It was in November, 1904. We went from Washington to New Orleans and were greeted in a kindly manner all along the way. When we arrived we were met by a most imposing committee of citizens who escorted us to our hotel. No sooner were we installed, in the midst of all the luxury that could be prepared for us, than Governor Blanchard, with due ceremony and accompanied by members of his staff in uniform, called to pay his official respects. We hadn’t very long to stay, but every hour was filled with entertainments made memorable by the courteous and highbred lavishness for which New Orleans is famed, the only private event of our visit being a dinner with Archbishop Chapelle, now dead, who was Archbishop of Manila when Mr. Taft first went to the Philippines and with whom he good-naturedly, but persistently, disagreed on the important problems connected with the necessary disentanglement of the affairs of Church and State in the Islands.
We sailed on the little Dolphin from New Orleans to Pensacola, where the cruiser Columbia lay waiting to take us down to Panama, and it was to the boom of saluting guns, the cheers of hospitable Pensacola citizens and the strains of “The Star Spangled Banner” that we got under way on this first memorable trip to the Canal Zone.
We arrived at Colon on a Sunday morning, and I remember distinctly that it seemed more like “getting home” than like getting to a strange place. The whole atmosphere and surroundings, the people, the language they spoke, the houses and streets, the rank earth odours and the very feel of the air reminded me so strongly of the Philippines as to give me immediately a delightful sense of friendly familiarity with everything and everybody.
We were met at Colon by the vice-President of Panama, Señor Arosemana, and a number of other Panamanian officials, by General Davis, then Governor of the Canal Zone, and by Mr. John Barrett, the American Minister to Panama. A private train was waiting to take us across the Isthmus and we lost no time in getting started. Our visit had been “programmed” almost to the last hour of our time, and the first event was to be an exchange of formalities between the Secretary of War and the President of Panama that very afternoon.
When we got to the city of Panama just before luncheon we went to the home of Mr. Wallace, the Chief Engineer, whose guests we were to be during our stay, and early in the afternoon Mr. Taft, accompanied by uniformed aides and other Army officers, with enough ceremony to satisfy even the most formal, went to call on President Amador. The call was promptly returned with due formality, and the decks were then considered “cleared for action.”
Negotiations began at once, but the conferences were private, and in our daily round of sightseeing and social diversions it did not seem that the delicate machinery of diplomatic transaction was in motion at all.
Our Minister, Mr. Barrett, had a charming house in the old tropic city and on the Monday evening after our arrival he gave a dinner at which were gathered many high officials of the Panama Republic as well as all the interesting Americans who were then directing our great Canal building enterprise. Mr. Barrett, being a bachelor, placed President Amador opposite himself; he took Madame Amador at his right; Mr. Taft sat next to her, while I occupied the place at the right of the President and had on my other side Señor Arias, the Minister of Foreign Affairs. General Davis, Mr. Wallace, Colonel Gorgas—“the man of the hour” during that cleaning-up period—many Army officers and Cabinet Ministers in full regalia and many decorations, with their wives, were seated in order of rank along the sides of the great table, which, laden with flowers and gleaming glass and candles, made a picture long to be remembered even by one whose memory is overcrowded with dinner-party scenes.
The formality of this occasion, however, began and ended with its costuming and its beautiful tropic “setting.” Nearly everybody, including the President and Madame Amador, spoke English as well as Spanish, and the evening was gay from the outset. There is a wonderful fish caught in Panama waters; I wish I could remember its name; it is delicious and rare beyond description, and our pleasantries began with the President’s demand for a second helping which the embarrassed host and the more than flustered servants were unable to supply. The persiflage then turned upon the unenviable position of a bachelor diplomat and we all advised Mr. Barrett to get married. He parried our jibes as best he could until President Amador volunteered the information that the American Minister was honorary President of the Iris Club, an association of some three hundred-odd of the choicest girls in Panama. “And he can’t get one out of the lot,” said the President.
After dinner a large reception was held in the salon which, as in all Spanish houses in the tropics, was on what might be called the second floor, the first floor being only a sort of plastered and stone-paved street-level basement. The highly-polished floor of the big room didn’t look to me to be particularly safe and I suppose Mr. Barrett observed my worried looks as it “gave” under the weight of my husband. He hastened to reassure me by telling me that he had taken the precaution to have it shored up with heavy timbers under the spot where Mr. Taft was to stand to receive the long line of guests. He seemed to consider this a fine joke, but I thought it a most commendable measure.
When we arrived in Panama we were not at all certain that we should find the country in a state of tranquillity; nor did we exactly; though by prompt action the President had nipped a budding revolution only a short time before. Hostilities had been averted,
