The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

The commission’s Panama scheme, the projected Panama canal upon which all cost estimates were based and against which all virtues or shortcomings in the Nicaragua plan were compared, had been based in large part on a plan devised by the Compagnie Nouvelle. The essential element in the plan, its key, was a giant dam that would check the Chagres River at Bohio and form a large inland lake reaching nearly two-thirds of the way across the Isthmus. The commission’s decision had been to abandon the sea-level concept, as de Lesseps’ engineers had finally done, and to build a lock canal much along the lines of the proposal made by Godin de Lépinay in 1879. The Isthmus was not to be severed by a vast trench, but bridged by an artificial lake, Lake Bohio, as it was called in the plan. Ships would leave one ocean, climb to the level of the lake by a flight of locks, cross the lake, then descend by another flight of locks to the ocean on the opposite side, just as de Lépinay had outlined. The one great task of excavation would be at Culebra, at the Pacific, or southern, end of the lake, where a channel of nine miles would have to be cut through the Cordilleras.