The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

Verging on starvation, his men devoured anything they could lay hands on, including live toads and a variety of palm nut that burned the enamel from their teeth and caused excruciating stomach cramps.

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. All at once the planet had grown very much smaller. 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.

A picture of authority, Ammen was whiskered, grizzled, like Grant himself, but with a large, imposing nose and a permanent scowl. Once, while in command of a training cruise to Panama, he had settled a mutiny on the instant by calmly shooting the two leaders. He also had an agile and resourceful mind.

was looking for the “lost” cities of the Maya, which he found, and the book describing those discoveries, Incidents of Travel in Central America, went through edition after edition.

A man from Troy, New York, counted forty dead mules along the Cruces Trail, the twisting jungle path, barely three feet wide, over which they all came from the river to Panama City.

The level of the Pacific was not twenty feet higher than that of the Atlantic, as had been the accepted view for centuries. Sea level was sea level, the same on both sides. The difference was in the size of their tides.

How many did actually die is not known. The company kept no systematic records, no body count, except for its white workers, who represented only a fraction of the total force employed over the five years of construction. (In 1853, for example, of some 1,590 men on the payroll, 1,200 were black.)

A through ticket by way of Nicaragua also cost less and, perhaps as important as everything else, Nicaragua was not known as a deathtrap.

There was no lost canal, he reported, at the conclusion of a search across hundreds of miles of Atrato wilderness. Perhaps a Spanish priest had induced his flock to make a “canoe slide,” but it was never anything more than that.

Gustave Eiffel, the only engineer to have been stained by the scandal, would be cleared later of having done any “dishonorable” act by a special committee of inquiry convened by the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor. But his career as a builder was finished; he would thereafter apply himself to wholly different work in meteorology and aerodynamics.

Gustave Eiffel never went to prison because in June of 1893 the Cour de Cassation, the supreme court of France, overruled the verdict of the Court of Appeal. Eiffel, Fontane, Cottu, Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps were all acquitted on a technical ground: the summonses for their arrest, issued November 21, 1892, had come more than three years after the most recent of their alleged crimes and so, the court ruled, they were entitled to immunity under the statute of limitations.

Roosevelt was thirty-one years old at the time Mahan’s book appeared and had already made a place for himself among the leading figures in Washington. He would expound on his views at length during evenings at the Cosmos Club, for example, and to the rapt delight (appropriately) of the young English writer Rudyard Kipling, who used to drop in about half-past ten with the express purpose of hearing the expansive young American go on.

himself had gone too far to pull back and,

When he had finished, the story goes, he looked about the table, finally fixing his eye on Elihu Root. “Well,” he demanded, “have I answered the charges? Have I defended myself?” “You certainly have, Mr. President,” replied Root, who was known for his wit. “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”

The ceremony was over. Panama, in the formal sense, had attained legal status in the family of nations. Not a Panamanian had been present; not a word had been spoken in Spanish. And as was understood by all who had participated, there remained only four days until the special commission from Panama was due in New York.

With the $10,000,000 paid to Panama and the $40,000,000 to the Compagnie Nouvelle, the United States had spent more for the rights, privileges, and properties that went with the Canal Zone—an area roughly a third the size of Long Island—than for any actual territorial acquisition in its history, more than for the Louisiana Territory ($15,000,000), Alaska ($7,200,000), and the Philippines ($20,000,000) combined.

The appointment of any employee at a salary exceeding $1,800 required the approval of the full commission. The commissioners very often had trouble agreeing with one another, while Walker’s insistence on his prerogatives as chairman had an increasingly stultifying effect. When he departed from office later, no less than 160 requisitions would be found unopened in his desk, many of them months old. On the Isthmus, to hire a single handcart for an hour required six separate vouchers. Carpenters were forbidden to saw boards over ten feet in length without a signed permit. The clerical work required for each fortnightly payroll was amazing: by September, with 1,800 workers on the books, payment took six and a half hours and involved the filling out of 7,500 separate sheets of paper weighing in all 103 pounds.

The laborers who had to put down the track for the new shovel and dirt trains did not even have the right tools. Railroad spikes were being driven with axes.

Gorgas even had the holy water in the font at the cathedral changed daily after it was found that mosquitoes were breeding there, a gesture many Panamanians looked upon as possibly some subtle new form of religious persecution.

Medical care and services on the Isthmus were in fact “as good as that which could be obtained in our first-class hospitals at home.” The Sanitary Department was currently spending $2,000,000 a year; Ancon Hospital had a staff of 470. More than a dozen new hospitals and dispensaries had been built along the line. All hospital care was free for all employees, white and black.

For the first ten months of 1906 the actual death rate among white employees was seventeen per thousand. But among the black West Indians it was fifty-nine per thousand! Black laborers, those understood to be so ideally suited to withstand the poisonous climate, were dying three times as fast as the white workers.

He was also a chain smoker and he detested fat people—with the one exception of William Howard Taft. Secretary Taft, Goethals was once heard to remark, was the only clean fat man he had ever known.

A young graduate engineer with two or three years’ experience could expect to make $250 to start, which was about $25 more than he could make in the United States. And added to his salary was the host of free benefits and services (housing, hospital care) to which all employees were entitled. His annual vacation was forty-two days with pay (this in a day when two weeks was still the standard) and he was entitled to thirty days’ sick leave with pay.

Most notable of the brothels was the Navajo, on I Street, run by one of the best known of all Americans on the Isthmus, Mamie Lee Kelly, of New Orleans, who would be remembered vividly by one man more than half a century later as “lusty, large, voluptuous, very profane and very capable.” Since all such establishments were known locally as “American houses” and their occupants, irrespective of nationality, were known as “American women,” a local ordinance was put through making it unlawful for American women to be on the streets after dark, a rule that not surprisingly gave rise to a number of unfortunate misunderstandings.

By 1910 there were also thirty-nine churches within the Zone, twenty-six of which, like the Y.M.C.A clubhouses, were built and owned by the I.C.C. Fifteen full-time chaplains were employed—three Catholic, four Episcopal, four Baptist, two Methodist, one Wesleyan, one Presbyterian—their salaries and living expenses being charged off, as someone in Goethals’ office decided, to the Sanitary Department.

Others worried more over what the future effect might be of so efficient and apparently so successful a demonstration of socialism. In this largest of all modern enterprises, reporters were writing, not one man at the top, no one at any level, was working for profit. Visiting bankers and business people went home to report that the government-run Panama Railroad was a “model of efficiency and economy in every department.” No railroad in the United States was better equipped with safety devices. No private contractor in the world was feeding laborers so well as the I.C.C. In every phase of employer-employee relations the I.C.C. was more liberal than any private concern of the day, as several publications had already emphasized. The government ran the Tivoli Hotel, very well and at a profit. The steamship line between New York and Colón, also government-run, was earning a profit of some $150,000 a year.

A member of the Socialist Party was found on the payroll, a mechanic who had been on the job almost from the start, and he declared that by no means was it socialism. “First of all, there ain’t any democracy down here. It’s a Bureaucracy that’s got Russia backed off the map . . . . Government ownership don’t mean anything to us working men unless we own the Government. We don’t here—this is the sort of thing Bismarck dreamed of.”

little official notice would ever be paid to such contributions. In that official journal of Zone life, the Canal Record—-a reliable, admirable publication in most other respects—the black employee went unrecognized, except in death, and then only in a line or two, his tag number invariably appended, as if he were not quite human. It would be reported that Joshua Steele, of Barbados, Number 23646, was killed in an explosion in the Cut or that Samuel Thomas, of Montserrat, Number 456185, was crushed to death in the pulleys of a mud scow. But no obituaries appeared in the paper, any more than notices of black weddings, social affairs, or the birth of a black child. As a consequence, the popular mental picture of what life was like in the Canal Zone, and popular pride in the kind of society that had been created there, were founded on a very limited and erroneous view of reality. The measure of Utopia achieved through American know-how and largess was again relative, like the success of the medical crusade. And as a consequence of such distortion, most all of what would be written in the way of a social history of these years contains but part of the story.

no fewer than four out of five West Indians paid rent for wretched tenements in Colón or Panama City, where one room usually served an entire family. Or, more often, they settled in the jungle, building whole villages of dynamite boxes, flattened tin cans, any odd scraps of lumber or corrugated iron that could be scavenged. They lived where they pleased, as best they could, without benefit of screen doors or janitor service, growing small gardens, always a great many chickens pecking about their small shacks, and nobody of official importance cared very much about them one way or the other.

One extremely dangerous task in the last years of the work, for example, was the demolition of the giant trees that stood in what was to be the main channel through Gatun Lake. After the trees were cut down, dynamite crews—hundreds of West Indians—chopped holes in the huge trunks, sometimes as many as fifteen holes in a single tree. Two or three sticks of dynamite were put in each hole, with cap and fuse, then plastered over with mud. The blasting began once the workday had ended and the area was clear, just as dark came on. “After the 5:15 passenger train pass for Panama, we start lighting,” remembered Edgar Simmons, another Barbadian. “Some of us has up to 65 or 72 holes to light and find our way out. So . . . you can judge the situation. . . .” Each man, torches in both hands, dashed from tree to tree, lighting fuses as fast as possible, then ran for cover. “Then it’s like Hell. Excuse me of this assertion, but it’s a fact . . . it was something to watch and see the pieces of trees flying in the air.” Afterward, the pieces were gathered up and piled and burned, a task that went on for months. Gigantic heaps of trees were doused with crude oil, then touched off—and “another Hell roar again.”

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.

the Commission of Fine Arts sent the sculptor Daniel Chester French and the landscape architect Frederick Olmsted, Jr., son of the famous creator of New York’s Central Park, to suggest ways in which the appearance of the locks and other components might be dressed up or improved upon. The two men reported: The canal itself and all the structures connected with it impress one with a sense of their having been built with a view strictly to their utility. There is an entire absence of ornament and no evidence that the aesthetic has been considered except in a few instances . . . . Because of this very fact there is little to find fault with from the artist’s point of view. The canal, like the Pyramids or some imposing object in natural scenery, is impressive from its scale and simplicity and directness. One feels that anything done merely for the purpose of beautifying it would not only fail to accomplish that purpose, but would be an impertinence.

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. If the deaths incurred during the French era are included, the total price in human life may have been as high as twenty-five thousand, or five hundred lives for every mile of the canal.

The lowest toll on record was paid by Richard Halliburton, world traveler, best-selling author, toast of the lecture platform, who in the 1920’s swam the length of the canal, doing it by installments one day at a time. He was not the first to swim the canal, but was the first to persuade the authorities to allow him through the locks. So based on his weight, 140 pounds, he was charged a toll of 36 cents.