The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

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.