Building the Panama Canal
The four-century project took the lives and fortunes of tens of thousands.
Like using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
This is a riff on a Matthew Parker History Today article from 2014
It was supposed to have a glorious historical symmetry. August 2014, exactly a hundred years after the triumphant completion of the Panama Canal, should have seen the opening of the new $5.5 billion expansion. Amid strikes, huge cost overruns and rumors that the main construction consortium was in financial difficulty, the completion date slipped first to October, then to March 2015. The expansion project concluded in June 2016 at nearly twice the quoted cost. Each day of delay reportedly cost the canal company nearly a million dollars in lost revenue. Panama’s fiendish geology and extraordinary rainfall caused the cost overruns. The canal project has always attracted insane optimism, corruption, and disaster. Part of the danger of “the lure of Panama” was that, from the earliest days, it always looked so obvious and easy. Given the history of The Big Ditch, what is startling is that any of these setbacks should come as a surprise.
The Panama Canal has broken many people, fortunes, and reputations.
Having established a colony on the isthmus’ Atlantic coast in September 1513, the Spanish conquistador Vasco Nunez de Balboa led a party of men into the interior to search for the rumored Great Ocean across the mountains. Only a third survived the heat, insects, snakes and hostile Cuna Indians in the jungle, but on 25 September Balboa climbed a hill and ‘silent on a peak in Darien’ he turned one way and then the other; he could see both oceans clearly. Only a tantalizingly narrow strip of land blocked the way to the riches of the East. Alvaro de Saavedra, an engineer with Balboa, reported to Spain’s Charles V that although they should continue searching for a strait between the two oceans, if they did not find one, “yet it might not be impossible to make one.” In 1534, since no one found a waterway, Charles ordered a survey with a view to excavation. In an early example of the hubris that the canal dream attracted throughout its history, a priest wrote to Charles from Panama:
If there are mountains, there are also hands...To a King of Spain with the wealth of the Indies at his command, when the object to be attained is the spice trade, what is possible is easy.
Fortunately for future diggers, the Spanish authorities soon decided that it was safer to have a wall of land between the riches of Peru and rival European powers, so they did not undertake any work.
A bold plan from Scotland.
William Paterson was born in 1658. Part missionary, part buccaneer, and part speculator, he made a fortune as a promoter of moneymaking schemes, which included founding the Bank of England. After a sojourn in the Caribbean, Paterson had been in the grip of a venture to cap everything. By establishing ports on both coasts of the Panama isthmus, they could transfer cargoes over the narrow strip of land, saving ships the long and dangerous voyage around Cape Horn. Paterson identified a spot where, he said, there was “no mountain range at all” and where “broad, low valleys” extended from coast to coast. It was perfect enough to envisage not just a road but, in time, a waterway. Paterson intended a truly global entrepot, to rival any in the world, and whoever controlled it, proclaimed the Scot, would possess “the Gates to the Pacific and the keys to the Universe.” It is clear, however, that Paterson had never seen Panama. When the Scottish Parliament, jealous of the riches flowing into England from trade, passed an Act to encourage new settlements and commerce, Paterson rushed to Edinburgh to sell his Darien scheme, named for the dangerous and densely forested region on the modern Colombia-Panama border.
Do but open these doors and trade will increase trade, and money will beget money.
William Paterson to the Scottish Parliament
Warnings about Spain’s jealous guarding of the area and Paterson’s tendency to over-promote did not prevent the government from approving the plan. In June 1695, an Act of the Scottish Parliament established the Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies, but then the English Parliament turned against the project. £300,000 in English subscriptions and royal assent to the Act vanished. However, a wave of Scottish patriotic indignation saw £400,000 pouring in from all levels of society, about half the country’s available capital.
It was a colossal risk for so much of the national silver.
In July 1698, five ships carrying 1,200 people left Edinburgh for Panama. Although over 40 of the colonists died on the three-and-a-half month voyage, at first all went well. They established friendly relations with the local tribes, cleared land, and found the soil to be highly fertile. But as soon as the Scots had landed in the New World, there were fierce protests from the Spanish ambassador and English merchants. In response, William III issued orders to the Governors of Virginia, New York, New England, Jamaica and Barbados, forbidding them to trade with or supply provisions to the Darien colonists. For a trading station, this was a fatal blow.
Everything unraveled.
The death rate from fever skyrocketed. No one attempted to open an overland route to the Pacific through Paterson’s imaginary valleys. Relations with the Indians cooled when it became apparent that the new arrivals were not preparing to attack the Spanish. Scarcity of food brought increasing weakness, disease, and demoralization; among the first to die was Paterson’s wife. Within six months, nearly 400 settlers had perished from fever or starvation. The onset of the rainy season in May and the concurrent further worsening of living conditions was the final straw. Utterly discouraged, on 20 June 1699, after just seven months, the Scots abandoned the isthmus. Only half of the weakened settlers would survive the journey home. Two more fleets sailed from Scotland, and twice settlers briefly re-established the colony. But in March 1700, the last settlers, weakened by hunger and disease, were driven out by Spanish troops. Paterson’s scheme cost over 2,000 lives, the savings of an entire nation and, with that, Scottish independence. Seeing the futility of trying to compete with England and stripped of capital from the disaster, Scotland merged into Great Britain in 1707.
The “Darien Disaster” hastened the coming of the Act of Union that dissolved the Scottish parliament.
Scotland’s tragedy did nothing to dampen interest in the dream of a transisthmian canal. Benjamin Franklin envisaged a canal to ensure world peace through enhanced commerce and communication. Thomas Jefferson saw the canal as an essential step towards the southward expansion of US power. But it was the lifting of the dead hand of Spanish rule in the 1820s and Europe’s Canal Age (ca. 1760-1860) and the United States, and the development of steam power, which gave the idea fresh momentum.
The isthmus saw a stream of optimistic surveyors and explorers.
It was an idea that, once taken on, seemed again and again to become an obsession. Backers were sometimes private companies, sometimes kings or emperors. The King of the Netherlands and Louis-Philippe of France were at various times interested. Most explorers got lost, perished from hunger or disease, or the Indians wiped them out. But they still sent back optimistic and false reports of “remarkable depressions” and Indian canals. The idea of a canal joining the Atlantic to the Pacific attracted amateur and proven engineers, millionaires, dreamers, charlatans like Paterson, and crackpots.
By the mid-19th Century, it was the greatest, unfulfilled engineering challenge in the world.
Which was why the isthmus remained the focus of international great power rivalry. In the 1840s it almost brought war between Britain and the US, only averted by the Clinton-Bulwer Treaty in 1850, pledging that neither would build a canal on their own. For the Americans, no canal was better than one under the control of a foreign power. At the end of the American Civil War, Washington launched an aggressive policy to reverse creeping European involvement in Central America. For Abraham Lincoln’s and Andrew Johnston’s Secretary of State William Seward, a transisthmian canal was a cornerstone of Manifest Destiny. Under Ulysses Grant (who, as a young Army officer, had transited the isthmus by train), surveyors meticulously carried out a series of surveys to decide the preferred route. They decided the best option was a canal in Nicaragua, using a high lake. But the Clinton-Bulwer Treaty and concerns that it did not have a strong enough navy to defend the waterway prevented any other action.
Here come the French.
Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, brought the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique to Panama in and began construction on a canal in 1881. The French public, told that it was their patriotic duty to back the canal project, duly did so in their hundreds of thousands. De Lesseps decided on a sea-level canal before he’d even seen the isthmus, but shared the enormous confidence of his age in the benign effects of new technology and tried to raise money in Britain and the United States. The Americans, infuriated that the French should be meddling in what they saw as their backyard, gave him nothing. Britain applauded him for his achievement at Suez, but his Panama plans were cold-shouldered.
The French effort, characterized by corruption, fantasy, and heroism, resulted in one of history’s greatest ever engineering disasters.
By 1884, the estimates of cost had been wildly optimistic, and there was a pretty much permanent epidemic of disease on the isthmus, the worst killers being malaria and yellow fever. People then thought "miasma"—toxic emanations from the rich corruption of tropical soil disturbed by the digging—caused malaria. The British Empire successfully used Jesuit’s bark, or quinine, as a preventive for malaria, but the French shunned it. Yellow fever was supposedly the result of filth or dead animals, or even, experts suggested, from a particular wind off the sea or from eating apples. Treatment comprised mustard, brandy, and cigars.
Knowledge that mosquitoes transmitted both diseases was still a decade away.
Over 20,000 died during the French canal period, most of them Jamaicans, who provided the muscle for the effort. Amazingly, some Frenchmen were prepared to die for the canal. Three out of four of the French engineers who set out to be part of de Lesseps’ scheme were dead within three months. Jules Dingier arrived in Panama as chief engineer in early 1883. Many people shared his theory that immoral personal behavior or moral weakness caused that yellow fever. To prove that the disease held no fear for him and to stiffen morale, he brought his wife, his son and daughter, and his daughter’s fiancé to Panama. Within a year and a half, all succumbed to the disease. Dingier returned to France a broken man. The sense of death all around, a sword of Damocles hanging over them, stoked a feeling of idealistic unreality. “The constant dangers of yellow fever,” wrote one engineer, “exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love for the great task undertaken. To its irradiating influence was joined the heroic joy of self-sacrifice for the greatness of France.”
American observers on the isthmus took a more cynical line.
To them, such patriotic reflections were so much “Gallic hot air.” “Nothing is ever done by the canal company without an inordinate amount of pomp, circumstance and red tape,” one American journalist wrote in late 1887. “Of what one hears in Panama disregard one third, doubt one third, and disbelieve the other third ... The air is as rife with deception as with miasma.” To raise money at home, the company had to cover up the death rate and set ever more unrealistic excavation targets while distributing over 12 million francs to the French press to keep it on side.
The money borrowed became ever more expensive.
As the de Lesseps adventure, bedeviled by disease and engineering problems (many because of Panama’s extraordinarily heavy rainfall) and also fire, war and earthquakes, slid towards failure, American technicians on the isthmus became convinced that they would assume control of the enterprise. Great Britain, just as de Lesseps’ Suez Canal had been, also assumed they would take the Panama Canal over. Yet, in the crunch at the beginning of the 20th Century, the American diplomats found their British counterparts at last willing to remove the restrictions of the 1850 treaty. Embroiled in a costly and unpopular war in South Africa, a naval arms race with Germany, and fearful of Russian ambitions towards India, Great Britain had to remove the shackles of the treaty and concede hegemony over the western hemisphere to the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt acted with utter ruthlessness to make the canal a reality.
The Americans bought out the French company for $40 million, a figure that dwarfs the purchases of Louisiana, Alaska and the Philippines. When the Colombian government seemed unwilling to give in to the American demands that they concede total control over a canal zone, Roosevelt made plans to invade Panama, but fomented, supported and protected a separatist revolution on the isthmus. He then bullied the new Panama republic into signing a treaty that reduced it to vassalage and established total military control of the new canal zone. US citizens reacted sharply, and they accused the president of dragging the country down to the sordid level of the European land-grabbing powers. But it was a fait accompli and a watershed for US presidential power and American imperial ambition.
America learned virtually nothing from France’s failures.
For the first two years, they hoped to build a sea-level canal, which de Lesseps had already shown was impossible. Because of the fallout from Roosevelt’s action, there was pressure to ‘make the dirt fly’ and excavation work started without proper preparation. They tied the project up in horrendous bureaucracy to avoid the corruption of the French era. Worst of all, although established scientists had proven the mosquito theory for transmitting malaria and yellow fever, conservative members of the US canal leadership called it “balderdash” and would not back William Gorgas, the Commission’s head doctor, who was an experienced yellow fever specialist. The disease inevitably struck and, lacking the motivation of the French, three quarters of the American workers fled the isthmus as panic broke out.
A year after the start, the project was on its knees.
After two years of chaotic bungling, planners decided on a lock and lake canal, a “bridge of water” rather than a sea-level through-cut. Roosevelt hired John Stevens, a successful railway engineer, as chief engineer for the canal. He fully supported Gorgas’ work and, in 1906, a visit by the president himself boosted morale. To attract and keep skilled labor from the US, the canal authorities offered generous holidays, high pay, and free accommodation. In 1907, Roosevelt handed the project over to the Army after a crisis arose from Stevens's resignation because of exhaustion; the project experienced a 100 percent technical labor turnover each year, and domestic criticism arose that graft and waste riddled the project.
The Army regime was utterly ruthless, arresting and deporting critics and keeping the Panama republic on a tight rein.
This achieved, its greatest challenge was the Culebra Cut, the highest point on the canal line. This nine-mile stretch required three quarters of the total excavation. At the peak of the work, it contained 76 miles of track carrying 160 trains, 300 rock drills, and 6,000 men. With temperatures reaching 120 degrees, it became known as Hell’s Gorge. As the workers removed the mountain, the ground fought back. Because of the extreme geological complexity of the isthmus, slides were numberless, eventually adding 25 million cubic yards to the total excavation, which in the end would be three times that required for the Suez Canal. An American called it the “land of fantastical and unexpected. No one could say when the sun went down at night what the condition of the Cut would be the next morning.” Or, as one West Indian put it: “Today you dig, tomorrow it slides.”
Most of the labor force was from Barbados.
Of a population of 200,000, some 45,000 went to Panama during the American period. Both the French and the Americans treated West Indians as cheap and expendable. One described the working conditions as “some sort of semi-slavery,” and a rigid apartheid system was in place throughout the canal zone under the Americans. The West Indian workers received all the most dangerous jobs, and disease or accidents on the works made them three times as likely to die as any others. Nearly 6,000 died during the American construction period, as well as 300 US citizens. Despite obvious resentments, the West Indian accounts are full of pride in knowing they were part of a civilizing achievement. “Many times I met death at the door,” wrote one worker 50 years after the completion of the canal, “but thank God I am alive to see the great improvement the canal had made and the wonderful fame it has around the world.”
When the canal opened, it started a whole new chapter in trans-Pacific power politics.
Building it was the easy part, because the same day it opened in 1914, Japan declared war on Germany while seeing the Canal as a direct threat to their position in Asia. After the Americans turned the Canal over to Panama as required by treaty, China installed their operating companies on both ends, stopped only in 2026 by the Panamanian Supreme Court.
Everyone wants to control the path between the seas.
The Persistent Past: Discovering the Steele Diaries
Uncovering the past often requires monumental effort by many hands. When influential people try to keep facts from being discovered, it gets even harder.
This is how history books are written.
And Finally...
On 23 May:
1618: The third Defenestration of Prague took place when Bohemian nobles threw two imperial regents and their secretary from a third-story window of Prague Castle. This act of defiance against Habsburg authority triggered the revolt that sparked the Thirty Years’ War. The 1419 Defenestration sparked the Hussite Wars; the 1483 Defenestration didn’t do much.
1908: John Bardeen is born in Madison, Wisconsin. Bardeen was a brilliant physicist and engineer, known as the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice—first for the invention of the transistor (1956) and second for the theory of superconductivity (1972). Marie Curie won two Nobels for chemistry.
And today is NATIONAL TAFFY DAY for no discernable reason. I never liked the stuff—makes my jaw hurt—but knock yourself out.