The Path Between the Seas – The Panama Canal
While in Panama recently, I got enmeshed in the Path between the Seas, David McCullough’s history of the Panama Canal. The US, France and Britain were all interested in building the Canal. Colombia (Panama), Nicaragua and Mexico were all considered as possibilities. Many of the proponents had never visited the countries and the sites in question, just looked the maps. The US’ interest dated back to Jefferson who during his Presidency had met Alexander Humboldt, the German explorer and scientist, and caught the bug to build a Canal from him; he recognized how important it would be to US commerce and international trade in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase and more than a century before the Canal was completed. After the Gold Rush and our Civil War, Grant authorized multiple expeditions to map out and survey possible routes in Panama and Nicaragua.
The two key technical questions for would be canal builders were: 1) can you build it at sea level or must you use locks to raise the ships up to get over the height of land, and 2) do you build it in Panama or in Nicaragua. The French canal builder, Ferdinand De Lesseps was obsessed with building it at sea level because that is what he did so successfully in the Suez Canal. He was so popular and charismatic (and had been so successful in Egypt) that no one would listen to the technical experts who said you must use locks, and you will have to build a dam across the Chagras River to create Gatun Lake to make the Canal work in Panama. He destroyed his family, his company, his associates, his stockholders, and his employees in his monomania for a sea level canal. He also built the infrastructure and knowledge base for the Americans to succeed in his aftermath. His workers and engineers were being killed left and right by yellow fever, malaria, and dysentery – over 22,000. Some scientists and doctors said then that it was carried by certain mosquitoes; the popular belief was that it was dissolute living and swamp miasmas during the night carrying the disease.
The US wanted to build in Nicaragua. There were two rivers -- one flowing into the Atlantic and one into the Pacific, and in between was Lake Nicaragua; these could all be connected and transformed into the Canal; it was an easier technical and engineering challenge than Panama. It would be longer, curvier and more expensive to build, but the US politics were in favor of Nicaragua rather than Panama due to the French debacle.
Teddy Roosevelt got the Canal bug during his Presidency; his technical advisers recommended Panama, but the old bulls in the Senate preferred Nicaragua, which would be better for their sectional interests, ports in the South. The French Canal company reduced their asking price for acquiring the railroad, the unfinished canal, the equipment, the infrastructure in Colon and Panama City, and all the drawings (the works) to $40 million. Cromwell (of Sullivan and Cromwell representing the French trustees in bankruptcy), Bunau-Varela (from the Canal Compagnie in Paris) and Senator Mark Hanna, the power broker from Cleveland, combined to get the Panama bill through the Senate, and then they ran into the obstacle of the Colombian Congress’ opposition to signing the treaty that their government had just negotiated; they wanted $10 million from the French Canal company. The Panamanians, aided, encouraged and abetted by the US who brought in their warships to prevent and neuter Colombian reinforcements, made a coup declaring their independence and promptly signed a treaty with the US on US terms to build the Canal. It was an outrageous, but not bloody, theft of Panama from the Colombians.
Once the Americans started to build the canal, they used modern scientific advances to wipe out the mosquitoes that were carrying the killer diseases. As a result, far fewer workers got sick and died, down to one and then to zero. Yellow fever for example had had a mortality rate of 50% for those who got infected. Partly the success was due to advances in medicine; partly the public and the workers accepted the advances in public health and medical science. There was a huge difference in the death rates of black and white workers on the Canal – black workers died at rates ten times as high due primarily to the differences in their housing conditions; the white workers were in houses with screens, the black workers (primarily from the Caribbean, including Jamaica and Barbados) were in tents or other shelter fully exposed to the mosquitoes.
The US Canal company created a strong wage, housing, health, food and social benefits system for the white workforce from the states — they built from scratch an affluent, Midwestern suburb in the middle of the tropics. The same amenities, except health care, were not available for the black Caribbean workers who did all the most back breaking jobs and some of the most dangerous work like dynamiting the Culebra cut. Unlike, the French effort, which was a private company selling speculative stock to shareholders, the US government financed and led the building of the Panama Canal, in one of the greatest engineering and manufacturing and medical triumphs of its time. The Panamanians themselves were excluded from the building of the Canal and the benefits enjoyed by the Canal workers and contractors, leaving lots of bitterness that persisted between those living and working in the Zone and the rest of Panama.
I transited the Canal in 1984 in Starbuck. This was not too long after Carter and General Torrijos negotiated the return of the Canal. The American Canal workers were training their replacements for the railroad and the canal. They predicted disaster; that never happened.
I wish that I had read this book so I could have more fully appreciated the extraordinary efforts that it took to build the Canal we transited.