The Darkest Jungle: The True Story of the Darien Expedition and America's Ill-Fated Race to Connect the Seas - Hardcover

Balf, Todd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609609890 ISBN 13: 9780609609897

Publisher: Crown, 2003

Synopsis

“Commit yourself to the Virgin Mary, for in her hands is the way into the Darién—and in God’s is the way out.”

The Darkest Jungle tells the harrowing story of America’s first ship canal exploration across a narrow piece of land in Central America called the Darién, a place that loomed large in the minds of the world’s most courageous adventurers in the nineteenth century. With rival warships and explorers from England and France days behind, the 27-member U.S. Darién Exploring Expedition landed on the Atlantic shore at Caledonia Bay in eastern Panama to begin their mad dash up the coast-hugging mountains of the Darién wilderness. The whole world watched as this party attempted to be the first to traverse the 40-mile isthmus, the narrowest spot between the Atlantic and Pacific in all the Americas.

Later, government investigators would say they were doomed before they started. Amid the speculative fever for an Atlantic and Pacific ship canal, the terrain to be crossed had been grossly misrepresented and fictitiously mapped. By January 27, 1854, the Americans had served out their last provisions and were severely footsore but believed the river they had arrived at was an artery to the Pacific, their destination. Leading them was the charismatic commander Isaac Strain, an adventuring 33-year-old U.S. Navy lieutenant. The party could have turned back except, said Strain, they were to a man “revolted at the idea” of failing at a task they seemed destined to accomplish. Like the first men to try to scale Everest or reach the North Pole, they felt the eyes of their countrymen upon them.

Yet Strain’s party would wander lost in the jungle for another sixty nightmarish days, following a tortuously contorted and uncharted tropical river. Their guns rusted in the damp heat, expected settlements never materialized, and the lush terrain provided little to no sustenance. As the unending march dragged on, the party was beset by flesh-embedding parasites and a range of infectious tropical diseases they had no antidote for (or understanding of). In the desperate final days, in the throes of starvation, the survivors flirted with cannibalism and the sickest men had to be left behind so, as the journal keeper painfully recorded, the rest might have a chance to live.

The U.S. Darién Exploring Expedition’s 97-day ordeal of starvation, exhaustion, and madness—a tragedy turned “triumph of the soul” due to the courage and self-sacrifice of their leader and the seamen who devotedly followed him—is one of the great untold tales of human survival and exploration. Based on the vividly detailed log entries of Strain and his junior officers, other period sources, and Balf’s own treks in the Darién Gap, this is a rich and utterly compelling historical narrative that will thrill readers who enjoyed In the Heart of the Sea, Isaac’s Storm, and other sagas of adventure at the limits of human endurance.

About this title

About the Author:

TODD BALF, the author of The Last River and a former senior editor for Outside, is a contributing editor to Men’s Journal. He first traveled to Panama’s Darién in 1991—a memorably flawed crossing in which he and his companions traveled by foot, burro, and dugout canoe yet managed to see neither the Pacific nor the Atlantic.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1 / GALES of DECEMBER

And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people. . . . God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience our wisdom . . . And let us always remember, that with ourselves--almost for the first time in the history of the Earth--national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world.

Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850)
December 19, 1853
39* 56' N, 75* 8' W
Philadelphia

The ships rounding cape henlopen at the mouth of the Delaware River were rushing home to port. A blockade of frost had fastened upon Delaware Bay and was spreading up the river's winding, 100-mile course to Philadelphia. Already two merchant ships, the bark Louisa and the brig Loretto, were bound up near the breakwater. Another few days of single-digit cold and even the port's steam tugs might not make it out. The river would be corked until March. Along the bitterly cold Southwark waterfront, where the long wood-planked wharves and the brick-walled Navy yard thronged with officers and merchantmen safely back, the talk wasn't of Christmas or the New Year but the coming ice. Few could recall it fixing so early.

At dockside the sloop-of-war Cyane's preparations drew curious onlookers. She wasn't one of the American Navy's powerful new steamships, but an old square-rigged man-of-war whose heyday was the Mexican War, almost a decade before. There wasn't a graceful line in her 132 feet of running length, critics said, and the secretary of the Navy seemed to agree; her active duty in recent years had been confined to quiet coastal cruises. Of late the vessel had gone nowhere. A year earlier, at port in Hampton Roads, Virginia, a near mutiny had erupted, and the subsequent trial had kept the ship in limbo for months. Only in recent weeks had the Cyane received the okay to return to duty and with the order a different, more restorative kind of attention. Her hull was newly coppered and her decks and hold meticulously disinfected with a purging vinegar wash.

She was crammed with personnel. In addition the standard two-hundred-man complement for a vessel her size, she carried an unusual number of supernumeraries--a party that included three additional naval officers, a trio of engineers, and two civilian volunteers, one of those a surgeon. The extra outfit was evidently getting a lift somewhere. The Cyane was said to be headed south on Home Squadron business, but where exactly, nobody knew. The hustle and bustle suggested she had little time to lose.

In fact, throughout the frigid winter day the activity intensified. The ship's carpenters banged together chicken coops and pigpens, and the boatswain's mate's silver whistle pealed insistently. A "high die" or "heave hard" command boomed from the deck officer's speaking trumpet with enough venom to awaken the dear departed souls on Chestnut Street. Man-hauled sail bundles rose up the fore, main, and mizzen masts, and late-arriving stores, livestock, and sea trunks coursed across the gangway. By the locals' rough estimate there were well over 15,000 pounds of sea biscuit and salted meat bound for the hold--sufficient provisions for a three-month cruise, maybe more. Barrels of fresh water and spirits went down the hatchways with a number of less recognizable containers. Theodolites, sextants, spyglasses, mountain barometers, and leather cases of mathematical instruments--the exotica of a precise land survey--were being salted away too.

On the morning of December 20 the Cyane made final preparations to get under way. The long-awaited steam tug, Thunderbolt, had arrived during the night to tow them through the gathering ice. At 10 a.m. the topmen went aloft and the crew hauled up anchor. They would be making sail and tracking south along the Gulf Stream in less than forty-eight hours. The ice shattering over Cyane's bow notwithstanding, a young, adventure-minded lieutenant named Isaac Strain could not remember a time when he had felt more fortunate.

The Navy Department, in response to the wishes of President Franklin Pierce, had assigned Cyane to "special service,'' a reconnaissance of a prospective Atlantic-Pacific ship canal route through the Isthmus of Darien in present-day Panama. After a series of autumn meetings with the secretary of the Navy and Pierce, Strain unexpectedly won the command, his first. His crossing party, officially known as the U.S. Darien Exploring Expedition, was to locate what until recently had not been thought to exist: a break in the mountains across the narrowest portion of the isthmus, the so-called Darien Gap.

The tropics location had the whiff of freshness in an otherwise old and costly battle to link the seas. After centuries of being battered on the endless ice of the Canadian Arctic and never finding the storied Northwest Passage, the first nations saw something a good deal brighter in the warm crease of a slender forest. Great Britain and France were simultaneously mounting a joint survey expedition of the same Darien route, with Her Majesty's Admiralty said to be sending three English vessels, including a man-of-war and an advanced survey ship, the steam-powered Scorpion. Naturally the governments pledged cooperation. Privately, it was a different matter. Like their successful race to summit Everest a hundred years later, England saw an undertaking that would define her people's greatness. President Pierce, an aggressive expansionist who viewed the country's borders expanding to Cuba and beyond, was no less determined. Isaac Strain, he would have easily seen, was his Hillary.

There are no surviving photographs of the Cyane's crew. The exploring party didn't bring a camera, a bulky contraption still in its infancy at midcentury and rarely used outside the popular city portrait studios. Instead the journey was expected to be recorded with a draftsman's faithful and exuberantly detailed line drawings.

The first of the images, a wardroom tableau, is telling. The thirty-three-year-old Strain was a small man, but he dominates the frame. He is the lone figure standing at a large table of his fellow officers. The ship's stout captain, George Hollins, appears almost a spoof of the old Navy: rotund, sedentary, dispassionate. The ship belonged to Hollins, of course; he was the permanent commander. But the coming expedition command was Strain's, and he is Hollins's dashing opposite: lean and all storm-trim--more the sinewy bowsprit than the dense mainmast. His shoulders are right-angle square. He has an aquiline nose and a full but slender brown beard that seems to wrap his jaw like planking on a well-formed bow. His head, with its boyish thatch of brown hair, is luminous, bathed in light where the others are not. His physical posture, left arm bracing the top of a chair and right tucked inside a full-length, high-collared naval coat, is intensely attentive. The portrait seems to describe a new kind of leader, one defined by movement and stirred by the remarkable ambition of the age.

An "interoceanic" ship canal was not just a gigantic task, said one statesman, "but the greatest the world has ever known." The canal's creation would defy nature in the most fundamental way imaginable--dividing the Americas in two. The rising tide of the Pacific would flow right through a man-made, 150-foot-wide channel (bringing Atlantic-bound ship traffic along with the flood; on the receding ebb tide the vessels would cross in the opposite direction, Atlantic to Pacific).

It was an audacious plan but it was a confident time--genius was everywhere. Steamships and mail packets cruised the waters of the world, and where they stopped, the newly lain railroads started. Where a river stopped, an American engineer saw another beginning. By 1850 hundreds of artificial waterways webbed the East. It was the Canal era.

Darien, the grandest canal of them all, would change the world all over again. No railway crossed the North American continent in 1853, and none would for another fifteen years. If a "gap," or low pass existed in Darien's Atlantic mountains, as it was hotly rumored to, then the tunneling work would be minimal and the seas would be joined with relative ease. Suddenly goods, from mail to gold, might be shipped to distant places like California, or even Australia, in a fraction of the usual time. The traditional sailing route around Cape Horn, one of the most storm-ravaged passages in seafaring, might be avoided, sparing lives and millions of dollars in wrecked shipping. The four-month voyage from New York to California would take half as long.

Darien was a project whose commercial advantages were hardly possible to overrate, Strain wrote the Navy Department on November 3, when he formally accepted his command. "As an American officer [there is nothing] I should feel more pride in connecting my name,'' he added. If commerce was king, then tiny Darien was potentially the most gilded terrain on the vast planetary map.

And yet Darien wasn't a new idea--it was the oldest. In 1503 Christopher Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage, futilely combed the Panama coast, believing the isthmus was merely a peninsula and that in the vicinity of Darien he would find its termination and thus a passage through. El estrecho secreto, the secret strait, never revealed itself, of course, and in November of the same year he dejectedly turned away from the palm-fringed shores of Panama for the dreary homeward voyage to Spain.

The search was famously resumed by Vasco Noe-ez de Balboa. In 1512, from a peak in Darien, Balboa became the first European to see the vast Pacific. The Spaniard's Darien settlements at Santa Mar'a del Antigua and Acla, the first mainland New World colo...

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0609609890
• ISBN 13: 9780609609897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352