In 2024, the Panama Canal came back into the news, almost 110 years after its silent opening (almost literally on the day World War I began.
The Canal remains one of the world’s greatest engineering achievements. The US succeeded after France epochally failed to dig its own ditch, with death, bankruptcy, and jail. The story includes Spain’s treasures of gold, the French Suez Canal success, the first transcontinental railroad, defeating malaria and yellow fever, huge dams, and the raising of a sea-level ditch into the air to transform the world.
The most famous man in the world, the hero, Messrs. Ferdinand du Lesseps — the man who completed the Suez Canal — was asked to dig another canal, this time through Panama. He thought it would be an easier dig — it was surveyed as only 50 miles long — not the 120 miles of Suez. He had visited during the season of almost perfect weather. Unfortunately, nature returned. Panama is deluged by torrential rains for much of the year. Huge of amounts of money were wasted trying to dig a pass through the mountains.
Some 20,000 men and women died during the French attempt from the diseases endemic in Panama. The story of the canal is of humans overcoming staggering obstacles to transform the world.
Gold is an important part of that success. The story begins with the Spanish bringing New World gold across Panama on their “Camino Real” – The Royal Road. Over it, for hundreds of years, they brought gold plundered from the Incas, then Peru’s silver.
In 1848, gold was discovered in California, and a flood of 49ers sought to reach the gold fields. This prompted the building of the trans-continental Railroad — all 50 miles of it — following the path charted by Balboa when he discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513.
The story of the canal includes a huge volcanic eruption on the Carribean Island of Martinique. It was destroyed in minutes with some 30,000 killed — and had a role in the US no digging a Canal Nicaragua.
An almost 500 year-long history of greed, suffering, ambition, and triumph.