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The creation of the Panama Canal was far more than a vast, unprecedented feat of engineering. It was a profoundly important historic event and a sweeping human drama not unlike that of war.
Because of it one nation, France, was rocked to its foundations. Another, Colombia, lost its most prized possession, the Isthmus of Panama. Nicaragua, on the verge of becoming a world crossroads, was left to wait for some future chance. The Republic of Panama was born. The United States was embarked on a role of global involvement.
the first grandiose and assertive show of American power at the dawn of the new century.
It was the same point from which Balboa had begun his crossing in 1513, and where, at the end of the seventeenth century, William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, had established the disastrous Scottish colony of New Edinburgh, because Caledonia Bay (as he named it) was to be the future “door of the seas.”
Panama, the last of which was still a province—indeed a most prized province—of Colombia.
or th most forgotten
And within the preceding nine months alone two of the most celebrated events of the century had occurred: the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad and the opening of the Suez Canal.
With the canal, the railroad, the new iron-screw ocean steamers, it was possible—in theory anyway—to travel around the world in a tenth of the time it would have taken a decade earlier, as Jules Verne would illustrate in his next voyage extraordinaire.
“The barrier is down!” a French prelate proclaimed on the beaches of Port Said when Suez was opened. “One of the most formidable enemies of mankind and of civilization, which is distance, loses in a moment two thousand leagues of his empire. The two sides of the world approach to greet one another . . . The history of the world has reached one of its most glorious stages.”
Man, modern man—the scientist, the explorer, the builder of bridges and waterways and steam engines, the visionary entrepreneur—had become the central creative force.
De Lesseps’ desert passage of 105 miles had brought Europe 5,800 miles closer to India. The Near East had been restored to its ancient position as a world crossroads. Africa had been made an island at a stroke. And the fact that the project had been denounced by men reputedly far wiser than de Lesseps—most especially by Britain’s own Robert Stephenson—made the ultimate triumph all the more thrilling.
If there was to be a water corridor, he wanted it in the proper place—as determined by civil engineers and naval authorities—and he wanted it under American control. “To Europeans the benefits of and advantages of the proposed canal are great,” he was to write, “to Americans they are incalculable.”
Spaniard, Alvaro de Saavedra, a kinsman of Cortés’, who supposedly “meant to have opened the land of Castilla del Oro . . . from sea to sea.” There had never been any serious possibility of a canal during Spanish times. “There are mountains, but there are also hands” was the lovely declaration of a Spanish priest of the sixteenth century, “and for a king of Castile, few things are impossible.” The priest, Francisco López de Gómara, was the first to raise the issue of location, naming Panama, Nicaragua, Darien, and Tehuantepec as the best choices, in a book published in 1552.
Humboldt’s Spanish-American travels had been the result of an unprecedented grant from the Spanish Crown to investigate wherever he wished in the cause of scientific progress. Until then explorations of any kind by foreigners within Spain’s New World realm had been strenuously discouraged. But once Spanish rule began to dissolve in the 1820’s the way was open to almost anyone.
But in January of 1848 a carpenter from New Jersey saw something shining at the bottom of a millrace at Coloma, California, and within a year Central America re-emerged from the shadows. Again, as in Spanish times, gold was the catalyst.
There were three routes to the new El Dorado—“the Plains across, the Horn around, or the Isthmus over”—and for those thousands who chose “the Isthmus over,” it was to be one of life’s unforgettable experiences.
It was also the world’s first transcontinental railroad—one track, five-foot (or broad) gauge, exactly forty-seven and one-half miles long—and the most expensive line on earth on a dollar-per-mile basis, expensive to build and expensive to travel. A one-way ticket was $25 in gold.
(The tides on the Pacific are tremendous, eighteen to twenty feet, while on the Caribbean there is little or no tide, barely more than a foot.
But of a thousand Chinese coolies, hundreds fell no less rapidly or died any less miserably of disease, and scores of Chinese workers were so stricken by “melancholia,” an aftereffect of malaria, that they had committed suicide by hanging, drowning, or impaling themselves on sharpened bamboo poles.
The United States and Great Britain had come close to war over Nicaragua, in fact, at the beginning of the gold rush, so seriously was Nicaragua’s importance as a canal site regarded on both sides of the Atlantic.
Reminds me of the book "The Panama conflict between the US and GB"
1853, for example, traffic in both directions across Panama was in the neighborhood of twenty-seven thousand people; that same year probably twenty thousand others took the Nicaragua route, going from ocean to ocean on an improvised hop-skip-and-jump system of shallow-draft steamers on the San Juan, large lake steamers, and sky-blue stagecoaches between the lake and the Pacific. The actual overland crossing at Panama was shorter and faster, but Nicaragua, being closer to the United States, was the shorter, faster route over all— five hundred miles shorter and two days faster. A through ticket
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In 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry with his “black ships” had forced Japan to open her ports to Western commerce. Seven years later the first Japanese delegation to the United States, eighteen lords wearing the swords and robes of samurai, passed through Panama on its way to Washington.
mosquitoes so thick I have seen them put out a lighted candle with their burnt bodies.” There was no longer any mystery, he mused, why the secrets of the Isthmus had remained locked up for so many hundreds of years.
the year of Austerlitz,
the battle of the three emperors
“Do not forget that to accomplish great things you must have enthusiasm,”
So at age forty-three he was without the career his background and natural gifts had so ideally suited him for, and to which he had given himself so wholeheartedly. The future was a blank page. He was in debt. Public disgrace was something he had never experienced.
Cairo opera house had been built for the occasion and Verdi had been commissioned to write a spectacular new work, Aïda.
From Panama City to Bogotá was normally a journey of three, even four weeks, though the distance on a straight line was only about five hundred miles.
Because the Darien wilderness stood between Panama and the rest of Colombia, Panama was as removed as if it were an island, and Colombia could be reached only by sea, either by the Caribbean or the Pacific.
One sailed first either to Barranquilla or to Buenaventura. The journey from Barranquilla to Bogotá involved a four-hundred-mile trip by river steamer up the Magdalena to a point called Honda, then another hundred miles over the mountains by horse or wagon. There were no railroads.
Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers. —VICTOR HUGO
was Baron Godin de Lépinay—Nicholas-Joseph-Adolphe Godin de Lépinay, Baron de Brusly—a small, bearded aristocrat who was a chief engineer with the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées (the
he proposed the scheme which finally became the Panama canal configuration
His solution was what Philippe Bunau-Varilla would call the “Idea of the artificial Nicaragua.” Incredibly and tragically, the delegates paid him no attention.
Had the delegates reacted differently, had they taken de Lépinay seriously, the story of the canal could have turned out quite differently.
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.”
A. G. Menocal, afterward, did an interesting analysis of the vote. Though the yea votes were predominantly French, not one of the five delegates from the French Society of Engineers had voted for the proposal. Of those seventy-four delegates who did declare themselves for a sea-level canal at Panama, only nineteen were engineers and of those nineteen only one had ever set foot in Central America and he was young Pedro Sosa of Panama.
But as others had learned at Suez, de Lesseps was not one to share power or glory. He denied having guaranteed Wyse a role of any kind. The young officer had served his purpose and so now he was dropped—“betrayed” Wyse felt.
John Lloyd Stephens had christened the town Aspinwall, but the Colombians had insisted on calling it Colón, for Columbus, and so a silly dispute had been dragging on ever since. To most of the older Americans it was still Aspinwall.
It was as if a western mining camp had been slapped together willy-nilly in the middle of an equatorial swamp, then left to molder and die. Once, at the height of the gold rush, there had been a kind of redeeming zest to the place, and old-timers talked of such celebrated establishments of the day as the Maison du Vieux Carré, which specialized in French girls.
Matachín was best known as the place where Chinese workers, hopelessly lost to “melancholia,” had committed suicide en masse. Matar is Spanish for “to kill,” it was explained; chino, the word for “Chinese.” The fact that matachín is also a perfectly good Spanish word meaning “butcher” or “hired assassin,” and that the place had been called that long before the railroad came through, did not seem to matter.
how many times have i heard the story , now I learn it is not true
The point he does seem to have stressed—the great lesson to be learned from his experience—was that everything, everything, had to be brought to Panama, including the men to do the work. The Panamanians themselves would be of no use. The poor were unused to heavy manual labor and were without ambition; the upper classes regarded physical work as beneath their dignity.
De Lesseps could count on Panama to provide nothing but the place to dig the canal.
the panameno identity already existed
After Emperador, or Empire, as the Americans called it, came the summit at Culebra (“snake”), or Summit Station.
is this where the park takes its name? it is nearby
With all stops en route, the delay at Barbacoas, the trip had lasted six hours. In his letter to the Bulletin, de Lesseps said they did it in three.
then you wonder why th french canal failed
The plaza was in the exact center of the city and was dominated by the old brown cathedral with its twin bell towers, the most imposing structure on the Isthmus.
the full text of a new Presidential message to Congress. The United States, Hayes avowed, would not surrender its control over any isthmian canal to any European power or combination of powers. Nor should corporations or private citizens investing in such an enterprise look to any European power for protection. “An interoceanic canal . . . will be the great ocean thoroughfare between our Atlantic and our Pacific shores and virtually a part of the coastline of the United States.” The “policy of this country is a canal under American control.”
By simply going to Panama, returning physically whole and hearty, he had worked a stunning transformation at home. His grave mistake was to underestimate his own success. His popular support now was far greater than he had any idea, and his misreading of that fact, ironically, was to prove nearly as fateful as his more obvious misreading of Panama itself.
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.
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. Early in the 1860’s, after a thorough study of the system, an American authority on education, Henry Barnard, declared it gave France the best-trained corps of civil and military
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.
the essential American spirit was improvisation. It was the attitude expressed in a remark attributed to the engineer John Fritz, who, upon building a new machine, is supposed to have said, “Now, boys, we have got her done, let’s start her up and see why she doesn’t work.”
