The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

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.”