The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

But had he and his technical advisers decided to make it a lock canal even as late as 1886, at the time of his second tour of the Isthmus, there probably would have been a French canal at Panama, death, disease, jungle, geology, costs, and de Lesseps’ advanced age all notwithstanding. The size of the locks being contemplated would have made the canal obsolete in relatively little time, but the canal would have been built. As for any possible complicity on his part in the less-than-noble practices that went on behind the scenes, there is no real mystery. He was neither innocent nor a simpleton. He was involved in bribing the press, in the Herz compact, indeed he was the one who crossed that line at the very beginning at the time of the first successful stock issue. His public pronouncements, his Bulletin, were replete with misinformation, misleading statistics, promises that he knew to be beyond realization. In his “dashing, off-hand way [he] lied any amount to interviewers,” as Emily Crawford said. He was determined to build the canal, to succeed again, to be all that his adoring multitude believed him to be. As the situation worsened, he had agreed to desperate measures to gain time, to postpone disaster. When Charles said in court that he himself had done what he thought he had to do, he was undoubtedly speaking for his father as well. “What would you have decided in our place?” Charles had asked. The fundamental mystery one comes down to in the end is the endlessly trum...