The Queen Mary, launched in 1936, was the first ship too large for the locks and others followed– Queen Elizabeth, Norman die, and, in recent years, supertankers larger even than the Tokyo Bay, ships more than 1,000 feet long with beams of more than 150 feet.* As a consequence of this and the steadily mounting traffic in the canal, serious proposals were prepared for a new canal. The President of the United States appointed a commission and all the old routes were surveyed once again–across Tehuantepec, Nicaragua, in the valley of the Atrato, and across the Darien wilderness, at San Bias and at Caledonia Bay.
In 1915 tolls for the year were about $4,000,000. By 1970 they exceeded $100,000,000, even though the rates remained unchanged. In 1973, after sixty years, the Panama Canal Company recorded its first loss, as a result of mounting costs of operation, so in 1974 tolls were raised for the first time, from 90 cents per cargo ton to $1.08, an increase of 20 percent.† Annual revenues from tolls presently exceed $140,000,000.
The largest toll yet paid was for the largest passenger ship ever to pass through the canal, the Queen Elizabeth II. She was locked through in March 1975 and paid a record $42,077.88. The average toll per ship (at the present rate) is about $10,000, which is roughly a tenth of the cost of sailing eight thousand miles around Cape Horn.
The lowest toll on record was paid by Richard Halliburton, world traveler, best-selling author, toast of the lecture platform, who in the 1920’s swam the length of the canal, doing it by installments one day at a time. He was not the first to swim the canal, but was the first to persuade the authorities to allow him through the locks. So based on his weight, 140 pounds, he was charged a toll of 36 cents.
Changes have been made in the canal as time passed: the Cut was widened to five hundred feet, a storage dam was built across the Chagres about ten miles above Gamboa, and the original towing loco-motives were retired and replaced by more powerful models made in Japan. But fundamentally, and for all general appearances, the canal remains the same as the day it opened and its basic plan has been challenged in only one respect. It has been argued that the separation of the two sets of locks at the Pacific end was a blunder, that it would have been a more efficient canal had the Pacific locks been built as a unit at Miraflores, just as at Gatun. But those who have had the most experience with running the canal in recent years do not regard the Pacific arrangement as a limiting factor, and indeed various tests run by the Panama Canal Company through the years indicate that Gatun is actually more of a bottleneck. With certain improvements, the engineers believe the capacity of the present canal could be increased to about twenty-seven thousand ships a year.
The one undeniable misjudgment on Goethals’ part was his forecast concerning the slides: he was sure they were over the summer the canal opened. But on a night in October 1914, the side of the Cut at East Culebra gave way and in half an hour the entire channel was blocked. In August the following year the same thing happened again. On September 18, 1915, came the most discouraging break of all in what had been newly renamed Gaillard Cut–an avalanche that closed the canal to traffic for seven months. When the canal reopened, Goethals again insisted that the problem would be “overcome finally and for all time.” But that day never arrived. Hundreds of acres of mud and rock slipped into the Cut as the years passed; dredging remained an almost continuous task and a huge expense. And the angle of repose has still to be found. One slide in 1974 dumped an estimated 1,000,000 cubic yards into the Cut.
The creation of a water passage across Panama was one of the supreme human achievements of all time, the culmination of a heroic dream of four hundred years and of more than twenty years of phenomenal effort and sacrifice. The fifty miles between the oceans were among the hardest ever won by human effort and ingenuity, and no statistics on tonnage or tolls can begin to convey the grandeur of what was accomplished. Primarily the canal is an expression of that old and noble desire to bridge the divide, to bring people together. It is a work of civilization.
For millions of people after 1914, the crossing at Panama would be one of life’s memorable experiences. The complete transit required about twelve hours, and except for the locks and an occasional community along the shore, the entire route was bordered by the same kind of wilderness that had confronted the first surveyors for the railroad. Goethals had determined that the jungle not merely remain untouched, but that it be allowed to return wherever possible. This was a military rather than an aesthetic decision on his part; the jungle he insisted before a congressional committee was the surest possible defense against ground attack. (Actually he wanted to depopulate the entire Zone, since, as he explained to reporters, “we, as Americans, have no property rights in it.”) But for those on board a ship in transit, the effect for the greater part of the journey was of sailing a magnificent lake in undiscovered country. The lake was always more spacious than people expected, Panama far more beautiful. Out on the lake the water was ocean green. The water was very pure, they would learn, and being fresh water, it killed all the barnacles on the ship’s bottom.
In the rainy season, storms could be seen long in advance, building in the hills. Sudden bursts of cool wind would send tiny whitecaps chasing over the lake surface. The crossing was no journey down a great trough in the continent, as so many imagined it would be, but a passage among flaming green islands, the tops of hills that protruded still above the surface. For years after the first ships began passing through, much of the shore was lined with half-drowned trees, their dry limbs as white as bones.
The sight of another ship appearing suddenly from around a bend ahead was always startling, so complete was the feeling of being in untraveled waters, so very quiet was everything.
In the Cut the quiet was more powerful, there being little if any wind, and the water was no longer green, but mud-colored, and the sides of what had been the spine of the Cordilleras seemed to press in very close.
Even in the locks there was comparatively little noise. Something so important as the Panama Canal, something so large and vital to world commerce, ought somehow to make a good deal of noise, most people seemed to feel. But it did not. Bells clanged on the towing locomotives now and again and there was the low whine of their engines, but little more than that. There was little shouting back and forth among the men who handled the lines, since each knew exactly what he was to do. The lock gates appeared to swing effortlessly and with no perceptible sound.
* If placed upright in present day Manhattan, a Panama lock would be among the tallest structures on the skyline, surpassed only by the World Trade Center and the Empire State and Chrysler buildings. The difference between the length of a lock and the height of the Empire State Building, for example, is 250 feet.
* In their initial search for sand of the proper quality, the engineers had gone as far as the San Bias Islands, ninety miles east of Colón, and found just what they wanted. But the San Bias Indians declared that the islands–land, water, and sand-were God’s gifts to them and that which God had given they would neither sell nor give to the white man. The engineers were permitted only to anchor overnight, and on the condition that they would leave at dawn and never return.
* In fact, the emergency dams, like the 16-inch guns, would never be used and eventually they were dismantled and removed.
* Except for wars, the only remotely comparable federal expenditures up to the year 1914 had been for the acquisition of new territories, and the figure for all acquisitions as of that date–for the Louisiana Territory; Florida; California, New Mexico, and other western land acquired from Mexico; the Gadsden Purchase; Alaska; and the Philippines–was $75,000,000, or only about one-fifth of what had been spent on the canal.
* At this writing there are more than seven hundred “superships” of a size too large to pass through the Panama Canal. But it should be understood that those who built them knew the dimensions of the locks; in other words, use of the canal by such vessels was never intended.
† By law the canal is designed to be self-su
staining and must break even.
Afterword
Among those who were most profoundly stirred by the opening of the canal in August 1914 were Charles de Lesseps and Admirals Alfred Thayer Mahan and Thomas Oliver Selfridge, all three quietly retired, but each still very much alive.
Philippe Bunau-Varilla, having declared it a moment of glory for Goethals (and for “the Genius of the French nation”), rushed home to fight. He lost a leg at Verdun and in later years could be seen “taking his exercise” on the Champs Elysees, a tiny, upright figure marching along on a wooden leg, eyes front, his chauffeur in a limousine following slowly some distance behind. A young American journalist in Paris, Eric Sevareid, who made his acquaintance in 1940, would recall, “I had never encountered such a powerful personality.”
Bunau-Varilla died on May 18, 1940, only weeks before Paris was occupied by the German Army.
Theodore Roosevelt never returned to Panama; he never saw the Panama Canal. The passage of the Pacific fleet through the locks in 1919 took place seven months after his death. Nor did he live to see the United States pay Colombia an indemnity of $25,000,000 (in 1921) for the loss of Panama, a move that had been initiated during the Wilson Administration, much to Roosevelt’s fury. “One of the rather con temptible features of a number of our worthy compatriots,” he wrote privately to Bunau-Varilla, “is that they are eager to take advantage of the deeds of the man of action when action is necessary and then eager to discredit him when the action is once over.”
William Gorgas, who headed the Army medical service in the First World War, died of a stroke while in London in 1920. Before his death, Gorgas was visited in the hospital by King George and was knighted for “the great work which you have done for humanity.”
George Goethals remained as Governor of the Panama Canal through 1916. During the war he was made quartermaster general in Washington and had charge of procurement, transport, and storage of all supplies for the Army. As a private consulting engineer after the war, with offices on Wall Street, he was extremely active but not a particular success financially, largely because he refused to allow the use of his name “for financial consideration.” He died of cancer in 1928 and was buried, as he had requested, at West Point.
John Stevens survived the longest. His work had taken him over much of the country since leaving Panama, and in 1917, at the request of Woodrow Wilson, he went to Russia to reorganize the Trans-Siberian Railway, an assignment that lasted five years. Unlike the others, he made a return trip to Panama, but though tremendously impressed by all that he saw, it was the flight on a Pan American Clipper that gave him the greatest thrill. Vigorous to the end, Stevens died in Pinehurst, North Carolina, in 1943 at the age of ninety.
Once, in a paper addressed “To the Young Engineers Who Must Carry On,” Stevens said something with which all of these remarkable men would assuredly have agreed–for all that had happened to the world since Panama.
His faith in the human intellect and its creative capacities remained undaunted, Stevens wrote. The great works had still to come. “I believe that We are but children picking up pebbles on the shore of the boundless ocean. . . .”
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude to the numbers of persons who over the years have generously helped me with the preparatory work for this book.
First, to my editor, Peter Schwed of Simon and Schuster, who had the idea and who is a steadfast source of creative advice and encouragement; to my literary agents, Paul R. Reynolds and John W. Hawkins, for their counsel; to Captain Miles P. DuVal, Jr., a lifelong student of canal history and author of two fine books on the subject, who offered valuable suggestions at the start of my research; to my sons David and William, who at the ages of fourteen and twelve went with me to Panama and observed things I might otherwise have missed; to my wife, Rosalee, whose confident spirit was never failing, and to whom the book is dedicated. Her part in the work was important beyond measure.
Of enormous value, year by year, were my conversations with numbers of actual participants in the American effort in Panama prior to 1914 and with the descendants and friends of many of the central figures in the book–American, French, Panamanian, and West Indian. The names of twenty-nine of these persons, several since deceased, are listed in the Sources.
Many interviews lasted two to three hours; the majority were taped in part or whole, depending on the wishes of the individual being interviewed. And though all who participated helped tremendously, recalling what life and work on the Isthmus meant in human terms, several supplied explanations, recollections of events, and people, of the kind that no amount of conventional research could ever produce.
Especially in this respect do I acknowledge my indebtedness to Mme. Herve Alphand, who by a former marriage was the daughter-in-law of Philippe Bunau-Varilla; Alice Anderson, who recalled her childhood beside the canal “diggings” and what the coming of the Americans meant to her family and others of Panama’s West Indian community; Crede Calhoun of Panama City; Arthur H. Dean, who as a young man was a protege of William Nelson Cromwell’s; Katharine Harding Deeble, whose father, Chester Harding, served on Goethal’s staff and afterward became Governor of the Canal Zone; John Fitzgerald; David St. Pierre Gaillard; Mrs. Thomas Goethals; Alice Roosevelt Longworth; Aminta Melendez of Colón.
Hubert de Lesseps, whom I interviewed in his office on the Boulevard Haussmann, had not only a fund of sparkling stories about his famous grandfather, Ferdinand, but a clear memory of his Uncle Charles. More-over, with his physical appearance and bearing, his exceeding charm, M. de Lesseps provided the author with a living example of the legendary family personality.
Professor Elting E. Morison of M.I.T., historian, author, authority on Theodore Roosevelt, guided me in my research into the career of his greatuncle, George Shattuck Morison, and read and commented on portions of the manuscript. The late Richard H. Whitehead of Laconia, New Hampshire, with whom I spent days and with whom I corresponded over several years, was then the last surviving member of Goethals’ staff. Aileen Gorgas Wrightson, not long before her death, reminisced at length about her father, William Crawford Gorgas.
In the course of my reading, more than four hundred books were consulted (the listing in Sources is a “select” bibliography) and nearly a hundred different newspapers, magazines, and technical journals. Many months–well over a year in total–were spent combing through collections of unpublished correspondence, diaries, field journals and notebooks, company reports, bulletins, contracts, meteorological records, maps, surveys, boxes of press clippings, scrapbooks, photograph albums–often in out-of-the-way places. The background material has been pieced together from libraries and archives and private collections in twelve different states, in Paris, in Bogotá, in Panama and the Canal Zone, and in Washington, where the major portion of the surviving record of both the French and the American efforts is on file at the Library of Congress and the National Archives. (A rough idea of the volume of material in Washington alone can be conveyed with a few statistics. The general records of the two French canal companies take up 111 feet of shelf space at the National Archives; the general correspondence of the Isthmian Canal Commission from 1905–1914 occupies 186 feet. The papers of Philippe Bunau-Varilla at the Library of Congress include approximately ten thousand items; the Goethals’ papers, fifteen thousand items.)
Yet a remarkable amount of rare material has been within arm’s reach on my own office shelves, thanks to the interest and generosity of Elinor T. Douglas of Santa Barbara, who let me borrow the pick of what was once General Goethals’ own collection of Panama history-books long since out of print, some extremely rare, all hard to come by; Mrs. James B. Moore, Jr., of Plandome, New York, who loaned letters, private memoranda, and technical reports passed down from her grandfather, the eminent civil engineer Alfred Noble (this collection has since been given to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor); and again to Richard H. Whitehead, who contributed volumes of material collected
over a lifetime (as well as a suitcase to carry it all off in).
For their assistance with translation I wish to thank Harold Bell (in Paris), Annie Geohegan, Constance C. Jewett, and Alfred E. Street. Keith L. Oberg worked with newspaper files in Bogotá. Anne Rauffet of the Paris office of The Reader’s Digest helped with introductions and interviews at the Societe de Geographie and the Ecole Polytechnique. Kate Lewin (Paris) and Judith Harkison (Washington) helped track down old photographs. I am a strong believer in the research value of photographs and literally thousands have been examined.
The help and cooperation received from the Canal Zone Library at Balboa and from the staff of the Panama Canal Information Office were unstinting. Especially am I indebted to Librarian Emily J. Price and the late Ruth C. Stuhl, and to Mrs. Nan S. Chong, who is the Panama Collection Librarian; to Frank A. Baldwin, Panama Canal Information Officer, and his able associates Victor G. Canel and Annie R. Rathgeber. (They answered my many queries as time went on. They arranged interviews, provided statistics, photographs, and a complete transcript of the written reminiscences of 112 canal laborers, most of them West Indians and all veterans of construction years–an invaluable collection assembled in 1963 by the Isthmian Historical Society.)
Others in Panama who gave of their time and knowledge and hospitality were Major General David S. Parker, then Governor of the Canal Zone; Ruth Rickarby; and Frank H. Robinson. Dr. Patricia A. Webb of the Gorgas Memorial Institute of Tropical and Preventive Medicine kindly guided me in my reading on yellow fever.
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