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and only later, in hindsight, would their allegiance seem blind or his leadership purposefully deceitful.
He had asked for far too little money—less than half what even he was saying the canal would cost—and the irony is that he could have had all he thought he needed and more, right then at the start.
and conceivably he might have succeeded without payoffs to the press.
Panama had only one advantage over Suez: the distance to be covered. Everything else at Panama was infinitely more difficult.
“The canal hospitals on the Panama side are without doubt the finest and most perfect system of hospitals ever made within the tropics.”
a “disdain of peril,” as Philippe Bunau-Varilla would say,
The most horrendous and immediate problem for anyone in command was the volume and diversity of equipment in use.
“The truth is,” reads the report issued later by the Deputies committee, “that during the trial period Couvreux and Hersent had been able to form a shrewd idea of the difficulties of the enterprise but were unwilling to undermine the [canal] company’s credit by a frank admission of the motive behind their retirement.”
Among the more curious facts about the French canal at Panama is that about a third of it was dug by Americans.
These too were ladder dredges, Belgian-made and not so large or powerful as the Slaven machines, but more efficient and extremely well built.
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.
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.
Success, as the best of the French engineers understood perfectly, depended on somehow containing and controlling the Chagres, yet it remained, in Dingler’s phrase, “the great unknown.”
It was endlessly fascinating terrain to a geologist, but for the engineer it was an unrelieved nightmare.
They never saw that the Panama Railroad was the key, which is especially ironic considering the heavy price that had been paid to get control of the railroad.
So, a year after his arrival, at age twenty-seven, Bunau-Varilla found himself acting head of the entire effort.
“The Arab proverb says, ‘The dogs bark, the caravan passes.’ I passed on.”
When he departed for this, his second, tour of the Isthmus—for his first actual look at the Panama canal—Ferdinand de Lesseps was eighty years old.
The task had no parallel in history he said. Americans had far too little appreciation of what the French were attempting.
abandon the sea-level plan while there was still time.
Having toured the work, he declared that a sea-level passage was unattainable and urged the building of a canal with locks along the same path.
the delegation returned with the unanimous opinion that the sea-level plan must be dropped at once if disaster was to be averted.
And not until the sea-level plan was scrapped could there be any hope of government action in support of the lottery.
The genius of the proposal, however, its enormous value at the moment, was not in its technical ingenuity. It was the fundamental precept that a lock canal need be only a transitional step toward the old ultimate goal of a channel à niveau. It represented no betrayal of the dream. It offered de Lesseps an honorable alternative. There need be no promises broken, no semblance of retreat or failure.
The subcommission of his Advisory Commission met and endorsed the temporary lock canal;
“as of this morning” Alexandre Gustave Eiffel had been engaged to design and build the locks that would open Panama to the ships of the world.
De Lesseps considered Eiffel’s name a golden touch.
So for Eiffel to step forth now and join forces with Ferdinand de Lesseps seemed the perfect, brilliant stroke, and the announcement had an especially energizing effect on de Lesseps,
The prospect of the tragedy being compounded by a sensational and ruinous scandal was neither anticipated nor desired by the public at large.
and there was the growing conviction that France had been the victim of a diabolic conspiracy.
they had been the repeated victims of extortion.
The company had been told to pay for political support, for influence on the Bourse, for the willingness not to discredit its claims—or face the consequences.
He recalled how the first sale of lottery bonds had been wrecked by anonymous telegrams announcing his father’s death.
we were driven to paying out enormous sums right and left . . . and this mode of procedure was encouraged by the government.”
Charles Sans-Leroy said he had no idea how his initials happened to be on the incriminating check stubs.
Yet neither Floquet, nor de Freycinet, nor Clemenceau, nor Rouvier, nor anyone of importance was ever prosecuted.
But it seems reasonable to conclude that the total sum paid out for political influence and for “friendship” on the Bourse could not have been less than 20,000,000 francs, or roughly $4,000,000.
No less than 2,575 different French newspapers and periodicals had shared in the company’s beneficence.
and often as not, and especially in the early years, the confidence these men expressed in the Panama enterprise, their faith in Ferdinand de Lesseps, were perfectly genuine.
Nor, it should be noted, was there anything strictly illegal or even unorthodox about such practices.
Gustave Eiffel, the only engineer to have been stained by the scandal,
When he re-emerged to save the country in 1917, Clemenceau would be seventy-six, as old as de Lesseps had been when he set out to redeem French honor after Sedan.
Gustave Eiffel never went to prison because
The Suez company had kept him on its board of directors even during his time in prison.
And the surge of anti-Semitism that Édouard Drumont unleashed was soon to spill over into the appalling Dreyfus Affair.
His submission to the demands of financiers and crooked politicians had been, by this interpretation, as innocent as his disregard for what the engineers called practicalities.
He was both the most daring of dreamers and the cleverest of back-room manipulators.
From the technical standpoint the tragedy hung on the decision to cut through at sea level, to make another Suez Canal. Such a task at Panama was simply too overwhelming, if not impossible. The strategy did not suit the battleground.
He was involved in bribing the press,
From Suez on, as he himself once said, he enjoyed “the privilege of being believed without having to prove what one affirms.” It was this that made him such a popular force and such a dangerous man.
