ACB The Panama Canal
On a P&O cruise I got a book out of the library. It was entitled "The Path between the Seas" by David McCullough and it was an extremely readable narrative of the building of the Panama Canal. I was so impressed by the book that I made a précis of the story. I give that précis below.
A few statistics on the building of the Panama Canal
The French under Ferdinand de Lessops tried in the late 1890s and the Americans succeeded by 1914. de Lessops totally underestimated the enormity of the task. This included the fight against disease as well as the fight against the unstable terrain.
With the Americans it became a national project where three different presidents became involved. Several leading figures were given charge of the project. In one case the project was being run from Washington with instruction to use only use cables when essential because 'they cost money’ The result was some ludicrous bureaucracy. An example of the bureaucracy being that five tons of used newspapers was ordered to be used as packing material for some of the building work. The cable just asked for the newspapers without explaining why they were needed. Two months later half a hundredweight was delivered because the Washington official considered that that was plenty to give hospital patients their reading matter.
Another fiasco was one thousand doors were ordered along with two thousand hinges. When they arrived, twenty thousand hinges were supplied.
After Teddy Roosevelt made a personal visit to Panama, he put a real live wire in charge. This man demanded an enormous salary and Presidential authority to be given TOTAL COMMAND. He got his demand and work speeded up. A number of resignations at crucial times caused problems.
At an early stage local officials ordered carpenters not to waste time putting screens on windows as they ‘knew’ that mosquitoes were not the cause of yellow fever and malaria. It was the noxious vapours from the jungle, plus the filth in the towns that caused disease.
One particular experiment by the Sanitary Department failed to prove that mosquitoes carried malaria because insufficient time was given to allow the newly-infected insect to multiply its parasites so that it could become a carrier. A good experiment that failed due to a minor error in procedure. An infected person was allowed to bitten, and then an uninfected person was bitten by the same insect
Another unexplained absurdity was the order from Washington that carpenters were not allowed to saw planks longer than ten feet
The USA task was like a war against nature. One reporter commented that no man had ever taken such liberties with Nature before.
In 22 December 1908, 24 tons of dynamite were tamped into holes bored into the rock, but no fuses were fitted because the blast was wanted later on. For reasons not known, the whole lot went off and 23 men were killed and 40 injured
In March 1909 68 steam shovels moved two million cubic yards of dirt. This was more that ten time the best month of the French effort
At one time 160 trains a day were moving spoil, and trains were running on cascades of railway lines on a number of terraces of the excavation site
In one year a thousand miles of train track had to be repositioned as work progressed.
Compressed air was piped from a distant compressor in the manner water is piped on a housing estate. Compressed air drove many of the drills and other machines
At the Calubra Cut 97 million cubic yards of dirt was removed. Dumping sites were as much as 23 miles from the excavation points.
A lot of spoil was not dumped but used in dams and embankments. During some rainy seasons as much as ten feet of rain fell in one season making whole areas a sea of mud
Huge mud-slips took place both in the French era and in the USA era. Some of the slips buried steam shovels that had to be written off. Some of the slips buried cranes almost up to their highest point.
A huge number of accidents killed an enormous number of men.
It took three months to dig out the rock and earth that slipped in the Calubra Cut by slides in 1911. Some of the ‘continuous inch a day’ slips kept gangs at work moving the rail tracks back into position for weeks at a time.
Actual geological movements also contributed to the unsteady ground. Blasting vibrations were blamed for some of the ground movement. The worst slide took place close to the town of Culebra at the west of the Cut. Huge cracks began appearing in 1911. By the summer of 1912 three million cubic yards of dirt had blocked the path of the canal. Thirty buildings in the town had to moved from the brow of the Cut. Before the final slip 75 acres of the town broke away .and was carried over the edge, and this was in the dry season! It is estimated that 10 million cubic yards of dirt fell into the Cut, and the Cut became a quarter of a mile wider.
One Barbadian opined that his children would come and their children after them would come, before the task was completed.
There was boiling water issuing from one of the cracks in the ground, at one point. Geologists disputed the view that they were digging into a volcano but the heat came from “oxidization of pyrite” An envelope held over a crack that issue hot air, the paper became charred in the hand of the official that tried the experiment. The workers were terrified. The floor of the Cut would rise by thirty feet in five minutes, but with extremely uniform motion. The cause was deduced that to the immense weight of the soil at the sides of the excavation, and the plastic ground simply squeezed the soil so that it rose where there was least resistance
Multitudes of tourists came to watch the work proceed. 15,000 came in 1911. The Culebra Cut became like the Sphinx as a view for tourists. (my simile).
Visitors to the site were astonished at how many American women and children in clean bright clothing could be seen. The fetid jungle history was known world-wide by that time, but the astonishing improvements in the environment by the USA were not.
“The “highest dam”, “the highest locks”, “the greatest artificial lake” were becoming trite and banal slogans by newspapers “A grimy worker dripping in sweat being greeted by his wife in a bright pink dress, with their children accompanying her” was looked on by tourists as a miraculous sight.
Towards the end, the work force was between forty five and fifty thousand. people. Almost nobody existed if they were not part of the construction team or immediate family. The total number of white Americans was only six thousand , with two and a half thousand being women and children. “Gold-roll” (white staff) salaries for a nurse or a teacher, were $60 to start. Clerks and bookkeepers were on $100. A doctor was on $150. A steam-shovel engineer was on $150 rising to $310 The top salary for a woman (e.g. a telephone operator) was $125.. A young graduate engineer with a couple of year’s experience would get $250 to start, which was only about $25 more than he could get in the USA at that time.
“Shore Leave” would be taken in Colon or Panama City as bars were very sparse and spartan in the Canal Zone. Cinemas and brothels existed off-zone. The locals referred to the prostitutes as “American Women” regardless of their origin. A town law forbade these ‘American women’ from being on the street after ten pm. There were a number of embarrassing misunderstanding as a result of that law.
If an canal employee got married, his status changed abruptly If he earned less that $250 a month he and his bride were moved into a rent-free four room apartment. with a broad-screened porch (a fifth room), and a bath. This is what would be known as a Type 14 house. If the man was on $200 to $300 a month he was eligible for a Type 17 house or a small individual cottage. $300 to $400 a month entitled the man to a Type 10 house with three bedrooms etc. Over $400 a month, the houses were quite distinguished. Everybody shopped at a local (sort-of) supermarket where prices were lower than in the USA (much to the chagrin of the locals and the blacks).
A black maid could be got for $10 a month with plenty of takers. The society was very much like that ‘back home’ Small talk was the same as back home with the sinking of the Titanic being as big a news on the zone as it was in USA proper. “Wait till the sun shines Nellie” was a popular tune at The Tivoli. The ‘Canal Record’, a newspaper like many a newspaper in small town America, covered all the events, A huge number of societies existed including “The Knights of Malta” Everybody was someone’s ‘brother’ There was even an order of ‘Panamanian Kangaroos’ It seemed that The Canal Zone became another US town or city.
The US establishment became alarmed at the “socialist regime” that existed in Panama. “When the staff all return to the USA the political consequences could be enormous” worried a New York banker. “The socialist Party will have a lot of new members!” Some of the politically aware employees disagreed heartily. The few military men in the Zone were miserably paid and treated like dirt. If they went off zone the Panamanian police took every opportunity to humiliate the soldiers. There was a fight in one bar and the local police. shot three unarmed soldiers ‘to keep the peace’
The official record of the canal hardly mentions the huge number of blacks that carried out essential work. Labourers, waiters, sanitary workers, and many others were ignored despite their essential presence in the zone. Many American tourists expected to see white men laboujring in the Cut, and were dismayed to see that white men were almost always away from the actual ‘coal face’ The colour separation existed at every level in the zone, but very little of the records mentioned the fact
The completion of the Canal did not make the world news very much in 1914 as the outbreak of WW1 overshadowed the event The cost to the American government since 1904 was $352M with the total cost (including the French outlay) being $639M. Except for wars, the only comparable costs had been the acquisition of new territories like Alaska. 5609 lives had been lost, if hospital records are to believed. The number of white Americans was 350. If the French part is included there were 500 lives lost for every mile of the canal.
The number of slides to be re-excavated by the Americans was almost equal to the useful excavation by the French (a little over 25M cubic yards). The Culebra Cut cost $90M, or $10M per mile. It is doubtful if the price had been known originally, that Congress would have given approval. ^The total excavation since 1904 was 232,440,945 cubic yards.. Including the French effort, 262M cubic yards of dirt had been moved, more than four times what de Lessops estimated for a sea-level canal., and three times the amount moved at Suez. George Goethals is the person who made most of the success of the venture. None, or very little, corruption has ever been uncovered. No excessive profits were made by any of the several thousand firms who took part in the build.
The design of the locks had many safety features. Even a ship totally out of control could be halted by specially-installed chains without doing damage to the structure of the locks. The complicated interlocking of the multiple operations of passing a ship through the canal could not be done wrongly. The newly designed electrical interlocks made an error impossible. By 1939 annual traffic exceeded 7000 ships a year. In the decades following WW2”, the traffic more than doubled. Lighting allowed 24 hour operation and ships were transiting at more than one per hour during a 24-hour period every day of the year.
By the 1970s 15,000 ships a year with total tonnage beyond 100M tons was transited. In 1915 it had been 5M tons. In 1915 the tolls earned $4M a year, and by 1970 they exceeded $M100. In 1973 the Canal made its first loss. In 1974 tolls were raised from 90c per cargo ton to £1.08 per cargo ton. By law the canal must at least break even. When the book was written in 1977, the annual tolls raised $M140 The largest toll was for the Queen Elizabeth II. She paid $42,077.88. The average toll per ship in 1977 is about $10,000, roughly a tenth the cost of going the long way round via Cape Horn. The lowest toll was paid by Richard Halliburton who swam through the Canal, by instalments, one day at a time. Based on his weight of 140 pounds, he paid 36 cents. Although not the first person to swim the canal, he was the first to persuade the authorities to allow him to swim through the locks.
The Canal is essentially the same as when it was built although widening has taken place. We were informed, during my recent cruise in January 2005, that widening and straightening is a constant task to allow bigger and bigger ship to pass. With a few improvements, it is believed that up to 27,000 ships a year could be accommodated,
On September 18 1915 a collapse closed the canal for seven months. In August the following year the same thing happened again One slide in 1974 dumped an estimated million cubic yards of dirt into the Cut.
Four days after the canal was opened an earthquake in the Zone demolished a church but did not appear to affect the Canal or its locks.
McCullough waxes lyrical about the finest engineering achievement that mankind has ever undertaken. For myself, having seen the Canal from a cruise ship (The GT Infinity) I am inclined to echo the author’s sentiment. Unless the book is a pack of lies, the Canal goes down in history as an equal to the Pyramids and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
Nature, where is thy sting?
Theodore Roosevelt never saw the finished Canal Nor did he see the USA pay Colombia $25M in 1921 for the loss of Panama. Before the USA finally handed the Canal over to the Panamanian government, there was a lot of apprehension as to whether the Panamanians were capable of maintaining the Canal.
The book contains an enormous number of acknowledgements and references. I wholly commend it as a “book that must be read”. The Americans are often seen as boastful, but this book shows that they have something to boast about.
Précis by Colin D Campbell of The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough ISBN-0-671-24409-4 Pbk