To begin with, he had hated Colón. At first sight, from the deck of the New York steamer, it seemed to float on the bay, its white houses and their red roofs hanging against the overpowering green backdrop of the jungle. Most of the population of Colón was now West Indian, men on their way to or from the Culebra Cut. The military engineers from West Point and Annapolis had gone home, their work accomplished, though there were still some Americans who had found in humid Colón a refuge that Cincinnati or Wyoming had denied them. There were pay clerks, remittance men and recent college graduates who were the worry of their families and churches back home. The Americans were paid in gold dollars, the West Indians in silver; and the length of the canal, the ‘Silvermen’ had their own inferior bathrooms, canteens and drinking fountains.

Colón had been much worse in the French era, Maxwell told Anton. ‘Shiploads of wine arrived every week. The French said they couldn’t drink the water. They had girls shipped in from all over the world. When a new consignment came in they used to send a message down the telegraph line. “Langoustes arrivées.” “Lobsters arrived.”’ Maxwell laughed. ‘Half the girls were on the company payroll. Of course the Americans tried to clean it up, but old habits die hard.’

Nothing took Maxwell by surprise, Anton soon discovered. He had reported from South Africa, India and the Sudan and was convinced that there was nothing new under the British Empire sun. The most perverse twist of events was met by the response: ‘Typical’. Anton found him a useful companion because he understood the common feeling. The Americans, to Maxwell, were childlike, bullying and without moral scruple, particularly in the way they had avoided paying Colombia, of which Panama had been a province, for the land required for the canal. This had been achieved by telling a restless Panamanian faction that if they declared independence from Colombia the US would support them. The coup had passed off peacefully, with an American warship in the harbour at Colón firing a single shell for form’s sake.

The French, in Maxwell’s account of things, could never have got the job done. Ferdinand de Lesseps, a hero in France, had overseen the digging of a ditch through the flat sands at Suez; but Panama was jungle, river, granite, floods, basalt, plague, mud, mountain and tropical downpour. De Lesseps was not a mathematician, not an engineer, not even a surveyor; he was a retired diplomat of no great distinction, a seventy-eight-year-old show pony who ‘couldn’t keep his whatnot in his pantaloons’. He came to the isthmus and had himself photographed at parties and riding up a hillside on his horse, then went back to his several mistresses in Paris.

It amused Maxwell that the financial collapse of the French effort had brought down the government in Paris. Most of the deputies in the chamber had taken bribes to vote more money to the failing enterprise; de Lesseps’ son was in prison and the old man excused jail only on sentimental grounds. There had been suicide, cover-up and a scandal that had involved even Gustave Eiffel, architect of the recent tower. Typical French, was Maxwell’s conclusion.