These particular officers, moreover, had been imbued with a starspangled sense of American destiny in the Pacific Ocean. As a young lieutenant, Daniel Ammen had sailed On Commodore James Biddle’s voyage to China and Japan, the voyage that resulted in 1846 in the first treaty between China and the United States. Selfridge also had begun his career with a South Pacific cruise and Shufeldt had been in command of the Wachusett in the Orient only the year before the Tehuantepec Expedition.
“Sufficient is it to add that advantageous as an interoceanic canal would be to the commercial welfare of the whole world, it is doubly so for the necessities of American interests,” Selfridge was to write. “The Pacific is naturally our domain.”
“It May be the future of our country lies hidden in this problem,” Shufeldt would address his crew when the Kansas sailed for Tehuantepec. And from the rail of a battered little river steamer laboring against the brown current of the San Juan, his eyes squinting against the hard glare of a Nicaragua morning, Edward Lull would envisage American ships of the line riding the same path to the Pacific.
These were professional sailors, not remarkable men, or so they undoubtedly would have said. They were experienced in command, meticulous about details, physically very tough; but without airs or pretense. In the field, with their sun hats and field glasses, their blue northern eyes, they would look much like other English-speaking harbingers of civilization in other so-called “dark” corners of the world. But there was no overflowing ego among them, no Burton or Speke or Stanley possessed by visions of personal destiny. Nor were they great men in the way a Powell or a King was, intellectually and in orginality of purpose. Had they been asked, they undoubtedly would have said they were doing their job.
II
The seven Grant expeditions to Central Americ a between 1870 and 1875 can be seen as a sharp, clean line through the whole long history of canal plans and proposals reaching back to an obscure reference concerning an obscure Spaniard, Alvaro de Saavedra, a kinsman of Cortez’, who supposedly “meant to have opened the land of Castilla del Oro . . . from sea to sea.” There had never been any serious possibility of a canal during Spanish times. “There are mountains, but there are also hands” was the lovely declaration of a Spanish priest of the sixteenth century, “and for a king of Castile, few things are impossible.” The priest, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, was the first to raise the issue of location, naming Panama, Nicaragua, Darien, and Tehuantepec as the best choices, in a book published in 1552. But he was sadly deceiving himself. Not for another three hundred years, not until the nineteenth century, would a canal, even a very small canal, become a reasonable possibility. It required certain advances in hydraulic engineering, among other things; and it required the steam engine.
The place most nineteenth-century North Americans expected to see the canal built, including the President, was Nicaragua. If not Darien, it would be through Lake Nicaragua; if not there, then probably it would have to be Panama. Tehuantepec had the virtue of being so much closer to the United States, but that was about all that could be said for Tehuantepec. The great overriding problem, however, was the extremely low level of reliable geographical information on Central America, and this despite more than fifty years of debate over where a canal ought to go, despite volumes of so-called geographical research, engineering surveys, perhaps a hundred articles in popular magazines and learned journals, promotional pamphlets, travel books, and the fact that Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec had all been heavily traveled shortcuts to the Pacific since the time of the California gold craze. As Admiral Davis had quite accurately stated, there were not in the libraries of the world the means to determine even approximately the most practicable route.
The earliest authoritative study of the problem, or rather the first to be taken as authoritative, appeared in 1811 and designated Nicaragua as the route posing the fewest difficulties. The author of this rather tentative benediction was Alexander von Humboldt, the adventurous German-born naturalist and explorer, and Nicaragua thereafter had been “Humboldt’s route.” Humboldt, as it happens, had never set foot in Nicaragua, or in any of the four alternatives he named. He had built his theories wholly from hearsay, from old books and manuscripts, and the few pitiful maps then available, all of which he plainly acknowledged. The precise location of the City of Panama was not even known, he warned. Nor had anyone determined the elevation of the mountains at Panama, or at any other point along the spine of Central America.
Panama he judged to be the worst possible choice, primarily because of the mountains, which he took to be three times as high as they actually are. Tehuantepec appeared to be too broad, as well as mountainous, and he feared the “sinuosity” of the rivers. About the best that could be done at either Panama or Tehuantepec would be to build some good roads for camels. Humboldt was still comparatively unknown when he wrote his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, the book containing his long canal essay; his renown was limited still to scientific circles. No Peruvian current or glacier or river had been named for him; Humboldt, Kansas, and Humboldt, Iowa, were still unbroken prairie grass. His views, nonetheless, were to have more influence on the canal issue than everything that had been written previously taken together, for by mid-century he was to tower above all others as the beloved high priest of modern science, a university unto himself, as Goethe would say.
Humboldt’s Political Essay was the result of a five-year journey through Spanish America, the likes of which would never be equaled. He had been up the Orinoco and the Magdalena; he had been over the Andes on foot. In Ecuador he had climbed Chimborazo, then believed to be the highest mountain on earth, and though he failed to reach the top, he had gone to nineteen thousand feet, which was higher–considerably higher–than any human being had ever been before, even in a balloon. If he had not been in Nicaragua or Panama or Tehuantepec or anywhere along the drenched, green valley of the Atrato River, the location of his two other possible pathways to the Pacific, he had been almost everywhere else and no one was assumed to have more firsthand knowledge of the American jungle. The rather vital fact that his canal theories were almost wholly conjecture was generally ignored. More-over, those who used his name to substantiate their own pet notions, those who would quote and misquote him endlessly, would find it convenient to forget that it was he who insisted that no canal should be considered until the comparative advantages and disadvantages of all possible routes were examined firsthand by experienced people and according to uniform standards.
The Nicaragua canal he visualized was much along the lines of Thomas Telford’s Caledonian Canal in Scotland, then the most ambitious thing of its kind. Lake Nicaragua, besides being navigable, would, like Telford’s Scottish lakes, provide a natural and limitless source of water for the canal–a vast “basin”–at the very summit of the canal.
Should Nicaragua be found unsatisfactory, then perhaps one of the two routes on the Atrato would serve best. The Napipi-Cupica route, as he named it and as it is still known, would follow the Napipi River, a tributary of the sprawling Atrato, to its headwaters, then continue down to the Pacific at Cupica Bay.
The other Atrato scheme, the so-called “Lost Canal of the Raspadura,” appealed mainly to his imagination. Years before, he had heard, a Spanish monk “of great activity” had induced some Indians to build a secret passage betweeen the Atrato and the Pacific, a passage large enough only for small boats, but one that followed a near-perfect path for a canal of larger size, somewhere off the Raspadura River, another distant tributary. All one had to do was find it.
How much of all this he may have discussed with Thomas Jefferson in the spring of 1804, at the end of the Spanish-American odyssey, is not known. But probably his stay at the White House marks the start of Presidential interest in the canal. It is known that Jefferson had shown prior curiosity on the subject while he was minister to France. Furthermore, the visit coincided with the departure of Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to seek, on Jefferson’s orders, a n
orthwest water passage to the Pacific. And Humboldt, a lean, deeply tanned, explosively energetic young man, had so enthralled Jefferson with accounts of his travels that Jefferson kept him on as a guest for two weeks. So it is difficult to imagine them not discussing a Central American corridor as they strolled the White House grounds or sat conversing, hours on end, at the big table in Jefferson’s first-floor office, maps and charts all over one wall and Jefferson’s pet mockingbird swinging in a cage overhead.
Humboldt’s Spanish-American travels had been the result of an unprecedented grant from the Spanish Crown to investigate wherever he wished in the cause of scientific progress. Until then explorations of any kind by foreigners within Spain’s New World realm had been strenuously discouraged. But once Spanish rule began to dissolve in the 1820’s the way was open to almost anyone. And almost anyone was what turned up. Engineers, naval officers, French, English, Dutch, Americans, promoters, journalists, many of whom expressed grand visions of a canal, in the event political permission could be obtained, in the event the necessary capital could be assembled. A few of these were able people, but very few had any technical competence. Many of them were also perfectly genuine in their aspirations and sincerely believed in their rainbow-hued promises, however inept or naive they may have been. Others, quite a good many others, were petty adventurers or outright crackpots.*
The canals they had in mind, regardless of specified location, were invariably feasible technically, within range financially, and destined to be bonanzas for all investors and for whichever impoverished little Central American republic was to be involved. Emissaries from Bogotá and Managua and Mexico City were dispatched to the capitals of Europe and to Washington to enlist support. Even the pope was approached. Special agreements and franchises were signed and sealed with appropriate formality. The future was rich with possibilities.
With the opening of Telford’s canal and the Erie Canal, both in the 1820’s, reasonable men also felt justified in projecting comparable works across the map of Central America. “Neptune’s Staircase,” the spectacular system of locks on the Caledonian Canal, could lift seagoing ships–could lift a thirty-two-gun frigate, for example–a hundred feet up from the level of the sea. The Erie Canal, though built for shallow-draft canal barges, was nonetheless the longest canal in the world, and its locks overcame an elevation en route of nearly seven hundred feet. So on paper a canal at Panama or Nicaragua or any other place in favor at the moment did not seem unrealistic. Telford in his last years was considering “a grand scheme” for Darien. DeWitt Clinton, “father” of the Erie Canal, had joined with Horatio Allen, builder of the Croton Aqueduct, to plan a water passage through Nicaragua.
A skeptical or cautionary voice was the rare exception. The view of someone such as Colonel Charles Biddle, sent by President Andrew Jackson to appraise Panama and Nicaragua, stands in solitary contrast to almost everything else being written or said. Having made his way up the Chagres River by canoe, then overland to Panama City, a trek of four days, Biddle concluded that any talk of a Panama canal was utter foolishness and that this ought to be clear to all men, “whether of common or uncommon sense.” (He did not bother to go see Nicaragua.)
Far more representative were the views of John Lloyd Stephens, which appeared about the time John O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, was writing that “our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
The task, declared Stephens, posed no major problems and ought not cost more than $25,000,000, a figure most people took to be absurdly high.
Stephens was “the American traveler,” an engaging, romantic, red-bearded lawyer and author of popular travel books who passed through Nicaragua on his way to the Mexican provinces of Chiapas and Yucatan in 1840. He was looking for the “lost” cities of the Maya, which he found, and the book describing those discoveries, Incidents of Travel in Central America went through edition after edition. It was a classic, thrilling piece of work and can be seen now as the beginning of American archaeology. But Stephens had no more business issuing pronouncements on the feasibility of a Nicaragua canal from the little he had seen than had the engineer Horatio Allen from the comforts of his Manhattan office.
A Nicaragua canal posed no major problems, Stephens declared. Here was an enchanting land of blue lakes and trade winds, towering volcanic mountains, rolling green savannas and grazing cattle. Nicaragua could become one of the finest resorts on earth were a canal to be built. Like Humboldt he had scaled a volcano–Masaya–then, to the horror of his guide, descended bravely into its silent crater. “At home, this volcano would be a fortune, with a good hotel on top, a railing to keep the children from falling in, a zigzagging staircase down the sides, and a glass of iced lemonade at the bottom.” The mountain, he noted, could probably be purchased for ten dollars.
The truth is that all the canal projects proposed, every cost estimated, irrespective of the individual or individuals responsible, were hopelessly unrealistic if not preposterous. Every supposed canal survey made by mid-century was patently flawed by bad assumptions or absurdly inadequate data. Assertions that the task would be simple were written by fools or by men who either had no appropriate competence or who, if they did, had never laid eyes on a rain forest.
The one important step taken prior to the California gold rush was of another kind, but very little was made of it.
On December 12, 1846, at Bogotá, a new American charge d’affaires, Benjamin Alden Bidlack, of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, acting entirely on his own initiative, signed a treaty with the government of President Tomas Cipriano de Mosquera. The critical agreement was contained in Article XXXV. New Granada guaranteed to the United States the exclusive right of transit across the Isthmus of Panama, “upon any modes of communication that now exist, or that may be, hereafter, constructed.” In exchange the United States guaranteed “positively and efficaciously” both the “perfect neutrality” of the Isthmus and New Granada’s rights of sovereignty there. (It was this agreement by which the Panama Railroad was to be made possible.)
In Washington the news was greeted with only moderate interest since Bidlack had acted without instruction and since there was much old, deep-seated distrust of “entangling” alliances. Not for another year and a half did the Senate act on confirmation and not until the government of New Granada had sent a special envoy to Washington, the very able Pedro Alcantara Herran, to lobby for the agreement.
The Bidlack Treaty, as it was commonly called, was Bidlack’s only diplomatic triumph. A small-town lawyer and newspaper editor, a congressman briefly before going to Bogotá, he died seven months after the treaty was ratified.
For three centuries the gold in the stream beds of the Sierra Nevada had gone undetected and for all the commotion over Central American canals in the first half of the new world-shaking nineteenth century, Central America remained a backwater. No canals, no railroads were built. There was not a single wagon road anywhere across the entire Isthmus. But in January of 1848 a carpenter from New Jersey saw something shining at the bottom of a millrace at Coloma, California, and within a year Central America re-emerged from the shadows. Again, as in Spanish times, gold was the catalyst.
There were three routes to the new El Dorado–“the Plains across, the Horn around, or the Isthmus over”–and for those thousands who chose “the Isthmus over,” it was to be one of life’s unforgettable experiences. The onslaught began first at Panama, early on the morning of January 7, 1849, when the little steamer Falcon anchored off the marshy lowlands at the mouth of the Chagres River and some two hundred North Americans–mostly unshaven young men in red flannel shirts loaded down with rifles, pistols, bowie knives, bedrolls, pots and pans, picks, shovels–came swarming ashore in one great noisy wave. To the scattering of native Panamanians who stood gaping, it must have seemed as if the buccaneer Morgan had returned after two hundred years to storm the Spanish bastion of San Lorenz
o, the frowning brown walls of which still commanded the entire scene. The invaders shouted and gestured, trying to make themselves understood. Nobody seemed to have the least idea which way the Pacific lay and all were in an enormous hurry to get started.
Amazingly, all of this first group survived the crossing. They came dragging into Panama City, rain-soaked, caked with mud, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, and ravenously hungry. They had gone up the Chagres by native canoe, then overland on mule and on foot, as Charles Biddle had and as thousands more like them would, year after year, until the Panama Railroad was in service. Old letters and little leather-bound journals mention the broiling heat and sudden blinding rains. They speak of heavy green slime on the Chagres, of nights spent in vermin-infested native huts, epidemics of dysentery, mules struggling up to their haunches in the impossible blue-black Panama muck. A man from Troy, New York, counted forty dead mules along the Cruces Trail, the twisting jungle path, barely three feet wide, over which they all came from the river to Panama City. Others wrote of human companions dropping in their tracks with cholera or the dreaded Chagres fever.
“I have no time to give reasons,” a Massachusetts man wrote home after crossing Panama, “but in saying it I utter the united sentiment of every passenger whom I have heard speak, it is this, and I say it in fear of God and the love of man, to one and all, for no consideration come this route. I have nothing to say for the other routes but do not take this one.”
Yet the gain in time and distance was phenomenal. From New York to San Francisco around the Horn was a months-long voyage of thirteen thousand miles. From New York to San Francisco by way of Panama was five thousand miles, or a saving of eight thousand miles. From New Orleans to San Francisco by Panama, instead of around the Horn, the saving was more than nine thousand miles.
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