Panama fever (4 page)

hat impresses now about the story of the canal is not just the extraordinary number of “firsts” its achievement entailed—financial, technical, and medical—but the astonishing, almost arrogant ambition of it all. Nothing like it had ever been attempted in the tropics before. The leaders of the project, be they French or American, simply believed they could do anything, that innovation and technology—the forces of progress, of the Industrial Revolution and the great Victorian age—were able to conquer any challenge.

The French effort, in particular, powered as it was by private capital and a sublime belief in emerging technology, sees this age overreach itself, with tragic consequences. The Americans were driven less by idealism than by national, racial, and military ambition, but they too would be humbled by the challenges that the jungles of Panama presented. The U.S. construction project succeeded because of state funding, local political control, and access to scientific and technical expertise beyond the reach of the French. But it also opened the door to a new era where the efforts of individuals would be controlled and channeled by the state for its own purposes, the machine age that was ushered in by the industrial slaughter of the western front.

In both cases, and throughout the history of the canal dream, almost everyone involved with the project, from the humblest pick-and-shovel man to the most venal Wall Street speculator, became gripped by the “great idea” of the canal, by “Panama Fever.” For many, the canal would become an obsession. But it is striking, too, how much controversy and how many enemies the project attracted through its history. Vested interests feared the change in the status quo that such a radical altering of the geography of the world would usher in. The Americans, in particular, were fiercely opposed to a foreign power controlling any transcontinental waterway. The French attempt would bring heavy criticism of the “overoptimism” of its promoter, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and its failure would see his ruin and disgrace, as well as financial and political disaster for France. The American project was even more controversial, entailing at its inception the murky maneuvers of political lobbyists and a vivid demonstration of a new kind of United States, casting off its historical aversion to imperialism and aggression on the international stage.

The successful opening of the canal in August 1914, at almost precisely the moment when Old Europe was embarking on a ruinous war, was the climax of the United States’ spectacular rise to world power. The Isthmus was the key to the struggle for mastery of the Western Hemisphere as well as to wider international commercial and naval strength. With the successful completion of the Washington-funded and dominated canal, the United States emerged as a truly global power and the “American Century” could begin.

In Panama itself, the canal was the realization of a dream that went back four hundred years. It had been the destiny of the Isthmus ever since 1513, when the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa ventured inland from Panama's Caribbean coast and, “silent upon a peak in Darién,” discovered a previously unknown great ocean separated from the Atlantic by only a narrow bridge of land forty miles wide. Balboa's discovery immediately engendered a belief that a waterway could be built linking the two oceans. Thereafter the Isthmus became of crucial strategic importance and the focus of fierce international rivalry among Spain, France, Great Britain, and, as it emerged, the United States.

Not only was Panama a magnet for empire builders; its transit route—first a paved road, then a railway—had brought the world to the Isthmus even before a canal was started. An international crossroads a hundred years before the
Mayflower
landing, Panama played host at times to traders, bullion carriers, pirates, missionaries, soldiers, and then a California-bound gold rush. The canal dream would bring explorers, doctors, engineers, more soldiers (this time to stay), and, at one time, a workforce of fifty thousand from twenty-seven different countries. Many of the canal builders believed that fever was the result of vice, but that did not prevent Panama's two cities from becoming roaring dens of gambling, drinking, and prostitution. All this descended on an unstable region still struggling to find political solutions to its problems. At times the canal has been an awkward destiny for Panama.

In the wider world, the great dream of the canal attracted idealists, dreamers, and scoundrels from the very outset. The four hundred years after Balboa's discovery saw Panama's unique geography inspire grandiose canal schemes from each age's greatest engineers, promoters, and visionaries. It was the great unfulfilled engineering challenge. But for those four centuries all efforts had ended in failure or disaster.

CHAPTER ONE

“THE KEYS TO THE UNIVERSE”

What had motivated the voyages that led to the discovery of the New World was exactly what the Panama Canal would eventually deliver—a through passage to the East. On his fourth voyage, in 1502, Columbus, by then embittered and sickly, sailed all along Panama's northern coast, obsessively searching every tiny cove for a “hidden strait.” At one point he anchored in Limón, or “Navy,” Bay, now the Atlantic terminus of the canal. Even after Columbus's failure to find an open passage to the East, the idea died hard. In 1507, the first map ever printed of the New World optimistically showed an open strait about where the Isthmus of Panama is located.

But Columbus did report back that the
Tierra Firme
he had discovered was rich in gold and pearls. West of Limón Bay he had encountered Indians wearing solid gold breastplates, which they were happy to exchange for a couple of hawk's bells. Having set out to discover a route to the wealth of the East, the Spaniards had effectively found far greater riches on the way. At the end of 1509 a settlement was established, Santa María de la Antigua del Darién, some sixty miles southeast of what would later be named Caledonia Bay. Then in 1513 the colony's leader, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, his curiosity aroused by Indian stories of a Great Ocean across the mountains, put together an expedition of 190 Spaniards, accompanied by a number of bloodhounds, which the natives found particularly terrifying. On September 6, having sailed up the coast, they set off across the mountains on a route about a hundred miles east of the modern canal, their heavy loads of supplies carried by a mixture of press-ganged local Cuna Indians and black slaves. The expedition's rate of advance through the Darién jungle was at times only a mile a day. The rivers were in spate and numerous bridges had to be improvised from tree trunks. Even in the sweltering jungle, the Spaniards wore helmets and breastplates of polished steel, thick leather breeches, woolen stockings, and thigh boots. Heatstroke, hostile Indians, and disease began to thin their numbers. On September 25, with only a third of his men left, Balboa reached a small hill. From its summit, promised the guides, you could see the Great Ocean. Balboa set off alone at midday. At the top, he turned one way and then the other; he could see both oceans quite clearly. He fell to his knees in prayer and then called up his men, “shewing them the great maine sea heretofore vn-knowne to the inhabitants of Europe, Aphrike, and Asia.”

They struggled down to the shore, on the way defeating and then befriending Indians who had barred their route to the ocean. On the afternoon of September 29 they reached the sea. That evening Balboa, in full armor, waded into the muddy water and laid claim in the name of Ferdinand of Castile to what he called the “South Sea.”

The party remained on the Pacific coast for over three months, exploring the bay and trading trinkets with the local Indians. Balboa heard stories of a rich land away to the south, but wrongly deduced that he must be close to Asia. He at last returned, heavily laden with pearls and gold, to Santa María and a hero's welcome. Along with a fifth of his treasure, Balboa sent the King of Spain a report, which included, rather as an afterthought, the musing of a Castilian engineer, Alvaro de Saavedra—a suggestion that although the search for a strait between the two oceans should continue, if it was not found, “yet it might not be impossible to make one.”

Five years after Balboa's discovery, a land route had been established linking Nombre de Dios, a port on the Caribbean, with a new Spanish settlement at Panama, a prosperous Indian village on the Pacific coast. The transit route opened up the Pacific. Although Magellan found a way around the southern tip of the continent in 1519–21, the voyage was so remote and hazardous that it did nothing to discourage the quest for a way through the Isthmus to the newly found ocean. In 1522 explorers sailing north from Panama discovered Lake Nicaragua. The following year Hernando Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, was ordered by Charles V to continue the search for an open strait. By 1530 it was clear that no such waterway existed in the tropics, and in 1534 Charles ordered that the Chagres River be mapped and cleared as far as possible in the direction of Panama City, and that the intervening land be studied with a view to excavation. This was the first survey for a proposed ship canal through Panama, and it more or less followed the course of the current Panama Canal. At the same time, the San Juan River, which runs from Lake Nicaragua to the Caribbean coast, was also to be surveyed as part of a possible canal. The great rivalry between the two routes was thus started.

Detailed, reliable information on these very early surveys has not survived, although Charles seems to have received mixed messages. Some reported that the project was totally unfeasible; others, like the Spanish priest Francisco López de Gómara, writing to the king in 1551, thought anything was possible. In an early example of the hubris that the canal dream attracted throughout its history, the priest wrote: “If there are mountains there are also hands … To a King of Spain with the wealth of the Indies at his command, when the object to be attained is the spice trade, what is possible is easy.”

Then Spanish priorities in Panama changed. Philip II, Charles V's successor and a religious fanatic, shared little of his enthusiasm for a canal, seeing it, among other evils, as “unnatural,” as meddling with God's creation. More important, the conquest of Peru led to concerns that an Isthmian canal could be a strategic liability. As early as 1534, the governor of Panama had warned against the construction of a canal as it “would open the door to the Portuguese and even the French.” By the 1560s most believed that it was safer to have an unbroken wall of land between the gold and silver of Peru and Spain's maritime enemies in the Atlantic. Similar strategic concerns would arise three hundred years later when the United States debated building a canal.