The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

The one sin Le Grand Franèais might be found guilty of was excessive optimism. But it was only the optimist who succeeded in this world. Pessimists were never anything but spectators.

Nor, it should be noted, was there anything strictly illegal or even unorthodox about such practices. What impressed the committee most, in fact, was the extent of services rendered for money invested. As large a sum as 12,000,000 to 13,000,000 francs might seem, it represented only about I percent of the company’s total expenditures. Of course, it was regrettable, the committee declared, that the press had need to resort to such practices, but such were the realities of survival.

Spoofs of his flight from the detectives became the delight of the Paris music halls and among the most fascinated observers at his trial was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who did a series of rapid pencil sketches of the proceedings.

There was no grand funeral procession; there were no crowds at the graveside services, only the family, a representative of the Société de Géographie, one very old boyhood friend, and the directors of the Suez Canal Company. The Suez company paid all the funeral expenses. In the eulogies the word “Panama” was never mentioned.

The root sources of his downfall had been apparent since the Paris congress of 1879: the insistence on a sea-level passage through country he knew nothing about, the total disinterest in conceptions other than his own, the refusal to heed voices of experience, the disregard for all data that either conflicted with or that appeared to vitiate his own cherished vision; but none of these would have mattered greatly had it not been for that extraordinary ability to inspire the loyalty and affection of individual human beings at every social and intellectual level.

“That is what the Attorney General would call all great adventures which do not succeed. But humanity has need of such illusions. And when a great people is no longer kindled by them, then it must resign itself to be but a stolid ox, head bowed to earth.”

can also be said, and with certainty, that nothing whatever would have been attempted or accomplished at Panama had it not been for Ferdinand de Lesseps, a point missing from the postmortems of the 1890’s, largely since the actual work itself had been either forgotten or was assumed to be utterly without value. In

Nobody talked of the hospitals that had been built, the offices, storehouses, and dock facilities, the living quarters and machine shops; the maps, plans, surveys, and hydrographic data that had been assembled; the land that had been acquired or the Panama Railroad. And the fact that more than 50,000,000 cubic meters of earth and rock had been removed from the path of the canal, an amount equal to two-thirds of the total excavation at Suez, was virtually forgotten.

A canal was beyond the capacity of any purely private enterprise; that much now was plain. It must be a national undertaking. The United States appeared to be the one nation ready to mount such an effort, and if the American people had drawn one overriding conclusion from the French disaster, it was that the place not to build a canal was Panama.

The failure of the French—“the greatest failure in modern times”—was above all a lesson in geography.

He was the first President to call his official residence the White House (rather than the Executive Mansion), the first to be known by his initials, the first to take up tennis, which he played badly but with explosive verve, the first to be photographed jumping on horseback.

By the time he was appointed to the staff of the War College, after thirty years in the service, he was still, in his own words, “drifting on the lines of simple respectability as aimlessly as one ever could.”

A naval base had been established at Cuba. Hawaii had been annexed. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines had been acquired, and the canal had become an enormously popular cause largely as a result of an incident early in the war, the celebrated “Voyage of the Oregon.”

On May 24, sixty-seven days after leaving San Francisco, the Oregon was spotted off Palm Beach, Florida, and the news was flashed across the country. She had arrived in time to play a part in the Battle of Santiago Bay. Though the voyage was hailed as “unprecedented in battleship history,” a triumph of American technology and seamanship, it was the implicit lesson of the experience that would matter in the long run. “By that experience,” wrote Mark Sullivan, social historian of the era, “America’s vague ambition for an Isthmian canal became an imperative decision.” As a demonstration of the military importance of the canal, it had been made to order.

He was not an imperialist, he insisted. It was inconceivable to him that Americans could ever be viewed as imperialistic. In all the United States he had never met an imperialist, he once said before an audience in Utah. He was personally offended by the charge. Expansion was different; it was growth, it was progress, it was in the American grain. He was striving to lead his generation toward some larger, more noble objective than mere moneymaking.

To each generation was allotted a task, Roosevelt knew. “I wish to see the United States the dominant power on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.”

Morgan noted that England had once done everything short of war to prevent the canal at Suez, but then took it over after the work was completed. Allegedly this could again be the intent.

Any ordinary citizen who dared even to suggest that perhaps the French had picked the best place after all, or that a Panama canal ought not be dismissed out of hand because it was a French idea or because it would be a Panama canal, spoke virtually alone.

The Nicaragua line is in comparatively wild country which has not been explored to anything like the same extent that the Panama line has. The Panama line has been a great thoroughfare, traveled for two or three hundred years. It has been examined with reference to a canal for many years past . . . and the country along the line is cleared up so that one can see what he is doing.

An underlying theme in much of the testimony was that industrious, practical, moral men—Americans—might succeed where others had failed. Indeed, in an inverse way, the downfall of the French, the sheer unpleasantness and difficulty of taking the Panama route, began to have a peculiar, compelling kind of attraction. The pesthole could be a proving ground, an opportunity to succeed gloriously, for all the world to see, where a less industrious, less manly, and less virtuous people had failed so ignominiously.

One witness, a railroad contractor, had told Morgan in a letter, “Engineers are sometimes the least practical of men, they may be attracted by difficulties. . . . .”

Panama was the place to build the canal for the following reasons, Hanna began, as his secretary, who sat behind him, handed up a sheaf of papers. One: A Panama canal would be 134.57 miles shorter, terminal to terminal. Two: It would have considerably less curvature. Three: The time in transit, by steam, would be less than half that at Nicaragua—twelve hours against thirty-three. Four: Panama required fewer locks. Five: Panama had better harbors. Six: Panama was “a beaten track in civilization.” Seven: Panama had a railroad “perfect in every respect.” Eight: A Panama canal would cost less to run. Nine: “All engineering and practical questions involved in the construction of the Panama canal are satisfactorily settled and assured. . . .”

By the treaty the Compagnie Nouvelle was authorized to sell its “rights, privileges, properties, and concessions” to the United States, and Colombia granted the United States control of a canal zone six miles wide from Colón to Panama City, but not including either of those cities. The franchise was for a hundred years and was renewable at the option of the United States. In return the United States was to pay the Republic of Colombia the lump sum of $10,000,000 cash (gold) plus an annual rent of $250,000.

Until 1903, Du Bois said, Colombia was the best friend the United States had south of the Rio Grande.

Those who were there included his old friend Senator José Agustín Arango, Carlos Constantino Arosemena, and an American named Herbert G. Prescott, all of whom, like the doctor, were employees of the Panama Railroad and had been in regular communication with William Nelson Cromwell. Arango, a senator from the Department of Panama, was the railroad’s attorney on the Isthmus, its land agent and chief lobbyist; Arosemena was a staff civil engineer; Prescott was the assistant superintendent.

To inform the others in Panama City of this scheme, and of a plan to hijack the Cartagena, it was decided to make up an unscheduled train and send Meléndez’ daughter across. Aminta Meléndez, a tiny, cheerful eighteen-year-old who appeared considerably younger than her age, made the journey as asked, an act of considerable courage, which she would modestly discount afterward. She was neither stopped nor questioned by anyone. She simply found Arango, whom her father regarded as the real leader of the movement, and delivered the message. And as things turned out, the information had no effect one way or the other, since neither scheme was to be necessary, but Aminta Meléndez and her “ride” would become an essential element in the story of the revolution. In a favorite version she would be pictured as riding in the cab with the engineer, when in fact she sat quite comfortably in a coach.

At dusk, as the municipal council met to give the junta its formal recognition, the Colombian gunboat Bogotá opened fire, throwing five or six shells into the city, killing one man—a Chinese shopkeeper who had been asleep in bed—and a donkey. These were the day’s only casualties. When a shore battery responded, the ship withdrew behind an island in the bay and was heard from no more. The Padilla, meantime, had kept perfectly silent.

In several public appearances Theodore Roosevelt by now had mentioned “an old adage which runs, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.’ ” By the big stick he meant a strong Navy and he was wielding it for the first time. The latest orders from Washington were to prevent the landing of Colombian troops anywhere within the Department of Panama, not merely in the vicinity of the railroad. On the Pacific side the Boston and the Concord patroled as far east as the Gulf of San Miguel. More American troops were landed, some were sent into the interior.

Colombia, had it had free access from the sea, could have landed several thousand veteran troops on both sides of the Isthmus, just as the conspirators themselves had appreciated from the beginning. As it was, a Colombian force of some two thousand men did attempt an overland march through the Darien wilderness, but ravaged by fever, they gave up and turned back.

Accordingly I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.

“I took Panama because Bunau-Varilla brought it to me on a silver platter,” Roosevelt is supposed to have remarked privately, which would be a more accurate summation.

And in fact one need only review the steps by which the plot unfolded to see how very tenuous it all had been and how many critical turns were determined by the individual responses of people about whom Theodore Roosevelt knew nothing.

Had James Shaler not pulled the signal cord when he did, had Señora Amador failed to fire her husband’s flagging resolve, had the Colombian general Tobar been less concerned over his injured dignity, had he gone peacefully to Colón and merely remained there quietly with Torres and the troops, had any of a dozen small but critical developments gone differently, Theodore Roosevelt’s ships would have arrived to find a wholly different situation and in all probability there would have been no new Republic of Panama either to proclaim or to protect.

For Colombia, already crippled by a costly civil war, Roosevelt’s “most important action” meant the loss of what since the days of Bolívar had appeared to be its most valuable natural treasure, the Isthmus, with its unique geographic position “between two oceans.”

There were riots in Bogotá; desperate offers were to be made by special Colombian emissaries dispatched to Washington, including an offer to accept the treaty as it stood, which served only to satisfy the Administration conclusively that the earlier rejection of the treaty had been an outrageous act of extortion.

The United States was empowered to construct a canal through a zone ten miles in width (in contrast to a zone of six miles in the Hay-Herrán pact). Colón and Panama City were not to be part of the zone, but the sanitation, sewerage, water supply, and maintenance of public order in these terminal cities were placed under United States control. Further, four little islands in the Bay of Panama—Perico, Naos, Culebra, and Flamenco—were granted to the United States and the United States had the right to expropriate any additional land or water areas “necessary and convenient” for the construction, operation, sanitation, or defense of the canal. In return the United States guaranteed the independence of Panama.

He was standing on the platform as the Panamanians stepped off the train and his first words were these: “The Republic of Panama is henceforth under the protection of the United States. I have just signed the Canal Treaty.” According to Bunau-Varilla’s own account, Amador looked as though he was about to faint. Federico Boyd, again according to Bunau-Varilla, was no less able to mask his “consternation.” But as the story would be told later in Panama, considerably more than consternation was expressed. The Panamanians had been by stages incredulous, indignant, then livid with rage. Federico Boyd is said to have hit Bunau-Varilla across the face.

The actual delivery of the canal works at Panama occurred early on the morning of May 4, 1904, and to the Panamanians, who adored ceremony and celebration, who remembered Cathedral Plaza festooned with palm branches and French flags, who remembered parades and banquets and Ferdinand de Lesseps prancing on horseback, it was a terrible disappointment and most unbecoming to the occasion.

No force would be required to raise or lower the level of water in the locks (and thus to raise or lower a ship in transit) other than the force of gravity. The water would simply flow into the locks from above—from Gatun Lake or Miraflores Lake—or flow out into the sea-level channels. The water would be admitted or released through giant tunnels, or culverts, running lengthwise within the center and side walls of the locks, culverts eighteen feet in diameter,

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.

The first oceangoing ship to go through the canal was a lowly cement boat, the Cristobal, and on August 15 the “grand opening” was performed almost perfunctorily by the Ancon. There were no world luminaries on her prow. Goethals again watched from shore, traveling from point to point on the railroad.

For by ironic, tragic coincidence the long effort at Panama and Europe’s long reign of peace drew to a close at precisely the same time. It was as if two powerful and related but vastly different impulses, having swung in huge arcs in the forty some years since Sedan, had converged with eerie precision in August 1914. The storm that had been gathering over Europe since June broke on August 3, the same day the Cristobal made the first ocean-to-ocean transit.

Across Europe and the United States, world war filled the newspapers and everyone’s thoughts. The voyage of the Cristobal, the Ancon’s crossing to the Pacific on August 15, the official declaration that the canal was open to the world, were buried in the back pages. There were editorials hailing the victory of the canal builders, but the great crescendo of popular interest had passed; a new heroic effort commanded world attention. The triumph at Panama suddenly belonged to another and very different era.

The other cost since 1904, according to the hospital records, was 5,609 lives from disease and accidents. No fewer than 4,500 of these had been black employees. The number of white Americans who died was about 350.

The total volume of excavation accomplished since 1904 was 232,440,945 cubic yards and this added to the approximately 30,000,000 cubic yards of useful excavation by the French gave a grand total, in round numbers, of 262,000,000 cubic yards, or more than four times the volume originally estimated by Ferdinand de Lesseps for a canal at sea level and nearly three times the excavation at Suez.

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.

Among those who were most profoundly stirred by the opening of the canal in August 1914 were Charles de Lesseps and Admirals Alfred Thayer Mahan and Thomas Oliver Selfridge, all three quietly retired, but each still very much alive.

Philippe Bunau-Varilla, having declared it a moment of glory for Goethals (and for “the Genius of the French nation”), rushed home to fight. He lost a leg at Verdun and in later years could be seen “taking his exercise” on the Champs Élysées, a tiny, upright figure marching along on a wooden leg, eyes front, his chauffeur in a limousine following slowly some distance behind.

“One of the rather contemptible features of a number of our worthy compatriots,” he wrote privately to Bunau-Varilla, “is that they are eager to take advantage of the deeds of the man of action when action is necessary and then eager to discredit him when the action is once over.”