Bunau-Varilla was kept close at hand to answer all technical questions. Charles likewise was never very far. Charles was “very clear headed and capable,” noted John Bigelow, an emissary from The New York Chamber of Commerce who had joined the party, and the friendship Bigelow struck up with Bunau-Varilla was to last a lifetime.
All in all, it was a brave show. Morale had been restored on the Isthmus to a degree no one there would have thought possible. Boyer, the new head, had been installed. The guests enjoyed themselves throughout, with the exception of Bigelow, who came down with something briefly and thought he was dying of yellow fever. Their host enjoyed himself supremely. When it came time to go, all parties (Bigelow also by then) were in perfect health.
The one dissatisfied individual seems to have been Philippe Bunau-Varilla, whose devotion to the work was no less for having been relieved of command, but who felt he had been slighted by Le Grand Français. In their private talks de Lesseps had expressed nothing but praise and gratitude for all the young man had done, yet said nothing to that effect publicly. “Any homage paid to any other personality but himself seemed to steal a ray from his crown of glory,” Bunau-Varilla would write years later, still resentful.
On reaching home the delegates from the French chambers of commerce expressed unqualified confidence. Unquestionably the canal could be built–provided de Lesseps had the funds needed (provided the government let him have his lottery). Bigelow, too, in a long, detailed, and entirely fair appraisal, concluded that the canal could and would be built, for the reason that “too large a proportion of its cost has already been incurred to make retreat as good a policy as advance.” He had been bothered by the heat; he remained deeply troubled by the great number of lives being lost, a subject scarcely mentioned during the tour. But like Lieutenant Kimball, he concluded that the critical, unanswerable question was cost, not the cost of construction simply– and any figure offered, even by the most experienced engineers, was pure conjecture–but the cost of the money itself. “Till the money is secured, and the cost of getting it is ascertained, it would be about as safe to predict the quarter in which the winds will be setting next Christmas day at St. Petersburg . . .”
Bigelow was a prominent figure, in addition to being highly intelligent and observant, a former part-owner (with William Cullen Bryant) of the New York Evening Post, a former American minister to France, lawyer, and scholar. He had taken the tour very seriously, preparing in advance long lists of questions for the French engineers. What impressed him beyond everything else was the magnitude of the effort, and this, like a certain foreboding, can be read between the lines throughout his report. The task had no parallel in history he said. Americans had far too little appreciation of what the French were attempting. Once, to his astonishment, Charles had told him that the United States would eventually have to take financial control, as England had done at Suez. It was a remark made in confidence–and with sadness, one would imagine–and Bigelow said nothing of it, other than in his diary. But in his report, published well before any of Captain Mahan’s theories, Bigelow did write that whenever or by whatever manner the canal was completed, the great beneficiary would be the United States, for the canal would “secure to the United States, forever, the incontestable advantage of position in the impending contest of nations for the supremacy of the seas.”
De Lesseps, as soon as he reached Paris, made a predictable declaration of faith in the speedy completion of the work. Yet in virtually the same breath, and as smoothly and cheerfully as if he had been announcing some favorable turn of events, he also conceded that Panama was a more difficult undertaking than Suez–ten times more difficult.
On March 29, in an interview with Emily Crawford, correspondent for the London Daily News, he further claimed that the baffling issue of the Chagres was at last resolved: “. . . we have changed the whole course of the river and made it run on the other side of the mountains altogether.” Undoubtedly he meant that the river had been rerouted on paper, which it had, and actual excavation for a vast diversion channel had begun. That, however, was not the impression given by Mrs. Crawford’s article, which, as she noted in conclusion, he read and vouched for prior to publication. The distinct impression was that the river no longer intervened, that it had been neatly placed somewhere safely out of the way, and thus success was assured.
Meantime, as the government, indeed, as the whole of France, waited for the other prognosis–the one from Armand Rousseau–the canal company was having trouble paying its bills, despite another issue of conventional bonds.
The Rousseau Report was released in May, and to the French public, accustomed to unwavering support for the canal in the press, to the shareholders, long fortified by the Bulletin and de Lesseps, its impact was considerable. Rousseau, a former chef des Ponts et Chaussées, was a man of the highest repute and his views were taken as entirely forthright, which indeed they were.
To abandon the canal now would be unthinkable, he had concluded. It would spell disaster not merely for thousands of shareholders, but for French prestige. If the present company were to drop the work, a foreign one–unnamed–would surely take it up. The canal company therefore ought to be given some kind of moral assistance by the government. He favored the lottery. But then came the crucial passages. Completion of the canal was possible; however, completion with the resources anticipated or within the time announced appeared extremely doubtful unless the company would agree at once to radical modifications of its plans. He did not specify what ought to be done, because he believed his charter did not authorize him to do so. But there was little doubt as to what he had in mind. The one radical modification possible was to abandon the sea-level plan while there was still time.
In sum, he was saying that the hopes entertained by Ferdinand de Lesseps were without foundation–in terms of time, money, and, most important, the canal he had been selling the French people all these years. A canal a niveau had been the axiom of de Lesseps’ conception since before the Paris congress. It had been his reason for picking Panama in the first place. So it was easy enough to draw from the report the dark and unsettling conclusion that the whole plan had been a stupendous mistake from the beginning.
In quick succession came two more opinions, both filed at the request of the canal company. The first was from another respected engineer, a man named Jacquet, whose candor was courageous in view of the situation and the mood among those paying for his services. Having toured the work, he declared that a sea-level passage was unattainable and urged the building of a canal with locks along the same path. The second opinion, sent from Colón, was written by Director General Boyer, whom Bunau-Varilla would recall as one of France’s most gifted sons. Boyer had brought sixty engineers out from France. Within a few months they had nearly all fallen by the wayside, sick, demoralized, or dead. Then, only a week or two after his report reached Paris, came the news that Boyer too was dead, another victim of yellow fever.
His was the most disquieting judgment of all, in that he spoke as the company’s ranking technical authority. Like Rousseau and Jacquet, he regarded the sea-level canal as impossible within the limitations of available time and money. It had taken him but a short time on the scene to reach this view.
Charles knew that his father must give way, but if his father saw this, he never let on publicly. Rather, he now insisted that it must be a canal at sea level–a great new “Ocean Bosporus” was his favorite expression–saying that it could be achieved in just three more years. His will was iron. All critics were enemies. What secret, unspeakable dread he may have felt–if any–what premonitions of disaster haunted his private hours, will never be known. But he certainly had all the facts at his disposal and the truth of the situation was plain as day: with the excavation in its fifth year, the contractors had managed to extract little more than a quarter of the total excavation anticipated by Dingler’s reckoning.
The Minister of Public Works, Charles Baihaut, moved that a lottery bill be acte
d upon without delay, but with the cloud of the Rousseau Report hanging over them, the deputies on yet another special lottery committee now voted to postpone further discussion and called for an audit of the canal company’s accounts. Outraged, de Lesseps refused to comply. Further, he wanted his application for a lottery withdrawn. “I am postponed, I do not accept the postponement,” he exclaimed in a letter to his stockholders. “Faithful to my past, when they try to stop me, I go on. . . . I am confident that together we will overcome all obstacles and that you will march with me . . .”
But by no means had he dismissed the lottery from his plans, the defiant words notwithstanding. His immediate next move was another conventional bond issue, and although the results appeared perfectly respectable–some 90 percent of the offering was taken–the company was paying too much for too little. It was becoming a dangerous, costly trend. In total the company was presently paying out a staggering 750,000,000 francs, or $15,000,000, just for annual interest on its borrowed money,
Paris was filled with conflicting claims and rumors emanating from the Bourse or from the offices on the Rue Caumartin, or from around the corner at the Suez offices, where de Lesseps still spent much of his regular day. Philippe Bunau-Varilla, home since spring, was telling visiting Americans of the money he had behind him, claiming he had a new concept that would revolutionize the work and save the canal. He had returned from Panama after barely surviving an attack of yellow fever, resigned his position with the company, and was currently the guiding spirit of the reorganized Artigue, Sonderegger et Compagnie, now the Culebra contractor.
But others were talking of the resignation of the secretary general of the canal company, Etienne Martin, because he regarded the contract with Artigue, Sonderegger as so outrageously advantageous to Artigue, Sonderegger. His replacement was Marius Fontane, the Company’s publicity agent. For every rumor of collapse and bankruptcy, there was another story, always on good authority, that the government was prepared to rescue the canal come what might, that the company’s great hidden strength was its political influence. It was noted, for example, that the Minister of Public Works, Baihaut, who had set the lottery bill in motion, had declared his support for the lottery, irrespective of what Rousseau might conclude. Baihaut, known as “the man with the beautiful wife,” was an outspoken moralist (an officer of the Society for the Promotion of Good) and a popular topic, since until recently the beautiful wife had been married to his best friend.
Management of the company’s financial affairs, moreover, had fallen to new hands. Marc Levy-Cremieux, the banker who directed de Lesseps’ initial stock successes, had died. Serving now as the canal’s chief financial agent was Baron Jacques de Reinach, of the original Türr Syndicate. The ebullient little baron had friends in high places– Adrien Hebrard, publisher of Le Temps; Jules Grevy; General Boulanger, the glamorous new Minister of War; the Radical leader Georges Clemenceau; Premier de Freycinet.
Emile de Girardin’s Petit Journal, the most popular paper in France, remained conspicuously loyal to the “cause of Panama.” As Emily Crawford was to note, the paper’s chief editorial writer “puffed Panama” to such a degree that he was “carried above the concert pitch of the paper by the heat of his enthusiasm.” Mrs. Crawford, the widow of an English newspaperman, was among the ablest foreign correspondents of the day, a handsome middle-aged Irishwoman who knew just about everyone in power and “did not worry about being conventional.”
De Lesseps remained as active as ever, a familiar figure on the boulevards, still fathering children, still to be seen riding in the Bois with a troupe of the older ones. He appeared to be without a problem. Ac cording to one story, a group of salesmen struck up a conversation with him on a train somewhere outside Paris and failing to recognize him asked what his line might be. “Isthmuses!” he said. He was introducing ship canals and after Panama he would build the Kr a Canal across the Malay Peninsula.
In October, largely in response to a malicious rumor that he was terminally ill, he crossed the Atlantic still one more time–his last–to participate in the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. At a rollicking celebration in New York Harbor, October 28, 1886, with cannon booming and tug whistles screaming on every side, he stood with President Grover Cleveland on a flag-draped platform set at the foot of the colossal statue.
“Soon, gentlemen, we shall meet again,” he said, “to celebrate a peaceful conquest. Good-bye until we meet at Panama . . .”
II
The façade of an Ocean Bosporus was maintained for another year. In January of 1887 de Lesseps’ Advisory Commission formally convened to consider the possibility of a lock canal, with the net result that a subcommission was appointed to look into the matter. The subcommission would not meet until the fall.
Charles de Lesseps returned to Panama in March, taking still another delegation of experts to give still another appraisal, and the delegation returned with the unanimous opinion that the sea-level plan must be dropped at once if disaster was to be averted. The company quietly put this report into safe storage.
Every day the decision was postponed was a day of enormously expensive wasted effort on the Isthmus. Cash reserves in Paris were shrinking rapidly. And not until the sea-level plan was scrapped could there be any hope of government action in support of the lottery.
Had de Lesseps decided on a lock canal in the fall of 1886, had he gone to his stockholders then with a new plan, instead of sailing off to New York, the outcome of la grande entreprise might have been quite different. Possibly the dream could have had a different ending had he but spent the first part of 1887 preparing his public for the change in plans. This he did not do, however. Apparently he kept thinking that somehow, some way, the crisis could be resolved, that some miraculous turn of fate would save the sea-level canal. It is hard to imagine what turn of fate he possibly had in mind, but then he remained, as before, one who saw his own existence and all that he did as part of a glorious cosmic pattern.
Meantime, consideration was being given to a temporary solution devised by Bunau-Varilla. He wanted to make one kind of canal in order to dig another kind. It had been the accepted engineering wisdom that dredges were pretty nearly useless against rock. At Suez, for instance, when the dredges struck underlying rock between the Bitter Lakes and the Red Sea, the engineers had put earth dams across the cut and drained that section so it could be excavated “in the dry.” Consequently at Panama the assumption had been that only soft strata could be removed by dredging. But when the Slaven machines hit rock at a point called Mindi, near Colón, Bunau-Varilla conceived a technique whereby the rock could be blasted into pieces of an exact size for the dredges to cope with. The system rested on a particular mathematical placement of underwater charges, and once perfected, it was no more expensive than conventional dry excavation, or such was his claim. Later on, at Culebra he had taken the idea another step. Artificial lagoons were built at either side of the saddle. Earth dams were thrown up and water was piped in. The dredges were then brought up and floated on these lagoons and the excavation proceeded.
His proposal now was to carry the idea to its ultimate conclusion: Subdivide the whole line of the canal into a series of such artificial pools and unite these with locks; in other words, build a lock canal upon which to float the dredges and let the dredges eventually transform that canal into an uninterrupted passage at sea level. He would use water, rather than railroad track, to transport his excavation machinery, and to carry the spoil away. Such a system would be little affected by rains or landslides. The cut at Culebra need only be made half as deep for the time being. The locks could be removed two by two as the dredging progressed. And since the locks would be built to accommodate conventional ships, regular canal traffic could begin as soon as the locks were ready. So ships could be passing to and fro as the work proceeded, the tolls going far to meet the cost of the work.
Bunau-Varilla was an extremely high-powered, persuasive individual, as future events would bear out; and h
e appears to have convinced most of the engineers and technical advisers that the scheme could actually work. The genius of the proposal, however, its enormous value at the moment, was not in its technical ingenuity. It was the fundamental precept that a lock canal need be only a transitional step toward the old ultimate goal of a channel a niveau. It represented no betrayal of the dream. It offered de Lesseps an honorable alternative. There need be no promises broken, no semblance of retreat or failure.
Another bond issue was tried, the third in little more than a year. It produced a sum de Lesseps quickly pronounced sufficient to carry on for another two years. But again the company had paid dearly for the money and by autumn its financial position was desperate.
It was only then, with his back to the wall, that de Lesseps at last did what had to be done.
The subcommission of his Advisory Commission met and endorsed the temporary lock canal; a new set of plans was rushed into presentable form. At the end of October he used an invitation to speak at the Academie des Sciences as opportunity to prepare the public for the momentous change. Saying nothing of the plan itself, he announced that the canal would be far enough along by 1890 to permit the passage of twenty ships a day. Annual receipts, he said, would be 100,000,000 francs.
Panama stock, in steady decline since late summer, now fell to a new low of 282 francs.
On November 15, de Lesseps sent off two letters. One was to the Minister of Finance asking once again for authority to sell lottery bonds. The other, addressed to his shareholders, contained the dramatic announcement that “as of this morning” Alexandre Gustave Eiffel had been engaged to design and build the locks that would open Panama to the ships of the world.
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