David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  What was not reported, but already known by then, was that the lowest pass on the Sucubti was 553 feet above sea level, and that the mountains were indeed a thousand feet or more in elevation, just as Strain had reported. So Edward Cullen was a fraud after all.

  Still the expedition continued and under considerable hardship. The terrain was often such that it was impossible to do the chaining and leveling for the survey, detours had to be made, progress on the survey slowed to not more than a thousand feet a day. The cameras of Timothy O’Sullivan, the heavy glass plates and the dark tent he had brought along, were just about useless because of the heat and humidity and the vegetation that shut out nearly all daylight.

  The standard attire was a big straw hat, blue flannel shirt, duck trousers, shoes with canvas leggings. The flannel shirt was to be worn next to the skin, and the day began with a tablespoon of whiskey and two grains of quinine per man. To such precautions–“under Providence”–Selfridge attributed the “wonderful good health” of the command the entire time in the jungle.

  Perhaps because of his preliminary orders, perhaps because of the conspicuous Marine guard, there were no troubles with the Indians of the interior, many more of whom were encountered than expected and none of whom had ever before seen a white man. Once on the Sucubti several Indians armed with poisoned arrows volunteered to serve as guides, then led the party along the most tortuous course possible. The Americans saw what was going on and said nothing, as “it was thought better not to offend them.”

  A few entries from the field diary kept by Selfridge give an indication of their days:

  Thursday, April 7.–Took up our March at 6:30 A.M., the Indian Jim and others with us. . . . One of the Marines shot another private by accident in the arm, and he was left behind in camp. The Indians were very much surprised that the affair was taken so coolly, and two or three ran off to tell their chief. About 9 A.M. we struck the river again, and the Indians left us. . . . At half past 2 o’clock we forded the La Paz; this was the deepest river we met, the water coming up to our armpits, and obliging us to carry our ammunition and provisions on our heads. Several bungo-trees full of monkeys were seen, as many as twenty or thirty in a tree; some were shot, and provided a pleasant and much-needed repast. . ..

  Friday, April 8– . . . Eugenio, the machetero, was bitten during the night by a scorpion or tarantula, and his leg and foot became so swelled that we were forced to leave him behind. . . . Passed a miserable night, tormented by mosquitoes and sand-flies.

  Saturday, April 9.–Started down the right bank of the river. Left behind nine men who were shoeless. Cut through 5,000 feet, a dense mangrove [swamp]. . ..

  Sunday, April 10– Another sleepless night, on account of insects. . ..

  “We were to find,” he later wrote, “that in spite of the most careful preparations, the success of the expedition also depended upon extraordinary persistence and willingness to endure hardships.” The torment inflicted by the sand flies and mosquitoes was indescribable–“mosquitoes so thick I have seen them put out a lighted candle with their burnt bodies.” There was no longer any mystery, he mused, why the secrets of the Isthmus had remained locked up for so many hundreds of years.

  At Caledonia Bay, a week later, Selfridge concluded that he had seen as much as needed of Cullen’s route. So on April 20 the expedition packed up and steamed out of the bay for the Gulf of San Bias, another magnificent harbor on the Darien coast, approximately a hundred miles west, toward the Panama Railroad. Here again the mountains gave the appearance of a low pass, and from one of Frederick Kelley’s expeditions it was known that the distance from tidewater to tidewater at this point was less than thirty miles. San Bias was a mere knife edge, where the two oceans came nearer to touching each other than at any other point in Darien or all of Central America.

  Selfridge took his men ashore to search the Mandinga, the one large river on the Atlantic slope between the Atrato and the Chagres. By now the rainy season had returned and the bottom lands were a vast pulsing swamp. Frequently the men were “obliged to pass the night in trees, the water rising so rapidly as to drive them from their beds.” In a week of relentless effort they were able to survey a bare two miles, and it was a full month later still by the time they had measured the mountain gap that from the sea had seemed so near. The elevation was a disappointing three hundred feet.

  With provisions now runing low, his men worn out (“. . . and no longer kept up by the charm of novelty”), with their entire stock of shoes used up–all six hundred pairs!–Self ridge thought perhaps he ought to pull back and sail for” home. But “ . . . could we carry our levels over the divide, we should be able to decide upon the practicability of this route.” So on he went with a picked crew, moving their cumbersome, delicate equipment from point to point, putting down stakes, filling notebooks with pages of computations, observations on plants and animals, and geological notations. On June 7, at the top of the ridge, at an altitude of 1,142 feet by the barometer, they hammered in stake No. 96,000.

  On the Pacific slope, the climate, the whole character of the country, changed. “Trees, soil, all different,” Selfridge noted, “and the weather beautiful.” They took their line to the point where it coincided with the one Kelley’s people had mapped. Then, having followed the Kelley line far enough to be satisfied with its accuracy, they turned back, without going the whole way to the Pacific.

  The San Bias route, Selfridge now could report, was no more practicable than the one at Caledonia Bay. A tunnel would be required, and even if enough locks could be built to lift ships over the mountains–to the preposterous altitude of a thousand feet–there were no rivers at that level to supply water for the canal.

  Selfridge would return to Darien with a second expedition before the year ended, to search that section fronting on the Gulf of Uraba where the Isthmus joins South America. He would, on this second expedition, sail far up the Atrato to the Napipi to explore the route Humboldt had thought so promising. Later, in 1873, he would command a third expedition, this one to the Atrato headwaters. But none would compare to the Darien Expedition of 1870. It was the proudest accomplishment of his life. Nothing done before or after was so difficult or gave such personal satisfaction. It did not matter that they had failed to find the proper path, he would write near the end of a long life; they had led the way.

  In the official report he filed with Secretary Robeson, Selfridge said merely that the effort had served to simplify matters–“the field of research is reduced and the problem narrowed.” He was convinced that the determining factor must be the canal to be built. The canal “should partake of the nature of a strait, with no locks or impediments to prolong the passage . . .” It must be a “through-cut,” at the level of the sea, he wrote, a canal like the canal at Suez, and, from what was known of Central America, the only feasible point for such a passage was Panama.

  * One outstanding example was Charles de Thierry, or Baron de Thierry, as he preferred. An Englishman and graduate of Cambridge, he had so impressed some Maori chiefs who were visiting London that they asked him to come to New Zealand and rule as their king, or so he reported. His idea was to build a canal across Panama to further European trade with New Zealand and he thought the complete project could be finished without difficulty in three years. A railroad over the same route was quite out of the question, however, he said, since the ground was so uneven and covered with so many leaves.

  * The ice was supplied by the Boston and Panama Ice Company and it sold for as much as fifty cents a pound when first introduced on the Isthmus. One ship from Boston carried seven hundred tons of ice packed in sawdust all the way around the Horn to Panama City, with a loss from melting of only one hundred tons. But in the process of getting the ice from ship to land to the Panama icehouse, a distance of two miles, another four hundred tons melted. Yet such was the demand that the sale of the remaining two hundred tons paid for the voyage. Within a few years, ice on the Pacific side was being supplied by sh
ips from Sitka, from what was then known as Russian America.

  2

  The Hero

  How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

  To rust unburnish’d not to shine in use!

  –ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Ulysses

  I

  Independence, his vital source of strength, he often remarked, had come late in life to Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps. The charm, the pervasive, indomitable, world-famous de Lesseps charm that had carried him so very far, had been there right along, born in him, a family streak, it was said, like the zest for adventure and the good looks. From the very start of his career at Lisbon he had made a strong impression. Older observers likened him to his father and to his celebrated uncle, Barthelemy de Lesseps. Friends of both sexes were gathered effortlessly. “Ferdinand encounters friends everywhere,” his first wife had written from the post at Malaga. “He is loved with true affection. . . . It is wonderful to have a husband so liked by everyone.” And a little later on: “Ferdinand is so good, so amiable, he spreads life and gaiety everywhere.”

  He was gifted, passionate; he loved books, music, horses, his work, his children, his graceful, witty first wife, his stunning second wife, and occasionally, if we are to believe one admiring French biographer, the wives of others. But independence had not come until he was past forty, thrust upon him unexpectedly by forces not of his own making.

  In the summer of 1870, when he stood on the flower-banked platform within the great Crystal Palace, beaming as the boys from the Lambeth Industrial Schools waved their “Egyptian Salute,” Ferdinand de Lesseps was sixty-four years old, very nearly as old as the century. He had been born on November 19, 1805, the year of Austerlitz, in a beige-colored stone house with white shutters that still stands in the town of Versailles. Less than fifty yards from the house, through an iron gate at the end of the Rue de la Paroisse, were the gardens of the Versailles Palace, the great Neptune Basin with its spectacular fountains, and just beyond that, within a mile or so, the Grand Canal of Versailles, which once, in the time of Louis XIV, had been alive with brightly painted gondolas and had been the setting for mock naval battles staged by actual ships of the line.

  His family was long distinguished in the French diplomatic service. The men were esteemed as “lovers of progress and movement”; they were cultivated, athletic, fond of extravagant living, and immensely attractive to women. A great-uncle, Dominique de Lesseps, had been ennobled for his services to the state a hundred years before Ferdinand’s birth. Grandfather Martin de Lesseps had been French consul general to the court of Catherine the Great, and Ferdinand’s father, Comte Mathieu de Lesseps, had been an accomplished Napoleonic diplomat, a friend of Talleyrand’s. In Egypt, at the time of the British occupation, or shortly before Ferdinand was born, the vivacious Mathieu de Lesseps had worked miracles for Franco-Egyptian relations, and in 1818, when young Ferdinand was entering the Lycee Napoleon, Mathieu had been posted to the United States. Some sixty years later, at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty in New York, Ferdinand would tell how his father had negotiated the first commercial treaty between France and the United States.

  Barthelemy de Lesseps, the famous uncle, had been able to speak three languages by the time he was ten. While still in his twenties, he had sailed on the final expedition of the navigator La Perouse, around Cape Horn to California and, at length, to Petropavlovsk, in Kamchatka. From there, in 1787, on orders from La Perouse, all alone and with winter approaching, he had set out to find his way home to France. A year later, dressed as a Kamchatkan, he was presented to Louis XVI at Versailles, having traveled the entire distance across Siberia to St. Petersburg, mostly by dog sled, then on to Paris. He was a national hero overnight and in his subsequent diplomatic career–first under the Monarchy, then under the Empire, finally under the Restoration–he distinguished himself repeatedly, surviving three years of imprisonment in Turkey and the retreat of the Grande Armee from Moscow. So throughout his boyhood Ferdinand had been nourished on tales of valiant endurance, of heroic quests and heroic triumphs at the far ends of the world.

  His mother was Catherine de Grivignee, whose French father had settled in Spain, prospered in the wine business, and married a Spanish girl of good family. His mother had lived her entire life in Spain until her marriage; Spanish was her first language and she was very Spanish in temperament, as Ferdinand would recall. He had grown up speaking Spanish as well as he did French, all of which would be offered later in explanation for the special allure of Panama, “a country made to seduce him. “

  There was never an overabundance of money in the family, appearances to the contrary. His mother’s jewels had been pawned privately at least once to meet family expenses and his father had died all but bankrupt. Nor did Ferdinand attain great wealth. Like his father, he married well; like his father, he always lived in grand style. But the reputed de Lesseps fortune was a fiction.

  Whether as a youth he ever envisioned a life other than the diplomatic service is impossible to say. But at age nineteen, having studied a little law, he was appointed eleve-consul to his uncle, then the French ambassador to Lisbon. He served in Tunis afterward, with his father, until 1832, the year of his father’s death; then came a Biblical seven years in Egypt, where being the son of Mathieu de Lesseps was a decided advantage. Later came Rotterdam, Malaga, and Barcelona. In 1848, at age forty-three, he was made minister to Madrid.

  It was work he naturally enjoyed and he did it well. He was efficient; he was gallant. He sat a horse beautifully. He was a crack shot and a great favorite among sportsmen. (“These healthful occupations,” wrote one high-Victorian biographer, “contributed largely to the promotion of that robust health and that iron constitution, thanks to which he was able to bear, without even feeling them, the innumerable fatigues, labors, and voyages in all parts of the world”)

  Though of less than average height, he was handsomely formed. He had a fine head of thick black hair, a good chin, a flashing smile that people would remember. The eyes were dark and active. The mustache had still to make its appearance.

  His wife, the former Agathe Delamalle, bore him five sons, only Two of whom would live to maturity, and she appears to have been another important asset to his career. A French officer described her as “this young woman with the clear gaze, witty, decided . . .” “Diamonds glittered everywhere,” reads another account from the time, a description of a ball she gave at Barcelona. “Madame de Lesseps received the guests with perfect grace. Her toilette was ravishing, and she wore it with that marvelous air of which only Parisiennes have the secret. Let us add that the affection which everyone bears her did not a little to increase the charm of this magnificent soiree, which lasted until dawn.”

  His interest in canal building began supposedly in Egypt in the early 1830’s with the arrival of the Saint-Simonians, about twenty Frenchmen, many of them civil engineers, who were led by an improbable figure named Prosper Enfantin. They had come, they announced, to dig a Suez canal, a work of profound religious meaning.

  Their messiah was the late Claude Henri de Rouvroy, the Comte de Saint-Simon, who had fought under Lafayette at Yorktown, then, back in France, founded his own radical philosophy aimed toward a new global order. It was he who wrote, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” Private property and nationalism were to be things of the past. The leadership of mankind was to be entrusted to an elite class of artists, scientists, and industrialists. Mainly the good society was to be attained through ennobling, regenerative work. The world was to be saved–from poverty, from war–through immense public improvements, networks of highways, railroads, and two great ship canals through the Isthmus of Suez and the Isthmus of Panama.

  Prosper Enfantin had taken up the banner after the death of the Master, calling himself Le Pere, “one half of the Couple of Revelation.” The other half, he said, was a divine female who had still to make herself recognized. A “church” was established on the Rue Monsigny in Paris; lavish
receptions were staged to welcome the female messiah, candidates for the honor being received in Father Enfantin’s ornate bedchamber. Further, at a private estate near Paris, he founded an all-male colony for the faithful, where the prescribed habit, an outfit designed by the artist Raymond Bonheur, was a long, flowing tunic, blue-violet in color, tight-fitting white trousers, scarlet vest, and an enormous sash of richly embroidered silk. Enfantin, a big, bearded man, had the words “Le Pere” embroidered across the front of his blouse. When he was taken to court for his advocacy of free love, he appeared in Hessian boots and a velvet cloak trimmed with ermine. Asked to defend his behavior, he stood motionless and silent, then explained that he wished the court to have a quiet moment to reflect on his beauty.

  But for all this he had a decisive intelligence. He had been an excellent student at the Ecole Polytechnique, the ultimate in French scientific training. He was a financier of importance and converts to the creed included eminent financiers, respected business people, journalists, many of the ablest civil engineers in France.

  Enfantin had judged Suez to be an easier undertaking than Panama. He was further inspired by a premonition that his female counterpart waited for him somewhere in the ancient cradle of civilization. So after serving a brief prison term, he had sailed for Egypt, and it was de Lesseps who persuaded the ruling viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, not to throw him out of the country. De Lesseps may also have provided Enfantin with financial assistance. At any rate, Enfantin and his engineers went into the Suez desert.

  After four years, more than half of them had died of cholera and little of practical value had been accomplished. Nonetheless, the prospect of a Suez canal was being talked about in Europe with seriousness at last, as a result of Enfantin’s proselytizing, and young de Lesseps, if not exactly a complete convert to Saint-Simonianism, had been uplifted by ideas that were to last a lifetime. “Do not forget that to accomplish great things you must have enthusiasm,” Enfantin had said, repeating the deathbed exhortation of the Master.