Altogether, opening the canal took ten years and cost nearly a third of a billion dollars—more if you count the cost of the landslides that perpetually closed the canal in its first years. As usual, records kept on the deaths of nonwhites were shoddy, but we think some fifteen thousand workers, mainly West Indian, died from accident or disease while on the job. And all to tame a strip of land ten miles wide and not even fifty miles long.
