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Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô , William Beckford’s Vathek , Paul Verlaine’s Hashish and Incense , the Marquis de Sade’s Justine , and a tome on Satanism and Witchcraft are among his best-known works), Blaine would soon make a career for himself as a book illustrator in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. The two shipmates would remain in touch. Four years after the voyage of the Katrina , Blaine would illustrate a striking dust jacket for Cup of Gold .
    Steinbeck left the Katrina at Panama City for a stay of several days. According to Joseph Henry Jackson, the writer planned “to absorb color there for a book he had in mind, the romanticized life of the pirate Henry Morgan.” But Panama City in 1925 was neither colorful nor romantic. In mid-October 1925, just a few weeks before Steinbeck’s departure from San Francisco, the city erupted in violence, as thousands of workers joined in a general strike and marched to protest high rents. The situation deteriorated into widespread rioting when Panamanian police killed a leader of the protests, Marciano Mirones. Would-be revolutionaries flying red flags massed in Cathedral Square, and American tourists told the New York Times of hearing a “thunderstorm” of rifle volleys from the protesters, followed by the sound of machine-gun fire as government troops responded. President Rodolfo Chiari asked the United States for military assistance, and on October 12 three steel-helmeted battalions of the Thirty-Third Infantry marched into the city from their barracks in the Canal Zone, dispersing mobs at bayonet point and setting up machine-gun nests to guard government buildings and the president’s palace. On October 23, with order restored, U.S. troops withdrew. The Christian Science Monitor reported a subsequent wave of arrests, deportations, and evictions of troublesome ringleaders, as well as President Chiari’s declaration that the Panamanian legislature did not need to meet because “the recent disturbances . . . might influence the lawmakers toward partial legislation in favor of tenants.”
    In Panama City between two and three weeks after the withdrawal of American forces, Steinbeck must have heard talk about the riots and seen the anger still smoldering in the eyes around him. In what reads as a racist attempt to trivialize the Panamanian crisis, the New York Times quoted an eyewitness, Captain George Zeh: “The nucleus of a revolution is a bottle of rum, two half-breeds, and a negro armed with rifles and machetes.” Steinbeck, whose Henry Morgan will lay waste to Panama City with a mob of such have-nots, would not have seen any irony in Zeh’s statement. From Steinbeck’s visit to Panama, Cup of Gold would derive not local color, but a sense of how vulnerable a people “grown soft in their security” might become, and of how the oppressed, once armed, might go “marauding like tigers from a broken cage.”
    After his brief stay in the city, Steinbeck boarded another freighter to continue his voyage via the Panama Canal. Now his voyage would trace the approximate line of Henry Morgan’s historic seventeenth-century march across the Isthmus of Panama. Fifty miles wide at its narrowest point, the Isthmus joins the continents of North and South America, while separating the Pacific Ocean from the Caribbean Sea. From its discovery by Balboa in 1513, movingly described by Steinbeck in Cup of Gold , the Isthmus has been used as a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a way to avoid a dangerous sea voyage of many months and thousands of miles around Cape Horn, the storm-torn southern tip of South America. The Spanish of Morgan’s day appreciated its commercial benefits. Gold and silver from Spanish mines in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile were carried up the Pacific coast in merchant vessels to Panama City, then loaded onto mule trains for transport by land across the Isthmus to Portobello, where a waiting flota would carry the treasure to Spain. Henry