Rodrigues, who had the room next door to de Lesseps, described how at five in the morning de Lesseps’ hearty laugh could be heard resounding through the halls of the hotel. Then, in the comparative cool of the early morning, the old man would be off on a fishing expedition or a hike with his sons. One morning, in the plaza, as Madame de Lesseps watched from the balcony of their room and a large and approving crowd gathered, he put a lively horse through its paces. Had there been a stone wall, as once there had been in Egypt, no doubt he would have attempted that as well.
“Then, M. de Lesseps is one of those men who know how to please,” observed Rodrigues. “He begins by enjoying hugely those popular attentions, and because he wishes to retain them he tries to deserve them.” which was perhaps as good an explanation as anyone ever offered of why the old hero did what he did. His exuberance was irrepressible. At one point an elderly resident Frenchman told him that if he persisted with his plan there would not be trees enough on the Isthmus to make the crosses to put over the graves of his laborers. De Lesseps appeared unmoved. As Robinson wrote, “Nothing ever seemed for an instant to dampen the ardor of his enthusiasm, or to cloud the vista of that glorious future which he had pictured in his imagination.”
Yet there is at least one clear sign in the record that the old hero saw more than he let on. In an amazing interview published a few years later, he told Emily Crawford, Paris correspondent for the London Daily News and the New York Tribune, that in fact he knew as soon as he traveled across Panama that the task would be far more difficult than he had been led to suppose, that the Wyse plan for a canal was a fraud–“daringly mendacious” were his words. “But,” wrote Mrs. Crawford, “he was in for the enterprise, and as he thought it feasible, he meant to go on with it.”
Less than twenty-four hours before de Lesseps was scheduled to sail for New York, his nine-man Technical Commission presented its final report. Three hundred pages in length, it was little more than a rubber stamp for what he had been planning. A canal a niveau was approved. A dam to hold the Chagres in check was recommended. There was to be a breakwater at Colón, as he wanted, a tidal lock on the Pacific end. Construction time was figured to require eight years rather than twelve, as declared at the Paris congress.
De Lesseps liked everything but the estimated cost–843,000,000 francs, a figure 357,000,000 francs below what had been estimated at the Paris congress. The new figure was still too high, he thought, and this in spite of the fact that now no interest on capital for eight years was included, or administrative expenses, or the sums due the Türr Syndicate and the Colombian government, or the very large expense of buying the Panama Railroad. Many such details had not been bothered with in the Paris estimate, it is true. However, the figure produced in Paris had included an extra 25 percent for contingent expenses, whereas the amount now added for contingencies was only 10 percent.
But what made the new estimate look even more remarkable was the further fact that the anticipated volume of excavation–the amount of digging to be done–had been increased by more than 50 percent (from 46,000,000 cubic meters, as reckoned at the congress, to 75,000,-000 cubic meters). Having seen Panama, having been over the ground, having decided that the job was to be half again greater than previously declared, the commission had reduced the total cost of the canal, then allotted less for unexpected difficulties. And de Lesseps’ sole complaint was that their reductions were too timid.
“Our work will be easier at Panama than at Suez,” he announced. To Charles he wrote: “Now that I have gone over the various localities in the Isthmus with our engineers, I cannot understand why they hesitated so long in declaring that it would be practicable to build a maritime canal between the two oceans at sea level, for the distance is as short as between Paris and Fontainebleau.” Talk of the deadly climate, he said, was nothing more than the “invention of our adversaries.”
None of the party had experienced any sign of ill health. The nearest thing to a crisis had been a case of sunburn suffered by Madame de Lesseps on the outing to Taboga.
On board the Colon, somewhere between Limon Bay and New York, seated quietly in his stateroom, de Lesseps took a pencil and went to work on the commission’s report. By the time the ship reached the East River he had cut the estimated price by another 184,400,000 francs, or by nearly $37,000,000. The canal, he told the reporters who came aboard at New York, was going to cost no more than $131,720,-000. It was, everyone agreed, an impressive reduction from the $240,-000,000 predicted at Paris.
IV
To nobody’s surprise he was front-page news the whole time he was in New York. Not for twenty years, the papers declared, had a foreign visitor been greeted by the city with such warmth and wholehearted appreciation. Newspaper articles made much of his striking physical appearance, the snow-white hair, the tropical tan, the youthfulness and intellectual vigor–all in notable contrast, it should be added here, to the claims made later that he was a dim, muddled old man by the time he first saw Panama. One reporter who had interviewed him years before at Suez found him “not a whit changed. The same marvelous bright eyes, the same earnest voice, the same sympathetic chuckle, personally magnetic as ever, erect, impulsive, and, if anything, younger.” A writer for the World thought he looked about fifty-five.
It was his first time in the United States and, as at Panama, he enjoyed himself grandly. He strolled Fifth Avenue, took a ride on the El, went by elevator to the top of the Equitable Life Assurance Building on Broadway (a full six stories high), “inspected” the half-finished Brooklyn Bridge. The great Culebra Cut at Panama, he declared dramatically, would be as deep as the bridge towers were tall–274 feet
In his suite at the Windsor Hotel On Fifth Avenue, talking rapidly but softly, and with numerous gestures, he assured reporters that his Panama plan posed no conflict with the Monroe Doctrine. The venture was a private enterprise and the American people especially should understand the virtues of private enterprise. The point was that he welcomed American investment. “I am but an executor of the American idea,” he insisted, and in fact he would be happy to see a majority of the stock sold in the United States and to have the company’s headquarters located in New York or Washington.
The tricolor flew over the Windsor as though a head of state were in residence. He was received by the American Geographical Society, and a reception given by the city’s French community was attended by an estimated eight thousand people. Another night, wearing white tie and tails, he walked onto a stage banked with potted palms and told the American Society of Civil Engineers that he was a diplomat, not an engineer, but that he was honored to be welcomed as a colleague. As at all such occasions he spoke through an interpreter and extemporaneously. He never used notes, he explained, because he always spoke the truth, the truth required no preparation.
For a banquet at Delmonico’s, the main dining room was decorated with French and American flags, a central chandelier had been transformed into an enormous floral bell from which ropes of evergreen intertwined with flowers ran to all corners, and every table had its ingenious confectionery centerpiece–Ferdinand de Lesseps in evening dress, shovel in hand, bestriding Africa; a sphinx; a Suez dredging machine; the steamer Colon. The menu was embossed with the de Lesseps coat of arms, and the all-male guest list, some 250 “notables,” included Mayor Cooper, Andrew Carnegie, Jesse Seligman, Russell Sage, Albert Bierstadt, Clarence King, Octave Chanute, Abram Hewitt, Chauncey Depew, Peter Cooper, David Dudley Field. At about nine o’clock, just before the speeches began, Madame de Lesseps made a dramatic entrance onto the musicians’ balcony, accompanied by Emily Roebling, wife of the crippled chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The speakers were Alexander Lyman Holley, pioneer of the Bessemer process in America; John Bigelow, the diplomat and publisher; Dr. Henry W. Bellows, the famous Unitarian; and Frederick M. Kelley, who gave the main address. In terms of who was there, the things said, the setting and all, it was one of those marvelous moments around which a w
hole study of an age could be developed. (One of Bierstadt’s vast western landscapes had recently been purchased by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, for example; Carnegie’s steel empire was by now the mightiest in the world due primarily to the innovative skills of Alexander Holley; a spiritual leader such as Henry W. Bellows could still speak, as he did, with perfect faith in “the white winged dove of commerce.”) Nonetheless, as several editorials stressed the morning after, the occasion and the sentiments expressed were plainly in honor of the man, not his present scheme. New York was enormously interested in Ferdinand de Lesseps, interested–but guardedly–in his Panama canal.
“For what he has done we give him our most cordial welcome and the homage of our heartiest applause,” declared Whitelaw Reid of the Tribune. “What he proposes to do is another matter . . .”
And so it was to be everywhere else he traveled in the United States. In Washington, where there were no banquets or receptions, the message was especially blunt. Everybody was perfectly cordial, to be sure, including President Hayes. On Capitol Hill, de Lesseps was received by the House Interoceanic Canal Committee and gave an eloquent plea for his project, then was invited to hear Captain James B. Eads, builder of the famous St. Louis bridge, present his proposal for a colossal ship railway across Tehuantepec. The plan was to hoist ships out of the water bodily, in huge wheeled cradles, and haul them overland with enormous locomotives pulling in tandem. An ingenious system of hydraulic rams, Eads explained, would push supports, or blocks, against the ship’s hull. Each block would be equipped with a universal joint so that it would automatically conform to the shape of the hull at the point of contact, thereby distributing equally the weight of the ship. To put a six-thousand-ton ship into the cradle would take half an hour. The cradle itself would ride on twelve rails placed five feet apart and on 1,200 wheels (100 on each rail). The locomotives, five times as powerful as the largest then in existence, would have an average speed in crossing of ten to twelve miles per hour. The complete transfer of a ship from one ocean to the other, over a distance of 134 miles, would take sixteen hours. And to build such a system, Eads said, would cost only $50,000,000, about a third that of Ferdinand de Lesseps’ canal.
De Lesseps’ listened politely to all this and perhaps some of it touched a vital nerve. Such visions of ships being picked from the water like toys and towed over the mountains of Mexico might have been hatched by Jules Verne in his tower study at Amiens. In any event, he offered Eads his compliments and made a gracious exit, only to be confronted by reporters carrying the full text of a new Presidential message to Congress. The United States, Hayes avowed, would not surrender its control over any isthmian canal to any European power or combination of powers. Nor should corporations or private citizens investing in such an enterprise look to any European power for protection. “An interoceanic canal . . . will be the great ocean thoroughfare between our Atlantic and our Pacific shores and virtually a part of the coastline of the United States.” The “policy of this country is a canal under American control.”
The message was a clear and deadly serious repulse to de Lesseps’ intentions. He could have protested, or he could have been diplomatic and evasive, or he could have said nothing for the moment. Instead he had Henri Bionne send off a cable addressed to Charles in Paris and, ultimately, to the Bulletin: “The message of President Hayes guarantees the political security of the canal.”
He, Le Grand Français, had won another noble victory, that was the implicit claim. If the United States declared that no European power could function as protector over the canal, then this meant that the United States would fulfill that vital function. And with the United States watching over the enterprise during construction and afterward, investors could be certain of success. That was not at all what had been meant. “What the President said,” wrote J. C. Rodrigues in his subsequent analysis, “[was that] he did not wish to see European corporations building canals in Panama; but M. de Lesseps was equal to the occasion, and consistent once more with all the plot of a play of which he was protagonist.”
Then, like the veteran performer who knows how well physical movement alone can command attention, he was on his way, barn-storming across the continent by train, From Philadelphia to St. Louis to San Francisco, then back by way of Chicago, Niagara Falls, and Boston. Madame de Lesseps and the children meantime remained in Philadelphia, where she had relatives.
He made the trip in three weeks and he was news at every stop. His crowds were large, often very large, and they were always friendly. Frequently they were even as enthusiastic as the Bulletin claimed. He called Americans the most hospitable people on earth. In Chicago a heckler shouted a gibe about the Monroe Doctrine. “Here are twenty thousand of you Americans,” de Lesseps responded. “Now explain to me how the Monroe Doctrine prevents my making the canal.” He waited; no one answered. Then he patiently explained their Monroe Doctrine to them and why it had no bearing on his canal, adding, “I cannot agree with a town only a third my own age . . . which says that the thing is impossible.”
“Hurrah! That’s the boy we want!” somebody shouted and there was a long approving cheer.
In Washington the French minister presented a note to Secretary Evarts saying the French government was in no way involved in the de Lesseps enterprise at Panama “and in no way proposed to interfere therein or to give it any support, either direct or indirect.”
De Lesseps and party sailed on April 1, 1880. He had been praised and feted right up to the final day, when there was a farewell luncheon at the home of Cyrus Field, who had laid the Atlantic Cable. Moreover, he had found the time in New York to put together what he was to call his Comite Americain to handle the sale of Panama stock in the United States. Three New York firms had agreed to participate–J. & W. Seligman & Company, Drexel, Morgan & Company, and Winslow, Lanier & Company. And yet for all this, his popularity, his vigor, there were no takers. He had sold no stock. Not a single American capitalist of consequence had expressed the least serious interest in his Compagnie Universelle.
The real money, he responded to his followers, would come from France. “It is in France alone, where one is in the habit of working for the civilization of the world, that I shall . . . raise the capital necessary . . .” And within no less than two hours after his arrival in Paris he was sitting beneath a large Venetian chandelier in the upstairs salon of Madame Juliette Adam expounding on his travels to a gathering of old friends and admirers.
The next weeks were packed with lectures, dinners, interviews, and he thrived on the schedule no less than he had on all the thousands of miles at sea, the countless new faces, the rich food and strange hotels and endless talk. Friends told him he never looked better. A doctor in one after-dinner speech accused him of jeopardizing the medical profession, since obviously the visit to Panama had resulted in the discovery of the fountain of youth.
So the odyssey of four, nearly five, months had ended in a resounding display of popular approval of exactly the kind he knew to be essential. By simply going to Panama, returning physically whole and hearty, he had worked a stunning transformation at home. His grave mistake was to underestimate his own success. His popular support now was far greater than he had any idea, and his misreading of that fact, ironically, was to prove nearly as fateful as his more obvious misreading of Panama itself.
5
The Incredible Task
For country, science, and glory.
–Motto of the Ecole Polytechnique
I
The early years of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique were a time of soaring hopes, a considerable amount of misleading propaganda, and some real, if costly, progress. In Panama amazing things were accomplished by men whose devotion to the task was exemplary, often heroic. Their achievements were never quite what Ferdinand de Lesseps promised, and for all their noble intentions, they made serious mistakes almost from the beginning. Still, in view of the difficulties they had to face, the sheer magnitude of
the task, the things they simply did not know, the repeated instances of personal suffering and tragedy, they did extremely well.
In Paris the sale of stock in the company–Ferdinand de Lesseps’ second attempt to go public–turned out to be one of the most astonishing events in financial history.
La grande entreprise was to be the biggest financial undertaking ever attempted until then. Panama stock was to be more widely held than any ever issued before. And never had any strictly financial proposition inspired such ardent devotion among its investors. The explanation, of course, in good part, was that to most of them it was never a strictly financial proposition. Nothing so vital to French pride just then, nothing led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, could have been seen as that only. Of enormous importance also were the almost limitless expectations associated with venture capitalism– pionnier capitalisme. The talk was of “the poetry of capitalism” and of “the shareholders’ democracy.” The unprecedented response of the French people to de Lesseps had many sides, many psychological levels, and only later, in hindsight, would their allegiance seem blind or his leadership purposefully deceitful.
He put the management of the sale this time in the hands of Marc Levy-Cremieux, vice-president of the powerful Franco-Egyptian Bank, who had been among his vigorous opponents during the first go-around. Levy-Cremieux also sent his own man–an engineer–out to appraise the situation at Panama, and the man returned with the confidential report that the canal would never pay. Half a dozen companies would go down in ruin before any ship passed through Panama, the man insisted. But not a word was said of this publicly.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 341