What he was proposing was not really a canal at all in the conventional sense. His lakes would be created by building two huge dams, one at the Chagres near the Atlantic, the other on the Rio Grande, which flows into the Pacific. The dams would be built as near to the two oceans as the configuration of the land permitted. The Chagres dam, the largest, should be built, he said, at the confluence of the Chagres and the Gatun rivers, at a point called Gatun, and it would hold the largest of the lakes. The surface of the lakes would be eighty feet above sea level and the lakes would be joined by a channel cut through the mountain spine at Culebra, this being the only heavy excavation required.
The virtues of the plan were enormous. To begin with, it greatly reduced the amount of digging to be done. Further, it eliminated all danger of Chagres floods, since the river would feed directly into the lakes. The dams would control the river; the river would serve as an unlimited water supply for the lakes–for the canal. Thus the river would become the life blood of the system, rather than its mortal enemy.
The resulting passage, furthermore, would be a broad lake, rather than a narrow channel. Ships would be able to move at greater speeds and they would be able to pass one another without shunting into sidings, or tying up, as was necessary at Suez. Passage through such a canal would take no more than twelve hours, even if one were to figure the time in each lock at half an hour, when, in fact, actual time in the lock would probably run closer to fifteen minutes. And twelve hours was only an hour and a half more than could be expected for passage through the best-engineered sea-level canal at Panama.
Such a project could be completed in six years, he said, and at a cost of 500,000,000 francs ($100,000,000), including interest and overhead, but not including the cost of buying the Panama Railroad, which, he stressed, would be an essential step and a very sizable expenditure.
Most important of all, he said, was the saving the plan would mean in terms of human lives. As was understood by everyone in the audience, nearly all varieties of tropical fever and miasma were caused by “noxious vapors” released from the putrid vegetation and rank soil of the jungle. Any excessive disturbance of such ground, therefore, naturally meant the spread of disease in epidemic proportions. But since his scheme called for a minimum of excavation, there would be a minimum of disturbance during construction and the incidence of disease would be correspondingly small. Furthermore, once the canal was built, much of the poisonous terrain would be sealed off by the lakes, producing a long-lasting beneficial effect. To dig a canal a niveau in Panama, he said, would cost the lives of no less than fifty thousand men.
His ideas were eloquently expressed and uncannily prophetic, but the delegates did not think enough of them to grant him even a token discussion. The congress turned to other matters.
Two subcommittees–one on tunnels and another on lock canals-were in closed session through the weekend and on Monday, May 26, presented their conclusions. Menocal’s Nicaragua canal was found to be perfectly practicable. Its cost was figured at $140,000,000 and the opinion was that it could be built in six years. The Wyse plan too was declared practicable. But the cost was put at $209,000,000. It was further stated that at least twelve years would be needed to build such a canal and all claims were qualified by a final explicit warning that construction of a Panama canal at sea level, as well as any measures designed to restrain the Chagres, presented many problems past reckoning.
Those delegates friendly to Lieutenant Wyse responded by asserting privately–in the halls outside the auditorium, over lunch in nearby cafes and restaurants on the Boulevard Saint Germain–that de Lesseps “would positively refuse” to lead the building of any canal other than one at Panama, a statement that had the desired effect of bringing a number of wavering delegates quickly back into line.
Commander Selfridge joined those attacking the Nicaragua plan and for the first time raised the issue of Nicaragua’s history of earthquakes and volcanic disturbances. But two of the most prominent French members of the Technical Committee, Cotard and Lavalley, both former engineers with de Lesseps at Suez, sided with the Nicaragua forces, as did Gustave Eiffel.
Wednesday, May 28, following a late night at the banquet tables (at the Hotel Continental, overlooking the Tuileries Gardens), the language of several speakers became considerably less diplomatic than heretofore. Menocal in particular made no effort to conceal his mounting disgust. He had come to Paris, he said, to present serious proposals based on volumes of information gathered through great effort and at great cost. He and his colleagues had expected other delegates to present material of comparable character, and that from a proper consideration of all such data, serious people, professionals of proven competence, would make their decisions in a spirit of reason and impartiality. Instead, the American plans were being weighed on the same scale as were imaginary schemes traced on imperfect maps, some of them the result of a night’s inspiration.
With that the oratory became highly charged. One French delegate, speaking for several hours, declared that it must be a sea-level canal, no matter what the cost.
The final recommendation of the Technical Committee, the decision the whole congress had been waiting for, was arrived at late that night amid tremendous confusion and excitement. Even in the stilted official account of the proceedings it is apparent that the session very nearly became a brawl. Twenty delegates, nearly half the committee, walked out before the vote was taken. In the end, only Ferdinand de Lesseps and eighteen others were willing to vote on a resolution, and of these, just three refused to vote as he wished.
Panama was pronounced the proper place for the canal and a sea-level canal was especially recommended.
It had been raining off and on for the past few days and it was raining again the following day, Thursday, May 29, when at 1:30 in the afternoon the full congress convened to hear the committee’s report and to cast the final, historic vote. “The hall was densely crowded, many ladies being present,” recalled Admiral Ammen; “about one hundred members or delegates and three to four hundred other persons . . . .” Dr. Johnston, who had no illusions as to how the vote would go, wrote bitterly:
We had arrived at the moment of “sublime resolutions,” of those “sublime resolutions” which have been the glory and ridicule of France; they were going to carry hundreds of millions of money abroad for the good of mankind in general. It would cost much money, but the money they had; it would require men of genius, but these also they had; the absurd barrier which nature had thrown up between the two seas was going to fall before the force of French genius and the power of French money.
French observers would recall the solemnity of the moment as de Lesseps read aloud the crucial resolution:
The congress believes that the excavation of an interoceanic canal at sea level, so desirable in the interests of commerce and navigation, is feasible; and that, in order to take advantage of the indispensable facilities for access and operation which a channel of this kind must offer above all, this canal should extend from the Gulf of Limon to the Bay of Panama.
The necessary time for construction was fixed at twelve years–a finished canal by 1892–and the cost of construction was estimated at 1,070,000,000 francs, or $214,000,000. Supposing the interest payable in the meantime would amount to 130,000,000 francs, the total expenditure worked out to 1,200,000,000 francs, or $240,000,000-almost triple the cost of Suez.
It was a voice vote in alphabetical order. Henri Bionne called the names.
Daniel Ammen rose and abstained on the grounds that only professional engineers should be allowed to vote on such a proposition. Two other Americans, Nathan Appleton and Christian Christiansen, the latter from San Francisco, voted yes. The first no was sounded by the Guatemalan delegate. Daubree, who had been chairman of the Technical Committee, voted yes, as did a former Suez engineer named Dauzats. Gustave Eiffel voted no.
Flachat, Hawkshaw, and Dr. Johnston decided to absent themselves from the proceedings. Alexandre Lavalley was also ab
sent. When Godin de Lepinay was called, he got to his feet and looked about the large crowd. “Though unable to make my advice triumph, I will not abandon it. And in order not to burden my conscience with unnecessary deaths and useless expenditure I say ‘no!’ ” When he sat down it was to a noisy chorus of jeers and booing.
Seventy-seven of the delegates had voted at this point and forty-three had voted yes. The next name in alphabetical order, everybody knew, was Ferdinand de Lesseps.
“I vote ‘yes!’ ” he cried out, his voice filling the room. “And I have accepted command of the enterprise!” It was his first such public declaration and it electrified the house. The applause and cheering went on and on, interrupting the roll call for several minutes.
The rest went swiftly. Eli Lazard, of San Francisco, the Russian admiral, the Chinese delegate, a man from the Italian Geographical Society, declared themselves in the affirmative. A. G. Menocal abstained. As the final tabulation was being made, de Lesseps, looking immensely pleased, told the audience, “Two weeks ago I had no idea of placing myself at the head of a new enterprise. My dearest friends have tried to dissuade me, telling me that after Suez I should take a rest. Well! If you ask a general who has just won a first victory whether he wishes to win a second, would he refuse?”
To other audiences later he was to say that it was the overwhelming approval of the congress, the faces he saw before him, and especially the look his wife gave him that propelled him to make the decision, adding that to have backed down then would have been an act of cowardice. His wife, he would say, had been the foremost of those dearest friends who had tried to dissuade him. She had wished only that their life could continue as it was. So apparently she too had been swept up by the spirit of the moment.
There was absolute silence as the vote was declared: in favor of the resolution, 74; opposed, 8; abstaining, 16; absent, 38.
Delegates were on their feet cheering; women were waving hand-kerchiefs. It was as if an astonishing victory had been won. De Lesseps stepped forward and promised success; Admiral de La Ronciere-Le Noury declared that the day marked the beginning of one of the greatest undertakings of modern times. “It seems to me that nothing could have been more glorious. . .” Henri Barboux, attorney for Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps, would recall years later before a packed courtroom. “Might not one think of it as a council ordaining, after the lapse of seven hundred years, a new crusade?”
Ferdinand de Lesseps was a man accustomed to having his own way and he had not been disappointed. The congress, as its severest critics claimed, had been put on primarily to give the Wyse Concession a legitimacy, an authority, that it otherwise lacked and that it greatly needed to attract the necessary financial backing, as de Lesseps knew better than anyone. The grand international gathering had been conceived not to arrive at a consensus, but to provide an inaugural ceremony for a decision already made by the one delegate who mattered, Ferdinand de Lesseps. The objective from the start had been to ordain, to consecrate, the Wyse Concession, the Wyse plan, in full public view, with all possible ceremony, to give the appearance of an impartial, scientific, international sanction. The Americans with their maps and plans and convictions had come alarmingly close to spoiling the effect, but even they had been no match for “the first promoter of the age.”
Virtually all of de Lesseps’ blind spots, all the tragic errors of his way, had shown themselves in the course of the two weeks–the jaunty disregard of technical problems, the inability to heed, to trust, the views of recognized authorities if those views conflicted with his own, the faith that the future would take care of itself, that necessity would give rise to invention in required proportions and at the proper moment, the unshakable faith in his own infallibility.
But then all these same qualities had been fundamental to his success in Egypt, and combined with his love of people, his charm, these were what made him Ferdinand de Lesseps. And who then was to say that he knew more about building a canal, more about success in such grandiose undertakings?
The Americans went home furious and extremely skeptical that any-thing would ever come of the affair.
Why Ammen and Menocal had failed to vote no, to record their negative views in public when it counted, remained a puzzle to many and a disappointment to the handful who had. By way of explanation Dr. Johnston offered that “these delegates were met and surrounded during their whole stay with such a large hospitality, they were so dined and feted, that they will be excused for lacking the heart to look their entertainers in the face and pronounce so harsh a word as ‘no.’”
A. G. Menocal, afterward, did an interesting analysis of the vote. Though the yea votes were predominantly French, not one of the five delegates from the French Society of Engineers had voted for the proposal. Of those seventy-four delegates who did declare themselves for a sea-level canal at Panama, only nineteen were engineers and of those nineteen only one had ever set foot in Central America and he was young Pedro Sosa of Panama.
CULVER PICTURES, INC.
Ferdinand de Lesseps
CULVER PICTURES, INC.
Jules Verne
COLLECTION OF GEORGES SIROT
The second Madame de Lesseps, Louise Héléne Autard de Bragard
Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon-Bonaparte Wyse
BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE
Charles de Lesseps
CULVER PICTURES, INC.
Secretary of State William Evarts
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Admiral Daniel Ammen
HARPER’S WEEKLY
American skepticism over the vast undertaking as expressed by Thomas Nast in Harper’s Weekly: “Is M. de Lesseps a Canal Digger or a Grave Digger?”
BOTH PHOTOS: CULVER PICTURES, INC.
View of the Chagres River at the time the French arrived. The Panama Railroad is in the foreground; the village of Gatun is across the river.
Front Street, Colón, as it looked during the French era
UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY
Headquarters of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique, Cathedral Plaza, Panama City
Ferdinand de Lesseps with his entourage in Panama in 1880
PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
Four unidentified French engineers and an unidentified companion. Probably three of the five died of disease.
UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY
One of the giant French excavators upon which de Lesseps based his high expectations
BOTH PHOTOS: PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
I’Hôpital Nôtre Dame du Canal, the French hospital on Ancon Hill outside Panama City
Operating room at Ancon sometime in the late 1880’s
FROM MOSQUITO CONTROL, JOSKPII I.K PRINCE, G. P. PUTNAM, 1916
Crockery rings filled with water were used by the French to protect plants on the hospital grounds from the ravages of umbrella ants, but served also as perfect breeding grounds for Stegomyia fasciata, the yellow-fever mosquito
One of hundreds of surviving death certificates from the Ancon hospital, this of a twenty-nine-year-old Frenchman who died of yellow fever in 1886
Philippe Bunau-Varilla at the time of his graduation from the Ecole Polytechnique
PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
The hanging of Pedro Prestan at Colón, August 18, 1885, following the disastrous “Prestan Uprising”
BOTH PHOTOS: PANAMA CANAL COMPANY
West Indian labor gangs ride a raft specially devised by Bunau-Varilla for the underwater placement of dynamite charges prior to dredging. Long steel drills were driven by hand according to his mathematically calculated pattern,
French ladder dredge at work. It was upon machines of this kind that Bunau-Varilla rested his novel scheme for rescuing the French effort during its desperate finale.
Baron Jacques de Reinach
Georges Clemenceau
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS: BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE
Charles de Lesseps pleads his case in the Paris Court of Appeal in January 1893, at the start of
the first of two sensational trials. The three other defendants seated behind Charles are, from left to right, Gustave Eiffel, Henri Cottu, and Marius Fontane. Henri Barboux, attorney for Ferdinand and Charles de Lesseps, is the small white-haired figure standing behind Charles’s empty chair. This courtroom looks today exactly as it did then.
A contemporary artist’s conception of the bedridden Cornelius Herz, the “mystery man of Panama,” sequestered in his hotel room at Bournemouth, England
The abandoned château of the first Directeur Général, the muchpublicized “folie Dingler”
An abandoned French excavator is overtaken by the jungle near Tabernilla.
4
Distant Shores
. . . and I maintain that Panama will be easier to make, easier to complete, and easier to keep up than Suez.
–FERDINAND DE LESSEPS
I
With no further delay Ferdinand de Lesseps swung into action. In a matter of days he had organized a private syndicate of some 270 rich and influential friends who, for providing 2,000,000 francs, were to receive founders’ shares at a bargain price, once a company was legally established. It was the same as he had done for Suez.
Next he bought out the Türr Syndicate for 10,000,000 francs ($2,000,000). Payment was to be half in cash, half in stock in the new company. The Wyse Concession was now his alone, as much as the Suez concession had been, and Wyse, Türr, and the rest realized a profit on their initial investment of more than 3,000 percent. Istvan Türr took his money and went off to negotiate a concession from the king of Greece to build a canal across the Isthmus of Corinth. Wyse and the others, however, were in to stay, convinced that the best was yet to come. Wyse was happily telling friends that de Lesseps had promised to put him in command of the work, as reward for his efforts. But as others had learned at Suez, de Lesseps was not one to share power or glory. He denied having guaranteed Wyse a role of any kind. The young officer had served his purpose and so now he was dropped–“betrayed” Wyse felt.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 338