The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

Reports for the fiscal year 1907–1908, the point at which Goethals replaced Stevens, show that 1,273 employees died of all causes. At the end of the construction era, that is, in fiscal year 1913–1914, deaths from all causes totaled 414, a phenomenal reduction. In 1907–1908 there had been 205 deaths from malaria; in the final year of construction, there were only 14. Deaths from pneumonia dropped from 466 to 50. As remarkable as any statistic was the average death rate in the final year among all employees—7.92 per thousand, which was much lower than the general death rate in the United States. Not even in Washington, Montana, or Nebraska, then the healthiest states in the country, was the death rate lower than it was in the Canal Zone.

Of the total 414 deaths for the final year, 30 were white Americans, 31 were white employees of other nationalities. All the rest, 353, were black. The death rate among all white employees from the United States was actually a mere 2.06 per thousand, an almost unbelievably low figure and deserving all the acclaim that ensued, but the death rate among black workers was 8.23. So, in fact, for all the medical progress that had been made, Panama was still four times more deadly for the black man than it was for the white.

Had the black labor force been housed in screened quarters comparable to those provided the white employees, in areas where the sanitary officers exercised control, malaria might possibly have been eradicated, as had yellow fever. As it was, the total loss from disease in the ten years it took to build the canal was less than five thousand people. But Gorgas later declared that if conditions had remained as they had been during the French era, the death toll would have been upward of seventy-eight thousand (figured on a death rate of two hundred out of every one thousand employees). That a man such as James Williams, or the many thousands of others who took sick, survived at all was regarded, by black laborers as much as by anyone, as a miracle of medical progress.

There seemed to be but one aspect of progress on the Isthmus over which one might reasonably express some skepticism or concern. Relations between the canal builders and the local populace, uneasy from the beginning, had deteriorated markedly. “In temperament and tradition we are miles away from the Panamanians,” noted The Outlook correspondent. “ . . . The age-old hostility to the ‘Gringo’ is deep-rooted. Differences in language, customs and religious practices keep the breach wide.” To the average American, Panama was a land of dark, ignorant, undersized people who very obviously disliked him. (“It is hard to like people who have evidently made up their mind to dislike you.”) It was said that the whole country had a “chronic case of sulks.” The Panamanian—any Panamanian, regardless of position or social status—was a “Spiggotty” or “Spig,” terms supposedly derived in earlier years from the erroneous claim of Panama City hackmen that they could “speaks-da-English.” It was thought that the Panamanian showed too little gratitude for all that was being done for him. When Robert Wood declared in a speech years afterward that the United States had created all the wealth in Panama, he was expressing the profound conviction of virtually every American who worked on the canal.

With the advance of the waters of Gatun Lake, as thousands of villagers were dispossessed of their land and homes and were moved to new sites on higher ground, very few of them felt that they were given fair compensation and bitterly resented the arbitrary fashion in which their new locations were decided for them. “The Americans took awful advantage of the poor people, because they had no one to speak for them,” one woman would remark sadly, more than sixty years later, remembering the home her family had been forced to abandon.

The charge was that $200,000 to $300,000 had disappeared from the Panamanian treasury, the discovery having been made only when Obaldía took office. Goethals appears to have learned of it first on October 8, 1908, in a confidential letter from Admiral Rousseau written when Goethals was away from the Isthmus on official business. “It is said Amador gets half the loot himself,” Rousseau reported. “Not only that Amador charged up to the Panamanian Government all sorts of private entertainment, presents, etc. given President and Mrs. Roosevelt, Secretary Taft, Secretary and Mrs. Root, and also Miss Roosevelt’s wedding present. The pieces charged up are 5 to 10 times actual expenditures. Obaldía and his party are ‘mad’ all the way through and threaten to publish far and wide just what Amador has done.” But as Rousseau further explained it had been agreed to keep the story “bottled up,” out of respect to Roosevelt and his family. Nor was any official alarm expressed over the larger animosities between the two peoples. If such feelings prevailed, the consensus seemed to be, they had always prevailed, from the time the first wave of gold prospectors came ashore in 1849. And doubtless there was no quick or ready solution. To the average American at work on the canal, the aggrieved pride or “smoldering wrath” of the Panamanian (to use the words of one reporter) was of only marginal concern. There would be time enough later to resolve such difficulties. For now the work was going too...

Everything is on a colossal scale. —Scientific American March 18, 1911

But it was also in the closing years of the task that the great locks took form for all to see and they were the most interesting and important construction feats of the entire effort. They were the structural triumphs at Panama. In their overall dimensions, mass, weight, in the mechanisms and ingenious control apparatus incorporated in their design, they surpassed any similar structures in the world. They were, as was often said, the mighty portals of the Panama Gateway. Yet they were something much more than monumental; they did not, like a bridge or a cathedral, simply stand there; they worked. They were made of concrete and they were made of literally thousands of moving parts. Large essential elements were not built, but were manufactured, made in Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Schenectady, and other cities. In a very real sense they were colossal machines, the largest yet conceived, and in their final, finished form they would function quite as smoothly as a Swiss watch. They were truly one of the engineering triumphs of all time, but for reasons most people failed to comprehend.

To build the Great Pyramid or the Wall of China or the cathedrals of France, blocks of stone were set one on top of the other in the age-old fashion. But the walls of the Panama locks were poured from overhead, bucket by bucket, into gigantic forms. And within those forms there had to be still other forms to create the different culverts and tunnels, the special chambers and passageways, required inside the walls. Everything had to be created first in the negative, in order to achieve the positive structure wanted. Moreover, the creation of the building material itself was a “science” requiring specific, controlled measurements and a streamlined system of delivery from mixing plant to construction site. Timing was vital. Concrete—a combination of sand, gravel, and portland cement (itself a mixture of limestone and clay)—had been known since the time of the Romans, but was used very little as a building material until the late nineteenth century and then mainly for subbasements and floors. Dry docks and breakwaters were built of reinforced (or ferro) concrete—concrete in which metal rods are added—and in the early 1900’s several major buildings were built of the same material in Europe and the United States, as well as silos, some small bridges, and a Montgomery Ward warehouse in Chicago. George Morison drew up plans for his concrete bridge over Rock Creek Park in Washington, and by 1912 a tremendous concrete railroad bridge, the Tunkhannock Viaduct, was under way near Scra...

The lock chambers all had the same dimensions (110 by 1,000 feet) and they were built in pairs, two chambers running side by side in order to accommodate two lanes of traffic. The single flight at Gatun consisted of three such pairs. There was one pair at Pedro Miguel and two at Miraflores, making six pairs (twelve chambers) in all. The chambers in each pair shared a center wall that was sixty feet wide from bottom to top. The width of the side walls was forty-five to fifty feet at the floor level, but on the outside they were constructed as a series of steps, each step six feet high, starting from a point twenty-four feet from the base level. So at the top, the side walls were only eight feet wide. The floors of the chambers were solid concrete, anywhere from thirteen to twenty feet thick.

But as resourceful as Schildhauer had been in this and other designs, as notably as he and Goldmark succeeded in everything they undertook, the end results were, above all, a stunning demonstration of how very far industrial technology had advanced. Among the more fascinating facts about the Panama Canal, for example, is that all hardware for the lock gates—the lifting mechanisms for the stem valves, the special bearings, gears, and struts for the gate machines, all ninety-two bull wheels—was made by a single manufacturer in Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1878, only thirty-five years before, the Quaker ironmaster Daniel J. Morrell had marveled at certain relatively simple steel castings displayed by the French at their Universal Exposition in Paris. Most of what he had seen was quite beyond the most advanced work at Pittsburgh then or at his own mills in Johnstown. Now a comparatively small organization, the Wheeling Mold and Foundry Company, in a comparatively small industrial center, could produce castings in sizes and quantities unimagined in 1878, and of alloy steels formerly used in small quantities only for fine tools and cutlery. Carbon steel, nickel steel, vanadium steel, steels of exceptional strength and high resistance to corrosion, were being developed for naval armament before the turn of the century, but it was the advent of the automobile that spurred their real production. Vanadium steel, for instance, had been adopted by the Ford Motor Company for use in its ...

For the still young, still comparatively small General Electric Company the successful performance of all such apparatus, indeed the perfect efficiency of the entire electrical system, was of the utmost importance. This was not merely a very large government contract, the company’s first large government contract, but one that would attract worldwide attention. It was a chance like none other to display the virtues of electric power, to bring to bear the creative resources of the electrical engineer. The canal, declared one technical journal, would be a “monument to the electrical art.” It had been less than a year since the first factory in the United States had been electrified.

It was 6:45 when the last gates were opened in the third and last lock and the tug steamed out onto the surface of Gatun Lake. The day had come and gone, it was very nearly dark, and as the boat turned and pointed to shore, her whistle blowing, the crowd burst into a long cheer. The official time given for this first lockage was one hour fifty-one minutes, or not quite twice as long as would be required once everything was in working order. That an earthquake should strike just four days later seemed somehow a fitting additional touch, as if that too were essential in any thorough testing-and-proving drill. It lasted more than an hour, one violent shudder following another, and the level of magnitude appears to have been greater than that of the San Francisco quake of 1906. The needles of a seismograph at Ancon were jolted off the scale paper. Walls cracked in buildings in Panama City; there were landslides in the interior; a church fell. But the locks and Gatun Dam were untouched. “There has been no damage whatever to any part of the canal,” Goethals notified Washington.

The first complete passage of the canal took place almost incidentally, as part of the new workaday routine, on January 7, when an old crane boat, the Alexandre La Valley, which had been brought up from the Atlantic side sometime previously, came down through the Pacific locks without ceremony, without much attention of any kind. That the first boat through the canal was French seemed to everyone altogether appropriate.

That so vast and costly an undertaking could also be done without graft, kickbacks, payroll padding, any of the hundred and one forms of corruption endemic to such works, seemed almost inconceivable at the start, nor does it seem any less remarkable in retrospect. Yet the canal was, among so many other things, a clean project. No excessive profits were made by any of the several thousand different firms dealt with by the I.C.C. There had not been the least hint of scandal from the time Goethals was given command, nor has evidence of corruption of any kind come to light in all the years since. Technically the canal itself was a masterpiece in design and construction. From the time they were first put in use the locks performed perfectly.

Changes have been made in the canal as time passed: the Cut was widened to five hundred feet, a storage dam was built across the Chagres about ten miles above Gamboa, and the original towing locomotives were retired and replaced by more powerful models made in Japan. But fundamentally, and for all general appearances, the canal remains the same as the day it opened and its basic plan has been challenged in only one respect. It has been argued that the separation of the two sets of locks at the Pacific end was a blunder, that it would have been a more efficient canal had the Pacific locks been built as a unit at Miraflores, just as at Gatun. But those who have had the most experience with running the canal in recent years do not regard the Pacific arrangement as a limiting factor, and indeed various tests run by the Panama Canal Company through the years indicate that Gatun is actually more of a bottleneck. With certain improvements, the engineers believe the capacity of the present canal could be increased to about twenty-seven thousand ships a year.

The creation of a water passage across Panama was one of the supreme human achievements of all time, the culmination of a heroic dream of four hundred years and of more than twenty years of phenomenal effort and sacrifice. The fifty miles between the oceans were among the hardest ever won by human effort and ingenuity, and no statistics on tonnage or tolls can begin to convey the grandeur of what was accomplished. Primarily the canal is an expression of that old and noble desire to bridge the divide, to bring people together. It is a work of civilization.

Even in the locks there was comparatively little noise. Something so important as the Panama Canal, something so large and vital to world commerce, ought somehow to make a good deal of noise, most people seemed to feel. But it did not. Bells clanged on the towing locomotives now and again and there was the low whine of their engines, but little more than that. There was little shouting back and forth among the men who handled the lines, since each knew exactly what he was to do. The lock gates appeared to swing effortlessly and with no perceptible sound.

Once, in a paper addressed “To the Young Engineers Who Must Carry On,” Stevens said something with which all of these remarkable men would assuredly have agreed—for all that had happened to the world since Panama. His faith in the human intellect and its creative capacities remained undaunted, Stevens wrote. The great works had still to come. “I believe that we are but children picking up pebbles on the shore of the boundless ocean. . . .”