The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

What was the nature of that day and age now gone to dust? What moved people?

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

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 dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnish’d not to shine in use! —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Ulysses

“patience which I assure you requires more force of character than does action.”

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. —VICTOR HUGO

. . . and I maintain that Panama will be easier to make, easier to complete, and easier to keep up than Suez. —FERDINAND DE LESSEPS

For country, science, and glory. —Motto of the École Polytechnique

Gaston Blanchet, meantime, had led a surveying party far up the Chagres, to begin work on the first serious maps and surveys. They were the advance guard and they made a striking picture—intent, tanned faces under white sun helmets, pistols at the belt. They chewed on Havana cigars as they squinted into the brass eyepieces of surveying instruments. They slapped at the interminable mosquitoes; they picked scorpions the size of a hand from their boots in the morning. They shot alligators, some twenty feet in length, and brought back the stripped pelts of jaguars. And they were extremely good at their work.

“We are, gentlemen, soldiers under fire; let us salute the comrade who falls in the battle, but let us think only of the fight of tomorrow and of victory.” —PHILIPPE BUNAU-VARILLA

Among the more curious facts about the French canal at Panama is that about a third of it was dug by Americans.

That de Lesseps had neglected to send to Panama a single specialist in railroads was among his gravest errors.

Faithful to my past, when they try to stop me, I go on. —FERDINAND DE LESSEPS

“What have you done with the money?” —ÉDOUARD DRUMONT

The root sources of his downfall had been apparent since the Paris congress of 1879: the insistence on a sea-level passage through country he knew nothing about, the total disinterest in conceptions other than his own, the refusal to heed voices of experience, the disregard for all data that either conflicted with or that appeared to vitiate his own cherished vision; but none of these would have mattered greatly had it not been for that extraordinary ability to inspire the loyalty and affection of individual human beings at every social and intellectual level.

In time to come, he wrote, when the Americans built the Nicaragua canal, Panama would remain one of the greatest ruins on earth, a relic of swindle and death and of the tragic old man who had been so misguided as to believe in a Panama passage.

. . . the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner. —RUDYARD KIPLING

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.

“A lie,” he was once heard to declare on the floor of the Senate, “is an abomination unto the Lord and an ever-present help in time of need.”

In the course of a very active and very extended professional career . . . the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell had found itself placed in intimate relations, susceptible of being used to advantage with men possessing influence and power. —WILLIAM NELSON CROMWELL

The first bugle-note had been heard. I hastened to settle up my business affairs and left France on the Champagne . . . for this crusade which was to result in the resurrection of Panama. —PHILIPPE BUNAU-VARILLA

“I do not want to be interrupted, for I am very tired . . .” —MARK HANNA

The plan seems to me good. —MANUEL AMADOR

It was a remarkable revolution—I think the most remarkable I ever read of in history. —SENATOR SHELBY M. CULLOM

I had fulfilled my mission . . . I had safeguarded the work of the French genius; I had avenged its honor; I had served France. —PHILIPPE BUNAU–VARILLA

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.

The world requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be. —SIR RONALD ROSS

You are going to have the fever, Yellow eyes! —JAMES STANLEY GILBERT

You are going to have the fever, Yellow eyes! In about ten days from now Iron bands will clamp your brow; Your tongue resemble curdled cream, A rusty streak the center seam; Your mouth will taste of untold things, With claws and horns and fins and wings; Your head will weigh a ton or more, And forty gales within it roar! The poem “Yellow Eyes” and others of much the same vein had just appeared in a little volume with a burgundy-colored binding, Panama Pathwork, published by the Star & Herald. The author, James Stanley Gilbert, an American resident of Colón for many years, had done for Panama something comparable to what Robert Service was to do for the Yukon. His themes—in “Funeral Train,” “The Isthmian Way,” “King Fever,” “Beyond the Chagres”—were disease, alcoholism, ever-encroaching death, and the futility of any and all human endeavor associated with the valley of the Chagres River. Beyond the Chagres River ’Tis said—the story’s old— Are paths that lead to mountains Of purest virgin gold; But ’tis my firm conviction, Whatever tales they tell, That beyond the Chagres River All paths lead straight to hell!

What we needed was a fighter. And we got one. —FRANK MALTBY

“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.”

And never did a President before so reflect the quality of his time. —H. G. WELLS

The chief point of attack was, of course, the Culebra Cut, then, as always, the most formidable obstacle to be fought and overcome. How much more formidable it really was than had been suspected was soon to be revealed. —JOSEPH BUCKLIN BISHOP

For a while we tramped on in silence, till Umbopa, who was marching in front, broke into a Zulu chant about how brave men, tired of life and the tameness of things, started off into a great wilderness to find new things or die, and how, lo, and behold! when they had got far into the wilderness, they found it was not a wilderness at all, but a beautiful place full of young wives and fat cattle. —H. RIDER HAGGARD King Solomon’s Mines

And this on the slope of the death-dealing Chagres! —CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS

Everything is on a colossal scale. —Scientific American March 18, 1911

That an earthquake should strike just four days later seemed somehow a fitting additional touch, as if that too were essential in any thorough testing-and-proving drill. It lasted more than an hour, one violent shudder following another, and the level of magnitude appears to have been greater than that of the San Francisco quake of 1906. The needles of a seismograph at Ancon were jolted off the scale paper. Walls cracked in buildings in Panama City; there were landslides in the interior; a church fell. But the locks and Gatun Dam were untouched. “There has been no damage whatever to any part of the canal,” Goethals notified Washington.

For by ironic, tragic coincidence the long effort at Panama and Europe’s long reign of peace drew to a close at precisely the same time. It was as if two powerful and related but vastly different impulses, having swung in huge arcs in the forty some years since Sedan, had converged with eerie precision in August 1914. The storm that had been gathering over Europe since June broke on August 3, the same day the Cristobal made the first ocean-to-ocean transit. On the evening of the third, the French premier, Viviani, received a telephone call from the American ambassador who, with tears in his voice, warned that the Germans would declare war within the hour. The American ambassador was Myron T. Herrick, who had once been so helpful to Philippe Bunau-Varilla, and at the same moment in Panama, where it was still six hours earlier in the day, Philippe Bunau-Varilla was standing at the rail of the Cristobal as she entered the lock at Pedro Miguel, at the start of her descent to the Pacific, he being one of the very few who had come especially for the occasion. Across Europe and the United States, world war filled the newspapers and everyone’s thoughts. The voyage of the Cristobal, the Ancon’s crossing to the Pacific on August 15, the official declaration that the canal was open to the world, were buried in the back pages. There were editorials hailing the victory of the canal builders, but the great crescendo of popular interest had passed; a new heroic effort commanded world att...

For millions of people after 1914, the crossing at Panama would be one of life’s memorable experiences. The complete transit required about twelve hours, and except for the locks and an occasional community along the shore, the entire route was bordered by the same kind of wilderness that had confronted the first surveyors for the railroad. Goethals had determined that the jungle not merely remain untouched, but that it be allowed to return wherever possible. This was a military rather than an aesthetic decision on his part; the jungle he insisted before a congressional committee was the surest possible defense against ground attack. (Actually he wanted to depopulate the entire Zone, since, as he explained to reporters, “we, as Americans, have no property rights in it.”) But for those on board a ship in transit, the effect for the greater part of the journey was of sailing a magnificent lake in undiscovered country.