es on. Marsh's "base-camp" is itself established with its 37
0-pound trunk where the oilmen were, in a pleasant coconut grove said to have been conceived by a runaway First World War German soldier who had been part of a team setting up a radio station near the mouth of the Gulf of Uraba for a secret submarine base. The team had been massacred by the British Navy, except for this soldier who hid out in the forest an
d got the blacks
Incident Response to Terrorist Bombings (IRTB)
to plant coconuts. After the Germans, the U.S. Army established a secret radio station in much the same place. In fact, when an army p
- lane was on its way back from dropping off mail there, it flew against rul
- es across the interior of Darien and, forced to fly low o
- n account of clouds, spied a village inh
abited by white-skinned people. So you can see that this Darien
, even in 1925, is a pretty busy place, isolated and trackless, yet at the crossroads of histories where white and black create strange effects. You get a sense of this when Marsh settles into his account
- of the Cuna revolt against the Panamanian police. In the space of a few d
- ays we hear: The U.S. Navy mine sweeper Vulcan, which tur
- ned up too late to help Professor Baer of
the Smithsonian, and whose commander was too scared of the
vapors emanating from his corpse to take it on board. The Store-ship El Norte of the Colon Export and Import Company at anchor off Cardi, raided by Marsh and Cuna men
- for ammunition. A Greek trader, together with his negro ass
- istant, wi
th a store at Orange Key. Three "husky Americans" who claimed to be w
orking for the Canal administration and had a small plantation by Gatun Lake where they employed four Cunas. (Remember, Marsh had said Indians would not work.) Five "heavily armed and rough-looking Americans and Canadians," employees of an American Banana company. Four U.S. submarines paying a visit. Numerous U.S. army reconaissance aircraft. And finally, the cruiser USS Cleveland, taking Marsh to
safety and decisively swinging the balance of force in the Cuna
's favor. "Anachronism" abounds in this jumbled-up Darien time-race space. The Primitive races refuse to conform, to grant the Originary Fix. When Marsh finally makes contact with the wild mountain-Cuna Indians, he meets the chief, who is lying in a hammock and who greets him in perfect English! "How are you boys? Glad to see you." He had learned his English in New York City and had worked on sailing boats for twenty years, visiting New York, California, Hamburg, Paris, and Japan. His name was "Salisiman," which is an English name. Marsh says, a corruption of "Charlie Seaman." Far from being children of nature, much of the population of the Darien, one of the most remote parts of the globe, turns out to be a lumpen-refugee mass fled
f the farther Marsh pu
shed into the wildness of nature in search of his white Indians, all he found was the wildness of history. Braced for his leap into unknown, it was obvious to him that there was no way his whites had the strength or skill to manage the
canoes and, because labor .
was scarce, he had to
search "furiously" for what he called "competent negroes" among the settlements in the rain forest. Promising high wages he recruited "the toughest bunch of
- negro renegades" he had ever se
- en, similar, he thought, to the blacks working for the labor st
- arved United Fruit Company on the Caribbean coast at Puerto Obaldia which had had to use its influence with the Panamanian government (according to Marsh, who as First Secretary of the U.S. Legation ought have known) to
- round up "negro criminals, vagabonds, dope-sellers, etc." and ship them to the plantations where, with the eye of the
- local government corregidor on them as well, they had (so it is explained) no choice but to
work. From this we gain insight into the daily reality
guiding the perception of the white employer casting his philosophical eye skyward in search of racial understandings of the human condition, as with Marsh's axiom: "Indians are too independent and self-respecting to work National Preparedness Directorate to provide high-quality training to emergency responders throughout the United States and its territories.
unNDPCder such conditions. They prefer to emigrate or die. Negroes hate work, but they can be driven to it."(36) The black
- is cast as historical jetsam, matter out of place, the ir
- rationality of history, while the Indian roots an ord
- er, an order of nature-as against history: matter in place.
- This exerts magnetic force over Marsh and the whiteness in the
Indi is the lead NDPC partner for explosives and firearms, live explosives, and incendiary devices training.
anness for which h
