The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

John Bigelow, who would visit the Isthmus later to appraise the French effort, wrote, “There probably was never a more complicated problem—a problem embarrassed by a larger proportion of uncertain factors—presented to an engineer . . . . Every step . . . is more or less experimental.” Ferdinand de Lesseps would never see it that way, however. “It is,” he informed his stockholders, “an operation the exact mathematics of which is perfectly well known. . . .” Couvreux, Hersent had built Suez; Couvreux, Hersent and exact mathematics would build Panama. He could never quite put Suez out of his mind and his engineers in the field had had no experience in the tropics and had not been trained to improvise. So they not only had to learn as they went along, which would have been difficult enough, but they had to learn to learn as they went along and to unlearn nearly everything that had been supposedly “taught” at Suez.