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recent events were still resonant as Steinbeck traversed the Panama Canal. In 1921, the scandals had been revived when the League of Nations forced the United States to grant Colombia $25 million and free access to the canal as reparations for the illegal seizure of Panama. In 1925 in Panama City, Steinbeck had learned firsthand that the United States would use military force to prop a puppet government in Panama. Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold , albeit set in the seventeenth century, is at least in part about twentieth-century American imperialism and the piratical ethics of American business, as exemplified by Panama. In both centuries, a Morgan had contrived to carry the Isthmus by force and to swindle workers and stockholders of their fair share in the profits. Writing about Edward Mansvelt, who formed the buccaneers of the Caribbean into the dreaded Brethren of the Coast, Steinbeck writes obliquely about the violence and greed implicit in the American Dream:
    But there was a power of dream in him. Out of his mob of ragamuffin heroes he wanted to make a strong, durable nation, a new, aggressive nation in America. As more and more of the buccaneers flocked to his command, his dream solidified. He consulted the governments of England and France. They were shocked, and forbade him to consider such a thing. A race of pirates not amenable to the gibbets of the crowns? Why, they would be plundering everybody.
    Steinbeck’s freighter steamed out of the Panama Canal and on through the Caribbean Sea to his next port of call, Havana, Cuba. In 1925, Cuba, like Panama, was a U.S. protectorate, only nominally independent after the Spanish-American War of 1898. Like the English buccaneers of Henry Morgan’s time, Americans on the threshold of the twentieth century had invested in driving the Spanish from the New World. Cuba too was associated with the belligerent imperialism of Teddy Roosevelt, who famously led his Rough Riders in the charge up San Juan Hill, and with the militant capitalism of J. P. Morgan, whose steel-hulled steam yacht Corsair , commissioned into the U.S. Navy, helped destroy the Spanish fleet at Santiago Bay.
    In Henry Morgan’s day, Havana was the major city of New Spain, a rich and bustling port where Spanish galleons gathered in fleets before crossing the Atlantic. Coming into the harbor, Steinbeck would have seen Havana’s sixteenth-century El Morro castle and its fortifications, built to keep marauders like Morgan out. Touring the historic city, he would have absorbed atmosphere useful in his novel to come, enjoying Havana’s Spanish architecture, including a 1701 cathedral as well as Old World plazas and drives. In a 1952 memoir titled “Autobiography, ” Steinbeck recalled taking “a pretty girl around Havana in a carriage” and being “charmed and worldly about broad rum drinks like tubs of soaking fruit.”
THE BIG APPLE AS CUP OF GOLD
    From there, it was on to New York City, the writer’s “Cup of Gold.” For Steinbeck, New York had come to be what Panama was to his Henry Morgan, “the harbor of all my questing.” So strong was the young man’s dream of the fortune, fame, and love awaiting a writer there, that Steinbeck later remembered thinking he could simply step off the freighter and into a fantasy of the celebrity life. In “Autobiography,” he wrote, “I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with that very pretty girl [from Havana] once I got to New York—marry her, I guess, and take her into my penthouse on Park Avenue, where my guest list had no names but those of the famous, the beautiful and the dissolute.” Reality was very different.
    From a porthole, then, I saw the city, and it horrified me. There was something monstrous about it—the tall buildings looming to the sky and the lights shining through the falling snow. I crept ashore—frightened and cold and with a touch of panic in my stomach.
    Steinbeck was not destined for a penthouse, but for a sofa bed in his