“Men reported to work early and stayed late, without overtime,” Robert Wood remembered. “. . . I really believe that every American employed would have worked that year without pay, if only to see the first ship pass through the completed Canal. That spirit went down to all the laborers.”
The last concrete was laid at Gatun on May 31, 1913, eleven days after two steam shovels had met “on the bottom of the canal” in Culebra Cut. Shovel No. 222, driven by Joseph S. Kirk, and shovel No. 230, driven by D. J. MacDonald, had been slowly narrowing the gap all day when they at last stood nose to nose. The Cut was as deep as it would go, forty feet above sea level.
In the second week in June, it would be reported that the newly installed upper guard gates at Gatun had been “swung to a position halfway open; then shut, opened wide, closed and . . . noiselessly, without any jar or vibration, and at all times under perfect control.”
On June 27 the last of the spillway gates was closed at Gatun Dam. The lake at Gatun had reached a depth of forty-eight feet; now it would rise to its full height.
Three months later all dry excavation ended. The Cucaracha slide still blocked the path, but Goethals had decided to clear it out with dredges once the Cut was flooded. So on the morning of September 10, photographers carried their gear into the Cut to record the last large rock being lifted by the last steam shovel. Locomotive No. 260 hauled out the last dirt train and the work crews moved in to tear up the last of the track. “The Cut tonight presented an unusual spectacle,” cabled a correspondent for The New York Times, “hundreds of piles-of old ties from the railroad tracks being in flames.”
Then on September 26 at Gatun the first trial lockage was made.
A seagoing tug, Gatun, used until now for hauling mud barges in the Atlantic entrance, was cleaned up, “decorated with all the flags it owned,” and came plowing up from Colón in the early-morning sunshine. By ten o’clock several thousand people were clustered along the rims of the lock walls to witness the historic ascent. There were men on the tops of the closed lock gates, leaning on the handrails. The sky was cloudless, and in midair above the lower gates, a photographer hung suspended from the cableway. He was standing in a cement bucket, his camera on a tripod, waiting for things to begin.
But it was to be a long, hot day. The water was let into the upper chamber shortly after eleven, but because the lake had still to reach its full height, there was a head of only about eight feet and so no thunderous rush ensued when the valves were opened. Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of this phase of the operation, so far as the spectators were concerned, was the quantity of frogs that came swirling in with the muddy water.
With the upper lock filled, however, the head between it and the middle lock was fifty-six feet, and so when the next set of culverts was opened, the water came boiling up from the bottom of the empty chamber in spectacular fashion.
The central control board was still not ready. All valves were being worked by local control and with extreme caution to be sure every-thing was just so. Nor were any of the towing locomotives in service as yet. Just filling the locks took the whole afternoon. It was nearly five by the time the water in the lowest chamber was even with the surface of the sea-level approach outside and the huge gates split apart and wheeled slowly back into their niches in the walls.
The tug steamed into the lower lock, looking, as one man recalled, “like a chip on a pond.” Sibert, Schildhauer, young George Goethals, and their wives were standing on the prow. “The Colonel” and Hodges were on top of the lock wall, walking from point to point, both men in their shirt sleeves, Goethals carrying a furled umbrella, Hodges wearing glossy puttees and an enormous white hat. The gates had opened in one minute forty-eight seconds, as expected.
The tug proceeded on up through the locks, step by step. The gates to the rear of the first chamber were closed; the water in the chamber was raised until it reached the same height as the water on the other side of the gates ahead. The entire tremendous basin swirled and churned as if being stirred by some powerful, unseen hand and the rise of the water–and of the little boat–was very apparent. Those on board could feel themselves being lifted, as if in a very slow elevator. With the water in the lower chamber equal to that in the middle chamber, the intervening gates were opened and the tug went forward. Again the gates to the stern swung shut; again, with the opening of the huge subterranean culverts, the caramel-colored water came suddenly to life and began its rise to the next level.
It was 6:45 when the last gates were opened in the third and last lock and the tug steaméd out onto the surface of Gatun Lake. The day had come and gone, it was very nearly dark, and as the boat turned and pointed to shore, her whistle blowing, the crowd burst into a long cheer. The official time given for this first lockage was one hour fifty-one minutes, or not quite twice as long as would be required once everything was in working order.
That an earthquake should strike just four days later seemed some-how a fitting additional touch, as if that too were essential in any thorough testing-and-proving drill. It lasted more than an hour, one violent shudder following another, and the level of magnitude appears to have been greater than that of the San Francisco quake of 1906. The needles of a seismograph at Ancon were jolted off the scale paper. Walls cracked in buildings in Panama City; there were landslides in the interior; a church fell. But the locks and Gatun Dam were untouched. “There has been no damage whatever to any part of the canal,” Goethals notified Washington.
Water was let into Culebra Cut that same week, through six big drain pipes in the earth dike at Gamboa. Then on the afternoon of October 10, President Wilson pressed a button in Washington and the center of the dike was blown sky-high. The idea had been dreamed up by a newspaperman. The signal, relayed by telegraph wire from Washington to New York to Galveston to Panama, was almost instantaneous. Wilson walked from the White House to an office in the Executive Building (as the State, War, and Navy Building had been renamed) and pressed the button at one minute past two. At two minutes past two several hundred charges of dynamite opened a hole more than a hundred feet wide and the Cut, already close to full, at once became an extension of Gatun Lake.
In all the years that the work had been moving ahead in the Cut and on the locks, some twenty dredges of different kinds, assisted by numbers of tugs, barges, and crane boats, had been laboring in the sea-level approaches of the canal and in the two terminal bays, where forty-foot channels had to be dug several miles out to deep water. Much of this was equipment left behind by the French; six dredges in the Atlantic fleet, four in the Pacific fleet, a dozen self-propelled dump barges, two tugs, one drill boat, one crane boat, were all holdovers from that earlier era. Now, to clear the Cut of slides, about half this equipment was brought up through the locks, the first procession from the Pacific side passing through Miraflores and Pedro Miguel on October 25.
The great, awkward dredges took their positions in the Cut; barges shunted in and out, dumping their spoil in designated out-of-the-way corners of Gatun Lake, all in the very fashion that Philippe Bunau-Varilla had for so long championed as the only way to do the job. Floodlights were installed in the Cut and the work went on day and night. On December 10, 1913, an old French ladder dredge, the Marmot, made the “pioneer cut” through the Cucaracha slide, thus opening the channel for free passage.
The first complete passage of the canal took place almost incidentally, as part of the new workaday routine, on January 7, when an old crane boat, the Alexandre La Valley, which had been brought up from the Atlantic side sometime previously, came down through the Pacific locks without ceremony, without much attention of any kind. That the first boat through the canal was French seemed to everyone altogether appropriate.
The end was approaching faster than anyone had quite anticipated. Thousands of men were being let go; hundreds of buildings were being disassembled or demolished. Job applications were being written to engineering offices in New York and to factories in Detroit, where, accor
ding to the latest reports, there was great opportunity in the automobile industry. Families were packing for home. There were farewell parties somewhere along the line almost every night of the week.
William Gorgas resigned from the canal commission to go to South Africa to help fight an alarming surge of pneumonia among black workers in the gold mines. The understanding was that it would be a brief assignment, after which he was to be made surgeon general of the Army.
Joseph Bucklin Bishop left to resume his literary career in New York.
With the arrival of the new year the Isthmian Canal Commission was disbanded and President Wilson named Goethals the first Governor of the Panama Canal, as the new administrative entity was to be officially known. Goethals’ salary as governor was to be $10,000 a year, which was $5,000 less than what he had been paid as chairman of the I.C.C., a decision made in the Senate, which inspired the popular “Mr. Dooley,” the syndicated creation of humorist Finley Peter Dunne, to observe:
“They say republics are ongrateful, but look, will ye, what they’ve done f’r that fellow that chopped the continent in two at Pannyma. He’s a hero, I grant ye, although I’m sorry f’r it, because I can’t pronounce his name. . . . What is he goin’ to git? says ye? Why, Hinnissy, th’ Governmint has already app’inted him Governor iv th’ Canal at a greatly rejooced salary.”
In Washington after a drawn-out, often acrimonious debate, Congress determined that the clause in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty stipulating that the canal would be open to the vessels of all nations “on terms of entire equality” meant that American ships could not use the canal toll free, as many had ardently wanted and as much of the press had argued for. American ships would pay the same as the ships of every other nation, 90 cents per cargo ton.
In Washington also, and in San Francisco, plans were being made for tremendous opening celebrations intended to surpass even those at the opening of the Suez Canal. More than a hundred warships, “the greatest international fleet ever gathered in American waters,” were to assemble off Hampton Roads on New Year’s Day, 1915, then proceed to San Francisco by way of Panama. At San Francisco they would arrive for the opening of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a mammoth world’s fair in celebration of the canal. The estimate was that it would take four days for the armada to go through the locks.
Schoolchildren in Oregon wrote to President Wilson to urge that the old battleship Oregon lead the flotilla through the canal. The idea was taken up by the press and by the Navy Department. The officer who had commanded the ship on her famous “race around the Horn” in 1898, retired Admiral Charles Clark, hale and fit at age seventy, agreed to command her once again and the President was to be his honored guest.
But there was to be no such pageant. The first oceangoing ship to go through the canal was a lowly cement boat, the Cristobal, and On August 15 the “grand opening” was performed almost perfunctorily By the Ancon. There were no world luminaries on her prow. Goethals again watched from shore, traveling from point to point on the railroad. The only impressive aspect of the event was “the ease and system with which everything worked,” as wrote one man on board. “So quietly did she pursue her way that . . . a strange observer coming suddenly upon the scene would have thought that the canal had always been in operation, and that the Ancon was only doing what thousands of other vessels must have done before her.”
Though the San Francisco exposition went ahead as planned, all but the most modest festivities surrounding the canal itself had been canceled.
For by ironic, tragic coincidence the long effort at Panama and Europe’s long reign of peace drew to a close at precisely the same time. It was as if Two powerful and related but vastly different impulses, having swung in huge arcs in the forty some years since Sedan, had converged with eerie precision in August 1914. The storm that had been gathering over Europe since June broke on August 3, the same day the Cristobal made the first ocean-to-ocean transit. On the evening of the third, the French premier, Viviani, received a telephone call from the American ambassador who, with tears in his voice, warned that the Germans would declare war Within the hour. The American ambassador was Myron T. Herrick, who had once been so helpful to Philippe Bunau-Varilla, and at the same moment in Panama, where it was still six hours earlier in the day, Philippe Bunau-Varilla was standing at the rail of the Cristobal as she entered the lock at Pedro Miguel, at the start of her descent to the Pacific, he being one of the very few who had come especially for the occasion.
Across Europe and the United States, world war filled the newspapers and everyone’s thoughts. The voyage of the Cristobal, the Ancon’s crossing to the Pacific on August 15, the official declaration that the canal was open to the world, were buried in the back pages.
There were editorials hailing the victory of the canal builders, but the great crescendo of popular interest had passed; a new heroic effort commanded world attention. The triumph at Panama suddenly belonged to another and very different era.
Of the American employees in Panama at the time the canal was opened only about sixty had been there since the beginning in 1904. How many black workers remained from the start of the American effort, or from an earlier time, is not recorded. But one engineer on the staff, a Frenchman named Arthur Raggi, had been first hired by the Compagnie Nouvelle in 1894.
Goethals, Sibert, Hodges, Schildhauer, Goldmark, and the others had been on the job for seven years and the work they performed was of a quality seldom ever known.
Its cost had been enormous. No single construction effort in American history had exacted such a price in dollars or in human life. Dollar expenditures since 1904 totaled $352,000,000 (including the $10,000,-000 paid to Panama and the $40,000,000 paid to the French company). By present standards this does not seem a great deal, but it was more than four times what Suez had cost, without even considering the sums spent by the two preceding French companies, and so much more than the cost of anything ever before built by the United States government as to be beyond compare.* Taken together, the French and American expenditures came to about $639,000,000.
The other cost since 1904, according to the hospital records, was 5,609 lives from disease and accidents. No fewer than 4,500 of these had been black employees. The number of white Americans who died was about 350.
If the deaths incurred during the French era are included, the total price in human life may have been as high as twenty-five thousand, or five hundred lives for every mile of the canal.
Yet amazingly, unlike any such project on record, unlike almost any major construction of any kind, the canal designed and built by the American engineers had cost less in dollars than it was supposed to. The final price was actually $23,000,000 below what had been estimated in 1907, and this despite the slides, the change in the width of the canal, and an additional $11,000,000 for fortifications, all factors not reckoned in the earlier estimate. The volume of additional excavation resulting from slides (something over 25,000,000 cubic yards) was almost equal to all the useful excavation accomplished by the French. The digging of Culebra Cut ultimately cost $90,000,000 (or $10,000,-000 a mile). Had such a figure been anticipated at the start, it is questionable whether Congress would have ever approved the plan.
The total volume of excavation accomplished since 1904 was 232,440,945 cubic yards and this added to the approximately 30,000,000 cubic yards of useful excavation by the French gave a grand total, in round numbers, of 262,000,000 cubic yards, or more than four times the volume originally estimated by Ferdinand de Lesseps for a canal at sea level and nearly three times the excavation at Suez.
The canal had also been opened six months ahead of schedule, and this too in the face of all those difficulties and changes unforeseen seven years before.
Without question, the credit for such a record belongs chiefly to George Goethals, whose ability, whose courage and tenacity, were of the highest order.
That so vast and costly an undertaking could also be done without graft, kickbacks, pay
roll padding, any of the hundred and one forms of corruption endemic to such works, seemed almost inconceivable at the start, nor does it seem any less remarkable in retrospect. Yet the canal was, among so many other things, a clean project. No excessive profits were made by any of the several thousand different firms dealt with by the I.C.C. There had not been the least hint of scandal from the time Goethals was given command, nor has evidence of corruption of any kind come to light in all the years since.
Technically the canal itself was a masterpiece in design and construction. From the time they were first put in use the locks performed perfectly.
Because of the First World War, traffic remained comparatively light until 1918, only four or five ships a day, less than two thousand ships a year on the average. And not until July of 1919 was there a transit of an American armada to the Pacific, that spectacle Theodore Roosevelt had envisioned so long before. Thirty-three ships returning from the war zone, including seven destroyers and nine battleships, were locked through the canal, all but three in just two days.
Ten years after it opened, the canal was handling more than five thousand ships a year; traffic was approximately equal to that of Suez. The British battle cruiser Hood and the U.S. carriers Saratoga and Lexington squeezed through the locks with only feet to spare on their way to the Pacific in the 1920’s. By 1939 annual traffic exceeded seven thousand ships.
But in the decades following the Second World War, that figure more than doubled. Channel lighting was installed in 1966 and night-time transits were inaugurated. Ships were going through the canal at a rate of more than one an hour, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Many of them, moreover–giant container ships, bulk carriers–were of a size never dreamed of when the canal was built: the 845-foot Melodic, the 848-foot Arctic, the 950-foot Tokyo Bay, the largest container ship in the world at the time she made her first transit in 1972. Traffic in the canal by the 1970’s was beyond fifteen thousand ships a year, annual tonnage was well beyond the 100,000,000 mark. Tonnage in 1915 had been 5,000,000.
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