The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

And all the while, in the lovely gardens surrounding the hospital, thousands of ring-shaped pottery dishes filled with water to protect plants and flowers from ants provided perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. Even in the sick wards themselves the legs of the beds were placed in shallow basins of water, again to keep the ants away, and there were no screens in any of the windows or doors. Patients, furthermore, were placed in the wards according to nationality, rather than by disease, with the result that every ward had its malaria and yellow-fever cases. As Dr. Gorgas was to write, had the French been consciously trying to propagate malaria and yellow fever, they could not have provided conditions better suited for the purpose.

Yellow fever spread by the way the French set up their hospitals.

Among the more curious facts about the French canal at Panama is that about a third of it was dug by Americans.

Wages were regarded as extremely good, about $1 to $1.50 a day, more money than most of the men had ever dreamed of making. Each worker was required to do a specific amount in a day—so many buckets of earth—but he could work at his own speed and do more if he wished, his pay being computed by the bucket.

French workers wages

By summer, forty-eight officers of the canal company had died of yellow fever alone, and according to one American naval officer, laborers were dying at a rate of about two hundred a month.

French yellow fever death rate

Had de Lesseps decided on a lock canal in the fall of 1886, had he gone to his stockholders then with a new plan, instead of sailing off to New York, the outcome of la grande entreprise might have been quite different. Possibly the dream could have had a different ending had he but spent the first part of 1887 preparing his public for the change in plans. This he did not do, however. Apparently he kept thinking that somehow, some way, the crisis could be resolved, that some miraculous turn of fate would save the sea-level canal. It is hard to imagine what turn of fate he possibly had in mind, but then he remained, as before, one who saw his own existence and all that he did as part of a glorious cosmic pattern.

De Lessops’ stubbornness led to his demise

Dr. Gorgas, from his analysis of the French records, would conclude that at least twenty thousand, perhaps as many as twenty-two thousand, died. Possibly that is high, but it remains the accepted estimate.

To him, first, last, and always, the canal was the vital—the indispensable—path to a global destiny for the United States of America. He had a vision of his country as the commanding power on two oceans, and these joined by a canal built, owned, operated, policed, and fortified by his country. The canal was to be the first step to American supremacy at sea.

Roosevelt’s belief in the need for a canal.

States were to build a Nicaragua canal, what then was to prevent some other power—by which he meant Germany—from finishing the French canal? Our competitors then, he said, would have all the advantages.

Panama, declared the old Senator at length, was “death’s nursery”; those who wished “to touch that thing” might go ahead and do so.

And Panama was the superior choice, as George Morison said, and for the reasons he, Hanna, and the others cited. Given the sort of canal that was needed, considering the size of the ships of the day, taking into account all the advantages offered by the two routes, Panama was the place. The choice was never so clear-cut as Bunau-Varilla made it out to be, and while a Nicaragua canal would have taken longer to build and would have cost more, it would not have been a failure. Furthermore, if such nonengineering concerns as health and Central American politics are entered into the discussion, as Morgan had always insisted they must be, then the issue becomes as debatable in hindsight as it was then.

Maccauleys conclusion

Concha wrote, “The desire to make themselves appear, as a Nation, most respectful of the rights of others forces these gentlemen to toy a little with their prey before devouring it, although when all is said and done, they will do so in one way or other.”

The American flag would “bring civilization into the waste places of the earth,” he had declared in one of his speeches earlier in the year.

“We have no choice as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world,” he had told another cheering crowd at San Francisco. “That has been determined for us by fate. . . .”

By refusing to allow Colombia to uphold her sovereign rights over a territory where she had held dominion for eighty years, the friendship of nearly a century disappeared, the indignation of every Colombian, and millions of other Latin-Americans, was aroused and is still most

intensely active. The confidence and trust in the justice and fairness of the United States, so long manifested, has completely vanished, and the maleficent influence of this condition is permeating public opinion in all Latin-American countries, a condition which, if remedial measures are not invoked, will work inestimable harm throughout the Western Hemisphere.

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.

Wages were ten cents an hour, ten hours a day, six days a week. Segregation by color, long an unwritten rule on the railroad, as well as in Panamanian society in general, became established policy. There were separate mess halls for blacks. Housing, schools, hospitalization, were separate and by no means equal. And it remained a “Jim Crow” railroad, though restrictions were never hard-and-fast or enforced. Travel on the line was either first or second class, and while most whites rode first class and most blacks second, low-paid white laborers frequently chose second class, just as higher-paid skilled blacks sometimes traveled in the first-class

segregation of canal work

cars. In all official rules and documents, on signs in post offices and other public places, the color line was expressed in “gold” and “silver” rather than black and white, these designations having been derived from the pay system. Pay for the unskilled work force was in Panamanian silver—balboas, as the standard coins were called. Pay for Americans, on the other hand, was in gold, that still being the monetary standard of the United States. And since nearly all the unskilled workers were black and since virtually all the Americans recruited were skilled workers and white, the terms “gold roll” (gold payroll) and “silver roll” came to be used more or less synonymously for skilled whites from the United States (who might be anything from a steam-shovel engineer to a postal clerk to a nurse to a division engineer) and for black unskilled British subjects (most likely from Barbados and most likely illiterate; but who could also be an educated, French-speaking artisan from Martinique, a Swiss surveyor, or an illiterate Spaniard or Italian).

Construction of the canal would consume more than 61,000,000 pounds of dynamite, a greater amount of explosive energy than had been expended in all the nation’s wars until that time.

Its cost had been enormous. No single construction effort in American history had exacted such a price in dollars or in human life. Dollar expenditures since 1904 totaled $352,000,000 (including the $10,000,000 paid to Panama and the $40,000,000 paid to the French company). By present standards this does not seem a great deal, but it was more than four times what Suez had cost, without even considering the sums spent by the two preceding French companies, and so much more than the cost of anything ever before built by the United States government as to be beyond compare.4 Taken together, the French and American expenditures came to about $639,000,000.

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 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.