The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

But at Panama the French had to improvise—or rather they had to learn to improvise under pressure. And they had no past experience to go by. Virtually everything had to be learned by trial and error, and their chief difficulty as time went on was the fearful cost of their errors.

For despite all de Lesseps told the press and his public, Panama had only one advantage over Suez: the distance to be covered. Everything else at Panama was infinitely more difficult.

In a country where an inch of rain can fall in an hour, 120 or 130 inches in a year may not mean a great many more than 120 or 130 hours of rain all told. Some of the most torrential downpours lasted only a few minutes. But it did rain nearly every day and it never just rained. At Colón six inches in twenty-four hours or less was not uncommon. In the single month of November, when the heaviest storms struck, rainfall along the Chagres basin—on the Atlantic slope, that is—could range from two to three feet.

At Panama City, the company bought the Grand Hotel and set up headquarters.

so.they closed the hotel to use the building

The effect of the climate on tools, clothing, everyday personal items, was devastating. Anything made of iron or steel turned bright orange with rust. Books, shoes, belts, knapsacks, instrument cases, machete scabbards, grew mold overnight. Glued furniture fell apart. Clothes seldom ever dried. Men in the field finished a day drenched to the skin from rain and sweat and had to start again the next morning wearing the same clothes, still as wet as the night before. Without laundry facilities, a clean shirt or fresh pair of trousers were luxuries beyond compare.

The legendary Flying Dutchman was founded on the story of a ship condemned to haunt the seas after yellow fever broke out on board and no country would permit the ship in its harbors.

The Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793 had been as savage as an attack of bubonic plague and doomed the supremacy of Philadelphia among the cities of North America.

The word “malaria” was from the Italian mal’aria (“bad air”), and it had been widely agreed long since that bad air, “noxious effluvium”—poisonous marsh gas in particular—was the cause.

To signal the arrival of new “ladies of leisure” on the Isthmus, a code announcement was flashed along the railroad’s telegraph line: “langoustes arrivées” (“lobsters arrived”). And the women, like the labor force and the technicians, came from every part of the world. If there was one obvious characteristic of the so-called French years that would be misunderstood in time to come, it was this cosmopolitan quality of society at every level.

Older faculty members at the École des Ponts et Chaussées were now privately advising graduates not to go to Panama, saying it would be suicidal. Still there was never a shortage of able volunteers. Indeed, the young men who came over the sea to Colón were the pick of the best-trained technicians. For them the canal was a stirring opportunity, a “Cause”—grand in scale, glorious in concept, French—and they sailed as if to battle, as they themselves said repeatedly. They were warriors bearing the banner of France. Discomforts, dangers, the likelihood of a miserable death on the wrong side of the world, these, wrote Philippe Bunau-Varilla, only “exalted the energy of those who were filled with a sincere love for the great task undertaken.

Philippe Bunau-Varilla merits a great deal of attention. Everything considered, he is one of the most fascinating figures in the entire Panama story, as important and controversial as Ferdinand de Lesseps, as time would tell. And it is fair to say, as his admirers have, that without him there would have been no canal at Panama. Because he survived the so-called French years and wrote extensively, drawing on his experiences, he also provided the fullest account we have of the French effort seen from the point of view of the elite young French technician, the man upon whom, presumably, the fate of the enterprise, not to mention the national honor, rested.

When he became a celebrity in the United States years later, it would be said that he was from a prominent, wealthy Paris family. But according to his registration records at the École Polytechnique he was the son of Pamela Caroline Bunau and of a père inconnu, unknown father, which can only mean that he was an illegitimate child.

His mother, the records show, was the widow of someone named Varilla, but apparently Philippe was born well after Varilla’s death, or at least long enough so that she was obliged to give her son her maiden name.

That some ladies “not too strictly virtuous” may have been carried on the payroll is certainly possible. Simple mismanagement was conspicuous enough, according to dozens of reports; the company was swindled repeatedly in small ways.

One common deception concerned the delivery of coal at Colón. When a coal ship arrived, only part of the cargo would be landed, but vouchers were made for the full amount. The ship then departed, to return again with what supposedly was another load, for which another voucher would be given, the result being that the company paid for the same shipment twice, even three times.

The intensity of the boredom these men faced after hours, the longing for home, can be imagined. There were no restaurants or cafés of quality, no theaters in the city, no galleries, no libraries, never a concert. A walk on the old seawall, as one of them recalled, was as pleasant as could be expected, “but after one has strolled up and down it every day . . . for several months . . . it ceases to provide more than mild diversion.” Even to sit and read at night could be a misery, since the smallest lamp or candle drew swarms of insects.

such was life in Panama in the time of Nueva Grenad

The oldest of these formations dated from the geological time period known as the Oligocene, making them roughly thirty million years old. Probably the Isthmus had its beginnings in the Oligocene as a string of islands in a shallow sea. A land bridge formed, and in the long geological periods that followed, this land bridge sank back below the sea at least four different times.

In the late Pleistocene, the epoch of the glaciers—yesterday in geological time—the land was elevated to several hundred feet above its present level, then subsided again to perhaps thirty feet below the present level.

The whole history of the ground underfoot, wherever one went on the Isthmus, was of change and instability. Within the forty-plus miles between Colón and Panama City was a total of seventeen different rock formations, six major geologic faults, five major cores of volcanic rock.

To further complicate matters there remained the very basic problem of what to do with the mountains of rock and earth being excavated, and it was a problem the French failed to solve.

Natural watercourses were blocked, water gathered in great pools, acres of new swamplands were formed—all perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

That de Lesseps had neglected to send to Panama a single specialist in railroads was among his gravest errors.

The large Anglo-Dutch Company—its formal name was Cutbill, de Longo, Watson, and Van Hattum—had the Culebra contract and was bound to remove 700,000 cubic meters a month. As yet it had managed to remove 100,000 cubic meters in a month. Still it hung on, subcontracting the most troublesome tasks to more and more small operators. One high hill on the western slope of the saddle soon had so many different contractors laboring away that it became known as Contractors Hill.

New arrivals, unaccustomed to the climate, suffered worst. The files of the Panama Star & Herald carry the obituaries of individual French officials who had been on the Isthmus so brief a time as to be scarcely known. A new French consul, Paul Savalli, died on July 25, 1885, having only arrived at his post.

Bunau-Varilla estimated that of every one hundred new arrivals at least twenty died, and of those who survived, only about twenty were physically strong enough to do any real work; “and many of that number had lost the best of their intellectual value.”

Others calculated that of every four people who came out from France at least two, often three, died of fever.

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.

One of the many who did was the painter Paul Gauguin, whose entrance and exit date from a later time, but whose feelings about the experience were no doubt shared by hundreds of others. Gauguin came out from France with another young painter, Charles Laval, in 1887. It was Gauguin’s first attempt to escape the atmosphere of Europe. The dream was to buy some land on Taboga and live “on fish and fruit for nothing . . . without anxiety for the day or for the morrow,” as he wrote. But he was broke by the time he reached Colón, and so like countless other drifters who wound up on the Isthmus—tropical tramps, as they were called—he took a job on the canal as a common laborer.

His partner, Laval, had been making money doing portraits of canal officials, but Gauguin would have none of it, since only portraits done “in a special and very bad way” would sell.

Then early in 1885 tragedy struck, taking everyone by surprise and eliminating the sanitation problem at Colón in about the most thorough fashion possible. 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.

Pedro Prestan was a tiny Haitian mulatto with a deep-seated hatred for foreigners, white men and white North Americans most especially.

The presence of the Galena in the harbor was a routine matter (as part of the 1846 agreement with Colombia), but he was under instructions not to intercede in local matters without express orders from Washington or in the event that railroad property or services were plainly in jeopardy.

ok this is the reason why American ships were always at hand during the separation

Prestan was on the run. Falling back on Colón, he set fire to the city and in a few hours there was little left but heaps of smoldering ashes. Only the brick offices of the railroad, the steamship offices, the stone church, and a fringe of buildings along the beach were still standing. Eighteen people had been killed. Perhaps eight thousand had been made homeless.

On April 10, the Tennessee and the Swatara, under the command of Rear Admiral James Jouett, arrived at Colón with a battalion of Marines. In Panama City, crowds gathered in Cathedral Plaza to watch the Americans parade about in their smart uniforms, wheeling a Gatling gun this way and that. Only once was there any real excitement. 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.

April 24 Aizpuru met with the American officers at the Central Hotel and surrendered.

Prestan, who had fled into the jungle after firing Colón, was captured and brought back to await trial.

The grim job of cleaning up, of tending to the injured and homeless, the whole effort of rebuilding Colón from scratch—a job that would be accomplished with amazing speed—fell largely to the American railroad officials.

Prestan and Aizpuru were dealt with in due course. Wearing a black suit and derby, Prestan was marched to the tracks on Front Street and was hanged before one of the largest crowds ever seen in Colón. Aizpuru was more fortunate. He was taken to Bogotá, tried, fined, and sentenced to ten years in exile.

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.

thus beginning of Panama descent and subsequent separation

all that had happened on the Isthmus of three observant parties whose personal roles had been relatively minor, but who would not forget what they had seen and the lessons to be drawn. Philippe Bunau-Varilla was one. Another was Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero, a physician employed by the railroad. The third was Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the Wachusett,

What most impressed Bunau-Varilla and Dr. Amador Guerrero was the degree to which events had been shaped by the mere presence of American naval strength.

In May he had spoken for the first time of lottery bonds to guarantee the canal. And at the July stockholders’ meeting he had asked for and received a show of approval. Now he talked of little else. Canal bonds would be sold with numbered tickets attached, some of which, the winning tickets, would be worth large cash prizes. In the final year of the Suez Canal, when an issue of conventional bonds failed to provide funds sufficient to finish the work, just such a lottery issue had saved the canal.

The one dissatisfied individual seems to have been Philippe Bunau-Varilla, whose devotion to the work was no less for having been relieved of command, but who felt he had been slighted by Le Grand Français. In their private talks de Lesseps had expressed nothing but praise and gratitude for all the young man had done, yet said nothing to that effect publicly. “Any homage paid to any other personality but himself seemed to steal a ray from his crown of glory,” Bunau-Varilla would write years later, still resentful.

Eiffel, the most brilliant engineer in France, suddenly famous as progenitor of the gigantic iron tower being started on the Champ de Mars. Conceived as the centerpiece for another Paris exposition scheduled for 1889, the tower was to be the tallest structure on earth. The plan had caused an uproar—many Parisians foresaw their city disfigured by an iron monstrosity—but to the vast majority of the public, the tower, like the canal at Panama, was a bold affirmation of French genius, French supremacy in the art of civilization.

Defeat appeared inevitable and it was. Of the 2,000,000 bonds offered, less than half—800,000—were sold.

Weilz Arts still carrier these bonds but ises them as canvas for allegorical paintings of the canal

Panama, to be sure, had remained a major topic. Some 800,000 French men and women had been directly affected, the savings of entire families had utterly vanished. People who could ill afford to lose anything had lost everything.

The prospect of the tragedy being compounded by a sensational and ruinous scandal was neither anticipated nor desired by the public at large. And very possibly there would never have been an affaire de Panamá had it not been for the country’s leading anti-Semite, the strange, secretive Édouard Drumont.

He would be tried twice, in two separate courts on different charges. The first trial was for fraud and maladministration, for “fraudulent maneuvers to induce belief in unreal schemes, and to raise imaginary hopes of the realization of a chimerical event.” The second trial was for corruption of public officials—political bribery. And since the elder de Lesseps was to be excused from appearing, because of his health and advanced age, Charles would bear the entire weight of the defense.

“Panama” had become a universal term of abuse, and, for many, a battle cry.