The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

There were riots in Bogotá; desperate offers were to be made by special Colombian emissaries dispatched to Washington, including an offer to accept the treaty as it stood, which served only to satisfy the Administration conclusively that the earlier rejection of the treaty had been an outrageous act of extortion.

The damage done to American relations with Colombia, indeed with all of Latin America, was enormous, just as John Tyler Morgan had prophesied. As an American minister at Bogotá, James T. Du Bois, would write in 1912, the breach worsened as time passed.

Panama was to be what Simon Bolívar had once prophesied, “the emporium of the universe.”

The purchase of the French holdings at Panama was the largest real-estate transaction in history until then. The Treasury warrant for $40,000,000 made out to “J. Pierpont Morgan & Company, New York City, Special Dispensing Agent,” was the largest yet issued by the government of the United States, the largest previous warrant having been for the $7,200,000 paid to Russia for Alaska in 1867.

With the $10,000,000 paid to Panama and the $40,000,000 to the Compagnie Nouvelle, the United States had spent more for the rights, privileges, and properties that went with the Canal Zone—an area roughly a third the size of Long Island—than for any actual territorial acquisition in its history, more than for the Louisiana Territory ($15,000,000), Alaska ($7,200,000), and the Philippines ($20,000,000) combined.

What he found was that a yellow-fever patient could be visited without hazard so long as the visit was made within ten to twelve days after the patient became ill. But beyond that period, even after the patient had died and the body had been removed from the house, family or visitors were in mortal danger. Hence the sick man could not possibly be the source of contamination. Hence there had to be a period of “extrinsic incubation,” as Carter named it.

For twenty nights, as part of one experiment, a doctor and three volunteer soldiers, confined to a one-room shack, slept in the soiled pajamas of yellow-fever patients, on beds reeking of black vomit and other excreta; and for all the discomfort of the experience, none of them suffered the least sign of illness.

A first inspection of Panama City revealed an abundance of Stegomyia in practically every building. Anopheles were still more numerous. By local custom, household drinking water was kept indoors in red earthenware jars, tinajas, within which Stegomyia larvae abounded. Mosquito larvae, or “wrigglers,” swarmed in the open cisterns and rain barrels beside nearly every building.

Though the female Stegomyia can feed on any warmblooded animal, her decided preference is for human blood, and thus the whole life cycle of the insect must be maintained in close association with human society.

To determine the time of day or night when the Anopheles would take blood, the men stretched out on cots in one of the wards, each man with a supply of pillboxes and a pocket watch. Every time a mosquito bit, or tried to, it was captured, put in a pillbox, and the date and hour were recorded on the box.

The problem in essence was that Admiral Walker, Governor Davis, and several others on the Isthmian Canal Commission, as well as a very large part of the populace and its political leadership, did not seriously entertain the notion that mosquitoes could be the cause of yellow fever or malaria. To spend time and money chasing after mosquitoes in Panama would be to squander time and money in a most irresponsible fashion.

He always kept three books at hand—one scientific, one of classical literature or history, one light fiction—which he took up in turn, giving each exactly twenty minutes according to a pocket watch placed on the table beside his chair. In this fashion, he said, he was able to remember what he read.

“One appreciated more and more the wonderful amount those French had really accomplished. It is vastly more than the popular impression . . . It touches from ocean to ocean.”

Still, the useful portions of the French work amounted to approximately 30,000,000 cubic yards of excavation; that was 30,000,000 cubic yards of Panama that no longer stood in the path of the canal, a volume equal to about a third of the excavation of the Suez Canal.

contrary to all declarations of the chief engineer—and much to her own amazement—yellow fever was taking the lives of “well set-up, clean boys with good principles.” One could be neither decadent nor French, apparently, and still succumb.

For all the deprecating talk of French inefficiency, French failure, for all the proud claims of American know-how and resolve, the United States had performed with less efficiency, less purpose, and markedly less courage than had the French at any time during their ordeal. A whole year had been lost and the situation on the Isthmus was an utter shambles.

“You won’t get fired if you do something, you will if you don’t do anything. Do something if it is wrong, for you can correct that, but there is no way to correct nothing.”

On those islands where recruiting was permitted, all workers were given a contract by which they received free passage to Colón and were guaranteed free repatriation, if they so chose, after five hundred working days (roughly a year and eight months). Martinique and Guadeloupe accounted for some 7,500 men all told, but the total from Barbados was to be nearly 20,000. Wages were ten cents an hour, ten hours a day, six days a week. Segregation by color, long an unwritten rule on the railroad, as well as in Panamanian society in general, became established policy.

What was needed for the heavy physical work, according to the accepted doctrine, were battalions of men who by nature and habit could withstand the punishing climate: black men from the West Indies. That black North Americans might also serve—as General Ben Butler once proposed to Abraham Lincoln—was taken into account, but this too met with strenuous opposition from southern congressmen who foresaw their home states suddenly drained of their natural supply of cheap labor.

The creation of Gatun Lake would mean that approximately 164 square miles of jungle, an area as large as the island of Barbados, would vanish under water.

“He seemed obsessed with the idea that someone was trying to hide something from him,” Frank Maltby would recall. “ . . . He was continually pointing to some feature and asking, ‘What’s that? . . . Well, I want to see it.’ . . . he was continuously stopping some black man and asking if he had any complaint or grievance.” Everyone who tried to maintain his pace wound up exhausted and half-drowned. He walked railroad ties in Culebra Cut, leaped ditches, splashed through work camps, made impromptu speeches in the driving rain. “You are doing the biggest thing of the kind that has ever been done,” he said, “and I wanted to see how you are doing it.”

Presidents of the United States had been photographed at their desks and on the rear platforms of Pullman cars; Chester A. Arthur had consented once to pose in a canoe. But not in 117 years had a President posed on a steam shovel.

Once, earlier in the year, H. G. Wells had called at the White House. It was a bright spring afternoon and he and Roosevelt had talked at length in the garden, much as Jules Verne and Ferdinand de Lesseps had conversed in the library of the Société de Géographie. Wells was in America, he said, to search for the future and “question the certitudes of progress,” for unlike Verne, he had grave misgivings about the long-range human consequences of science and technology.

The new approach was in fact wholly unorthodox by the standards of the day. In labor relations Goethals was way in advance of his time, and nothing that he did had so discernible an effect on the morale of the workers or their regard for him: “they were treated like human beings, not like brutes,” Bishop recalled, “and they responded by giving the best service within their power.”

“He who did not see the Culebra Cut during the mighty work of excavation,” declared an author of the day, “missed one of the great spectacles of the ages—a sight that no other time, or place was, or will be, given to man to see.” Lord Bryce called it the greatest liberty ever taken with nature.

For seven years Culebra Cut was never silent, not even for an hour.

Bishop and those others who described the spectacle from the cliffs above had very little to say about such hazards. But year after year hundreds of men were being killed or hideously injured. They were caught beneath the wheels of trains or struck by flying rock, crushed to death, blown to bits by dynamite. “Man die, get blow up, get kill or get drown,” recalled one black worker; “during the time someone asked where is Brown? He died last night and bury. Where is Jerry? He dead a little before dinner and buried. So on and so on all the time.”

The peak was in March 1909, when sixty-eight shovels, the largest number ever used at one time in the Cut, removed more than 2,000,000 cubic yards, ten times the volume achieved by the French in their best month.

The volume removed from the Cut was 96,000,000 cubic yards. So even allowing for replacements, the average shovel dug well over 1,000,000 cubic yards, despite the worst kind of punishment year in, year out. No machines had ever been subjected to such a test and their record was a tribute to the men who designed and built them.

“Culebra Cut was Hell’s Gorge,” one steam-shovel man would write, recalling the heat and dust and noise.

Often wisps of smoke would trail from the moving embankments. Once cracks in the surface below Culebra issued boiling water. When Gaillard arrived to investigate the matter, he took a Manila envelope from his pocket and held it over one of the vents in the earth. In seconds the paper was reduced to ashes. The explanation, according to the geologist who was summoned, was “oxidation of pyrite,” but the terrified workers were convinced that they were cutting into the side of a volcano.

Gaillard was practically in shock, according to one account, and Goethals was hurriedly called to the scene. “What are we to do now?” Gaillard asked. Goethals lit a cigarette. “Hell,” he said, “dig it out again.”

“We felt like pioneers,” numbers of them would recall a lifetime afterward. Far from home, they were rolling back the wilderness, serving the cause of progress, serving their country in one of its grandest moments. They were building large and building to last. It was to be a “monument for the world.” Every day was a story for the grandchildren.

The whole system was in fact quite intentionally designed to favor the married employee, to provide every inducement for matrimony, to bring stability to the skilled white segment of the community.

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, by John Fox, Jr., and The Winning of Barbara Worth, by Harold Bell Wright, were popular reading along the diggings in the years 1907–1914, as were When a Man Marries, by Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage.

Corporal Fitzgerald saw a fossil print of a fish (“not the meat, just the bones”) and still another of a fern, “proving,” he would recall, “that millions of years ago it was all in the sea. It all makes you feel very insignificant.”

“As for the man whose skin is a bit dull,” recalled Harry Franck, “he might sit on the steps of an I.C.C. hotel with dollars dribbling out of his pockets until he starved to death—and he would be duly buried in the particular grave to which his color entitled him.”

Reports for the fiscal year 1907–1908, the point at which Goethals replaced Stevens, show that 1,273 employees died of all causes. At the end of the construction era, that is, in fiscal year 1913–1914, deaths from all causes totaled 414, a phenomenal reduction. In 1907–1908 there had been 205 deaths from malaria; in the final year of construction, there were only 14. Deaths from pneumonia dropped from 466 to 50. As remarkable as any statistic was the average death rate in the final year among all employees—7.92 per thousand, which was much lower than the general death rate in the United States. Not even in Washington, Montana, or Nebraska, then the healthiest states in the country, was the death rate lower than it was in the Canal Zone.

Of the total 414 deaths for the final year, 30 were white Americans, 31 were white employees of other nationalities. All the rest, 353, were black.

A single lock if stood on end would have been the tallest structure in the world, taller even than the Eiffel Tower.

More than half a century later the same control panels would still be in use, functioning exactly as intended, everything as the engineers originally devised. “They were very smart people,” a latter-day engineer at Miraflores would remark. “After twenty-one years here I am still amazed at what they did.”

Technically the canal itself was a masterpiece in design and construction. From the time they were first put in use the locks performed perfectly.