The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

The creation of the Panama Canal was far more than a vast, unprecedented feat of engineering. It was a profoundly important historic event and a sweeping human drama not unlike that of war. Apart from wars, it represented the largest, most costly single effort ever before mounted anywhere on earth. It held the world’s attention over a span of forty years.

One is struck, too, by what a moving, potent force personality can be—de Lesseps and Theodore Roosevelt being the outstanding examples. But no less impressive to me are the numbers of instances in which large events turned on the actions of individuals who had little notion that they were playing a part in history.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT

In 1850, Dr. Edward Cullen, an Irish physician and member of the Royal Geographical Society, had announced the discovery of a way across Darien by which he had walked from the Atlantic to the Pacific several times and quite effortlessly.

It was said that the power generated by one steamship during a single Atlantic crossing would be sufficient to raise from the Nile and set in place every stone of the Great Pyramid. Men talked confidently of future systems of transport that would bring all peoples into contact with one another, spread knowledge, break down national divisions, and make a unified whole of humanity.

“The barrier is down!” a French prelate proclaimed on the beaches of Port Said when Suez was opened. “One of the most formidable enemies of mankind and of civilization, which is distance, loses in a moment two thousand leagues of his empire. The two sides of the world approach to greet one another . . . The history of the world has reached one of its most glorious stages.”

De Lesseps’ desert passage of 105 miles had brought Europe 5,800 miles closer to India.

With the opening of Telford’s canal and the Erie Canal, both in the 1820’s, reasonable men also felt justified in projecting comparable works across the map of Central America. “Neptune’s Staircase,” the spectacular system of locks on the Caledonian Canal, could lift seagoing ships—could lift a thirty-two-gun frigate, for example—a hundred feet up from the level of the sea. The Erie Canal, though built for shallow-draft canal barges, was nonetheless the longest canal in the world, and its locks overcame an elevation en route of nearly seven hundred feet.

“I have no time to give reasons,” a Massachusetts man wrote home after crossing Panama, “but in saying it I utter the united sentiment of every passenger whom I have heard speak, it is this, and I say it in fear of God and the love of man, to one and all, for no consideration come this route. I have nothing to say for the other routes but do not take this one.”

From New York to San Francisco around the Horn was a months-long voyage of thirteen thousand miles. From New York to San Francisco by way of Panama was five thousand miles, or a saving of eight thousand miles. From New Orleans to San Francisco by Panama, instead of around the Horn, the saving was more than nine thousand miles.

The little railroad was begun in 1850, with the idea that it could be finished in two years. It was finished five years later, and at a cost of $8,000,000, six times beyond anyone’s estimate. For a generation of Americans there was something especially appealing about the picture of this line across Panama, of a steam locomotive highballing through the jungle, pulling a train of bright passenger cars, a steam whistle scattering monkeys to the treetops—“ocean to ocean” in something over three hours. It was also the world’s first transcontinental railroad—one track, five-foot (or broad) gauge, exactly forty-seven and one-half miles long—and the most expensive line on earth on a dollar-per-mile basis, expensive to build and expensive to travel. A one-way ticket was $25 in gold.

Stephens was the first president of the Panama Railroad Company and its driving force until his death at age forty-six. He was the one member of the threesome to stay with the actual construction effort in the jungle, and the result was an attack of fever, a recurrence of which was fatal in the fall of 1852.

The volume of human traffic alone—upward of 400,000 people between 1856 and 1866—gave Panama a kind of most-beaten-path status unmatched by any of the other canal routes talked of.

they had determined once and for all that there was no difference between the levels of the two oceans. The level of the Pacific was not twenty feet higher than that of the Atlantic, as had been the accepted view for centuries. Sea level was sea level, the same on both sides. The difference was in the size of their tides.

How many did actually die is not known. The company kept no systematic records, no body count, except for its white workers, who represented only a fraction of the total force employed over the five years of construction. (In 1853, for example, of some 1,590 men on the payroll, 1,200 were black.)

Simply disposing of dead bodies had been a problem the first year, before the line reached beyond the swamps and a regular cemetery could be established on high ground. And so many of those who died were without identity, other than a first name, without known address or next of kin, that a rather ghoulish but thriving trade developed in the shipping of cadavers, pickled in large barrels, to medical schools and hospitals all over the world. For years the Panama Railroad Company was a steady supplier of such merchandise, and the proceeds were enough to pay for the company’s own small hospital at Colón.

Enfantin, a big, bearded man, had the words “Le Père” embroidered across the front of his blouse. When he was taken to court for his advocacy of free love, he appeared in Hessian boots and a velvet cloak trimmed with ermine. Asked to defend his behavior, he stood motionless and silent, then explained that he wished the court to have a quiet moment to reflect on his beauty.

“He persevered, you see,” a grandson would recall. “He was a very stubborn man.” Jules Verne called it “the genius of will.” But de Lesseps spoke of patience. “I wait with patience,” he wrote to a correspondent in the final year of the work, “patience which I assure you requires more force of character than does action.”

Jules Verne, strictly an armchair adventurer, worked in a tower study in his home at Amiens, but came often to Paris to attend meetings of the Société de Géographie and to do his research in its library. When he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, it was on the nomination of Ferdinand de Lesseps, and the sight of two such men at Société functions, talking, shaking hands with admirers, was in itself a measure of the organization’s standing.

By now, moreover, it was commonly understood that large sums of money were at stake. A Panama canal company had been formed in secret, it was rumored. “We were to be brought face to face with the singular spectacle of a congress which had become serious and honest, and which saw its way clear to the truth,” observed Dr. Johnston, “and yet which was obliged to remain dishonest, and carry out the original plan, no matter by what means . . . . It was the game of ‘I see you, and go you one better,’ played by men who had no cards, but plenty of money.”

One had only to look at the map to see that Panama was the proper place for the canal. The route was already well established, there was a railroad, there were thriving cities at each end. Only at Panama could a sea-level canal be built. It was really no great issue at all. Naturally, there were problems. There were always problems. There had been large, formidable problems at Suez, and to many respected authorities they too had seemed insurmountable. But as time passed, as the work moved ahead at Suez, indeed as difficulties increased, men of genius had come forth to meet and conquer those difficulties. The same would happen again.

A Cueva Indian word, Panama means “a place where many fishes are taken.”

“nos bonnes revanches.”

If Ferdinand de Lesseps was not having the time of his life all this while, he certainly left everyone with that impression. The Panamanians adored him, for his energy, for his “vivid interest in our rather dull Isthmus life” (as the Star & Herald said), for his beautiful children, his beautiful wife. (“Her form was voluptuous and her raven hair, without luster, contrasted well with the rich pallor of her . . . features,”

Monroe Doctrine

French civil engineers of the nineteenth century were an exceptional breed and justly proud of their heritage.

The effect of the climate on tools, clothing, everyday personal items, was devastating. Anything made of iron or steel turned bright orange with rust. Books, shoes, belts, knapsacks, instrument cases, machete scabbards, grew mold overnight.

Aware of what hospital expenses could amount to, familiar with the mortality rate inside the wards, the contractors were reluctant to finance such care and would even discharge a man at the first sign of illness to avoid the responsibility. Among the workers themselves the hospitals were regarded with abject horror, the common belief being that if a patient did not have malaria or yellow fever when he entered, he would very shortly. A hospital permit was considered little better than a ticket to the graveyard.

By summer, forty-eight officers of the canal company had died of yellow fever alone, and according to one American naval officer, laborers were dying at a rate of about two hundred a month.

Why in the name of God would he want to go to Panama? the old librarian at the École des Ponts et Chaussées had asked in Paris. “As an officer runs to it when he hastens to the battlefield,” Bunau-Varilla answered, “and not as the coward who flees from the sorrows of life.”

loss of human life would never be a deterrent in itself. Money was what counted. Human life was “always cheap.”

“Panama” had become a universal term of abuse, and, for many, a battle cry. On the night of January 6, La Libre Parole had staged a large anti-Semitic rally at the Tivoli Vauxhall. Jews had created Panama, exclaimed the main speaker, the Marquis de Morès, and it was the Jews who were rejoicing now at the ruin of French honor. When several hundred spectators rose in angry protest (as the rest of the audience cheered wildly), a riot broke out. Chairs were smashed; people were beaten to the floor and trampled.

The one sin Le Grand Franèais might be found guilty of was excessive optimism. But it was only the optimist who succeeded in this world. Pessimists were never anything but spectators.

From the technical standpoint the tragedy hung on the decision to cut through at sea level, to make another Suez Canal. Such a task at Panama was simply too overwhelming, if not impossible. The strategy did not suit the battleground.

But the crucial point is that de Lesseps was a rainmaker to the nineteenth century: he himself was no less bedazzled than anyone by that era’s own new magical powers. An enormous part of his appeal, perhaps the very essence of his appeal, was the fact that he was a nontechnical, nonscientific spirit, the most human of humanists. It made it possible for people to take him to their hearts. And yet it was he who had, at Suez, succeeded in bringing science and technology to bear for one noble, humanitarian purpose; and after that it had been very difficult to doubt his word or distrust his vision. From Suez on, as he himself once said, he enjoyed “the privilege of being believed without having to prove what one affirms.” It was this that made him such a popular force and such a dangerous man.

In France, as André Siegfried observed, no one seemed to recall that Panama had had anything to do with the building of a canal. “In the end one almost believed that The Company had hardly done anything at all in the isthmus . . .” The money, declared The Times of London, was “as clean gone” as if it had been sunk in the North Atlantic. Nobody talked of the hospitals that had been built, the offices, storehouses, and dock facilities, the living quarters and machine shops; the maps, plans, surveys, and hydrographic data that had been assembled; the land that had been acquired or the Panama Railroad. And the fact that more than 50,000,000 cubic meters of earth and rock had been removed from the path of the canal, an amount equal to two-thirds of the total excavation at Suez, was virtually forgotten. All had been in vain was the prevailing, unchallenged attitude; the defeat of the old pioneer had been total.

The President himself, it became known, was in the habit of “looking in” on the children before state dinners, by which he meant a terrific pillow fight.

Roosevelt was promoting neither a commercial venture nor a universal utility. To him, first, last, and always, the canal was the vital—the indispensable—path to a global destiny for the United States of America. He had a vision of his country as the commanding power on two oceans, and these joined by a canal built, owned, operated, policed, and fortified by his country. The canal was to be the first step to American supremacy at sea.

Roosevelt was thirty-one years old at the time Mahan’s book appeared and had already made a place for himself among the leading figures in Washington. He would expound on his views at length during evenings at the Cosmos Club, for example, and to the rapt delight (appropriately) of the young English writer Rudyard Kipling, who used to drop in about half-past ten with the express purpose of hearing the expansive young American go on. “I curled up on the seat opposite,” said Kipling, “and listened and wondered, until the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.”

He stressed basically what was to be stressed by the revised report of the Walker Commission: a Panama canal would be a third the length of a canal at Nicaragua; it would have fewer curves; it would require less excavation in total, fewer locks; it would cost less.

Panama had no volcanoes. There was not a single volcano, active or inactive, within 180 miles of the Panama line, he assured his listeners. In Nicaragua this was by no means the case. In Nicaragua in 1835 the eruption of the volcano known as Coseguina had lasted nearly two days. The noise, he said, had been heard a thousand miles away and enough stone and ashes had been ejected every six minutes to fill a Nicaragua canal.

Morgan had deliberately provoked him, he now saw in a flash; the whole encounter had been arranged to trap and destroy him. “I lowered my half-raised hand, and extending it solemnly toward the Senator, I said: ‘You have just inflicted upon me, sir, a gratuitous and cruel insult. But I am under your roof, and it is impossible for me to show you my resentment without violating, as you do, the laws of hospitality.’ ”

We know far less about the Nicaragua line than we do about the Panama line. It is impossible to know as much. The Nicaragua line is in comparatively wild country which has not been explored to anything like the same extent that the Panama line has. The Panama line has been a great thoroughfare, traveled for two or three hundred years. It has been examined with reference to a canal for many years past . . . and the country along the line is cleared up so that one can see what he is doing. In the wild parts of Nicaragua it is a jungle, where often we could not see fifty feet, and we would be much more likely to meet disagreeable surprises by the Nicaragua line than by the Panama line.”

“As it stands today Nicaragua is a healthier route, because there is no work of that kind being done and very few people get sick, but when you get to turning up the ground there would be sickness there, as there would be anywhere.”

“It is a piece of work that reminds me of what a teacher said to me when I was in Exeter [Phillips Exeter Academy] over forty years ago, that if he had five minutes in which to solve a problem he would spend three deciding the best way to do it.”

Some eighty-three shipowners, shipmasters, officers, and pilots—those who would use the canal—had given their unanimous preference for the Panama route.

Panama was the place to build the canal for the following reasons, Hanna began, as his secretary, who sat behind him, handed up a sheaf of papers. One: A Panama canal would be 134.57 miles shorter, terminal to terminal. Two: It would have considerably less curvature. Three: The time in transit, by steam, would be less than half that at Nicaragua—twelve hours against thirty-three. Four: Panama required fewer locks. Five: Panama had better harbors. Six: Panama was “a beaten track in civilization.” Seven: Panama had a railroad “perfect in every respect.” Eight: A Panama canal would cost less to run. Nine: “All engineering and practical questions involved in the construction of the Panama canal are satisfactorily settled and assured. . . .”

“Young nations [he had written in his pamphlet of the previous year] like to put on their coats of arms what best symbolizes their moral domain or characterizes their native soil. What have the Nicaraguans chosen to characterize their country on their coat of arms, on their postage stamps? Volcanoes!”

But the law bored him—as it had Ferdinand de Lesseps, as it had Roosevelt—so he had decided to be an engineer, “that I may lead a good and useful life.”

‘We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not,’ ”