The Panama Canal – Part 1: Le Piège Mortel

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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network; and as always, I’m your host, Zach Cornwell.

Today, we are starting a brand-new multi-part series, and I am very excited, because it’s taking us to a part of the world that we’ve never actually been/visited before on this show. At least not in any significant/real detail.

Today’s episode is taking us to Central America, that thin, jungle-y bit of land that tethers the two continents of the Western Hemisphere together.

Despite its name, Central America can often feel very peripheral in discussions of history, global politics and international affairs. Ask the average American to find Belize or Nicaragua on a map, and you’ll get a sort of vague pointing motion in the general direction of the Caribbean.

And yet, that part of the world is absolutely bursting with rich, amazing stories. Incredible tales of political intrigue, personal sacrifice and extraordinary courage. Not to mention the occasional genocide, regime change and colonial takeover. But one of the most fascinating chapters of Central American history is the one we’re going to be talking about over the course of the next few episodes:

The Story of the Panama Canal.

For those unfamiliar with the riveting nuances of trade routes and international shipping, the Panama Canal is a man-made, artificial waterway that runs through the Panamanian isthmus, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It allows ships to take a shortcut through that narrow strip of land, and avoid the long, treacherous journey around the tip of South America.

Prior to its completion in 1914, the dream of an inter-ocean canal through Panama had existed for a very long time. Many people tried and died in the pursuit of it. But eventually, it was the industrial might of the United States of America that finally brought it to fruition in the sepia-toned days of the early 1900s. It cost ten years, thousands of lives and the modern equivalent of $10 billion dollars, but when the waterway opened on August 15^th, 1914, it was undeniable: the world had changed, and it had changed, arguably, for the better.

In subsequent decades, the advent of air travel and sophisticated rail systems somewhat dimmed its star, but today the Panama Canal is still a vital artery of global commerce and maritime navigation. Something like 40% of US shipping container traffic still moves through the canal. Most of us probably don’t think about it very often, but if a meteor were to suddenly strike Panama tomorrow, entire economies and fortunes and ways of life would collapse.

And yet, at first glance, the story of the digging a very large ditch in the middle of the jungle might not seem all that interesting. Many of us drive by massive construction projects on our morning commute every day without sparing a second glance. So why should we care about some dusty old engineering effort from more than a century ago?

Because, the story of the Panama Canal is so much more than ships and channels and locks and trade routes. It is a capital “s” SAGA  –  dramatic as any conflict, bloody as any war,  consequential as any revolution. As historian David McCullough writes:

“The creation of the Panama Canal was far more than a vast, unprecedented feat of engineering. It was a profoundly important historic event and a sweeping human drama not unlike that of war. Apart from wars, it represented the largest, most costly single effort ever before mounted anywhere on earth. It held the world’s attention over a span of forty years. It affected the lives of tens of thousands of people at every level of society and of virtually every race and nationality.[…] In the history of finance capitalism, in the history of medicine, it was an event of signal consequence. It marked a score of advances in engineering, government planning, labor relations. […] Great reputations were made and destroyed. For numbers of men and women it was the adventure of a lifetime.”

That my friends, is the adventure we are embarking upon today.

And we won’t be going alone.

Over the course of this series, we will meet a wide and fascinating cast of characters, a motley menagerie of explorers, con-men and killers. We’ll meet nationalist revolutionaries and Washington lobbyists. Blue collar dreamers and Wall Street schemers. And hopefully, at the end of the road, we’ll have a better understanding/firmer grasp of an event/undertaking that literally altered the face of the earth, changed the destiny of at least three nations, and continues to shape our reality to this very day.

The title of this first episode comes from a French phrase: “Le Piège Mortel”

[leh pee-ej, mohr-tel]

It means “the death trap.”

Because although it was the United States of America who eventually finished a canal in Panama, the French were the first ones to take a crack at it. Decades before the first American shovel sank into Panamanian soil, the French were toiling in the jungle, dying in droves, struggling to carve a waterway through the spine of the world. And in the process, they learned that the price of progress is very high. And not always worth paying.  

So, with all that preamble said and done, let’s dive into the story.

Welcome to The Panama Canal – Part 1: Le Piège Mortel, or The Death Trap.

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SHIPS IN THE DESERT

It’s November 17^th, 1869.

Almost fifty years before the construction/completion of the Panama Canal.

We are standing in the middle of the Egyptian desert, surrounded by sand and dust and a horizon line flat enough to iron a shirt. Look in any direction, and the landscape is essentially a ribbon of beige and a ribbon of blue – the sand and the sky – welded together. It’s the kind of place where things don’t live – they just survive.

And yet, despite all logic, despite the tyranny of Mother Nature and the destiny of geography, there are ships sailing through the desert.

There are big ships and little ships. Frigates and schooners and private yachts. A veritable fleet of vessels, where no fleet of vessels has ever sailed before. Gliding past/through the dunes at a leisurely 4-6 knots, the pampered passengers aboard these ships take their time and sip their wine. After all, how often do you get to witness the birth of a brand-new wonder of the world?

Today, November 17^th, 1869, is the opening celebration of the world-famous Suez Canal.

For the last decade, a small army of workers and engineers has been digging, dredging, sweating and shoveling its way through the narrow stretch of desert that separates the Red Sea from the Mediterranean Sea. To date, the project has cost millions of dollars, thousands of lives, and ten long years…but now, it is finally complete.

The Suez Canal - a man-made channel of water roughly 30 foot deep, 300 feet wide, and a hundred miles along - is a paradigm-shifting achievement, one that will have huge implications for trade, travel and the global economy. A rising tide that quite literally lifts all boats.

And to celebrate this historic accomplishment, to inaugurate the Canal, the upper crust of Europe has descended upon Lower Egypt. Puffed-up aristocrats and flirty debutantes, empresses and earls and dukes and viscounts – all here to raise a glass of bubbly to mankind’s newest marvel of engineering.  

At the celebration, under a sky full of fireworks, little children tug on their mother’s skirts or their father’s sleeve and ask, what’s so important about a big ugly ditch in the middle of the desert? Well, their parents patiently explain, believe it or not - this big ugly ditch just changed the world.

AN OLD DREAM

For as long as human beings have been sailing ships around the globe, they’ve been trying to find faster, more efficient ways of doing it. For a very long time, the only option was to improve the ships themselves. Bigger sails, sleeker hulls, stronger crews. With implacable progress, nautical vessels got better and faster and safer – capable of traveling immense distances without stopping (or sinking). But despite those advances, there was always one deeply frustrating limitation.

You could change the methods, but you couldn’t change the map.

Long ago, when the supercontinent Pangaea cracked apart and split into seven continents, the tectonic plates rudely gave no consideration to things like international trade routes or maritime transit.

For a merchant ship to travel from the docks of Venice to the lucrative markets in India or China, it had to sail out of the Mediterranean, down the west coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up through the Indian Ocean – all without sinking or suffering a mutiny along the way. Dock to dock, it was 12,000-mile journey that took anywhere from 3-6 months.

For obvious reasons, divorce rates were especially high in the nautical community.

But the most frustrating part – the real pebble in their boat shoes - was that the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean almost were connected. The only thing separating those warm Mediterranean waters from the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean beyond was a wafer-thin, 100-mile-wide isthmus in Eastern Egypt.

It was so close….and yet, so far away.

But if someone could figure out how to cut through that narrow impediment, and bridge the two bodies of water, it would revolutionize maritime travel.

And for many hundreds of years, people tried. The ancient Pharaohs tried. The Kings of Persia tried. Even Napoleon Bonaparte himself briefly entertained plans to build a waterway to the Orient. But the problems were always the same. It was too expensive, or too time-consuming, or too technologically challenging. So, for most of human history, the idea of an Egyptian canal and a convenient sea route to Asia remained the stuff of dreams.

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But then, for better and worse, came the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s. We harnessed the power of steam and coal and electricity. We built mechanical behemoths that could break apart solid rock or liquify metal, or send invisible messages flying across impossible distances. Suddenly, construction projects that would’ve cost the ancient Pharaohs several decades and thousands of slaves, could now be accomplished in a few short years. 

By the mid-19^th century, the crazy dream of an Egyptian canal, didn’t seem so crazy anymore. The technology existed, the capital existed, and the expertise existed…all that was missing was a person audacious/crazy enough to try it.

“Canal” is actually an old French word, which means “channel”. So it seemed fitting that the person to step into that historical void and succeed where so many others had failed….was a Frenchman.

ENTER DE LESSEPS

And now folks, it is time to meet a very important character in our story. The steam in our engine. The wind in our sails. The French protagonist at the heart/center of a Greek tragedy. A walking cautionary tale named Ferdinand de Lesseps.

That’s D-E…. L-E-S-S-E-P-S….de Lesseps.

In your mind’s eye, picture the most charming person you know. The most well-spoken, the most affable, the most intoxicating individual in your life. The person that everyone loves to be around. The one that gatherings feel incomplete without. The person that lights up a room, just by darkening a door.

That is Ferdinand de Lesseps.

On the morning of November 17^th, 1869, De Lesseps springs out of bed with the energy of a much younger man. He is 64 years old, but to De Lesseps, age is – and always has been - just a number. As historian David McCullough writes:

“He kept in excellent physical condition. He exercised regularly—fencing, riding—and with the zest of a man half his age. He looked at least ten to fifteen years younger than he was.”

“An admiring American [..] described him as “a small man, French in detail, with . . . what is called a magnetic presence.” A reporter for the New York Herald provided this description:. “ His hair is almost white. His eyes are black, large, restless, and fringed by heavy lashes over which are shaggy eyebrows. His face is tanned . . . and ruddy with the evidence of perfect health. A mustache is the only adornment on his face. It is small, iron-gray, bristling and has an aggressive look. In stature he is a little below medium height. His bearing is erect, his manner suave, courteous and polished.”

As De Lesseps shimmies into a waistcoat, tightens his tie, and waxes the points of his iron-gray white mustache, he endeavors to look his very best. November 17^th  is, after all, the greatest and most important day of his life. Every duke and duchess from Paris to Petra has gathered here in the desert to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. His canal. The culmination of years of work, gallons of sweat and no small amount of French charm. 

Born in 1805 to a wealthy family of French diplomats, Ferdinand de Lesseps was not the kind of person who needed to work hard – or at all, for that matter. If he wanted to, he could’ve floated through life on a lazy river of champagne and compliments, enjoying the creature comforts of the Second Estate. But for a certain kind of person, achievement is a drug, and de Lesseps got addicted/hooked early on.

Rising through the ranks of the French diplomatic corps, de Lesseps made friends from Cologne to Cairo, negotiating treaties and lighting up parties, making the troubled European world a bolder, if not better, place. Table by table, room by room, he expanded the domain of his own influence. An apex social butterfly, he conquered the continent, one cocktail party at a time.

But then, in the 1830s, the great dream of his life took shape.

The old mirage in Egypt became tangible in his mind’s eye. Like so many others, de Lesseps envisioned a channel - a canal - a bright blue vein of water running through the desiccated mummy-flesh of the Egyptian desert, pumping wealth and commerce into the far-flung corners of the world.

Now, Ferdinand De Lesseps didn’t know the first thing about building a bookshelf, much less a canal. As historian David McCullough writes: “He had no technical background, no experience in finance. His skills as an administrator were modest. Routine of any kind bored him quickly.”

But De Lesseps had connections and charisma. And he was not going to be discouraged by peripheral details like a complete lack of technical expertise. As they say, everyone needs a hobby. And De Lesseps found his in the land of the Pharaohs.  According to David McCullough:

“For the next fifteen years he was everywhere at once—Egypt, London, [Istanbul] Constantinople, Paris—coaxing, flattering, convincing monarchs and newspaper editors, issuing endless reports, driving the work forward in the desert, watching over every detail, frequently overruling his technical advisers, defying the European bankers, and facing the scorn of the English prime minister, Palmerston, who called him a swindler and a fool and who saw the canal as nothing more than a cheap French grab for power in the Mediterranean.”

During those turbulent years, de Lesseps had more than his fair share of doubters and haters. Even close friends, like the banking kingpin Baron de Rothschild, were skeptical: “You will not succeed,” Rothschild told him. “We shall see” de Lesseps responded. [check this]

Modern historians have routinely (and rightfully) ridiculed the “Great Man” theory of history. The idea that history is less a chain of events than a chain of personalities. Caesar, Charlemagne, and William the Conqueror. Genghis Khan, Stalin and Napoleon Bonaparte. All the world, just hostages to overdeveloped egos. But lying at the heart of the Great Man theory is an understandable human impulse. The need to believe that someone has a plan. Someone is in control. The Great Man theory is considered a relic these days, but it’s hard to imagine the Suez Canal happening without the singular will of Ferdinand de Lesseps. As historian Matthew Parker writes:

“He never professed to be a trained engineer. But he was someone who could make things happen. More than anything, he was a communicator, one who could conjure up both the necessary capital and the dedication among the workforce […’ He had the reputation, energy, and charisma to turn fantastical schemes into reality.”

As a friend of de Lesseps reportedly told him:

 “My dear Lesseps . . . when you have something important to do, if there are two of you, you have one too many.”

Using his considerable connections, Ferdinand de Lesseps organized, managed, and oversaw the creation of the Suez Canal Company, named for the port of Suez on the Red Sea. By 1859, shovels were plunging into soft Egyptian soil. Like a spoon gliding over fresh butter, a massive ditch was dug across 100 miles of desert. It wasn’t easy, of course. Thousands of Egyptian workers dropped dead from heat exposure, malnutrition and cholera, but to the investors back in Paris, all’s well that ends well. By 1869, the work was finished and the canal was open for business.

It really is hard to overstate just how big of a deal this was at the time. Using this new waterway, ships bound for Asia didn’t have to travel all the way around Africa anymore – and vice versa. They could take a two-day shortcut through Egypt. Suddenly, a journey that used to take 4 months only took 4 weeks.

“In a stroke,” writes Matthew Parker, “India had been brought nearly six thousand miles closer to Europe.”

“The barrier is down!”, cried a French clergyman at the time, “One of the most formidable enemies of mankind and of civilization, which is distance, loses in a moment two thousand leagues of his empire. The two sides of the world approach to greet one another . . . The history of the world has reached one of its most glorious stages.”

The significance of the Suez Canal was rivaled only by the extravagance of its inaugural celebrations. No expense was spared. “The Suez Company and the Egyptian government,” explains writer Zachary Karabell,” budgeted a million francs to bring [thousands] of guests on an all-expense-paid tour of the canal for its official inauguration.”

“Six thousand invitations were sent,” elaborates David McCullough, “offering to pay all travel and hotel expenses. A Cairo opera house had been built for the occasion and Verdi had been commissioned to write a spectacular new work, Aïda. Five hundred cooks and a thousand waiters were imported from Europe. At Lake Timsah, halfway down the canal, a whole town, Ismailia, had been created, trees planted, hotels put up, a palace built.”-

There was even a piece of music commissioned especially for the event: “The Egyptian March”, by Austrian composer, Johann Strauss.

AUDIO:

In Egypt, from November 17^th to the 19^th, the blue bloods of the Mediterranean toasted the opening of the Red Sea. As Karabell continues:

“Naval vessels from various countries participated in a joint salute to the flags of Turkey, Austria, Egypt, Prussia, and Holland, and smoke and the smell of gunpowder filled the air.

A landing area had been set aside and decorated with a triumphal arch. On three platforms, arranged around an open square, sat nearly a thousand dignitaries….an international menagerie. The sharif of Mecca, the shaikh of al-Azhar, and the religious scholars of Cairo donned their finest robes and turbans for the occasion, as did their students and retainers. Kings, princes, ambassadors, and assorted royalty of Europe wore uniforms laden with decorative epaulets and ceremonial swords encrusted with jewels. Queens, princesses, and assorted royal consorts wore the latest finery.”

Watching the ceremony was a large crowd, attired in a cross-section of multicultural fashion, from frock coats and fez caps to Bedouin robes and Prussian helmets. Arab men mixed with Turkish officials, Circassian soldiers, and Armenian merchants, who in turn stood next to Nubian slaves, Greek businessmen from Alexandria, and English seamen. Half-veiled fellah women, with golden ringlets on their head-scarves, stood next to French and English ladies equipped with hats and parasols.”

It was, wrote a British journalist: “A crowd of all nations”

And at the center of it all, was the man of the hour, the parter of the desert, the “Great Engineer” himself…Ferdinand de Lesseps.

During a religious dedication of the canal, a French priest said that De Lessep’s name should “be placed side by side with Christopher Columbus.”, because, writes Karabell, “not since that explorer had landed in the New World had any one person so transformed the globe.”

From then on, De Lesseps was celebrated as “the greatest living Frenchman,” according to one historian. “Le Grand Français.”

And as for the Suez Canal itself? It performed exactly as advertised. According to historian Matthew Parker: “By the late 1870s, the benefits of the canal to European manufacturers were more than apparent, as the raw materials of the East, as well as its markets, had been brought so much nearer. More than anything, the canal gave Europe a critical advantage over the frighteningly fast-growing economy of the United States’ East Coast. For the canal's original backers, too, it was a bonanza. Initially the share price of de Lesseps's company had slumped. But by 1879 a 500-franc ($100) share was trading for over 2,000 francs, and the company was paying dividends of 14 percent. Suez had made a lot of people rich.”

Most people, when they achieve a certain level of success, will settle down, hang up their spurs, and rest on their laurels. In the 21^st century, we call it “retirement”. But retirement was not Ferdinand de Lesseps’ style. After conquering the sands of Egypt, “The Great Engineer” was eager for a new challenge, a new venture, a new addition to his immortal resume.

Sure, he was in his late-sixties, but he wasn’t dead. There was so much left to do, so many wells untapped, so many peaks unclimbed. To quote a certain character from an American movie:

“They say the number one killer of old people…is retirement.”

In short, Ferdinand de Lesseps was a man in search of a new mission.  And then, around 1875, The Great Engineer heard six letters and a single word that would change his life (and legacy) forever.

“Panama”

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A SHORT HISTORY OF PANAMA

It’s September 25^th, 1513.

400 years before the opening of the Panama Canal.

One thing we often take for granted about maps of the world, is just how…filled in they are. Every contour of every coast of every continent. Every island and mountain range, carved with scientific certainty into our collective understanding of reality.

But in 1513, that was not the case.

So much of the world was still a mystery. People did not know the things that we know now. For example, they didn’t know that the Western hemisphere was dominated by two massive continents: North and South America, respectively. They also didn’t know that while those two continents are distinct, they are not unconnected.

As it happens, North and South America are tethered together by a tiny s-shaped ribbon of land. An umbilical cord of thick jungle, green mountains and black swamps. From space, it looks as if some giant thumb and forefinger has reached out of the cosmos and pinched the land together. At its thinnest point, this isthmus is barely 30 miles across.

The indigenous people of the area, the Cueva, call their home “A place where many fish are taken”. At least that’s the English translation. In Cueva, it is much more succinct. Their name for their home is “Panama.”

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And here, somewhere in the Panamanian jungle, a twig snaps under the weight a long leather boot. As far as boots go, it is very well made. Thigh-high, crafted in Spain, connected to breeches and buckles and a breastplate made of steel. Tramping through the jungle, armed to the teeth and tired to the bone, is a small group of Spanish soldiers and explorers. The common term for men like these is “conquistadors” or conquerors. But after two weeks in this green hell/inferno, they don’t feel like conquering anything except a hot meal and a soft bed.

“Panama” – as the local tribes/indians call it – is very different from their homes in Spain, even from the recently-conquered Caribbean outposts of Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola. Panama, at least to European sensibilities, is a god-forsaken cesspool.

In the 16^th century, Darwin’s theory of evolution is still 300 years away, so the only conclusion these Spaniards can come to, is that every creature in this jungle has been personally created by Satan himself to drive them insane / torture them. Biiiirrrrds {Birds] screeching in their ear^. Snakes nesting in their boots-. Mosquitos feasting on their blood\. If God exists, this place is not in his jurisdiction.

And then there’s the rain. The rain in Panama was biblical. As David McCullough writes:

 “It had to be seen, to be felt, smelled; it had to be heard to be appreciated. The effect was much as though the heavens had opened and the air had turned instantly liquid. The skies, when it was not raining, were nearly always filled with tremendous, towering clouds—magnificent clouds, and especially so in the light of early morning. Then there would be an unmistakable rush of wind in the trees, a noticeable drop in temperature, a quick darkening overhead followed by a sound that someone likened to the “trampling of myriad feet” through leaves. In villages and towns everyone would instinctively dash for cover. From the hills[…] the jungle could be seen to vanish before onrushing silver cataracts of rain, and howler monkeys would commence their eerie ruckus. ….And then, while the trees still tossed and roared, the rain would be over—in an instant. The sun would be out again, fierce as ever. Everything would glisten with rainwater and the air would be filled with the fecund, greenhouse smell of jungle and mud.”

As rain drops the size of musket balls ricochet and slide off their armor, the conquistadors can’t help but notice that the wet climate is systematically destroying their equipment. Swords begin to rust, shirts turn fuzzy with mold, and gunpowder clumps together like matted toothpaste. At night, strange predators seem to lurk up in the trees, their lamp-like eyes shining just beyond the edges of the campfire.

But despite all these unnerving occupational hazards, the conquistadors will not be deterred. Despite the wind, the rain, the heat and the snakes, despite the jaguars on their tail and the ants on their skin, they will do what they came here to do.

At the head of this ragged expedition, leading the conquistadors south through the jungle, is a Spaniard named Vasco Nunez de Balboa. That’s B-A-L-B-O-A. Now, that’s a name you probably haven’t heard or thought about since middle school – just another Spanish name in the gold-plated pantheon that famously explored – some would say exploited - large parts of the Western hemisphere. Big names like Columbus and Cortez, Pizarro and Alvarado. All those “great men” of history.

But Balboa isn’t famous yet. Right now, in September of 1513, he’s just a guy – the leader of a ratty colonial settlement on the Panamanian coast.

It’s been about three weeks since he set out from that settlement with 190 men, a pack of war dogs, and a coterie of indigenous porters and slaves, chasing rumors about treasure in the jungle and golden cities nestled on the coast of an undiscovered sea. In that short amount of time, Balboa’s expedition has been reduced by more than half - its members slowly picked off by disease, snake bites, or indigenous arrows.

But today, Balboa’s tenacity is about to be rewarded. As he staggers up a particular hill, the jungle seems to thin out and clear away, offering an unobstructed view of the surrounding landscape. When he reaches the summit of the hill, Balboa looks to his left, and then to his right. Again to the left, again to the right. Back and forth, like he’s watching some heavenly tennis match. Maybe it’s heat stroke, he thinks, or some jungle hallucination, but on either side of him, he sees an open ocean.

As it happens, Vasco Nunez de Balboa has just discovered the Pacific Ocean. This tropical isthmus, Panama, is so thin that the human eye can see both the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time. As Matthew Parker writes:

“[Balboa] fell to his knees in prayer and then called up his men, “showing them the great main sea heretofore unknown to the inhabitants of Europe, Aphrike, and Asia.”

They struggled down to the shore, on the way defeating and then befriending Indians who had barred their route to the ocean. On the afternoon of September 29, they reached the sea. That evening Balboa, in full armor, waded into the muddy water and laid claim in the name of King Ferdinand of Castile to what he called the “South Sea.” –

Balboa never did find any mythical cities, but he did find something much more valuable: A connection point – a land bridge - between two vast oceans, unlocking new pathways for the rapacious expansion of the Spanish Empire. It was a big, triumphant moment, but for Balboa that success was short-lived. He quickly learned that glory is a double-edged sword – very similar to the one that chopped off his head six years later, courtesy of a jealous political rival. Yes, the great man Balboa died as he lived – trespassing on foreign soil.

But for the rest of the Conquistadors, it was the beginning of a golden age. – and, if there’s room on the boats – a silver, gem, pearl age, too. One by one, all the indigenous kingdoms of America fell to the pistols and pathogens of the Conquistadors. The Aztecs in Mexico, the Incas in Peru, and so many others we’ll never know about. The Spaniards subjugated and strip-mined those cultures or every ounce of gold they could carry.  But the key, the linchpin of this empire-building operation, was Panama. As historian Elias Marlow writes:

“The news of this incredible wealth electrified the Spanish world and sealed Panama’s destiny. Suddenly, the isthmus became the indispensable conduit for the greatest flow of treasure the world had ever seen. The silver mountains of Potosí and the gold of the Incas had to be transported to Spain, and the only viable route was through Panama. This transformed the colony's economy and its very reason for being. Panama was not a land of agriculture or mining in its own right; its business was transit. It became the vital “garganta”, or throat, through which the riches of South America were funneled to the imperial heartland.”

And for a century or so, the Spanish were living large.

But on a long enough timeline, all predators become prey themselves.

The Spanish were not the only Europeans with big guns, fast ships and a taste for gold. As the 16^th century became the 17^th century, South America became a battleground. Like flies swarming a hunk of bloody meat, privateers, pirates and rival powers started carving chunks out of Spain’s colonial portfolio. The English, the French, the Dutch and the Danes – everyone wanted a piece. By the early 1800s, the once-great Spanish empire was a swaying giant, and in South America, insurrection was in the air.

Inspired by successful revolutions in the United States and France, South American freedom fighters raised armies, drew up new Constitutions, and massacred Spanish garrisons. By the mid 19^th century, to quote historian Matthew Parker: “the dead hand of Spanish rule was at last removed.”  

And what about little Panama? After the flurry of South American revolutions, who gained control of that vital land bridge? Well, in a just world, the answer should’ve been “The Panamanians”, but sadly, self-determination was still a long, long way off for the common people of the isthmus. The ruling elite of Panama, realizing how vulnerable they were, chose to hitch their wagon to a larger, more powerful country. As Marlowe writes:

“Having cast off the distant authority of Madrid, they had no intention of navigating the treacherous waters of statehood alone. The isthmus was small, sparsely populated, economically weak, and possessed no army to defend its newfound freedom.”

And so, in the early 19^th century, Panama chose to become a political appendage of its larger neighbor to south, Colombia. Things had changed, and yet nothing had changed. The isthmus was still a possession - a province, rather than its own country.

Even though they owed allegiance to the bigwigs in Bogota, the Panamanians could at least rest easy knowing their exploitation at the hands of foreign powers was at an end. But –as the universal rules of irony dictate – that was not quite the case. Across the Atlantic, hungry eyes were looking at the isthmus - drawing up maps, raising capital, making plans.

And this time, it wasn’t the Spanish.

It was the French.

THE HERO OF SUEZ

AUDIO: [Belle Epoque Audio]

The year is 1879.

We’re about 5,000 miles away from the Panamanian jungle and all its feral beauty.

Tonight, we are in the city of Paris, the sparkling, decadent capital of the French Third Republic.

Over time, inevitably, every great city eventually earns an iconic nickname for itself. New York, for example, is The Big Apple. Rome is the Eternal City. And Boston – poor Boston, Massachusetts - is “Beantown”.

Well, Paris has a nickname too. It’s often called the City of Light. “La Ville Lumiere”

A common misconception, Parisians will explain down the bridge of their nose, is that the aforementioned “light” refers to literal light. Street lamps and signs and so-forth. But actually, (they say, with an upward push of their glasses), it refers to Paris’s important position in the French Enlightenment movement of the 17^th and 18^thcenturies, in which humanity finally discovered elusive concepts like Personal Freedom and Not Killing People For Their Religion (or lack thereof). Although, granted, we’re still working on that last one.

But on this cool Parisian night in 1879, one could be forgiven for assuming the more literal interpretation of the city’s nickname. When the sun goes down, Paris seems to glow from the surrounding countryside.  Thanks to the recent and rapid proliferation of gas and electric lighting, the capital of the French Republic is blazing bright well into the night.

And behind one those glowing windows, in a posh downtown apartment, an old friend of ours is working late. Well, I shouldn’t say “old” friend. He would probably prefer the term “experienced” or “seasoned” or “rich in years”.

Even at the age of 73, Ferdinand De Lesseps, “Hero of the Suez Canal”, does not feel old. Not one bit. Nor does he look old. A reporter who’d interviewed him a decade earlier said that de Lesseps looked “not a whit changed. The same marvelous bright eyes, the same earnest voice, the same sympathetic chuckle, personally magnetic as ever, erect, impulsive, and, if anything, younger.”

No, De Lesseps thinks as he prowls around his office, “old” is something that happens to other people – people who don’t’ stay busy. And in the ten years since he unveiled the Suez Canal down in Egypt in 1869, Ferdinand de Lesseps has stayed very, very busy.

He’s danced across ballrooms, charmed disagreeable diplomats, and dined at high tables from London to Milan. He stayed young by acting young. Everything about De Lesseps seemed to defy age – his face, his demeanor, even his wife was several decades his junior, a “voluptuous woman with raven hair and a rich pallor” in the words of one contemporary.

But for all his amorous accessories, De Lesseps’ one true love seemed to be “work”. He craved it like a drug, consumed it like water; if he wasn’t sleeping, he was working; if he wasn’t working, he was dying. In the years since his triumph in Egypt, de Lesseps had been hunting for a new project worthy of his talents. The next big thing. Throughout the 1870s, all kinds of schemes popped into / bubbled within his effervescent brain, as David McCullough writes:

“He talked of building a railroad to join Paris with Moscow, Peking, and Bombay. He had an astonishing plan to create an inland sea in the Sahara by breaking through a low-lying ridge on Tunisia’s Gulf of Gabès and flooding a depression the size of Spain.”

In short, De Lesseps was searching for something. An opportunity to outdo himself. At Suez, he had united the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, fulfilling a dream thousands of years in the making. What could possibly be grander than that?

Well, sometime around 1875, de Lesseps finally found the challenge he’d been looking for.

His next project, he told friends and financiers, would be even more significant than the Suez Canal. Bigger, better, and bolder in every way. Once again, he assured them, the Great Engineer would bend geography to his will and change the face of the earth forever.

Clutching their cocktail glasses, they waited with baited breath. With a twinkle in his eye and a twirl of his mustache, de Lesseps announced that he would build a NEW canal in that OTHER all-important, long-neglected isthmus: Panama. Yes, for the first time in history, de Lesseps boomed, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would be joined by an artificial waterway, to the fortune and benefit of all mankind.

This theatrical proclamation raised more than a few eyebrows. From his audience’s perspective, the old Frenchman might as well have just said he was going to build a canal on the Moon.

Long dismissed as technologically, logistically, and financially impossible, the idea of an inter-ocean canal in Panama had tantalized people since the days of Balboa and Cortez. It would, theoretically, allow ships to forgo the long and treacherous journey around the tip of South America, just as the Suez Canal had done for Africa. Digging a huge trench through fifty miles of jungle would not be easy, but if anyone could pull it off, they all agreed, it was Ferdinand de Lesseps.

In many ways, de Lesseps embodied the optimistic outlook of the times. As David McCullough writes:

“If there was one word to characterize the spirit of the moment, it was Confidence. Age-old blank spaces and mysteries were being supplanted on all sides. […] People were reading Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The Roebling’s had begun their Brooklyn Bridge. Harvard had installed a chemist as its president. In Pittsburgh, experiments were being made with a new process developed by the English metallurgist Bessemer. […] Man, modern man—the scientist, the explorer, the builder of bridges and waterways and steam engines, the visionary entrepreneur—had become the central creative force. […] There really seemed no limit to what man might do.”

And in the case of a Panama Canal, the man to do it was Ferdinand de Lesseps. But as the French developer extraordinaire began organizing and planning, two large obstacles emerged out of the fog. To even begin to build his canal, de Lesseps was going to have to solve two key problems: Funding and Access.

First, let us turn our attention to the problem of “Access”.

Digging a new canal in Panama wasn’t going to be as simple showing up with a tourist visa and few hundred shovels. The Suez Project had been greased by a warm relationship with the host country, Egypt, then a province of the Ottoman Empire. De Lesseps and the Egyptian elite went way back, and their hookah-scented hospitality made the Suez Canal a politically straightforward affair. 

But Panama was a completely different story. In 1879, Panama was at the center of a very complex, very delicate web of geopolitical relationships/interests/tensions.

On paper, the Panamanian isthmus belonged to the country of Colombia, ruling from its capital of Bogota, high in the Andes mountains. And after centuries of exploitation by the Spanish, the newly independent South American country was not exactly keen to invite the Europeans back into the house.

But the Colombians, De Lesseps knew, were not really the problem. The Andes aristocrats were proud, but they were poor. With enough time and money, they could be charmed, convinced, or simply bought off. No, the real problem was the other major power in the region. The long, looming shadow from the north. In 1879, there was one big sheriff watching over the Western hemisphere – and his name was Uncle Sam.

By the late 19^th century, the United States of America was barely a hundred years old, but it had grown very rich and very powerful since the days of tricorn hats, flintlock muskets and Paul Revere. Now, the United States was a fully-fledged regional power with the ability to project its influence far and wide across the Americas. A nasty five-year civil war had briefly slowed its ascent, but that was all blood under the bridge – at least on the surface. In 1879, America was wealthy, politically united, and extremely protective of what it perceived as its sphere of influence, which in Washington’s view, extended from the frozen wastes of Alaska to the balmy pampas of South America. 

Let it be known, they said, the Americas are closed to colonizers. Unless of course, it’s us doing the colonizing. And a perfect example of this doctrine in action…was Panama.

Technically, Panama belonged to Colombia. But in the 1870s, if you were to walk down the streets of Panama City, you would’ve heard a lot of American English in the bars and brothels and hotels. Americans have a lot of faults and failings, but their ability to sniff out financial opportunity is unparalleled. And Panama was a gold mine – at least metaphorically.  

In the 1800s, as the Red, White and Blue spread across North America like a spilled shot of bourbon, it quickly became clear to the Americans that they needed faster ways of getting from the sea to shining sea. Prior to the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, if you wanted to travel from New York to San Francisco sometime this century, you had two options. Travel overland across three thousand miles of mountains, plains and hostile tribes. Or…you could go by ship, through Panama.

Naturally, most people preferred a boat ride and a two-day jungle trek to a 3-month wagon journey and possible scalping, so Panama became the humid highway of intercoastal travel for Americans. As one historian put it:

“With the interior of the United States largely unsettled and un-pacified, the Isthmus was seen in Washington as a key strategic artery linking the two coasts of the country. […] the gain in time and distance was phenomenal. From New York to San Francisco around the Horn was a months-long voyage of thirteen thousand miles. From New York to San Francisco by way of Panama was five thousand miles, or a saving of eight thousand miles.”

And so, the United States decided it needed a foothold in Panama. / a proto-colony.

To make all of this legal and well-lubricated, the US Foreign Office placed a pen in the Colombian government’s hand and guided it like a benevolent big brother to sign Here, Here, aaaand Here – thank you so much. / Thanks a ton, pal.  It was a good arrangement, at least for Washington. An American-built railroad was able to ferry passengers across the isthmus, and if it ever became technologically or financially feasible, the United States would have sole rights to build any inter-ocean canal.

But then, a new fly entered the ointment. A geriatric French bigshot named Ferdinand de Lesseps started talking about building a canal through what was essentially an American protectorate. In Washington DC, cigars lit up and whiskeys sloshed in dark rooms. This old French dandy, they said, this modern Moses who’d parted the Egyptian desert at Suez… rumor is he wants to build a canal in Panama. An inter-ocean channel.

“At the heart of their displeasure,” writes Matthew Parker, “was outrage that anyone else, particularly the French, should dare to presume to build a canal in their backyard.”

On its face, a canal would not be a bad thing. In theory, a waterway through Panama would benefit everyone, but the American elite could not help but chafe at the audacity of de Lesseps.

Besides, where would the old Frog get the money to attempt something so insane? Even the United States had deemed such a venture ludicrously expensive. To carve a path through fifty miles of jungle, rock and swamp, to pay for the equipment and the workers, De Lesseps would need something like 200 million dollars. And who was gonna pay for that? Not the US taxpayers, that’s for sure; and certainly not the Panamanians or the Colombians.

No, at the end of the day, the Americans didn’t need to worry about some French tycoon digging holes in their backyard, because De Lesseps would never be able to raise enough money to make it happen.

Ah, but little did they know, across the Atlantic, The Great Engineer had been very busy.

The first thing De Lesseps did was assemble a group of investors, financiers and entrepreneurs from across Europe. Together, they created a private company, a syndicate called the “International Society of the Interocean Canal”. But for the sake of brevity, we’ll refer to it as the French Syndicate going forward.

Armed with this financial legitimacy, the Syndicate started negotiating directly with the Colombian government. De Lesseps argument to Bogota was simple: Look guys, if you let us build this thing, it’s going to transform your country. Imagine half the ships in the world traveling through your territory. Imagine the fees, the taxes, the tourism! It’ll make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. And as for the Americans…don’t worry about them; they may grumble and rage and rattle the saber, but eventually they’ll come around. A canal in Panama is good for everyone.

Besides, we are a private venture.  We’re not violating the American sphere of influence, because we don’t technically represent any one country or nation. Wink-wink.

The Colombians were convinced by these arguments, and they signed an agreement which, writes Marlowe, “granted the French company the exclusive right to build and operate a canal across Panama for 99 years. It was a sweeping victory for the French interests, secured before a single shovelful of dirt had been turned or a final route even agreed upon.”

While the ink was drying on the Colombian deal, de Lesseps turned his attention to matters more scientific. In May of 1879, he convened a conference in Paris of politicians, developers and engineers from all over the world. 136 delegates from 26 nations, including the United States, watched as the Hero of Suez gave the performance of a lifetime. De Lesseps rolled out maps, quoted geological surveys, and wove a tapestry of confidence around his plan.

De Lesseps had many talents, but his superpower was his ability to convince anyone of anything. He was a fiercely talented communicator. Charisma incarnate. A sort of French, 19^th century Don Draper. To listen to him speak was to fall into a sort of trance / to fall under his spell. His logic was airtight, his vocabulary dazzling, his confidence rigid as a steel bar. As one contemporary journalist observed:

 “Perhaps no other man ever possessed to such a marvelous extent the power of communicating to other minds the faith and the fervor which animated his own.”

“Science has declared that the canal is possible!” De Lesseps proclaimed, “and I am the servant of science.”

But in reality, science wasn’t so sure. Even at this early stage, despite all the rhetorical acrobatics, a few engineers attending the conference arrived at some very disquieting conclusions regarding the Syndicate’s proposal. De Lesseps apparently wanted to build a sea-level canal, just as he had done in Egypt.

“But there is a big difference,” writes Anthony Burton, “between constructing a waterway through the flat sands of a desert and building it through rocky hills and jungle.”

As one engineer at the conference blanched:

“They want this canal to be made after the model of the Suez Canal, that is to say, without locks—and yet its natural conditions are so very different. In Suez there is no water, the soil is soft, the country is almost on the level of the sea; in spite of the heat, the climate is perfectly healthy. In tropical America there is too much water, the rocks are exceedingly hard, the soil is very hilly, and the climate is deadly. The country is literally poisoned. Now to act thus after the same fashion under such different circumstances is to try to do violence to nature instead of aiding it, which is the principal purpose of the art of engineering.”

But Ferdinand de Lesseps was not a man to be defied, discouraged or deterred, and he waved these concerns away like an unwanted plate of hors d’oeuvres. There might be 136 opinions in the room, but his was the only one that mattered. De Lesseps was, to quote one historian, “a consensus of one."

No, the Panama Canal would be a sea level canal, thank you very much. End of story, no more feedback, gentlemen. As Elias Marlowe writes:

“De Lesseps, the hero of France, had spoken, and the matter was settled. “

With the haters and naysayers silenced, the Syndicate proceeded with its good work. In his Parisian office, De Lesseps allowed himself the rare, celebratory glass of weak wine. He did not like to dull his considerable faculties with strong alcohol, but he could indulge occasionally. All the pieces were settling into place. The Colombians were on board, the Americans were pacified for now, the engineers had their instructions, and yet… one pressing problem remained:

Money.

The French Syndicate had a perfectly respectable 300,000 francs in its coffers / at its immediate disposal, but that was pennies in the couch cushions compared to what they would actually need to finance a project of this size. The estimated price tag for a canal through Panama was projected at 400 million francs – and the work itself would take about a decade.

In short, De Lesseps needed cash, and lots of it. When his partners in the syndicate asked how he was going to conjure up such an astronomical amount of money, the old rascal answered with a wink and a smile:

 “It is in France alone, where one is in the habit of working for the civilization of the world, that I shall . . . raise the capital necessary.”

De Lesseps knew that the French public adored him, worshipped the very flagstones he walked on. He wasn’t just some businessman, was the Hero of the Suez, La Grande Francais! If he asked them for help, if he made the canal a matter of French honor, the common man would do his patriotic duty and toss a few hundred francs onto the pile. And so, writes Matthew Parker,

“de Lesseps embarked on a whirlwind tour of France. As with Suez, he aimed to raise the starting capital, directly from the public. […] A huge publicity campaign was launched: much was made of the fact that 500-franc shares in Suez were now worth more than 2,000 francs and paying a dividend of 17 percent; there were special picnics; de Lesseps was everywhere, staging conferences and banquets, urging the purchase of shares as a patriotic duty; there were advertisements trailed from hot-air balloons; handbills of various eye-catching colors were pasted on every highway; purchases from shops were sent home with advertisements attached; a silver medal was offered to every individual to whom five shares of stock were assigned.”

To the average Frenchman, buying stock in the French Panama Canal Company was an enticing, but expensive, proposition. At the time, 500 francs was the equivalent of $100, a steep price for a single share in any investment opportunity, much less a high-risk, overseas construction project that would take at least 10 years to bear fruit. / pay out.

But de Lesseps rallied the esprit de corps of his countrymen with assurances that once the Panama Canal was up and running, those shares of stock would be flying to the moon, and generous dividends would rain down upon the shareholders. To use a modern analogy, De Lesseps was essentially offering people the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an 18^th century Google or Apple or Bitcoin. Panama may seem like a pipe dream now, but in ten years’ time, you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. As he said at the time:

“Patience, I assure you, requires more force of character than does action.”

By 1880, the hype machine was churning at full force, accelerated by swooning puff pieces in  the French press. As Matthew Parker writes, quoting a series of publications:

“Capital and science have never had such an opportunity to make a happy marriage,” the Journal de Dé-bats announced. “Success … is certain,” said Le Gaulois. “One can see it, one can feel it.” La Liberté proclaimed: “The Panama canal has no more opponents …Oh, ye of little faith! Hear the words of Monsieur de Lesseps, and believe!”

When the stock went on sale on December 7^th, 1880, it was, “one of the most astonishing events in financial history,” according to David McCullough.

“Within three days, more than 100,000 people subscribed for 1,206,609 shares, or more than twice the number available. As a result, many people had to be satisfied with considerably less than what they wanted. As de Lesseps had forecast, it was the small investor who made the sale such a runaway success. Some eighty thousand people had bought one to five shares each. Only fourteen people owned a thousand shares or more. And about sixteen thousand of the shareholders were women.

Nothing like this had ever occurred before.”

Ferdinand De Lesseps had called on the common people of France for assistance, and their answer was deafening. As Elias Marlowe writes:

“Hundreds of thousands of ordinary French citizens—shopkeepers, farmers, and small merchants—poured their life savings into canal stock, eager to invest in the glory of France and the vision of its great hero.”

With the capital secured, the agreements signed, and the equipment in transit, all that was left to do…was get to work. The Panama Canal venture was an undeniably exciting thing, but some people close to de Lesseps could not understand why he would stake his golden reputation on such a risky project so late in life. The man was 73 years old; he had already accomplished so much. Why couldn’t he just rest? Enjoy the fruits of a life lived well?

One of the people who wanted answers to these questions was De Lesseps own son and business partner, Charles. He asked his father:

“What do you wish to find at Panama? Money? You will not bother about money at Panama any more than you did at Suez. Glory? You’ve had enough glory. Why not leave that to someone else? All of us who have worked at your side are entitled to a rest. Certainly the Panama project is grandiose . . . but consider the risks those who direct it will run! You succeeded at Suez by a miracle. Should not one be satisfied with accomplishing one miracle in a lifetime? If you decide to proceed with this, if nothing will stop you . . . if you want me to assist you, then gladly I will take whatever comes. I shall not complain no matter what happens. All that I am I owe to you; what you have given me, you have the right to take away.”

As always, de Lesseps radiated confidence from every pore, and he barely registered his son’s misgivings. He was the Great Engineer. The deserts of Egypt had parted like the pages of book for him, and Panama would do the same. After all, how different could it be? As he told a group of peers around that time:

“It has been suggested by my friends that after Suez I ought to take a rest. But I ask you: when a general has just won one battle and is invited to win another, why should he refuse?”

As French steamers loaded with equipment and men set out for South America in 1881(?), the eyes of the world were upon Ferdinand de Lesseps and his audacious undertaking. And watching especially closely, were the senators, speculators and power brokers in Washington D.C.

The Americans were content to let De Lesseps dig around the in the jungle, to be a tourist in their backyard. “What harm could it do,?” they thought. Why not leave alone Don Quixote to tilt at windmills in peace? If the Old Frog actually succeeded, the resulting canal would raise all boats, just like Suez.

And if he failed?

Well, what was a few more skeletons in that godforsaken isthmus?.

--- MUSIC BREAK ----

It’s January of 1884.

About three years after work first began on Ferdinand de Lesseps’ canal in Panama.

We’re deep in the Panamanian rainforest, up on one of the violently green hills that rise over the isthmus, overlooking two oceans at once. This early in the morning, when the Pacific sun bathes the jungle in a golden glow, and the tropical birds begin to sing, the hill seems serene. Peaceful, almost.

And then, it explodes.

Great geysers of smoke and rock and tongues of flame shoot up into the air, sending out a concussive blast that scatters the songbirds and sends the howler monkeys running for cover. For a brief moment, the incessant Panamanian rain is replaced with a shower of rocks and pebbles and bits of stone.

Students of ecology will note that explosions are not a naturally occurring phenomenon in any rainforest - not even the Panamanian rainforest. No, to get a boom that big, you need a very unnatural combination of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. Put it all together, stabilize it, and stick a fuse it in and you get demolition-grade nitroglycerine.

In other words, dynamite.

A few minutes later, another explosion rocks the jungle. Then another one and another one. All day long the drumbeat of dynamite rolls over the canopy, sending shockwaves through the trembling leaves, and down through the valleys, eventually arriving in Panama City in the form of a soft rumble. Like distant thunder in a storm that will not break.

These days, the citizens of Panama City are a bit numb to the sound of dynamite. No one stops walking; no one even flinches. Truth be told, they barely hear it at all anymore. These days, explosions are as common as bird calls, just one more note in the deafening symphony of progress.

For three years now, the French Panama Canal Company – the Syndicate - has been blasting, digging, hacking, biting, burning its way through the Central American jungle, trying to carve a path from sea to sea. It is, according to David McCullough, “the largest, most ambitious engineering effort the world had yet seen.”

And the beating heart of the whole enterprise, the headquarters of the French operation, is here, in Panama City.

Prior to the Syndicate’s arrival, Panama City was a tiny town in a tiny province – the kind of city so small that it has to literally put the word ‘City’ in its name to remind people that it is, in fact, a city.

But then, the French came rolling in. A tidal wave of 400 million francs and all the tools and tradesmen it could buy. Panama’s post-colonial population had always been as thin as the isthmus itself - less than 20,000 people at the best of times. But now, new faces were arriving every day. As Matthew Parker writes: “There were ten thousand workers by September 1883, fifteen thousand by January the following year, and by the end of 1884, there were over twenty thousand on the Company’s payroll.”

“The harbor at Colón, [which is the Atlantic-facing port in Panama] had become so crowded that inbound freighters sometimes had to wait weeks for a turn to unload,” ]” writes David McCullough, […] “Travelers crossing by train were amazed by the spectacle. It was true, they wrote; a canal really was being built at Panama. Buildings were going up almost everywhere one looked. Hundreds of acres of jungle were being chopped back to make room for more. Millions of dollars’ worth of equipment was being unloaded at Colón. More and more young French recruits were arriving, more engineers, more doctors, nurses, more boats from Jamaica, their decks solid with black men. By May (of 1884) upwards of nineteen thousand people were at work and the payroll was running to 200,000 francs ($40,000) a day.”

But every construction project, big or small, needs a boss. A head honcho. The man on the front lines, making the tough calls.

And all of those payroll approvals – all of the equipment orders and subcontractor agreements, the permits, surveys, blueprints and paperwork – it all arrives at the mahogany desk of one man in Panama City, stacked, folded and patiently awaiting the thump of his rubber stamp. Although Ferdinand de Lesseps is the officialleader of the Panama Canal project, he has left the actual, day-to-day management of the operation to quicker minds and stronger hands.

At this time, the hands in question belong to a 47-year-old chief engineer named Jules Dingler (Danglay)

That’s J-U-L-E-S (Jules), D-I-N-G-L-E-R (Danglay).

More than a few of the American contractors have had to be told that No, the Boss’s name is not ‘Dingler”; it is pronounced “Danglay”. A good French name for a good, God-fearing Frenchman. Now take your check, you Yankee merc, and get back to digging.

“Jules Isidore Dingler was not impressive-looking,” writes David McCullough, “In his mid-forties, he was short and bald. He had small, round shoulders, a soft, round face, soft blue eyes, and a drooping mahogany-colored mustache. He might have been a bank clerk or a provincial wine merchant. The appearance suggested neither initiative nor resolution and the appearance was deceiving.”

>> 

In January of 1884, Jules Dingler has been in-charge and in-country for about 2 years. He is not the first or even the second Chief Engineer of the Panama project; his predecessors had been overwhelmed by the rigors of the South American climate. But Dingler is different; he is here for the long haul. And to prove his commitment to the cause, he has brought his entire family with him to Panama – his wife Marie, their 20-year-old son Jules Junior, their 18-year-old daughter Louise, and her fiancée, [whose name history has neglected to record]

To complete their home away from home, Mr. Dingler has even arranged for the family pets to join them. Some people keep dogs, others keep cats or gerbils or teacup pigs; but the Dinglers keep horses. Magnificent, thoroughbred racing horses that the kids grew up feeding, riding and brushing. And now they’re all here in Panama City. A little taste of France in a faraway land.

But once he settled in to his office in Panama City, Chief Engineer Dingler was all business, and he soon became intimately acquainted with the unique challenges of building an inter-ocean canal through a tropical jungle. In those early days, Dingler might have been under the impression that a Panama Canal was a relatively simple engineering project. His boss certainly thought so. During Ferdinand de Lesseps’ feverish fundraising, the septuagenarian statesman had boasted that “Panama will be easier to make, easier to complete, and easier to keep up than Suez.”

Yes, Dingler laughed bitterly, and the sky is green, the grass is blue, and rain falls up from the ground.  Whatever what rose-tinted fiction de Lesseps was weaving back in Paris, the situation on the ground could not have been farther from it.  

The main problem, Dingler noted, was geological. As Elias Marlowe writes:

“Unlike the sandy plains of Suez, the Panamanian isthmus presented a formidable barrier of rock and mountain. The spine of the continent, the Culebra Cut, was a solid mass of earth and stone that had to be blasted and carved away.”

The Panamanian terrain, the French engineers discovered, was not only different from the Suez sand, it was different from anything they had ever encountered. Geologically speaking, the isthmus was essentially an alien/another planet. As Matthew Parker writes:

“The ground was nothing like anything the majority of the geologists had ever seen before, bearing no resemblance what[so]ever to the terrain in Europe mined and dug by many of those present. The unique geological history of the Isthmus, with the land bridge sinking below sea level and then rising again in a series of cycles and a long record of ancient volcanic activity, had created bewilderingly complex strata, including layers, at various angles, of breccia, limestone, coral, carb, sand, gravel, volcanic lava, and clay.” [...] it would have been easier had it been solid rock.”

“The whole history of the ground underfoot, wherever one went on the Isthmus, was of change and instability,” writes David McCullough,” within the forty-plus miles between Colón and Panama City was a total of seventeen different rock formations, six major geologic faults, five major cores of volcanic rock. […] It was endlessly fascinating terrain to a geologist, but for the engineer it was an unrelieved nightmare.”

Because of the unique geology, even the simple act of moving one shovels-worth of earth was difficult. The soil, complained one engineer, was “composed of a clay that is utterly impossible for a man to throw off his shovel once he gets it on. He had to have a little scraper to shove it off.”

All that would have been challenging enough, but there was also the matter of the Panamanian climate. As Elias Marlowe writes:

“The second enemy was the water. The tropical climate unleashed torrential rains for eight months of the year, turning the ground into a sea of viscous mud. The rains caused constant, devastating landslides that would undo months of work in a matter of hours, burying men, equipment, and railroad tracks under tons of earth. The wild Chagres River, which crossed the proposed canal route fourteen times, was a placid stream in the dry season but could transform overnight into a raging torrent, rising forty feet and sweeping away bridges and machinery.”

“The effect of the climate on tools, clothing, everyday personal items, was devastating,” elaborates David McCullough, “Anything made of iron or steel turned bright orange with rust. Books, shoes, belts, knapsacks, instrument cases, machete scabbards, grew mold overnight. Glued furniture fell apart. Clothes seldom ever dried. Men in the field finished a day drenched to the skin from rain and sweat and had to start again the next morning wearing the same clothes, still as wet as the night before.”

But occasionally, in between the moments of destruction and discomfort, it was impossible to deny that Panama was, in its own wild, murderous way, a truly breathtaking place.  For every firsthand account cursing the muck and the rain and the bugs, there’s another one admiring the beautiful, otherworldly landscape. As David McCullough describes:

“There were “moments when magnificent multicolored birds burst into the sky; the swarms of blue butterflies—“like blossoms blown away”; the brilliant green mountains, mountains to put Vermont to shame said a young man from Bennington.”

[It was] scenery reminiscent of Chinese landscape painting, with feathery green conical mountains rising on every side. […] Paraíso, a native village, was tucked between high hills shaped like inverted teacups.”

The growth of vegetation was as exuberant as any on earth. Giant cedro trees towered a hundred feet or more in the air, their smooth gray trunks like pillars of concrete. Trailing vines, blossoming creepers, scarlet hibiscus, orchids, crimson passionflowers, parasitic plants of every imaginable variety, hung wherever one looked. Bamboo crowded the railroad tracks in clumps the size of a house.”

Ferdinand de Lesseps himself, after a brief survey during the dry season, called Panama ““La plus belle région du monde.” – the most beautiful place on earth. Yes, but like the brightly colored coral snakes that infested the jungle, Panama was breathtaking, but it could kill you in a heartbeat.

Despite the risks, however, engineers and skilled workers flocked to Panama from all over the world, inspired by the history-making romance of it all….not to mention the hazard pay. “The engineers were from not only France,” writes Matthew Parker, “but also Germany, Britain, Switzerland, Russia, Poland, and Italy. Many of the mechanics were American, who came along with equipment purchased in the United States.”

“It was common knowledge that Panama was an extremely dangerous posting. But like a young man volunteering for service in a war, there existed for [the engineers] a belief, first, that the worst would always happen to someone else; that their country and the general progress of humanity demanded that they take the risk; and that at the end of the day, amazingly, they were prepared to die for the Great Idea of the canal.”

One young engineer captured that naive adventurism in a letter:

“The idea of the virgin forest, with tigers, crocodiles swirled round in my head; the life of a pioneer, penetrating into the unexplored depths of this isthmus was an irresistible temptation.”

But for all their enthusiasm, the European and American technicians were only a tiny fraction of the Syndicate’s work force in Panama. They still needed someone to do the…less glamorous labor - the back-breaking manual tasks like digging, dredging, hauling and mining.

During the construction of the Suez Canal, the French had used local Egyptian workers, essentially slaves, to do the majority grunt work. But that wasn’t an option in Panama; the isthmus’s native population was so small, that there just weren’t enough people to hire. So, outside help had to be brought in. To build their canal, the French imported tens of thousands of poor black workers from the West Indies – places like Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad. But unlike the Egyptians, they did not have to be coerced. As Matthew Parker writes:

“There was goood money to be made on the Isthmus.”

“Wages were regarded as extremely good,” adds David McCullough, “about $1 to $1.50 a day, more money than most of the men had ever dreamed of making. Each worker was required to do a specific amount in a day—so many buckets of earth—but he could work at his own speed and do more if he wished, his pay being computed by the bucket.”

In Jamaica, folk songs started to spring up about the economic opportunities awaiting them in Central America. One of them went:

“And when you come to Panama how happy you will be, ‘Cause money down in Panama like apples on a tree.”

“Soon large steamships were making the run from Kingston to Colón as frequently as every four days,” writes Parker, “Nonetheless, there were near riots at the docks [in Jamaica] as people fought each other to get a place on a ship. “A stampede took place which is hardly possible to describe,” reported the Jamaican paper Gall's News Letter in early 1884 of the scene at Kingston docks. “Men with trunks on their backs, women with little children tugging through the crowd, all trying to gain admission to the ship. In a few minutes the deck was crowded.”

“By October 1884,” writes David McCullough, “there were 19,243 employees at work, of whom 16,249 were blacks. To order and distribute supplies, to keep watch on contractors, to keep the books and see to the needs of this labor force, naturally required a small army of clerks, paymasters, stenographers—six to seven hundred in office help—most of whom were French. And French bureaucracy, it was found, could flourish no less in the jungle than at home. File clerks were given the title of Keeper of the Archives. Among the supplies being landed at Colón were crates weighing hundreds of pounds filled with nothing but pen points. “There is,” wrote Wolfred Nelson, “enough bureaucratic work, and there are enough officers on the Isthmus to furnish at least one dozen first-class republics with officials for all their departments.” -

DINGLER’S FOLLY

In short, the French Syndicate’s venture in Panama was a massive, multi-national operation that required constant (and creative) problem-solving. And all those problems – all that paperwork – eventually ended up on the desk of Chief Engineer Jules Dingler. But today, in late January of 1884, Dingler has a different sort of problem preying on his mind - one of a much more personal nature.

As quickly as he can, he abandons the mountain of paperwork, locks up his office, and hurries home to his private residence in Panama City. As his servants take his jacket and hang up his hat, Dingler notices that the mood in the house is grim and somber. None of them can look him directly in the eye. Without saying a word, Dingler proceeds nervously to a small bedroom at the back of the house.

He turns the brass knob, and gently opens the door. Inside, coiled in a cocoon of damp sheets, is his 18-year-old daughter, Louise. As Dingler approaches the bed, the girl is so still it starts to scare him. He reaches out to brush her black hair, and suddenly she starts coughing and hacking, spraying tiny flecks of blood onto the pillow. During his time in Panama, Dingler has seen some very disturbing things – men buried alive, arms ripped off by machines – but seeing his little girl in so much pain…it is all he can do just to bite down on his lip and not scream.

When Louise first arrived on the Isthmus with the rest of the Dingler family in 1883, she was the picture of health. A fair-skinned, raven-haired teenager whose worst fear was a sunburn. She would laugh and smile, point at the birds, and ride her horse through the hills until the Panama sun sank blushing into the bay.

But then, a little under a week ago, Louise started complaining of headaches and a loss of appetite. The next day, she was whimpering in pain, saying that her back felt like it was being pulled apart. The next day, she was running a temperature and begging for water. Dingler, his wife and their son looked on with horror as Louise’s skin turned yellow with jaundice, and black blood dribbled from her mouth and nose. A week into her illness, Louise can’t climb out of her bed much less climb up on a horse.

For Dingler, his daughter’s illness was not a mystery. He knew what it was immediately; since, he’d arrived in Panama, he had seen countless cases like it.. He just never thought it would happen to his family. Louise, the doctors confirmed, had contracted the disease known as Yellow Fever.

YELLOW JACK & BAD AIR

>> 

Sometimes called “Yellow Jack” or “The American Plague” (as in, the Americas), no one knew exactly how the disease spread.

“Part of the terror of the disease was in its mystery,” writes Matthew Parker, “how it arrived from nowhere, created havoc, and then just as inexplicably disappeared. As well as there being no effective treatment, there was little idea of how the disease was transmitted. Some doctors suggested that it was due to a certain wind off the sea; others were sure it was some sort of fungus. One insisted that it came from eating apples. Most agreed, though, that it was airborne, and as it was so often found around ports, that it had to have something to do with mud, filth, or dead animals.”

And although no one knew exactly where Yellow Fever came from, everyone knew what it did. And what it did… was horrifying. As Parker continues:

Yellow fever is an almost uniquely distressing, disgusting, and terrifying disease. There is still no cure, apart from treating the results of the disease, such as kidney failure, and in the 1880s a strong adult would have only about a [50/50] chance of surviving an attack.”

Once contracted, Yellow Fever overwhelms the immune system, triggers systematic organ failure, bleeding in the stomach and serious liver damage, causing the telltale jaundice and yellow skin from which the disease gets its name. And worst of all, it works fast. Yellow Fever kills most of its victims in less than two weeks. If you survive it, you’ll be immune for the rest of your life. But that’s a big “if”.

That is the knife’s edge that Louise Dingler’s life rests upon in January of 1884.

As he wipes the sweat from her forehead and the blood from her chin, flouting the doctor’s orders to keep his distance, Jules Dingler cannot help but think back to something he said when he first arrived. Something stupid and arrogant and karmically ironic. When the Panamanians had warned him of the dangers of Yellow Fever, he had dismissed it, saying, “I intend to show the world that only the drunk and the dissipated will die of Yellow Fever.”

Then, as if on cue, his men started dying in droves, their drinking habits notwithstanding.

Casualty figures from this period are very sketchy and difficult to pin down, but all the sources agree that Yellow Fever and its evil twin Malaria were killing Dingler’s workers like flies. To give you a rough idea of the scale, one Canadian doctor estimated that “during the wet seasons of 1882 and 1883 “burials averaged from thirty to forty per day.”

No one knew where these diseases came from or how they spread, but the Company had to do something. To combat the relentless spread of the epidemic, the French Syndicate paid millions for a state-of-the-art hospital outside of Panama City, a sprawling sanatorium where patients could rest, recuperate and isolate themselves from whatever bad vapors or noxious jungle fumes were causing the mysterious disease.

But for all their money, machines and technical expertise, the French were profoundly ignorant to one very important fact about yellow fever and malaria. In a rainforest full of deadly animals – jaguars and crocodiles and bullet ants – the most dangerous animal of all was only about 4 millimeters long. All of these tropical diseases were transmitted by the humble, blood-sucking mosquito; and without an understanding of this essential fact, all the French did was make the problem exponentially worse. As David McCullough writes:

“And all the while, in the lovely gardens surrounding the hospital, thousands of ring-shaped pottery dishes filled with water to protect plants and flowers from ants provided perfect breeding places for mosquitoes. Even in the sick wards themselves the legs of the beds were placed in shallow basins of water, again to keep the ants away, and there were no screens in any of the windows or doors. Patients, furthermore, were placed in the wards according to nationality, rather than by disease, with the result that every ward had its malaria and yellow-fever cases. As [one doctor] Dr. Gorgas was to [later] write, had the French been consciously trying to propagate malaria and yellow fever, they could not have provided conditions better suited for the purpose.”

“The human cost was catastrophic,” writes Elias Marlowe, “Disease ravaged the workforce, killing with terrifying speed. It was said that three out of four French engineers who came to Panama died within three months of arrival. The laborers, housed in crude barracks, died by the thousands. During the peak of the rainy seasons, dozens of workers were dying every day. So many died that the Panama Railroad, which the French company had purchased in 1881, ran funeral trains to cart away the dead. While precise figures are impossible to verify, it is estimated more than 22,000 men lost their lives.”

Ferdinand de Lesseps’ great undertaking had turned into a death trap. One medical doctor, bitter and furious at the horrendous loss of life, started referring to De Lesseps as “The Great Undertaker”

Back in Paris, as the casualties mounted, anxious stockholders were thinking that surely / wondering if some of these figures were a misprint or a typo. Hundreds of workers dying every year? Entire crews killed to the man? Ghost ships drifting/bobbing in the harbor, unable to dock because every person on board was dead. But bad headlines were quickly hushed up, and nervous investors were assured that their money was safe in the hands of Ferdinand de Lesseps and his capable engineers in Panama.

But some headlines are too big to be hushed up. On January 21^st, 1884, in the little bedroom in Panama City, Louise Dingler’s body went limp in her father’s arms. She died, according to Matthew Parker, “in miserable agony”.

Jules Dingler was almost catatonic with grief. His hands shook too hard to hold a pen, so his wife Marie had to write a letter back to Paris:

“My poor husband is in a despair that is painful to see. My first desire was to flee as fast as possible and carry far from this murderous country those who are left to me. But my husband is a man of duty and tries to make me understand that his honour is to the trust you have placed in him and that he cannot fail in his task without failing himself. Our dear daughter was our pride and joy.”

A tragedy on that scale seems beyond any one person’s fair share, but Panama was not done with Dingler yet. As Parker writes:

“It did not stop there. A month later Dingler's young son, Jules, sickened with the same disease and died three days later. The Star and Herald reflected the horror and grief of the whole community: “Mr. Dingler was but 20 years of age, the picture of physical health and strength… Sympathy is weak, and words are powerless in such a cruel blow, to convey to the grief-stricken parents the sense of loss and sorrow which these sad events have occasioned in the minds and hearts of all.” Soon after, Louise Dingler's young fiancé, who had come with the family from France, contracted the disease and also died. Around Christmas 1884 Madame Dingler started showing the unmistakable symptoms of the dreaded yellow fever.

She died on January 11^th, 1885, completing the total destruction of his family.”

By February of 1885, after two years in Panama, Jules Dingler’s project was in chaos, his sanity was slipping, and his entire family was dead. In the house, there were so many reminders of his daughter, his son and his wife – their clothes, their letters, their things - but the most heartbreaking, were the four thoroughbred horses he had brought over from France. Living manifestations of everything he had lost.

“Dingler,” writes Matthew Parker, “did not wish to encounter anyone else on the streets of Panama riding these horses, so he ordered the beasts to be killed. The staff refused to carry out the command. Finally, they found a poor fellow who was given the role of executioner, but at the last moment his hand trembled and he could not finish the job. For hours the horses were heard, partially disemboweled, screaming in agony. In the end they were shot dead.”

“Things began coming apart now,” elaborates David McCullough, “In the office overlooking the plaza, his last reserves of strength nearly exhausted, Jules Dingler had become so short-tempered and abusive of his staff that several key people, including one division head, resigned. Late in August of 1885, close to physical and mental collapse, Dingler himself gave up and sailed for France, a lone and defeated man. He had left all his family buried in Panama.

He was never to return again.”

---- MUSIC BREAK ----

It’s October 28^th, 1886

A little over a year since the tragic collapse of Jules Dingler and the death of his entire family.

Despite the unfortunate fortunes of the Dingler’s, the French Panama Canal project has continued to stagger forward, bleeding money, resources, and lives like a stuck javelina. 

But on this fine fall day, we are in a very different sort of jungle. A concrete jungle, to be precise. Today, we are walking through the crowded streets of New York City, the famed financial capital of the United States of America.

And instead of half-inch mosquitos buzzing in our ears, we hear the clang of streetcars and the shouts of paperboys, hawking the latest headlines. Instead of the fetid stink of jungle rot, we smell the oily fumes of coal and soot and paraffin. And instead of cedar trees rising up into the blue, we see a forest of glass and steel, growing beam by beam, brick by brick.  

New York is – to put it mildly – a lively town. Which is what tends to happen when you cram millions of people into 200 city blocks on an island the size of a thumbnail on the average globe.

But today, the Big Apple is even livelier than usual.

Winding through the streets like a Chinese dragon, a huge parade makes its way through downtown New York. There are trumpets and balloons and a hurricane/flurries of ticker tape. Confetti in the air and songs on the wind. It’s a Thursday morning; and today is one of the biggest public celebrations in the history of New York – not since the American Civil War ended 21 years ago has there been this much joy and energy in the boroughs.

And what is the reason for all this pomp and pageantry?

Well, a brand-new resident has just arrived in New York.

She is 300-feet tall, clothed in copper, [armed with a torch] and blessed with some serious upper body strength. Yes, the one and only Statue of Liberty is being unveiled today in the Upper Bay.

After 11 years of construction, 300,000 rivets, and a very long boat ride from France, Lady Liberty is now standing tall at her eternal vigil on Bedloe’s Island. Like so many great Americans, she is an immigrant to these wild shores, a gift to the United States from the French Third Republic, symbolizing the shared values between the two nations.

In time, the statue’s shiny copper skin will oxidize into its iconic green shade, and relations between the US and France will corrode in turn, but for now it’s all fireworks and fraternity over the New York skyline.

After the big parade winds down, a smaller, more elite crowd takes a yacht across the bay for an afternoon of speeches and ribbon cutting. Many important guests are in attendance – the Governor of New York, the Secretary of State, even President Grover Cleveland himself. And representing the French delegation, laughing and shaking hands, is the immortal social butterfly, the Hero of Suez – Ferdinand de Lesseps.

Despite rumors in the French press that he had recently died of old age, De Lesseps is still very much alive and well, fit as a fiddle at 81 years old. His mustache is a bit whiter; his gait is a bit wobblier, and he knows his way around an afternoon nap, but the Great Engineer is still the inveterate charmer. A miracle of genetics – or a freak of nature – depending on your point of view.

And as France’s most famous representative, he is here in New York to pass the torch of Lady Liberty to America as a gift from his country. Projecting his Gallic accent above the wind and the waves, De Lesseps delivers a short, tasteful speech in honor of Lady Liberty. According to one eyewitness:

“De Lesseps was then presented to the audience, and was received with great enthusiasm. As the venerable but alert and handsome old man, with head uncovered, although raining, stepped forward to address the vast assemblage, the noise of steam whistle increased and became deafening. Monsieur De Lesseps waved his hand as if to stop the noise, and laughingly remarked, “steam was invented as a benefit, but at present it is an evil and retards the progress of my speech!” Great applause followed this.”

With the audience resting comfortably in the palm of his hand, de Lesseps moved on to his official remarks. According to an eyewitness summary:

“France, monarchical, imperial, or republican, has ever been the friend and ally of the United States of America.

The thought which has inspired France upon this occasion was that of consecrating and cementing the centenarian friendship that unites the two great nations, which the breadth of the ocean cannot separate because there is between the two peoples such a connection of sentiment, that even when an unforeseen difference arises between them, circumstances quickly bring them back to a community of views and of action.

Upon the occasion of the excavating of the canal of Panama, for instance, after a moment’s hesitation the United States understood that this work, executed in a free state, should be of universal interest and completed by the common effort of the two friendly nations.

The powerful American industry came forward, in fact, to offer its co-operation to the French workmen. It will assure the success of this great enterprise; it will be one more tie between us; it will be the success of the union of the powers of that great American nation with those of France, her old and trusted friend.”

These remarks are very telling. Even at the inauguration of such an iconic and beautiful landmark as the Statue of Liberty, De Lesseps could not contain his obsession with Panama and inter-ocean canal.

In his speech, he seemed to frame the private venture as a public partnership between the two countries. And as the octogenarian orator spoke, American officials rolled their eyes. Sure, there were American contractors down in the isthmus, but those were all private business interests; the US government was by no means supporting the French effort in any official capacity. But, they let it slide. It was just more bluster and bloviation from a seasoned PR wizard.

Once the Statue of Liberty ceremony concluded, the VIPs shook hands and went their separate ways. But before he boarded his ship, De Lesseps left his American cousins with some parting words:

“Soon, gentlemen, we shall meet again to celebrate a peaceful conquest. Good-bye until we meet at Panama . . .”

But unfortunately, Ferdinand de Lesseps’ sunshine-and-champagne appraisal of the situation in Panama was, in the words of one historian, a “façade”.

Down on the isthmus, things were going very, very badly.

Tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria were killing or incapacitating thousands of workers a year, crippling the project and eroding the men’s morale. The Panamanian climate, with its biblical torrents of rainfall and ubiquitous moisture, was wreaking havoc on the expensive construction equipment, turning shiny new tools into scrap metal over the course of a few months. Then there was the terrain itself – the Central American rock formations which seemed impervious to shovels, tractors, even dynamite. To the French Syndicate, it was becoming abundantly clear that a sea-level canal, a channel that cut straight through the isthmus, was basically impossible.

“The strategy,“ writes David McCullough, “did not suit the battleground.”

But in Ferdinand De Lesseps mind, all of these things – the terrain, the disease, the climate – were secondary to the real problem. And the real problem was that they were running out of money.

OUT OF MONEY, OUT OF TIME

In his initial pitch to investors and stockholders back in the balmy days of 1879, de Lesseps had confidently predicted that the Panama Canal would cost about half a million francs to build over the course of 8 years. Well, the 8^th year was just around the corner, the canal was nowhere near complete, and the Company had spent more than a billion francs. In other words, they were less than halfway done at double the cost.

To the Syndicate’s growing alarm, the money raised by the everday patriots of France was not stretching nearly as far as they had hoped. The canal project was hemorrhaging money in great, aortic splashes/ bursts. And at this rate, the Syndicate’s accountants warned, the project would go bankrupt long before the work was complete.

The reason for this, writes Matthew Parker was a “combination of mismanagement, extravagance, and corruption. More than a hundred racehorses were imported from Europe and lavishly stabled at the Company's expense. There was also widespread pilfering. Inspectors sent to check on the contractors’ excavation quantities were often bribed. One estimate was that the Company lost some 10 percent of the work it paid for. The worst offenders were the [American contractors] Huerne, Slaven men, who were even accused of dredging soil from one side of their barges, for which they were paid, and then simply dumping it back into the water on the other side. The workers, also, became adept at exploiting the Company. “There was no system or organization,” reported a Nicaragua-born canal workman. “A man can work on five different jobs a day, and when the week ended you collect for all five jobs. Their timekeeping system was poor.” The local Panamanians were also making a lot of money out of the Company, charging exorbitant rates for land the French needed.”

As the work stalled and bad news began trickling back to France, the Syndicate did everything it could to reinflate the flagging confidence of its shareholders, including paying bribes to newspapers in exchange for positive coverage. As Elias Marlowe writes:

“To ensure a continuous flow of positive press and, more importantly, favorable votes in the French parliament for new loans and stock issues, the company began to systematically bribe journalists, newspaper editors, and politicians. Millions of francs were paid out to hide the horrific reality on the isthmus and maintain the fiction that the project was proceeding smoothly.”

And all the while, Ferdinand de Lesseps clung to his vision for a sea-level canal. He could not or would not accept the fact that Panama clearly required a completely different approach. The Hero of Suez was a walking, talking sunk-cost fallacy. According to McCullough:

“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.”

And like all horrible truths, the reality of the ongoing disaster in Panama eventually did submit its ugly face to the harsh light of public scrutiny.

By 1887, de Lesseps’ engineers had finally convinced him that the only way forward, the only way to salvage the Panamanian nightmare, was to abandon the plans for a sea-level canal and make the costly pivot to building a lock canal, which essentially moves ships over the terrain instead of cutting straight through it. But to do that, they needed more money. A LOT more money. So, De Lesseps once again appealed to the French public, promising fat profits and everlasting glory.

Like an old warrior strapping on his armor for one last battle, De Lesseps traveled far and wide across France, chatting, charming and cajoling – relying on the Wiley E. Coyote theory of toxic confidence: whatever you do, just keep running. And don’t ever, ever look down.

But this time, the people of France weren’t buying what he was selling. And for the first time in his life, de Lesseps found on ocean of air beneath his feet. No investors meant no money, and no money meant no canal. The jig was up.

Over the course of the next year, the stock price of the French Panama Canal Company tumbled and crashed like a piano falling down the stairs. The money dried up, the work on the isthmus screeched to a halt, and in early 1889, de Lesseps’ once-powerful syndicate had declared bankruptcy and insolvency. The dream was officially dead.

Back in Panama, the canal project was taken off life support, and the inevitable death spiral ensued. As Parker writes:

All along the line, thousands of laborers found themselves suddenly thrown out of work. Shops closed as merchants pulled down their shutters and relocated, the prostitutes and professional gamblers set off for more inviting pastures, the railway closed down stations, and the banks suddenly stopped honoring checks from the Company. Rent rates and land values collapsed just as immediately.

Within no time at all, the workforce had fallen from 14,000 to just 800 involved in basic maintenance. A large number of those laid off left the Isthmus, either for home or for other employment in the region. Many of the workers, however, found they had insufficient funds for the rail fare to Colón, let alone the steamer back to Kingston. Slowly, they made their way on foot to Colón, where they congregated in desperate groups. “There are hundreds [of destitute Jamaicans] absolutely starving,” reported the Star and Herald in early April, “who have not tasted food for days … Despair is taking possession of the people.”

Eventually the government of Jamaica agreed to start bringing their thousands of destitute countrymen home. In all, 7,244 were repatriated. Some six thousand Jamaican men, women, and children were left behind when the fixed period for repatriation ended, and most took up residence in shanties along the line, growing bananas and other crops for subsistence. Many refused to believe that the project could really be abandoned.

Across the sea, in France, the outrage burned hotter than phosphorus. De Lesseps had promised his investors a gold mine – a second Suez that would bring fortune and glory to the French people; but after 10 years, 22,000 dead people and 1.3 billion francs, all they had to show for it was fistful of worthless stock certificates and a quite possibly a stomach ulcer. Naturally, they demanded answers. According to Parker:

“Rumors of wrongdoing in the Company and in the government gathered momentum, and best-selling books were published on the “Scandal of Panama.” Le Grand Français was a fraud, a cheat, and a liar, one alleged. “What have you done with the money?” the author asked de Lesseps.

Much, it was immediately apparent, had gone to the large contractors taken on in late 1886. Few of them had achieved a fraction of their contracted total excavation, but some had somehow, nonetheless, cleared huge profits. The various banks and syndicates that handled and occasionally underwrote the bond issues had also made eye-wateringly huge profits from their business with the Company. Some 10 percent of the Company's total receipts, over 100 million francs, had disappeared against the cost of the flotations. Part of this cost was money paid to the press, and not all of it for advertising space. Twelve million francs had been distributed between 1880 and 1888, it emerged, with the largest “subsidy” going to Le Petit Journal, which had stayed loyal to the Canal Company right till the end. An astonishing 2,575 magazines and periodicals had received cash payments to plug the canal venture, including, bizarrely, Marriage Journal, The Poetic World, and Foresters’ Echo. Some small journals, it appeared, had been established purely to benefit from the “Panama Check.”

“The collapse of the Panama Canal Company was a national trauma for France,” writes Elias Marlowe, “It had swallowed nearly 1.3 billion francs, wiping out the savings of some 800,000 investors. The word "Panama" became a synonym for corruption and scandal. As the scale of the bribery became public, the "Panama Affair" exploded, rocking the foundations of the French Third Republic. Investigations revealed that over 100 members of parliament had accepted bribes.

“The evidence caused a sensation,” notes Matthew Parker, “and a new word, chéquard—check taker—entered the French language.”

The wheels of accountability sometimes turn very slowly, but eventually the bill comes due. “In 1893,” writes Elias Marlow, “Ferdinand de Lesseps, now an old, broken man, and his son Charles were prosecuted and found guilty of fraud and maladministration. The elder de Lesseps was spared prison due to his age.”

It was an ignominious end to the career of a man who had once been hailed as the Greatest Living Frenchman. The great social butterfly had his wings plucked by scandal, and spent his remaining days in isolation.

And so, at the age of 89, Ferdinand de Lesseps sat in his study, surrounded by old books and old maps and old memories. When servants or friends or family came to check on him, they found that Le Grand Francaise, could barely string a sentence together. Age, it seemed, had finally caught up with him. In just handful of years, his solid-gold reputation had been turned to rust by the Panamanian catastrophe.

“One newspaper had suggested quite sympathetically that it might have been better had Ferdinand de Lesseps died earlier, at the peak of his career, “writes David McCullough, “and Madame de Lesseps [his much younger wife] had written a moving reply that was quoted widely, then and for years to come. “I will not protest against this unchristian sentiment,” she wrote, “except to say that its author can have given no thought to the wife and children who deeply love and revere this old man and to whom his life, however frail it may be, is more precious than anything in the world.

 It is no crime to grow old.”

As we grow older, the human mind has a miraculous ability to selectively edit and curate memories. The bad and the unpleasant, the shameful or embarrassing, so much of it sinks beneath the waves of the subconscious, mercifully lost to time. As his wife changed his bedpan, kissed his wispy white forehead and wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth, who knows what memories stayed clear and crystalline in Ferdinand de Lesseps’ mind.

Maybe, even in that docile, diminished state, the Hero of Suez could still remember the miraculous image of ships – dozens and dozens of ships – sailing through the desert.

They say age is just a number, but try telling that to an 89-year-old circulatory system. Ferdinand de Lesseps died in December 1894 of natural causes after an unnaturally extraordinary life. But there was no grand funeral, no state function, no crowds of somber admirers lighting candles in his honor. As Matthew Parker writes:

“However many people had lined their pockets at the expense of the shareholders, de Lesseps had not been among them. His family were so poor that the funeral expenses had to be met by the board of directors of the Suez Canal.”

The Great Engineer was dead and gone, but as the 19^th century became the 20^th century, Panama and all its horrifying, tantalizing possibilities remained. “A canal was beyond the capacity of any purely private enterprise,” writes David McCullough, “that much now was plain.”

Most people concluded that the dream of a Panama Canal really was just that – a dream. It was too expensive, too challenging, too technologically demanding. The greatest engineers, backed by the most well-funded private outfit in the world had tried and failed to tame the jungle. Digging a canal though Panama – any canal – was a fool’s errand. Anyone with a lick of sense and a modicum of self-preservation would stay far, far away from that godforsaken jungle.

Only a madman would try to succeed where the French had failed. Only a person of delusional optimism, insane ambition and superhuman self-importance would ever attempt it.

But, as it happened, a man like that did exist.

And he was sitting in the White House.

--- OUTRO ---

Well folks, that’s all the time we have for today.

Next time, in Part 2, we will move into the American phase of the Panama Canal story, which forms the bulk OF this story. Throughout the French period, the US government was a ghostly presence on the isthmus, lurking at the edges, peeking through the blinds at the ruckus unfolding in their backyard. But with the collapse of the de Lesseps Syndicate, the way was now clear for Uncle Sam to pick up a shovel and step into the fold.

But first, a few lingering impediments had to be dealt with. Things like powerful Washington lobbyists, Panamanian revolutionaries, and the occasional regime change. Needless to say, we have a lot more story to tell, and I am very excited to share it with you.

So goodbye for now, thanks for listening, and have an awesome day.

This has been Conflicted. I’ll see you next time. 

--- END---