The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

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

Teddy, comin’ in hot with the wisdom nuggie

You are appointed to the command of an expedition to make a survey of the Isthmus of Darien, to ascertain the point at which to cut a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

There were rubber blankets and breech-loading rifles for every man, whiskey, quinine, an extra 600 pairs of shoes, and 100 miles of telegraph wire. Stores “in such shape as to be little liable to injury by exposure to rains” were sufficient for four months: 7,000 pounds of bacon, 10,000 pounds of bread, 6,000 pounds of tomato soup, 30 gallons of beans, 2,500 pounds of coffee, 100 bottles of pepper, 600 pounds of canned butter.

Kinda sounds like how I prepped for some of my long and arduous trips on the Oregon trail in middle school

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. He had been careful to mark the trail, Cullen said, and at no place had he found the elevation more than 150 feet above sea level. It was the miracle route everyone had been searching for and the story caused a sensation.

Edward Cullen!!!

Verging on starvation, his men devoured anything they could lay hands on, including live toads and a variety of palm nut that burned the enamel from their teeth and caused excruciating stomach cramps. The smothering heat, the rains, the forbidding jungle twilight day after day, were unlike anything any of them had ever experienced. Seven men died; one other went temporarily out of his mind. That any survived was due mainly to the discipline enforced by Strain and Strain’s own extraordinary fortitude. Leaving the others behind, he and three of the strongest men had pushed on in search of help. When they at last staggered into an Indian village near the Pacific side, Strain, who was torn and bleeding and virtually naked, turned around and led a rescue mission back to the others. A British doctor who examined the survivors described them as the most “wretched set of human beings” he had ever seen. “In nearly all, the intellect was in a slight degree affected, as evinced by childish and silly remarks, although their memory, and the recollection of their sufferings, were unimpaired . . . . They were literally living skeletons, covered with foul ulcers. . . .” Strain’s weight was seventy-five pounds. A few years later, at Colón, having never fully recovered, Strain died at age thirty-six.

The expedition had been deplorably misled, he argued. Strain had had no business proceeding without him or without his map, which by itself would have made all the difference. Admiral Davis, Commander Selfridge, and, most importantly, Admiral Daniel Ammen, chief of the Bureau of Navigation, were among those who considered the case still very much open. “It is to the isthmus of Darien that we are first to look for the solution to the great problem,” Davis had informed Congress. “The statements of Dr. Cullen had been so severely criticized,” Selfridge was to explain, “and so persistently advocated by him, that I was inclined to put some faith in his representations.” To Admiral Ammen, who had pored over every recorded detail of the episode, the critical clue was in Strain’s own report. Days after he had started inland, at a time when he should have been well beyond earshot of Caledonia Bay, Strain had written in his journal of hearing the evening gun on the Cyane, and this, Ammen believed, was evidence of a low-lying valley running inland from the bay; otherwise the sound would have been blocked by intervening hills.

The great overriding problem, however, was the extremely low level of reliable geographical information on Central America, and this despite more than fifty years of debate over where a canal ought to go, despite volumes of so-called geographical research, engineering surveys, perhaps a hundred articles in popular magazines and learned journals, promotional pamphlets, travel books, and the fact that Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec had all been heavily traveled shortcuts to the Pacific since the time of the California gold craze. As Admiral Davis had quite accurately stated, there were not in the libraries of the world the means to determine even approximately the most practicable route. The earliest authoritative study of the problem, or rather the first to be taken as authoritative, appeared in 1811 and designated Nicaragua as the route posing the fewest difficulties. The author of this rather tentative benediction was Alexander von Humboldt, the adventurous German-born naturalist and explorer, and Nicaragua thereafter had been “Humboldt’s route.”

The canals they had in mind, regardless of specified location, were invariably feasible technically, within range financially, and destined to be bonanzas for all investors and for whichever impoverished little Central American republic was to be involved. Emissaries from Bogotá and Managua and Mexico City were dispatched to the capitals of Europe and to Washington to enlist support. Even the pope was approached. Special agreements and franchises were signed and sealed with appropriate formality. The future was rich with possibilities.

On December 12, 1846, at Bogotá, a new American chargé d’affaires, Benjamin Alden Bidlack, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, acting entirely on his own initiative, signed a treaty with the government of President Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera. The critical agreement was contained in Article XXXV. New Granada guaranteed to the United States the exclusive right of transit across the Isthmus of Panama, “upon any modes of communication that now exist, or that may be, hereafter, constructed.” In exchange the United States guaranteed “positively and efficaciously” both the “perfect neutrality” of the Isthmus and New Granada’s rights of sovereignty there. (It was this agreement by which the Panama Railroad was to be made possible.)

Good day

There were three routes to the new El Dorado—“the Plains across, the Horn around, or the Isthmus over”—and for those thousands who chose “the Isthmus over,” it was to be one of life’s unforgettable experiences.

“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.” Yet the gain in time and distance was phenomenal. 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.

Dividends were 15 percent on the average and went as high as 44 percent. Once, standing at $295 a share, Panama Railroad was the highest-priced stock listed on the New York Exchange.

Surveys for the railroad had also produced two pertinent pieces of information. The engineers had discovered a gap in the mountains twelve miles from Panama City, at a point called Culebra, where the elevation above sea level was only 275 feet. This was 200 feet less than what had been considered the lowest gap. Then, toward the close of their work, 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.

Laborers had been brought in by the boatload from every part of the world. White men, mostly Irish “navvies” who had built canals and railroads across England, “withered as cut plants in the sun.” But of a thousand Chinese coolies, hundreds fell no less rapidly or died any less miserably of disease, and scores of Chinese workers were so stricken by “melancholia,” an aftereffect of malaria, that they had committed suicide by hanging, drowning, or impaling themselves on sharpened bamboo poles.

The worst year had been 1852, the year of Stephens’ death, when cholera swept across the Isthmus, starting at Colón with the arrival of a steamer from New Orleans. Of the American technicians then employed—some fifty engineers, surveyors, draftsmen—all but two died. When a large military detachment, several hundred men of the American Fourth Infantry and their dependents, made the crossing in July en route to garrison duty in California, the tragic consequence was 150 dead—men, women, and children. “The horrors of the road in the rainy season are beyond description,” wrote the young officer in charge, Captain Ulysses S. Grant, whose memory of the experience was to be no less vivid years later when he sat in the White House.

What was not reported, but already known by then, was that the lowest pass on the Sucubti was 553 feet above sea level, and that the mountains were indeed a thousand feet or more in elevation, just as Strain had reported. So Edward Cullen was a fraud after all.

A fraud!

In the official report he filed with Secretary Robeson, Selfridge said merely that the effort had served to simplify matters—“the field of research is reduced and the problem narrowed.” He was convinced that the determining factor must be the canal to be built. The canal “should partake of the nature of a strait, with no locks or impediments to prolong the passage . . .” It must be a “through-cut,” at the level of the sea, he wrote, a canal like the canal at Suez, and, from what was known of Central America, the only feasible point for such a passage was Panama.

Panama was as removed as if it were an island, and Colombia could be reached only by sea, either by the Caribbean or the Pacific. One sailed first either to Barranquilla or to Buenaventura. The journey from Barranquilla to Bogotá involved a four-hundred-mile trip by river steamer up the Magdalena to a point called Honda, then another hundred miles over the mountains by horse or wagon. There were no railroads. The other way, by Buenaventura, the route Wyse took, was shorter but considerably more arduous, covering nearly four hundred miles.

The agreement was this: The United States of Colombia granted the Société Civile—the Türr Syndicate—the exclusive privilege, good for ninety-nine years, to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. As a guarantee of their good faith, the grantees were obligated to deposit 750,000 francs in a London bank no later than 1882. It was required that surveys be made by an international commission of competent engineers, for which three years were allowed, and the grantees were permitted two additional years in which to organize a canal company, and then twelve years to build the canal. Colombia in turn was to get 5 percent of the gross revenue from the canal for twenty-five years, 6 percent for the next twenty-five years, 7 percent for the next twenty-five years, and 8 percent for the final years of the concession. The minimum payment, however, was never to be less than $250,000, which was the same as Colombia’s share in the earnings of the Panama Railroad. Colombia conceded to the company, without charge, 500,000 hectares (1,235,500 acres) of public lands, in addition to a belt of land 200 meters (219 yards) wide on each side of the canal. The terminal ports and the canal itself were declared neutral for all time. At the end of ninety-nine years the canal would revert to Colombia. Further conditions were stipulated, but the crucial ones were these: The concession could be transferred (i.e., sold) to other individuals or financial syndicates, but under no circumstances coul...

The Wyse Concession

The Congrès International d’Études du Canal Interocéanique, as it was formally titled, convened in Paris at two in the afternoon, Thursday, May 15, 1879. After centuries of dreams and talk, of hit-or-miss explorations and hollow promises, of little scientific knowledge, little or no cooperation among nations, leading authorities from every part of the world—engineers, naval officers, economists, explorers—were gathering under one roof “in the impartial serenity of science” to inaugurate La grande entreprise, greatest of the age. Or so it was being said.

Despite the emphasis on the numbers of nations represented, there was an obvious predominance of French delegates, most of whom seemed committed already, out of past loyalties or for reasons of personal ambition, to take whatever course the old man dictated. The more prominent French delegates, for example, included the former director general at Suez, Voisin Bey; Abel Couvreux, of the giant Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie, a major Suez contractor; and Alexandre Lavalley, who had built the great steam dredges used at Suez. Of the several committees, only one really mattered, the fourth, or so-called Technical Committee, which was charged with deciding where the canal should be built, what kind of canal it should be, and what it was all going to cost. It was the largest committee, the one de Lesseps himself would sit on, and of the 52 other delegates he had assigned to it, more than half were French. Indeed, of all the 136 delegates in attendance, a total of 73—well over a majority—were French and not a quarter were engineers. Further, de Lesseps seemed bound to hurry things through in record speed. The congress, he had said in conclusion, should get on with its work “in the American fashion—that is to say, with speed, and in a practical fashion . . .” One week, he thought, should suffice.

The official American plan for Panama was for a lock canal that would dispense with the problem of the Chagres by going over it. Menocal had designed a colossal stone viaduct 1,900 feet long to carry the canal over the river at a point known as Matachín. The elevation of the canal at the viaduct—the summit of the canal, that is—was to be 124 feet, and to carry the ships to this height there were to be a total of twenty-four locks (an equal dozen in either direction from the summit). To build such a canal would cost $94,600,000, a figure that startled a large number of his listeners, since it was approximately what Wyse was claiming for the cost of a canal at sea level. Menocal believed it to be as ingenious a solution as possible, considering the circumstances, but he had no heart for it. In good conscience he was unable to recommend a Panama canal of any kind. Even a lock canal, he emphasized, would always be threatened by possible floods, and he further warned that the deep cuts that would have to be made through the Cordilleras at that section known as Culebra—even for a lock canal—would be subject to persistent mud slides. “The surprise and painful emotion on the part of those who had plans à niveau, and of their many friends in attendance, can hardly be conceived,” wrote Daniel Ammen. “The fact stared them in the face that the plans which they had presented so confidently for adoption were absolutely impracticable.” “From this moment,” observed Dr. Johnston, “the Cong...

“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. For every challenge there would be a man of genius capable of meeting and conquering it. One must trust to inspiration. As for the money, there was money aplenty in France just waiting for the opening of the subscription books. He knew his audience and he delivered every line with perfect confidence in its effect. His audience adored him.

He acknowledged the truth of all Menocal had said regarding the Chagres River. He himself had been considering the problem of a Panama canal for some years. The idea of digging down to sea level was thoroughly unrealistic if one understood the terrain and ought to be discarded without further fuss. Those who talked of diverting the Chagres River in some fashion were sadly misinformed and deceiving themselves. They were allowing the triumph at Suez to distort their capacity to see things for what they were. Suez and Panama must not be regarded as comparable, he said. The environmental conditions were opposite in the extreme. “At Suez there is a lack of water, the terrain is easy, the land nearly the same level as the sea; in spite of the heat, it is a perfectly healthy climate. In tropical America, there is too much water, the terrain is mostly rock, the land has considerable relief, and finally the country is literally poisoned.” To act in the same manner in places of such opposite character, he declared, would be to “outrage nature” instead of to benefit by it, “which is the primary goal of the engineer.”

What he was proposing was not really a canal at all in the conventional sense. His lakes would be created by building two huge dams, one at the Chagres near the Atlantic, the other on the Rio Grande, which flows into the Pacific. The dams would be built as near to the two oceans as the configuration of the land permitted. The Chagres dam, the largest, should be built, he said, at the confluence of the Chagres and the Gatun rivers, at a point called Gatun, and it would hold the largest of the lakes. The surface of the lakes would be eighty feet above sea level and the lakes would be joined by a channel cut through the mountain spine at Culebra, this being the only heavy excavation required. The virtues of the plan were enormous. To begin with, it greatly reduced the amount of digging to be done. Further, it eliminated all danger of Chagres floods, since the river would feed directly into the lakes. The dams would control the river; the river would serve as an unlimited water supply for the lakes—for the canal. Thus the river would become the life blood of the system, rather than its mortal enemy. The resulting passage, furthermore, would be a broad lake, rather than a narrow channel. Ships would be able to move at greater speeds and they would be able to pass one another without shunting into sidings, or tying up, as was necessary at Suez. Passage through such a canal would take no more than twelve hours, even if one were to figure the time in each lock at half an hour, whe...

Most important of all, he said, was the saving the plan would mean in terms of human lives. As was understood by everyone in the audience, nearly all varieties of tropical fever and miasma were caused by “noxious vapors” released from the putrid vegetation and rank soil of the jungle. Any excessive disturbance of such ground, therefore, naturally meant the spread of disease in epidemic proportions. But since his scheme called for a minimum of excavation, there would be a minimum of disturbance during construction and the incidence of disease would be correspondingly small. Furthermore, once the canal was built, much of the poisonous terrain would be sealed off by the lakes, producing a long-lasting beneficial effect. To dig a canal à niveau in Panama, he said, would cost the lives of no less than fifty thousand men.

The necessary time for construction was fixed at twelve years—a finished canal by 1892—and the cost of construction was estimated at 1,070,000,000 francs, or $214,000,000. Supposing the interest payable in the meantime would amount to 130,000,000 francs, the total expenditure worked out to 1,200,000,000 francs, or $240,000,000-almost triple the cost of Suez.

There was absolute silence as the vote was declared: in favor of the resolution, 74; opposed, 8; abstaining, 16; absent, 38. Delegates were on their feet cheering; women were waving handkerchiefs. It was as if an astonishing victory had been won. De Lesseps stepped forward and promised success; Admiral de La Roncière-Le Noury declared that the day marked the beginning of one of the greatest undertakings of modern times. “It seems to me that nothing could have been more glorious . . .” Henri Barboux, attorney for Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps, would recall years later before a packed courtroom. “Might not one think of it as a council ordaining, after the lapse of seven hundred years, a new crusade?”

A. G. Menocal, afterward, did an interesting analysis of the vote. Though the yea votes were predominantly French, not one of the five delegates from the French Society of Engineers had voted for the proposal. Of those seventy-four delegates who did declare themselves for a sea-level canal at Panama, only nineteen were engineers and of those nineteen only one had ever set foot in Central America and he was young Pedro Sosa of Panama.

Front Street, Colón, as it looked during the French era

Looks similar to st augustine today

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

Famous last words

“M. de Lesseps is convinced that it [the canal] is the right thing,” wrote the Paris correspondent of The New York Times, “and . . . the simple fact of his connection with it will secure that Archimedean lever of the nineteenth century, money . . .”

Rumors were started in the Bourse that de Lesseps was in his dotage and ought not to be trusted with other people’s money. It was claimed that at the first blow of a French pickax at Panama, the American fleet would arrive and massacre the workers. Crédit Maritime said the canal would cost so much that it would never pay a dividend. Another financial paper called the scheme a swindle and warned readers not to risk their savings in it. The result was the failure of the stock issue, a failure so resounding that almost any man other than de Lesseps would have abandoned the whole plan there and then and spared himself any further humiliation. Of 800,000 shares offered, a trifling 60,000—less than 10 percent—were purchased. Yet “the wonderful old man” appeared undaunted. It was obvious what had to be done, he said privately. The bankers would be invited to participate. “The financial organs were hostile,” he explained, “because they had not been paid.”

“The canal will be made.” The upper Chagres would be turned into the Pacific, thus ending floods in the lower valley. “The canal will be made.” At the great cut at the summit, the work of many thousands of men would be handled by modern explosives. “The canal will be made.” He was overjoyed by the morning air. Colón was a delightful place. “The canal will be made.”

John Lloyd Stephens had christened the town Aspinwall, but the Colombians had insisted on calling it Colón, for Columbus, and so a silly dispute had been dragging on ever since. To most of the older Americans it was still Aspinwall.

Colon it is. Freakin white people *eye roll*

Tracy Robinson, that de Lesseps and his family were conducted, to judge for themselves the supposed privation of life in the American tropics. Robinson, a personable and intelligent man, had spent twenty years in Panama. He was fascinated by the country, liked the people and the life, and he was certain, as he told de Lesseps, that the great future of mankind was in the tropics.

Barbacoas, an Indian word meaning “bridge,” the point where the railroad crossed the Chagres.

The river originated in the steep jungle uplands miles off to the east, a “quick and bold” wilderness with mountains of two thousand to four thousand feet, where at the time of the Spanish conquest a legendary Indian chief, Chagre, had ruled. Even under average conditions, the runoff from such country was phenomenal. With abnormally heavy rains in the mountains, it was as if a dam had burst. And while the recent flood had been the worst since the railroad began bothering with records, the floods of 1857, 1862, 1865, 1868, 1872, 1873, and 1876 had been nearly as awesome. The situation at Barbacoas should have been the clearest possible warning to de Lesseps and the others.

The stone ruins of the original city, Old Panama, or Panama Viejo, still stood several miles down the bay. The site had been abandoned after the city was sacked and burned by the pirate Morgan in 1671, and the present Panama, a walled city, was begun three years later, at the head of the bay, on a narrow tongue of volcanic rock with water on three sides. “Panama is a very miserable old town . . . fast crumbling to pieces,” an American sea captain noted in his journal, at the start of the gold rush, having brought the California, the first of the San Francisco steamers, around the Horn. “The houses are miserable and going to decay and the churches are crumbling. . . .” The harbor was also too shallow for a ship of any size.

For de Lesseps’ arrival, furthermore, an almost miraculous transformation had been worked. The local populace had been told to clean up the streets, to paint, scrub, or whitewash everything within sight of his path, or face a stiff fine. Such an air of neatness, according to one report, had not prevailed within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. To give the celebrated visitor the right impression, to see that he was properly honored and entertained, the local government had allocated its entire budget for the forthcoming year. • • “The reception of M. de Lesseps at this town was something never to be forgotten,” wrote J. C. Rodrigues in his first dispatch from Panama City. It seems that every one of the 14,000 inhabitants was at the railway station, shouting, struggling to get a glimpse of the distinguished guest. I doubt very much whether more than one twentieth of them knew the true importance and meaning of the occasion. But . . . [their] enthusiasm did not know any bounds. We may laugh all we want at their ways of expressing it, but it was a most genuine triumphal entry, this one of M. de Lesseps.

Trenor Park is not in the picture, which may or may not say something about de Lesseps’ feelings toward him. Nor is it clear what Park was doing all this time. We know only that he and most of the others who had come down from New York sailed for home shortly after the picture was taken. We have only his parting comments. He still saw no reason, Park said, why a sale of the road could not be arranged once the French company was organized, which was the polite way of saying once de Lesseps had the cash.

De Lesseps appeared unmoved. As Robinson wrote, “Nothing ever seemed for an instant to dampen the ardor of his enthusiasm, or to cloud the vista of that glorious future which he had pictured in his imagination.”

Feels like a good way to live to me

As at all such occasions he spoke through an interpreter and extemporaneously. He never used notes, he explained, because he always spoke the truth, the truth required no preparation.

Presidential message to Congress. The United States, Hayes avowed, would not surrender its control over any isthmian canal to any European power or combination of powers. Nor should corporations or private citizens investing in such an enterprise look to any European power for protection. “An interoceanic canal . . . will be the great ocean thoroughfare between our Atlantic and our Pacific shores and virtually a part of the coastline of the United States.” The “policy of this country is a canal under American control.” The message was a clear and deadly serious repulse to de Lesseps’ intentions. He could have protested, or he could have been diplomatic and evasive, or he could have said nothing for the moment. Instead he had Henri Bionne send off a cable addressed to Charles in Paris and, ultimately, to the Bulletin: “The message of President Hayes guarantees the political security of the canal.” He, Le Grand Français, had won another noble victory, that was the implicit claim. If the United States declared that no European power could function as protector over the canal, then this meant that the United States would fulfill that vital function. And with the United States watching over the enterprise during construction and afterward, investors could be certain of success. That was not at all what had been meant. “What the President said,” wrote J. C. Rodrigues in his subsequent analysis, “[was that] he did not wish to see European corporations building canals in Panama; b...

In Washington the French minister presented a note to Secretary Evarts saying the French government was in no way involved in the de Lesseps enterprise at Panama “and in no way proposed to interfere therein or to give it any support, either direct or indirect.”

Three New York firms had agreed to participate—J. & W. Seligman & Company, Drexel, Morgan & Company, and Winslow, Lanier & Company. And yet for all this, his popularity, his vigor, there were no takers. He had sold no stock. Not a single American capitalist of consequence had expressed the least serious interest in his Compagnie Universelle.

A doctor in one after-dinner speech accused him of jeopardizing the medical profession, since obviously the visit to Panama had resulted in the discovery of the fountain of youth.

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