue, and cashew. He’s also the first Englishman to describe the effects of smoking marijuana. Quote: ‘Some it keeps sleepy, some merry, some putting them into a laughing fit, and others it makes mad.’
David: The author, Thomson, brings the whole pirate subculture into light. He writes about how they were an early form of democracy, voting on almost everything. He tells us that pirates never wore boots. He talks about how there was a form of worker compensation. For instance, if you lost your right arm, you were entitled to six hundred pieces of eight. That was part of something called ‘the Custom of the Coast.’
David: This is exactly the kind of thing I enjoy reading. It’s history written on a human scale. That it’s about pirates just made me enjoy it all the more. If you want more swashbuckling in your life, you might enjoy this. It’s ‘Born to Be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune’ by Keith Thomson.
Melissa: My final recommendation is ‘The World in Half.’The author Cristina Henríquez has made a career of writing books about or set in Panama — and to great acclaim. Her novel ‘The Book of Unknown Americans’ from 2014 was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Oprah, and the Daily Beast. She also wrote a story collection called ‘Come Together, Fall Apart.’ I read a few of those, and they’re very good. Her most recent novel was a huge hit when it came out this past March — ‘The Great Divide.’ It’s a historical novel about the building of the Panama Canal.
Melissa: After much deliberation, I chose her first novel ‘The World in Half’ from 2009 because it combines a family mystery with a travelogue.
Melissa: Here’s the setup: Miraflores is a college student in Chicago studying earth sciences. Her whole life, it’s been just her and her mom. Mira is the result of a love affair her mom had back in the day in Panama — when she was married to another man. Fun fact: Mira is named for the Miraflores lock on the Panama Canal. When Mira’s mom learned she was pregnant, she broke off the affair, even though she loved her paramour, and returned to the US. Mira was born, and her bio father was never in the picture. The family lore is that her dad didn’t want to be part of their lives.
Melissa: But! When her mom gets sick, Mira finds a stash of letters from her birth father that tells a different story. He loved her mother, he wanted to be a father, and he was devastated by this lost love.
Melissa: So Mira decides to secretly go to Panama to find her father. She going to get the answers to the questions that have plagued her whole life and maybe put her family back together.
Melissa: This is one of my favorite literary tropes. An impassioned trip to the homeland kicked off by a letter or some other MacGuffin? Yes, please. Bonus points are awarded if the main character goes off kind of half-cocked with no real plan for how this whole adventure thing is going to work.
Melissa: So, Mira takes herself off to Panama City to search for her father. It’s not long before she strikes up a friendship with a charming, mischievous young man named Danilo who joins her investigation. As the two follow nebulous leads, Danilo shows her around Panama. When they finally learn the truth about her dad, it raises more questions and feelings than Mira could have ever imagined.
Melissa: There is so much to love about this book.
Melissa: First, Mira is an excellent heroine. She’s intelligent and thoughtful, but also a little hot-headed. She tells the story in the first person, and I enjoyed being in her head. She weaves passages about geology into her story that draw parallels between the volatility of the Earth and human emotions. Here’s an example:
‘There are at least fifteen hundred active volcanoes in the world. There are dozens of variations: shield volcanoes, composite volcanoes, ice volcanoes, mud volcanoes, submarine volcanoes, subglacial volcanoes, supervolcanoes, and on and on. Some geologists dedicate their entire lives to studying them… But for the average citizen, the most interesting thing about a volcano is in the story of its eruption. People are fascinated by the idea of a fiery swell building underneath the surface of the earth for millions of years only to one day tear through the crust, flaring it open like a bullet shot through the skin of a peach. They imagine the restless lava disgorged into the air like a heavy and tired geyser… as if all the fury and energy amassed within the earth can’t be stopped… there is something about the process of a volcanic eruption that always strikes me as both beautiful and sad. It’s the pain of the earth bubbling up through the surface and ripping it apart. It’s the earth’s ineluctable heartbreak.’
Melissa: I also enjoyed seeing Panama through Mira’s eyes. She has the noticing skills of a first-time visitor. In between following the bits of info they find about her dad, Danilo takes Mira to the places she’s read about in her guide book. They visit the old town and go to the Miraflores Visitor’s Center on the Canal. They spend time at Mi Pueblito, which is the Panama City version of Colonial Williamsburg. The take a ferry to Toboga Island, which has very dreamy beaches. You could practically use their adventures as an itinerary for spending a few days in Panama City.
Melissa: This book could easily have fallen into a Hallmark movie trap: Mira and Danilo have a sweet romance, she finds her father, everyone lives happily ever after. This is so much better than that. The relationships and emotional waves are more complex, and that elevates the whole experience.
Melissa: This is a very satisfying exploration of family and friendship with a vivid setting in Panama. It’s ‘The World in Half’ by Cristina Henríquez.
Melissa: If you also enjoy macguffins and the ‘returning to the homeland’ trope, you should consider reading ‘Listen, Slowly’ — which I recommended in our Vietnam episode, ‘The Salt Road’ from our Morocco episode, and ‘The Last Watchman of Old Cairo’ from our Egypt show. I’ll put links to all of them in show notes.
David: Those are five books we love, set in Panama. Visit our show notes at strongsenseofplace.com for links and details. We’ll have sloth videos. We’ll tell you more about Richard Halliburton and his amazing life. We have a video about how the canal works, from the perspective of a ship.
David: Mel, where are we going for our next episode?
Melissa: We’re launching an investigation into Detective Agencies.
David: We’ll talk to you then.
[cheerful music]
Top image courtesy of Zdeněk Macháček/Unsplash+.
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