The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

In Paris the sale of stock in the company—Ferdinand de Lesseps’ second attempt to go public—turned out to be one of the most astonishing events in financial history. La grande entreprise was to be the biggest financial undertaking ever attempted until then. Panama stock was to be more widely held than any ever issued before. And never had any strictly financial proposition inspired such ardent devotion among its investors. The explanation, of course, in good part, was that to most of them it was never a strictly financial proposition. Nothing so vital to French pride just then, nothing led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, could have been seen as that only. Of enormous importance also were the almost limitless expectations associated with venture capitalism—pionnier capitalisme. The talk was of “the poetry of capitalism” and of “the shareholders’ democracy.” The unprecedented response of the French people to de Lesseps had many sides, many psychological levels, and only later, in hindsight, would their allegiance seem blind or his leadership purposefully deceitful.

Lévy-Crémieux also sent his own man—an engineer—out to appraise the situation at Panama, and the man returned with the confidential report that the canal would never pay. Half a dozen companies would go down in ruin before any ship passed through Panama, the man insisted. But not a word was said of this publicly.

The price paid for such enthusiasm was high—1,595,573 francs, as near as could be determined by subsequent investigations—and the brokers’ commissions for the flotation were higher still, in excess of 4,000,000 francs. For the bankers it was a perfect bonanza. Their commission on the stock sales was 4 percent, or 20 francs a share. Still, as some of the foreign correspondents in Paris were to note, such houses as the Crédit Foncier and the Rothschilds had steadfastly “refused to allow their counters to be used for such a flytrap.”

Sale of the stock began December 7, 1880. Within three days, more than 100,000 people subscribed for 1,206,609 shares, or more than twice the number available.

Thompson, who had been Secretary of the Navy, was actually de Lesseps’ second choice for the job. His first choice, General Grant, had been approached through Jesse Seligman, but had flatly declined the offer, a decision Grant explained in a letter to Daniel Ammen: “ . . . while I would like to have my name associated with the successful completion of a ship canal between the two oceans, I was not willing to connect it with a failure and one I believe subscribers would lose all they put in.”

Ten thousand shares of stock that had been withheld from sale were turned over to the Türr Syndicate as previously agreed, and de Lesseps relinquished to the new corporation, at no charge, all rights and privileges obtained earlier from the Türr Syndicate. Thus the Wyse Concession now belonged to the Compagnie Universelle. The project was under way.

Upon finishing at the Polytechnique, the highest-ranking graduates generally went on to the Ponts et Chaussées—an école d’application— from which they emerged as engineers in the service of the state, as builders of bridges, highways, harbors, or as officials with the state-run railroads.

The ingénieurs civils, the graduates of the École Centrale, were the engineers of private enterprise and closer to American engineers in spirit. Gustave Eiffel was an outstanding example; another was William Le Baron Jenney, a Chicago architect and engineer, who was to build the world’s first skyscraper. But all French engineers, and those from the Polytechnique especially, regarded themselves as men of science. Their creations were the result of abstract computation. The Americans, in the French view, were merely adroit at improvisation, which, however inspired or ingenious, was nonetheless of a lower intellectual order.

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.

There were, as all newcomers learned, but two seasons in Panama: the season Ferdinand de Lesseps had seen and the wet season. The dry season, with its clear skies and trade winds, began normally about mid-December and lasted four months, during which, in Panama City, water carts had to be used to keep the dust down.

Armand Réclus wrote regularly to Paris, as instructed, to report on local politics, employee morale, his own daily problems. To maintain an adequate labor force seemed nearly impossible. In this first year only about ten out of every one hundred newly arrived laborers remained on the job after six months. But contrary to later accusations, the well-being of the men was regarded as a priority responsibility. “We must make certain that the personnel suffer no privations and that their welfare is looked into,” Charles wrote to Réclus. “You will always find us disposed to approve any measures that you may have to propose in this matter.”

The facility at Ancon, which was to include some seventy buildings by the time it was finished, would cost $5,600,000, a staggering sum in that day. Another $1,000,000 was spent on the hospital at Colón, nearly $500,000 on the Taboga sanitarium. Dr. Wolfred Nelson, the Canadian physician who had opened an office in Panama the previous year, a man who was to be severely critical of almost everything the French did, wrote, “The canal hospitals on the Panama side are without doubt the finest and most perfect system of hospitals ever made within the tropics.” William Crawford Gorgas, writing some thirty-five years afterward, was to appraise the Ancon complex as “a very much better institution than any in the United States . . . at the same period carried on by a firm or corporation.”

So in June 1881, after drawn-out negotiations between Paris and New York, the sale was agreed to. The canal company bought some 68,500 of the existing 70,000 shares, which at $250 a share came to more than $17,000,000. In addition the company took over a sinking fund amassed by the railroad toward the eventual amortization of its bonded indebtedness of some $6,000,000. So all told the little stretch of track cost over $20,000,000, which was more than equal to a full third of the company’s resources. On a per-share basis the stock actually wound up costing $292 at a time when the true par value was less than $100.

But by summer it was also apparent that yellow fever had returned to the Isthmus. The wet season was traditionally the time of sickness and this year had been no exception. Several cases were reported in May. Then in the second week of June the first canal employee died of yellow fever, another of those incidental details not featured in the Bulletin.

“The truth is that the climate . . . like all hot climates, is dangerous for those who underestimate its effects . . . and who fail to observe the principles of hygiene,” explained the Bulletin. Yellow fever was not prevalent in Panama, the paper assured its readers, though “unhappily” a few laborers had been victims of the disease.

How many died that first year is uncertain. The official company estimate on record is about sixty. Malaria, which is an entirely different disease from yellow fever, probably accounted for a great many of the fatalities then as later. The fact is that more people would die of malaria at Panama than of yellow fever, notwithstanding the popular impression to the contrary. Malaria, the most common of tropical diseases and the one endemic disease at Panama, takes many forms and went by many different names on the Isthmus: calentura, miasma, the shakes, the chills, paludisme, ague, pernicious fever, putrid fever, intermittent fever, and, in its most virulent form, Chagres fever. Historically, malaria was the world’s greatest killer and it was confined to no one geographical area.

Wherever or whenever it struck, it spread panic of a kind that could all but paralyze a community. It was a far more violent and hideous thing to see; a more gruesome way to die. The mortality rate among those who contracted the disease could vary enormously, from 12 or 15 percent to as much as 70 percent. Generally speaking, however, a yellow-fever patient in Panama in the 1880’s had a less than fifty-fifty chance of survival. As with malaria, the patient was seized first by fits of shivering, high fever, and insatiable thirst. But there were savage headaches as well, and severe pains in the back and the legs. The patient would become desperately restless. Then, in another day or so, the trouble would appear to subside and the patient would begin to turn yellow, noticeably in the face and in the eyes. In the terminal stages the patient would spit up mouthfuls of dark blood—the infamous, terrifying vómito negro, black vomit. The end usually came swiftly after that. The body temperature would drop, the pulse fade. The flesh would become cold to the touch—“almost as cold as stone and [the patient] continues in that state with a composed sedate mind.” Then, as a rule, in about eight to ten hours, the patient would die. And so great was the terror the disease generated that its victims were buried with all possible speed.

Modern medical research also indicates that the common tropical disease known as dengue, or “breakbone fever,” can also have the resulting effects of an immunity to yellow fever. But no human being ever achieved an immunity to malaria; there was no such thing as a natural immunity to yellow fever, and if many blacks had been made immune to yellow fever before reaching Panama, there were vastly more blacks at work than whites, so the number of nonimmune blacks on the Isthmus was always quite large. Black laborers died of both malaria and yellow fever and no less miserably than the whites.

Recently, in 1878, in Memphis, Tennessee, more than five thousand people had died of yellow fever and the estimated financial loss, due to the entire cessation of commerce, was upward of $100,000,000.

French army was to have occupied New Orleans and Louisiana. But yellow fever cut through the veteran troops like no enemy imaginable; thousands died, including Leclerc, and this was a major contributing factor in the ultimate triumph of the black patriots. Haiti achieved independence, and Napoleon, thoroughly disenchanted with his American venture, decided to sell all of the Louisiana Territory to the United States.

There was, however, another theory—even as early as 1881. Dr. Josiah Clark Nott was a general practitioner in Mobile, Alabama, and it is one of those extraordinary coincidences of history that he happened to be the doctor who, in 1854, attended Amelia Gayle Gorgas at the birth of her son, William Crawford. In 1848 Dr. Nott published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal in which he made the fantastic claim that malaria and yellow fever were undoubtedly conveyed by insects and possibly by the mosquito. His mention of the mosquito was only in passing. His main point was that the spread of the disease could not be explained by any laws governing vapors or gases. But in 1854 a “traveling naturalist” for the Paris Museum, Lewis Beauperthuy, then in Venezuela, concluded that malaria and yellow fever “are produced by a venomous fluid injected under the skin by mosquitoes like poison injected by snakes.” Swamps and marshes spread sickness, he said, not by the vapors they exuded, but because mosquitoes bred there. In Washington, a Dr. Albert Freeman Africanus King, a professor of obstetrics, had arrived at the same conclusion.

In 1880, the very year de Lesseps launched his Compagnie Universelle, a French doctor on the staff of a military hospital in Algeria, Dr. Alphonse Laveran, discovered the presence of tiny crescent-shaped bodies wriggling in a blood sample taken from a malaria patient. Incalculably minute, they were detectable only under the strongest microscope, but he had little doubt that they were living organisms and it dawned on him that here was the cause of malaria. He described his discoveries in a letter to the Académie de Médecine in Paris and published a small monograph. Laveran’s claims were not accepted, however, any more than were the theories of Nott or King. The miasma theory had been fixed in people’s minds for generations. In addition, there now appeared a rival claim that seemed to support the miasma theory with scientific fact. Two doctors working in Rome, a German named Klebs and an Italian, Tommasi-Crudeli, had isolated a bacteria from the soil of a malarious region that when injected into a rabbit produced a malaria-like fever. The phenomenal discoveries of Pasteur and Koch had educated everyone to the role of bacteria, that whole other world beneath the microscope, and so it was widely accepted that a bacterium—bacillus malariae—was the long-sought cause of malaria.

Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay was the son of a Scottish father and a French mother. He had been educated in France and at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, and having practiced medicine in Havana for twenty-odd years, he had concluded that yellow fever was not only transmitted by the mosquito but by a specific mosquito—a silvery, comparatively noiseless household variety, Stegomyia fasciata (later to be called Aëdes aegypti). Out of some eight hundred known varieties, he had picked this one as the carrier of the disease.

Like Nott, Beauperthuy, and King, Finlay had the right idea about mosquitoes, and with astonishing precision he had singled out the right variety. Gorgas was to call it a splendid example of medical clairvoyance, “a beautiful manifestation of scientific imagination.” However, it made little difference. Finlay was utterly ignored.

And all the while, in the lovely gardens surrounding the hospital, thousands of ring-shaped pottery dishes filled with water to protect plants and flowers from ants provided perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. Even in the sick wards themselves the legs of the beds were placed in shallow basins of water, again to keep the ants away, and there were no screens in any of the windows or doors. Patients, furthermore, were placed in the wards according to nationality, rather than by disease, with the result that every ward had its malaria and yellow-fever cases. As Dr. Gorgas was to write, had the French been consciously trying to propagate malaria and yellow fever, they could not have provided conditions better suited for the purpose.

But if malaria and yellow fever were airborne, if plague could come or go with the wind, if the slimy pools and swamps along the railroad and the suffocating back streets of Colón and Panama City were the sources of deadly night airs and miserable death, it was also “known” that not everyone was in equal jeopardy. Fever struck according to a discernible pattern. Some people stood a better chance of surviving than did others, as countless examples attested. Simply stated, the odds on one’s survival were in direct proportion to one’s moral fortitude. The clean, blameless life was the long life in the tropics. Confidence, courage, belief in one’s destiny, a “disdain of peril,” as Philippe Bunau-Varilla would say, also mattered enormously. Debauchery, sins of the flesh, moral or physical cowardice, were sure paths to ruin.

The French were accustomed to wine with meals and wine happened also to be a great deal safer to drink than the local water,

The partners Couvreux and Hersent declared themselves honor-bound to say that the excavation could be carried forward more effectively without them. The canal could proceed faster and at less cost, it was said, by parceling the work out to a number of smaller contractors, each specializing in a particular task, an arrangement partly in effect and showing excellent results. The canal company henceforth should merely supervise the work on its own. To this de Lesseps obligingly agreed; the contract was not renewed, and Couvreux and Hersent were out in the clear. The real reason for the break, however, appears to have been rather different, as revealed by subsequent investigations conducted by the Chamber of Deputies. The death of the resourceful Gaston Blanchet had been a disheartening blow to Couvreux, Hersent et Compagnie. Nor was there anyone else in the firm of comparable ability who was willing to go to Panama and take Blanchet’s place. But much more important was the realization, after two years, that the canal could never be built in anything like the time or for anywhere near the cost foreseen by the exuberant Grand Français, whose glowing declarations often as not were derived from figures and forecasts supplied by Couvreux and Hersent.

For the next two years, from early 1883 until the summer of 1885, he was to direct the largest, most ambitious engineering effort the world had as yet seen. His decisions were not to be the best always. Before sailing from France he also made the unfortunate declaration that once on the Isthmus he would prove that “only drunkards and the dissipated take the yellow fever and die there.” Still it would be a long time before a more effective chief engineer would be dispatched to Panama—not until Theodore Roosevelt sent John Stevens in 1905—and Jules Dingler was to pay a dreadful price for his devotion to the work.

According to the company’s records 125 employees died in 1882, more than twice the number given for the first year. In 1883 there were 420 recorded deaths, or almost eight times the number given the first year. Yet such figures can be taken as only suggestive. Patients in the company hospitals were charged $1 a day, nearly a day’s wages. While the company covered this expense for its own employees, all but a fraction of the labor force worked for the contractors, not the company. Aware of what hospital expenses could amount to, familiar with the mortality rate inside the wards, the contractors were reluctant to finance such care and would even discharge a man at the first sign of illness to avoid the responsibility. Among the workers themselves the hospitals were regarded with abject horror, the common belief being that if a patient did not have malaria or yellow fever when he entered, he would very shortly. A hospital permit was considered little better than a ticket to the graveyard.1 So for all these reasons the majority of the sick never went near a hospital, and consequently, the majority of deaths never appeared in the record books. Dr. Gorgas would calculate that for every recorded death in the French hospitals there were at least two more outside that were not counted. In other words, the given casualty figures have to be multiplied by three: the toll in 1883 was closer to 1,300 than to 420.

according to one American naval officer, laborers were dying at a rate of about two hundred a month. Still the work went ahead. Travelers crossing by train were amazed by the spectacle. It was true, they wrote; a canal really was being built at Panama. Buildings were going up almost everywhere one looked. Hundreds of acres of jungle were being chopped back to make room for more. Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment was being unloaded at Colón. More and more young French recruits were arriving, more engineers, more doctors, nurses, more boats from Jamaica, their decks solid with black men. By May upwards of nineteen thousand people were at work and the payroll was running to 200,000 francs ($40,000) a day.

The worst troubles were in what was called the Cucaracha formation, composed chiefly of dark-green and reddish clays, lava mud flows, gravel, some shales. The first of the Cucaracha slides occurred on the eastern side of the Culebra Cut, where the uppermost layers of porous clay, layers overlying relatively impervious rock stratum, were from ten to forty feet thick. In the rainy season these clays became thoroughly saturated, slick and heavy, with a consistency of soap left overnight in water. But the saturation stopped at the underlying rock, and the build-up of water created a slippery zone along the whole plane of contact. If that plane happened to be tilted toward the Cut, then it was merely a matter of time until the clay began to move, by simple force of gravity, down into the Cut. Tremendous masses of the upper stratum would let go with all the effect of an avalanche, carrying with them whole sections of track, steam shovels, anything caught in the way.

French never figured a better way. It never dawned on them that digging the Cut was more a problem of transportation—of moving the spoil out of the way—than of actual excavation. They never saw that the Panama Railroad was the key, which is especially ironic considering the heavy price that had been paid to get control of the railroad. That de Lesseps had neglected to send to Panama a single specialist in railroads was among his gravest errors.

By October 1884 there were 19,243 employees at work, of whom 16,249 were blacks. To order and distribute supplies, to keep watch on contractors, to keep the books and see to the needs of this labor force, naturally required a small army of clerks, paymasters, stenographers—six to seven hundred in office help—most of whom were French.

In the years to follow, the ravages of yellow fever, malaria, typhoid fever, smallpox, pneumonia, dysentery, beriberi, food poisoning, snakebite, sunstroke, were only a shade less appalling. Ordinarily on the Isthmus, yellow fever came and went in cycles of two to three years. Now, unaccountably, it never went away and there was not a thing anyone could do. Malaria, ever present as always, remained the deadliest killer.

For the sick who never made it to the hospital—for the vast majority, that is—the end was frequently even more gruesome. The accusation that black workers were sometimes disposed of in the dumping grounds—simply rolled down an embankment, then buried beneath several tons of spoil—appears in several accounts and is undoubtedly based on fact.

:-(

From Colón the Panama Railroad ran a regular funeral train out to Monkey Hill each morning. “Over to Panama,” S. W. Plume would recall in his memorable testimony, “it was the same way—bury, bury, bury, running two, three, and four trains a day with dead Jamaica niggers all the time. I never saw anything like it. It did not matter any difference whether they were black or white, to see the way they died there. They die[d] like animals.” The rate of sickness throughout the French operations (as opposed to the mortality rate) would be as impossible to determine accurately from surviving records as the mortality rate; but it was extremely large. A conservative estimate made later by American physicians was not less than a third of the total force at any given time. So in a year such as 1884, with more than nineteen thousand at work, probably six thousand were sick.

Land on Taboga, he discovered, like land anywhere near the canal, was priced far beyond reach. He felt himself weakened—“poisoned”— by the wet heat and he took an ardent dislike to the Panamanians. At one point he was arrested for urinating in public in Panama City. His defense, that the street was nothing but an open sewer anyway, failed to sway the arresting policeman who marched him across town at gunpoint to pay a fine of one piastre (four francs). His one desire thereafter was to earn enough money to leave and in another month he was happily sailing for Martinique.

On March 31, with a strong wind blowing out of the north, the town went up in flames. The fire was the climax of what was to be called the “Prestan Uprising,” a brief reign of terror that was set off by another bloody affair in Panama City, the work of the former Panamanian president, Rafael Aizpuru. Though the French had been uneasy from the beginning about the incendiary quality of Panamanian politics—it will be recalled that de Lesseps was warned his first day on the Isthmus about Aizpuru —the violence of what happened seems to have caught them completely off guard.

Rafael Núñez, a major political figure for years, a former Liberal turned Conservative, had been elected to the presidency of Colombia and this had touched off insurrections in a number of places, including Cartagena and Buenaventura. Government troops stationed on the Isthmus were rushed off to Cartagena and Buenaventura, leaving at Colón only a token force of a few hundred men. With Panama City thus unguarded, Aizpuru, a Liberal who had been waiting his chance, led his “army” of some 250 men into the city and, after much destruction and loss of life, seized control. The loyal troops at Colón, under an officer named Gónima, then crossed by train to drive Aizpuru out. Aizpuru took refuge in the hills for the time being, but at Colón, with Gónima gone, Prestan went into action.

On the morning of March 29 the Pacific Mail steamer Colon arrived from New York with a contraband shipment of arms consigned to “order.” Prestan and his men marched to the Pacific Mail wharf and demanded that the weapons be turned over. When the order was refused by the Pacific Mail superintendent, an American named William Connor, Prestan seized him and five other Americans—the general agent of the steamship line, the American consul, the superintendent of the Panama Railroad, and two officers from the Galena, one of whom was sent out to the ship to tell his commanding officer that no hostages would be released until Prestan got the guns. Should the American commander try to land any men, Prestan said, he would kill the hostages and every other American in Colón.

A fight broke out between some of the local citizens; the Gatling was fired across the plaza at an elevation to clear the tops of the buildings and the plaza was emptied in seconds. Troops were sent across the Isthmus on improvised armored cars, flatcars fitted out with half-inch steel boiler plate and more Gatling guns. Marine guards in white sun helmets were posted at the Barbacoas bridge and at Matachín, but nothing more happened along the line. In Colón fifty-eight people were rounded up by government troops, tried for treason, and shot. Many, it would be said later, had been quite innocent.

Politically, things quieted down. The crisis passed, and seemingly without significant aftereffects. But, in fact, the rebellions in Panama and the other provinces marked a critical turning point for Colombia. The long-range repercussions would be considerable. To strengthen his position, President Núñez would proclaim a new constitution, with all real power centered in Bogotá. The nine provinces of Colombia, Panama included, were to be headed hereafter by governors appointed by the federal government—by Bogotá.

Things began coming apart now. In the office overlooking the plaza, his last reserves of strength nearly exhausted, Jules Dingler had become so short-tempered and abusive of his staff that several key people, including one division head, resigned. Late in August, close to physical and mental collapse, Dingler himself gave up and sailed for France, a lone and defeated man. He had left all his family buried in Panama. He was never to return again.

Wow

Hospital facilities, extensive as they were, were not enough. Food prices were high. Workers, black and white, were fearful of more political violence. Black workers were leaving faster than they were being replaced, going home to spend their money “before they are killed by the climate.” But, Kimball emphasized, loss of human life would never be a deterrent in itself. Money was what counted. Human life was “always cheap.”

Physicians who were at Colón and Panama City during these years would later state that more than 75 percent of all hospital patients had malaria.

Faithful to my past, when they try to stop me, I go on. —FERDINAND DE LESSEPS

On April 23, 1885, three weeks after news of the Colón fire reached Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps donned the green robe of the Académie Française. With all traditional solemnity, in the small ceremonial hall beneath the great dome of the venerable Institute, he achieved the ultimate honor in French life. He belonged now to the forty “Immortals,” the chosen of chosen. We are told that “such a galaxy of celebrities had rarely gathered” and that de Lesseps spoke with the air of a conquering general.

The triumphs of the engineers—their engineers—were real; the task was better than half finished—“the efforts actually put forth may be considered as more than half the total efforts necessary” was his exact claim and a total fiction. (Only about a tenth of the canal had been dug, as the American officer Kimball rightly judged.) The completion date, he also said, was being deferred somewhat and the original cost estimate of 1,200,000,000 francs, as set by the Paris congress, was being adopted. But such announcements went unchallenged. Nobody questioned or protested anything he said. When a man called for a formal investigation of the company’s management, there was no one in the entire hall who would even second the motion. Not until later that summer did the talk of failure begin to sound serious. Writing in the Économiste Français on August 8, the highly regarded financial editor Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, known to be an old friend of de Lesseps’, warned that unless the canal company was reorganized, “we shall see the most terrible financial disaster of the nineteenth century.” The New York Tribune, among other foreign papers, began calling the canal a “gigantic wild-cat speculation” and lamented that the poor innocent stockholders were unable to go out and see the truth for themselves.

His statistics were taken from the Bulletin, from de Lesseps’ letters to stockholders, from public pronouncements, and the like. It was shown that the projected completion date had been a fantasy from the beginning, as had every projected cost figure. No plan for the Chagres dam existed on paper as yet, after five years. The canal was doomed because the company was going to fail. The enterprise would be defeated in Paris, that is, not on the Isthmus, and it was only a matter of time. “The whole thing is a humbug, and has been so from the start.”