Linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the Isthmus of Panama in Central America in 1914, the Panama Canal—shown in this 1923 photo—became one of the world’s most important passageways for trade. (Library of Congress)
One of the world’s most important passageways, linking the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans across the Isthmus of Panama in Central America, built by the U.S. government from 1903 to 1914 after a failed earlier French attempt.
Spanish explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa first crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513. After realizing that this was but a narrow swath of land, Emperor Charles V of Spain ordered that a survey for a canal be made, but engineers concluded that such an undertaking would be too expensive. The narrow isthmus was only fifty miles wide, but it was covered with rain forest and mountains. Most ominous for construction workers were the heat, the humidity (the annual rainfall is 105 inches), mud slides, and tropical diseases, including yellow fever and malaria.
French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, having successfully completed a canal across the Isthmus of Suez in 1869, led a first, massive, if unsuccessful, French attempt to build a Panama canal in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. At Lesseps’s urging, the Geographical Society of Paris concluded in 1876 that such a canal, built at sea level along the lines of the lockless Suez Canal, remained feasible. On 1878, Colombia granted a ninety-nine-year concession, and the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-océanique de Panama, headed by Lesseps, formed the following year. After two years of surveys, work began in 1881.
Engineers and laborers worked gallantly and vigorously, but failed because of a faulty design, inadequate technologies, and tropical diseases. Against the advice of engineer Baron Godin de Lepinay, the French attempted to build a sea-level canal, an ambitious undertaking that required excavating massive amounts of dirt. Such an immense task required large steam shovels and excavators, not yet available in the 1880s, and the French made only limited use of the existing railroad line to haul dirt away. As the canal grew deeper, mud slides became more frequent, with downpours able to undo in one day what had taken months of arduous labor.
Malaria and yellow fever, both of which doctors could neither prevent nor cure, killed thousands of workers, including the daughter, son, son-in-law, and wife of Jules Dingler, the company’s director general from 1883 to 1885. The workforce reached a peak of 19,000 men in 1884, most of them from France and Jamaica, but by 1885 only one-tenth of the work had been completed. Even though it finally switched to a lock design in 1888 and started making more rapid progress, the company ran out of funds and dissolved in 1889. French politicians and company directors became embroiled in a large bribery scandal, and Lesseps narrowly avoided jail time because of old age.
The United States then replaced France as the main backer for an interoceanic canal. In the mid-1800s, with the settlement of California, traffic across the isthmus by means of a rail line increased exponentially, greatly increasing the appeal of a direct sea passage. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), a work that convinced many U.S. officials that a canal had a strategic value as well. During the Spanish-American War, it took the battleship USS Oregon, stationed in San Francisco, sixty-seven days to complete the 12,000-mile journey around the tip of South America before it was able to join in the fighting in Cuba, thus demonstrating that a canal was a military necessity.
Linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the Isthmus of Panama in Central America in 1914, the Panama Canal—shown in this 1923 photo—became one of the world’s most important passageways for trade. (Library of Congress)
In the eyes of the United States, Panama remained but one of three locations for a potential canal, along with Nicaragua and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico. Two U.S. commissions ruled in favor of a Nicaraguan route in 1876 and 1901. After several U.S. engineers, along with Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a French shareholder of the defunct Compagnie Universelle, lobbied for the Panama route, U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress opted for a Panama route. The U.S. government bought the French company’s remaining assets for $40 million.
U.S. secretary of state John Hay and Colombian chargé d’affaires Tomas Herran signed the Hay-Herran Treaty (1903), which would have allowed the United States to build the canal in what was then a Colombian province, but Colombia refused to ratify the agreement. Undaunted, Roosevelt ordered U.S. warships to provide naval support to a Panamanian independence movement. Unable to send in reinforcements, Colombia could not prevent Panama from declaring its independence in November 1903. With Bunau-Varilla conveniently nominated as Panama’s envoy extraordinary, the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty (1903) offered Panama $10 million in exchange for a canal zone, ten miles wide, held in perpetuity.
American engineers, along with workers drawn from Caribbean islands (chiefly Barbados), began construction in 1904. Learning from past French mistakes, chief engineers, first John F. Stevens, then Lieutenant Colonel George W. Goethals, built six pairs of locks that raised, then lowered, ships over the high continental divide, thus reducing the amount of excavating required. They introduced new, heavier machinery and made extensive use of the railroad line. Inspired by recent medical research proving that mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever and malaria (the Stegomyia fasciata and the Anopheles, respectively), they eliminated pools of stagnant water, thus destroying breeding sites for the insects. Malaria cases declined from 0.7 percent in 1906 to 0.03 percent in 1913, while yellow fever disappeared entirely. Over 5,000 workers, among a labor force that peaked at 44,000 men in 1913, nevertheless lost their lives (some 25,000 men had lost their lives during the French attempt).
Built at a cost of $325 million to the U.S. government (not including the fees to the French company and the Panamanian government), the canal opened in 1914. Fifty miles long from Balboa on the Pacific to Colón on the Atlantic, the canal boasts locks 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide. Given its economic and strategic importance, U.S. troops were permanently station in the U.S.-controlled Canal Zone. The United States also intervened militarily in Panama itself, most recently in 1989 and 1990, and in neighboring Central American and Caribbean republics. A 1977 treaty finally gave Panama custody of the canal, which took effect on December 31, 1999. Some 4,359 ships, displacing 230 million tons, crossed the canal in 2000.
Philippe R. Girard
See also: Disease; Suez Canal; United States.
McCullough, David. The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977.
Mack, Gerstle. The Land Divided: A History of the Panama Canal and Other Isthmian Canal Projects. New York: Octagon, 1974.
Major, John. Prize Possession: The United States and the Panama Canal, 1903–1979. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.