A Path Between the Seas

A path between the seas

Feb 22nd, 2007 | From the print edition, The EconomistClose

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ON FEBRUARY 1st 1881 Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who built the Suez Canal, read to a waiting group of French journalists a telegram containing two words: “Travail commencé.”

The news that work had begun on de Lesseps's second canal project seemed at the time to herald the final round of a challenge that had fascinated a long line of men from Christopher Columbus to Benjamin Franklin: to excavate a ship canal across the narrow waist of South America. The waterway would significantly cut the journey time between New York and San Francisco and offer a shorter passage to the East. Such was the excitement generated by de Lesseps's project, and not only in France, that in no time a literary wag had turned it into a palindrome: A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL—PANAMA is still one of the longest palindromic phrases in the English language.

Excitement in France was one thing. But the reality in Panama was quite another. Few engineering projects in history have been launched with so much arrogance and so little preparation.

Fresh from constructing a sea-level canal through the flat Egyptian sand, de Lesseps was determined, without having set foot in Panama and after only the vaguest of topographical studies, that his project through the mountainous central American isthmus would also be a sea-level canal, requiring no locks to cope with changes in altitude. The heat, humidity, insects, snakes and diseases were, said the director of the engineering company contracted to do the work, “nothing but an invention of the canal's adversaries”.

The plan had the backing of the French government, but it was financed mostly through public subscription, the personal savings of thousands of ordinary French people who regarded de Lesseps as a hero on a Napoleonic scale.

In less than a decade, however, the scheme had collapsed. De Lesseps's insistence that the canal be built without locks had led engineers to try to cut directly through the rock to sea level. Yet in less than 30 miles (48km) between Colón and Panama City there are six major geological faults, five significant volcanic cores and 17 different kinds of rock. It is not the easiest place to build. By 1889, eight years after work began, only a third of the canal had been excavated. So extensive were the wet-season mudslides that in some years more mud and rock fell back into the canal than had been taken out in the first place.

More than 5,000 French people died, many of them graduates of the country's most prestigious engineering schools. Thousands more Indian and Caribbean workers too succumbed to the malaria and yellow fever that swept the isthmus during the rainy season. In all, over 25,000 people died, 500 for each mile of the canal. De Lesseps was ruined, his son imprisoned for fraud. The French government that backed the scheme had collapsed.

It would take another quarter century, a campaign of American intervention ordered by President Theodore Roosevelt, the creation of a fenced canal zone and nearly a decade of work by the US Army Corp of Engineers before the Panama Canal was officially opened in 1914; comparable in scale and ambition to the building of the pyramids of Egypt. Although much shorter than the canal at Suez, it required three times the excavation and ended up costing four times as much.

The tale of the French and American efforts to build the Panama Canal has been told before, particularly well by David McCullough in his 1977 epic, “The Path Between the Seas”. Using a bottom-up approach to his research, as opposed to Mr McCullough's top-down method of looking at the project through a geopolitical prism, Mr Parker has written the Panama story for a new generation. He quotes extensively from letters and diaries of ordinary workers writing home to their families. And it is their heartfelt views on the conditions in which they lived and worked that really bring this book to life.

“Death was our constant companion,” wrote one West Indian worker, Alfred Dottin. “I shall never forget the trainloads of dead men being carted away daily, as if they were just so much lumber...There were days that we could only work a few hours because of the high fever racking our bodies—it was a living hell.” As the Panamanian government prepares to widen the canal for the first time in nearly a century, this is a history with lessons for the future.

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