David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  But while the Bohio dam was the most important structure on the line and a “vital necessity to the scheme,” it also presented enormous “difficulties of construction.” Numbers of prominent engineers considered it an extremely uncertain, hazardous solution if not an impossible one.

  The dam was to be a man-made earthen hill a hundred feet high and it would create a lake some forty square miles in area, the largest artificial lake in the world. But the dam was also to have a masonry core that would extend farther below ground than the dam was high, and to achieve this, pneumatic caissons–for the foundations of the core–were to be sunk 128 feet below sea level, a depth far in excess of anything previously attempted.

  Did the commission’s entire Panama plan hang on the Bohio dam? Senator Harris asked. Yes, replied Walker. Everything depended on the Bohio dam, but the dam would not be the most difficult undertaking. The great cut through the spine of the Cordilleras would be more momentous still. It alone might take as much as eight years.

  When it was Morgan’s turn, he began with costs. Why was there a difference of $1,000,000 in the estimates for the two canals? The number of locks accounted for most of that, Walker said. There would be five locks in the Panama canal, eight in the Nicaragua canal. The reason for the fifth lock at Panama, he explained, was the great rise and fall of the tide in the Bay of Panama.

  “We lift up from the Atlantic to the surface of Lake Bohio with two locks and then we drop down on the Pacific side with three locks, the last lock being the lock in which the lift varies very much, depending on the height of the tide. . . . The lock is intended as a method of passing ships from one level to another.”

  “I understand that,” Morgan replied in a low, even drawl.

  They were facing each other square on, the regal old Yankee sailor looking no less resolute than the small, white-haired one-time leader of Confederate cavalry.

  Did the admiral recall any point of fact upon which he had so suddenly changed his mind as to where the canal should be built?

  “Well, that would be pretty hard to answer. I went into the thing with my sympathies and prejudices, as far as I had any, in favor of the Nicaragua line, but I endeavored to take hold of this question with a mind open to proof.”

  Morgan said he had no doubt that this was so, but wished to know whether the admiral’s new position was based upon any fact.

  “I have changed it to this extent, that I know that the best line is the Panama line. . . .”

  “In an engineering sense?” “Yes, in an engineering sense.”

  Morgan, as he told reporters earlier, was convinced that the commission’s sudden affection for Panama had nothing to do with engineering arguments, but was based on price alone, “cheapness” was his word.

  “Well, you come to that conclusion without changing any facts in your former statements?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Your judgment is convinced that you were in error in the first statement?”

  “No, sir; not at all. I have not changed my mind a particle.”

  Then how, Morgan demanded, could he conclude that Panama was the best canal when he had recommended Nicaragua?

  Because, said Walker, when he recommended Nicaragua it had been the most feasible route under conditions then prevailing.

  “What conditions?”

  “When I voted in favor of the Panama route it was under quite different conditions.”

  “What conditions do you refer to?”

  “Very largely the unreasonable price that the Panama people asked for their property.”

  “Is it not exclusively that?”

  Walker fumbled for words. “I don’t think of anything–I do not go back . . . I think that the engineering features of the Panama route are better than those of the Nicaragua route, although both routes are feasible. . . .”

  “You think so?”

  “I think so.”

  Morgan, who had made his reputation in Selma as a trial lawyer, abruptly shifted ground. His interest now was in the sources upon which the commission had drawn its technical data. His purpose was to show that the commission’s entire Panama proposal, hence its entire decision, was founded on the word of Frenchmen, or on French plans, which by Morgan’s lights were as suspect as the people who drew them up.

  “How many days did your commission spend on the Isthmus of Panama?”

  “We were there about two weeks.”

  “You have not been back since?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Has any member of the commission been back since?” “Not to Panama.” “Well, in two weeks’ time you did undertake, I suppose, to obtain accurate knowledge of the engineering and of all the conditions of that canal and the country through which it passes?”

  “Yes,” said Walker, taking the bait, “we had very good knowledge of the matter from having examined the French data with great care; we had our working parties on the Isthmus of Panama. . . . We had a locomotive and a special car every day to take us back and forth along the line, so that we lost no time, and we devoted ourselves to that work every day that we were there. . . .”

  Morgan had a vivid picture in mind of the old admiral and his party breezing up and down the Panama Railroad in a private car, deciding the fate of the canal from the view from the window, attended by a swarm of hovering Frenchmen doing everything possible to put them at their ease. It was a grossly unfair picture, but it was one also shared by many in the room.

  “Well, you say you made an examination of the French surveys before you went to the canal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you examine them?”

  Like everyone on the committee, Morgan knew perfectly well that it had been in Paris; he knew of Cromwell’s stage-managing, the displays gotten up by the French company, and so forth.

  “In Paris. We spent about a month in Paris, working every day, usually two sessions a day with officers of the French company, who laid everything before us . . . and then we went to the Isthmus in person to supplement that information. . . . We made our plans for the building of a canal after we had examined this data and after we had personally visited the Isthmus and been over the ground with great care. . . .”

  “You did not undertake to make an independent survey of that canal line?” (As everyone present also appreciated, the entire Nicaragua survey had been “independent,” by which Morgan meant the work of American engineers alone.)

  “No, sir,” answered the admiral, who now apparently saw the trap being set for him. “For instance, we bored the site of the Bohio dam most thoroughly, much more thoroughly than the French had bored it. So far as what is ordinarily called surveying, topographical work, we did enough of it to convince ourselves that the French work was good and that we could accept their work as our own.”

  “Well, you did adopt it?”

  “We did adopt it after convincing ourselves of its accuracy.” “But the basis of that survey and the basis of your calculations and plans was the French survey?”

  “No; we accepted their survey after checking it enough to be sure that it was right, and then after that our work was our own.”

  “But based on what?”

  “Well, based on their surveys, if you like.”

  “That is what I mean,” Morgan said smoothly.

  Morgan moved right along, taking up the geology of the Bohio valley, the design of the controversial dam, the intended use of levees, the silting up of the old French works. It was his characteristic approach, persistent and exasperatingly patient. The impression he seemed to be striving for was this: that Walker and his commission, by recommending Panama, were asking Congress and the country to risk everything on faith, faith in old John Grimes Walker, faith in the assumptions of one particular set of civil engineers, and, at root and worst of all, faith in the French.

  Did the admiral happen to know whether the Bohio basin would hold water if a dam were built there? Would the admiral’s entire plan hold water was th
e implicit question.

  “Have we any right to suppose that it would not hold water?” Walker replied, obviously annoyed.

  “I am just asking your judgment,” Morgan said. “I am not an engineer or a commissioner. I am not recommending the government take your plan.”

  “I have never seen anything to make me suppose there was the slightest danger of its not holding water.”

  “You made no inquiry about that?”

  “I did not make any inquiry about that,” said Walker. “There are a great many things that I have not inquired about.”

  In the days when Walker had headed the Nicaragua Canal Commission, indeed until the latest reversal by the current commission, he and Morgan had often worked closely together. They had been colleagues in a common mission. But there was never the slightest sign of familiarity through this long session–no personal asides, no pleasantries–and when the committee convened the next morning, a Saturday, Morgan started in again. Often he was openly uncivil to Walker, or “spluttered” (as one reporter wrote) in exasperation at Walker’s answers.

  No, the locomotives left behind by the French were not worthless, Walker insisted. They would have to be overhauled, but they were quite serviceable, as were many of the French excavators and dredges. He knew of nothing along the Panama line that was not within engineering precedents, except for the Bohio dam. No, he had not experienced Panama in the rainy season. No, he did not think that $2,000,000 for the French maps and surveys was excessive. Yes, he thought the engineers on the commission were quite able, as able as any in the United States.

  Only when Morgan announced, after about an hour, that he had no more questions, did the tension in the air suddenly subside. It was then that Hanna, in sharp contrast, began to talk to the witness in genial, respectful tones. He asked merely for the admiral to tell the committee why–price aside–the canal should be built at Panama.

  “To start with the route has better harbors,” said Walker. “It is a much shorter canal, has easier curves, and we are surer by that route of what we are doing. While we made a very careful examination of the Nicaragua line, as thorough an examination as perhaps is ever made or likely to be made before undertaking a new enterprise . . .”

  “Right there let me interrupt you,” Hanna said. “You also had the advantage of all previous surveys made by the United States government of the Nicaragua route?”

  “Yes. We know far less about the Nicaragua line than we do about the Panama line. It is impossible to know as much. The Nicaragua line is in comparatively wild country which has not been explored to anything like the same extent that the Panama line has. The Panama line has been a great thoroughfare, traveled for two or three hundred years. It has been examined with reference to a canal for many years past . . . and the country along the line is cleared up so that one can see what he is doing. In the wild parts of Nicaragua it is a jungle, where often we could not see fifty feet, and we would be much more likely to meet disagreeable surprises by the Nicaragua line than by the Panama line.”

  He told Hanna he had no misgivings about any aspect of the Panama plan. Further, he did not regard the Panama climate as any greater threat to health than any other place in the tropics.

  “There was a great loss of life in building the railroad,” he conceded, “and when they [the French] first went to work on the canal there was a good deal of sickness, but the surface material from which this sickness is supposed to come has largely been removed, and of late years it has been as healthy there as anywhere in a tropical country. . . .”

  “Is it not likely,” Hanna put in, “that in the construction of the Nicaragua canal, working a large force, turning up the surface of that soil, and in dredging, that malarial conditions conducive to fevers would arise?”

  “Certainly,” said the admiral. “As it stands today Nicaragua is a healthier route, because there is no work of that kind being done and very few people get sick, but when you get to turning up the ground there would be sickness there, as there would be anywhere.”

  The parade of witnesses continued on into March. Much of what was said was repetitious or boring. Frequently one committee member or another would lead the witness through drawn-out explanations simply to get some obscure point into the record. Still much was said that had not been said before, at least for the records, and was of considerable interest.

  Lewis Haupt, the University of Pennsylvania professor, declared, for example, that he had signed the commission’s decision on Panama only to make it unanimous. He did not think Panama the superior choice. Alfred Noble, another eminent member of the commission, said no self-respecting American contractor would take the French equipment at Panama as a gift. A third commission engineer, William Burr, told the committee that the French work would all have to be greatly enlarged, from a bottom width of 98 feet and a depth of 29 feet to a bottom width of 150 feet and a depth of 35 feet. This, he said, would make it the largest canal in the world, but none too large for the American Navy being projected.* Morgan, taking a dim view of such talk, drawled, “Do you expect to make a canal that will carry Noah’s ark or something like that through it?”

  “No, probably not,” Burr answered. “We hope there will be no occasion for Noah’s ark.”

  The name Ferdinand de Lesseps came up repeatedly. He and his young French engineers seemed to fill the big room like specters. There was talk of the ruined canal, of ruined machinery wallowing forlornly in the jungle, of the graves on Monkey Hill, of scandal and dishonor, and whether the same would happen all over again if Americans were to go into Panama. Morgan was convinced that it would. The engineers said no. De Lesseps’ failure resulted from insufficient investigations on the grounds, said General Abbot, of the Comité Technique. An underlying theme in much of the testimony was that industrious, practical, moral men–Americans–might succeed where others had failed. Indeed, in an inverse way, the downfall of the French, the sheer unpleasantness and difficulty of taking the Panama route, began to have a peculiar, compelling kind of attraction. The pesthole could be a proving ground, an opportunity to succeed gloriously, for all the world to see, where a less industrious, less manly, and less virtuous people had failed so ignominiously. One witness, a railroad contractor, had told Morgan in a letter, “Engineers are sometimes the least practical of men, they may be attracted by difficulties. . . ..”

  Another of Morgan’s witnesses, a noted and most convincing engineer named Lyman Cooley, asked how anyone could possibly guarantee that Americans would prove three times as honest, three times as competent, as the French, because that, he said, was what it would take.

  The head of the Maritime Canal Company made the legal transactions involved in the purchase of its Nicaragua properties and franchise sound extremely simple and tidy. General Edward Porter Alexander, a former Army engineer, assured the committee that there would be no technical difficulties involved in a Nicaragua canal, then finished with a tribute to the physical allure of the country that not even Morgan ever quite equaled. “It impressed me as one of the most attractive countries that I ever saw for a poor man to make a living in . . . if I had to be born again I would ask the angel that was bringing me down to take me to Nicaragua. . . .”

  By far the greatest amount of time was spent on Panama, however, and the most impressive testimony was that of George S. Morison, whose reasons for wanting a canal there were essentially the same as those stated by Admiral Walker, only coming from him they appeared unassailable. Morison, as someone remarked, was a “force”–a huge, human bulwark, slow and deliberate in manner, slow to make up his mind and intractable once he had. The basic Panama plan was sound, he said; things that were impossible twenty years earlier were now quite possible. The dam could be built. The river could be controlled. The dam need not have a masonry core; the whole business of pneumatic caissons could be dispensed with.

  The thing that must not be underestimated, he said, was the size of the job. The Culebra Cut would be the largest excavation ever a
ttempted. “It is a piece of work that reminds me of what a teacher said to me when I was in Exeter [Phillips Exeter Academy] over forty years ago, that if he had five minutes in which to solve a problem he would spend three deciding the best way to do it.” No less than two years, Morison said, ought to be spent just getting ready for such a task.

  Again, as with Walker, Hanna asked about the problem of disease. “If the reports are correct” Morison said, “we can get rid of yellow fever by killing the mosquitoes.” Nobody picked him up on that, nobody seemed the least interested, and nothing more was said on the subject during the whole course of the hearings.

  The final witness, a fusty retired congressman from Nevada, who had spent some time in Nicaragua half a century earlier, appeared on March 10. Three days later the committee reported the Hepburn Bill favorably: the committee wanted a Nicaragua canal. The vote was seven to four, exactly what it would have been had it been taken before the hearings began.

  The odds against a Panama victory in the Senate appeared now to be about 100 to 1. The impression also was that a great deal of time had been spent on a great deal of talk for nothing. And in contrast to the events that were soon to follow, the drawn-out testimony of the engineers would seem particularly colorless and unimportant. But the case for Panama had not gone unnoticed in certain quarters, and this was to prove of critical importance. An incident in Brooklyn, for example, caught the attention of the New York papers, and thus, almost certainly, the New Yorker in the White House. At a dinner on March 16, in honor of a Brooklyn engineer, C. C. Martin, one of the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, the main speaker was Irving M. Scott, of San Francisco, head of the Union Iron Works, builder of the battleship Oregon. The canal was his topic. “We must have that canal. Whether it be Panama or Nicaragua, I care not. But have it we must.” His listeners, nearly all civil engineers, did care, however. “Panama! Panama!” someone shouted. Then at once everyone in the room was on his feet, handkerchiefs were fluttering in the air. Everyone was shouting, “Panama! Panama!”