But the principal cemetery was that located at Mount Hope. This was the cemetery for the city of Colon, and in all the writings of the early days on the Isthmus, it is known as “Monkey Hill.” It has been in use ever since the foundation of Colon, about 1850, and contains a large number of interments. Here sleep most of the men who died during the construction of the Panama Railroad, and many others well known on the Isthmus during the fifty years of the existence of the railroad as a transcontinental route. Dr. Connor, health officer of Colon, gave a great deal of attention and thought to the beautifying of this piece of ground, and it is now as pretty a garden of tropical trees and shrubbery as can be seen anywhere. At Porto Bello we used the principal fort on the north side of the harbor as a cemetery. This structure, though built of brick some two hundred years before, was in a very good state of preservation. The mountain rose several hundred feet on this side of the harbor, and on the side of this mountain, to the seaward from the old fort, was located our great Porto Bello quarry, from which was obtained the stone for building the Gatun locks and the Colon breakwaters. The fort was a very strong and complete military structure for its time, and it was located at the foot of the mountain, near the water’s edge. When I first visited the ruin, it was completely covered with jungle, to such an extent that it could not be entered or recognized as a structure built by human hands. I reached it and made an entrance by having a native machete-man cut out the jungle enough for me to force my way through behind him. Large trees were growing in all parts of the old structure, some of them six or eight feet in diameter, and more than one hundred feet in height. The interior of the fort was cleared of jungle and arranged so that it could be used as a cemetery, and here are buried the employees who died at Porto Bello within the six or seven years during which we operated the quarry. I selected it as the cemetery site, because it struck me as being appropriate that this old fort, which had seen so much of war, should finally be used for so peaceful a purpose as the last resting-place of the laborers engaged in the construction of a commercial enterprise like the Panama Canal, for which so much is hoped for the benefit of the whole human race. The old fort had been built by one set of pirates, the old Spaniards, to protect the plunder which they had wrung from the Incas and other natives of America, from that other set of pirates who infested the Spanish main, and were constantly attempting to wrest from the Spaniards this plunder. CHAPTER XVI MALARIA WORK AND THE HOSPITAL SYSTEM