Books: The Creation Of The Panama Canal

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - The Panama Canal belongs to the biggest constructions humans ever created. The construction of an artificial pathway between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean changed global travel & trading enormously - but with high costs.  

The book "The Path Between the Seas - The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914" by David McCullogh reports painstakingly over more than 600 pages how this feat was done (amazon). The author also characterized the people who participated and described their fate. He tried “to present the problems they faced as they saw them, to perceive what they did not know as well as what they did know at given time”.

Surprisingly the project wasn´t started by the Americans, who benefit most from the canal, but by the French. French citizens initiated, planned, organized & financed the canal and they tried to build it, with the help of hired foreigners, mostly blacks from the Caribbean. Maybe they were guided by the belief into French grandeur and they saw France still as a world power. 

The canal was the brain child of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the famed builder of the Suez Canal. Lesseps wished to replicate his success, or even to over-trump it, come what may. He promised “that Panama will be easier to make, easier to complete, and easier to keep up than Suez”.

It is very impressive how optimistic the canal organizers and investors had been. They showed a strong believe into the future, many were apparently influenced by the science fiction pioneer Jules Verne, who created positive visions. The canal investors took high risks and put their money onto a project which didn`t promise any profit for the near term, quite opposite to the behavior these days, when hedge funds and others demand instant gratification.

Unfortunately the French underestimated the costs & risks by far. The investors shared Lesseps`s euphoria and ignored the challenges caused by swamps, tropical rainforests and the landscape. Many who came to Panama got killed by malaria & yellow fever and the construction work got hampered by landslides & earthquakes. The project was totally underfunded and went finally bankrupt, impoverishing many small investors who had "bet the farm" on the exotic project.

The Americans finally overtook the project and bought the French out. The American project was quite different from the French. No private money was involved, instead the government fully financed & controlled the construction and the completion of the construction was lead by the military. The leading figure was not a charismatic person like Ferdinand de Lesseps, it was Theodore Roosevelt, the president of a rising world power.  

McCullogh claims “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”. Today it sounds funny, that the French tried the capitalistic way and the Americans finally succeeded with a public - almost socialist - system.

The Americans succeeded and completed the canal construction in 1914. Apparently the US government disposed over much more capital than the French. The Americans also benefited from the rapid technological advance over 40 years and huge progress in medicine & health care, especially the victories over malaria & the yellow fever.

The construction also lead to political changes. Panama had been a province of Colombia, ruled from the remote Colombian capital Bogota. The Americans were unhappy how Bogota dealt with the canal constructors, so they talked some citizens of Panama to start a revolution and to secede. Then the American marine supported the revolution by blocking the seaways so that Colombia couldn`t send troops to brake the revolution.

McCullogh describes also the technical details and the accomplishments in engineering necessary for constructing the canal and the locks. He summarizes that the expenditures since 1904 totaled $352 million (including $10 million paid to Panama and the $40 million paid to the French company) this was more than four times what the Suez canal had cost. Taken together, the French and American expenditures came to about $639 million. According to hospital record, the canal also cost 5,609  lives from disease and accidents since 1904. He concludes “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". 

Conclusion: "The Path" is highly recommended. I could learn a lot from it. The author not only portraits a milestone of history, he shows how human imagination can shape the world, but also what prices have to be paid for that.

  
PS The image above show tourists watching the construction of the canal