In Search Of Panama Hats, Part I

                      

Tracks To Panama

Located towards the Caribbean coast, this combo railroad/walking/driving bridge marks the northern border of Panama.  Called the Sixaola crossing, from Costa Rica to Panama, it's one of the more unusual borders I've ever seen.

Making my way across a few years ago, dragging my trusty duffel behind, I had to squeeze against the railing as a hulking bus crept by a foot or so away.  The structure is so rickety, some places you can look between the planks and see brown water swirling below.  Smiley people pop out seemingly from nowhere to offer plastic bags swelled with coconut juice or hand-carved wooden necklaces.    

Passing over the first time, fairly dripping from the humidity, I peered out through the wavey heat with anticipation -- I thought that I'd get to the other side and find Panama hats hanging about on trees, they'd be so plentiful.  In these I had long had an interest and looked forward to getting one of the real thing.  What a souvenir to show 'em back home!

Was I in for a surprise.  Not only didn't I find any, except for "knock-offs" or so-so imitations, I discovered that I wasn't even looking in the correct country.  Like an international woman of mystery, the hats were a lady with a past.  And like so many things Panama, I discovered, it has to do with the Canal. 

                                        

El Canal De Panamá

It took time, but I learned that the hats originated in Ecuador, a country along the Pacific coast of South America.  (Panama is in Central America.)  In fact, the hats were developed in Ecuador centuries ago.  The palm to make them is grown only in two provinces along the coast, and the hats, the genuine articles, were woven there and still are.

Because Ecuador is an out-of-the-way country, with no major routes passing through and no place to market their wares to the world at large, hat merchants shipped them to the isthmus of Panama in the 1800s. 

 
There, the 49ers were passing through in droves en route to California.  There, later on, the French and then the Americans and others arrived en mass to make the Canal.  The wide-brimmed hats proved perfect to protect the workers from the blazing sun and were pretty spiffy to boot.  Accordingly, they sold by the thousands.

And there, the hats eventually underwent a transition, of sorts, at least in the eyes of the public -- from practical headgear for the tropics to fashion statement.

As often happens, a President of the United States might have set off the trend.  On an inspection tour of the Canal in 1904, Teddy Roosevelt snatched one up and soon after was photographed on a steam shovel.  The image appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the globe.  As he might have said about all this:  "Bully!"

TR at the Canal in 1904.

With his hat back in the U.S. later on.

In subsequent decades, everyone from movie stars to gangsters was sporting one and they became symbols of wealth and elegance.  Because the country of Panama was the prime selling point, they became forever etched into the collective consciousness as Panama hats.  Poor little Ecuador got lost in the fray.

Such misnomers are not unusual, of course; they appear throughout history:  The Holy Roman Empire, for instance, was not holy, was not Roman and was not an empire.  The Bridge On The River Kwai in Thailand, of book and movie fame, did not span the River Kwai, and the Canary Islands off Spain are named after dogs, not the little, yellow tweeters.  And so on and so forth.

Most people, you understand, would just let this hat thing go.  They'd buy a knock-off, sip a cool drink with a little umbrella inserted, watch the ships pass by, and go on with life.  As I said, most people. 

However, me being what I am, I was determined to get to the Source.  Oh, it had to wait a few years, until this September as a matter of fact, when I finally got to make a visit to Ecuador.

[Part Two Follows, next Monday, Nov. 11]