"The Path Between the Seas" by David McCollough
Above: "The Path Between the Seas - The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870 - 1914." David McCullough. 620 Pages.
I supplemented my reading of Book Three with National Archives You-Tube footage of the actual Panama Canal construction. The Bucyrus shovels and dredges... and the locomotives.... and the blasting at the Culebra Cut is all there. It was emotionally thrilling to see McCullough's beautifully written descriptions of the construction process actually brought to life!
I completed reading the above book today.
Having been thrilled passing through the Panama Canal by cruise ship September of this year (2017), I felt impelled to supplement my knowledge.
I didn't even need to go out and buy the book. I had forgotten that it had been given me as a pre-cruise, August birthday gift by my son and daughter-in-law. My forgetfulness even resulted in a failed attempt at the last minute to buy the book before I departed on the cruise.
One of the reasons for my forgetfulness may have had something to do with the fact the TIMDT and I undertook the pre planned cruise only a month after I had had surgery for a broken right leg (tibia plateau fracture). My right leg could not bear any weight. I was wheel chair and crutch bound. A lot of our brain space, pre cruise, was focused on whether we could pull it off or not.
A picture is worth 1000 words.
Entering the Panama Canal from the Pacific side, I sat in the Regent Seven Seas Mariner observation lounge as she passed under the Pan American Bridge, and through the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks. I watched the port side landscape of the Culebra Cut from our 11th deck cabin outside deck. TIMDT and Mwah (sic) lunched with SpaGo and Montage, starboard side from the Veranda restaurant as the Regent cruise liner passed through Gatun Lake. I returned to our cabin to observe the passage through the Gatun Locks on the Atlantic side.
Having seen only my 1000 word "cruise picture" I could have been fulfilled. Yet, I knew that my picture was like the tip of an iceberg. I needed to know more.
Moving through the Panama Canal last September...
I was unable to see any one hundred or so, the 95 ton Bucyrus excavators, belching smoke and steam as their huge shovels loaded dirt and rock onto single sided rail flat cars to move dirt from the Culebra Cut.
I saw none of the 25 thousand West Indian workers walking up and down Culebra Cut trails and ledges carrying boxes of dynamite, pics and shovels.
I was unable to see any of the topography now submerged under Gatun Lake, before the oft raging Chagres River was damned to create what in 1918 was the largest artificial lake in the world.
I could see the top sections of the great locks (Miraflores, Pedro Miguel, and Gatun) but those concrete sections represented only a tenth of the actual lock structure, most of which was submerged.
Nowhere on my passage through the canal were there any anopheles mosquitoes, the source of malaria, a disease which resulted in up to 25 thousand canal worker deaths during the French canal construction effort in the 1880's.
The point here, of course, is that my 1000 word "cruise picture," the real Panama Canal, wonderful as it was, represented but a superficial image of one of the world's great engineering stories. How the Panama Canal came to be... the historical, political, financial, and engineering intricacies behind its realization... is what McCollugh expertly portrays in his book.
The book was the winner of the National Book Award in 1977.
"The Path Between the Seas" is actually three books.
Book One.
1870 to 1894. The story of early European and American pre canal surveys in Panama and Nicarauga, and the failed French effort to construct a canal on the Panamanian Isthmus.
Ferdinand de Lesseps, though not an engineer, was the force behind the creation of the Suez Canal. In the 1880's mass media wasn't there to force the likes Kardashians, LeBron James, or Miley Cyrus into iconic cultural status. De Lesseps - a builder/creator - was the "rock star" of his day.
Following his success at Suez, de Lesseps rallied European and American capital to launch a Pacific/Atlantic canal at Panama. But the French, and de Lesseps, didn't appreciate that Panama was not Suez. The dry Suez climate did not prepare De Lesseps and team for the tropics and the mosquito born diseases of Yellow Fever and Malaria. The sandy, near sea level excavation at Suez was nothing compared to the geological complexity of the Panamanian isthmus.
The French failed effort also led to a full blown financial crisis complete with thousands of fortunes lost and recriminations directed to de Lesseps and his team. Many of DeLessep's associates, including his son Charles and Gustav Effiel, great French engineer, ended up in jail. DeLesseps himself, by then an old man, avoided jail and lived, often oblivious to the denouement of his Panama effort, in his country home.
The French did accomplish something. About one third of the excavation on the Calebra Cut had been accomplished by the French before the Americans arrived. The French experience with tropical diseases forced an accelerated effort by the Americans to solve the disease problem.
Book 2.
1890 to 1904. The story leading to an American decision to take over the failed French operation.
William Nelson Cromwell, the founder of the now great New York law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was a friend of Teddy Roosevelt. He was also legal representative for "Compagnie Nouvelle," the anemic French company which had picked up the pieces from the bankrupt de Lesseps canal effort. He was an unabashed supporter of an American Panama Canal piggy backing off of the French effort.
John Tyler Morgan, powerful sixth term member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wanted a Canal in Nicaragua. The political intricacies and maneuvering between the Morgan and Cromwell factions make good reading.
The urbane French head of "Compagnie Nouvell," Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, was a major ally of Cromwell in pushing for the Panama option. Bunau-Varilla had a long history with the canal having worked as a young, senior engineer during the French effort.
Nicaragua was the direction America was headed to build its canal. But, with Compagnie Nouvelle buddies Burnau-Varilla and Cromwell working the system from inside, the "Panama fix" was in. After much intrigue...two-ing and fro-ing, the Panama option won out. Compagnie Nouvelle received $40 million from the US for rights to the erstwhile French dig.
Teddy Roosevelt (TR), of course, looms in the background of all these canal machinations. That TR had to foment a revolution that would force the Panamanians to separate from their Columbian masters is another wonderful and important narrative in this section. US imperialism anyone?
Book Three.
1904 to 1914. The construction of the Panama Canal... really a story about, medical doctors, engineers and management.
Great stories... that can stand alone independent of the book:
How Dr. William Gorgas stamped out Yellow Fever and Malaria in the Canal Zone. Want to learn about mosquito born diseases? Go no further than McCollough's insightful, well written write up on Gorgas' work at the Panama Canal.
How Lt. Colonel Harry Hodges designed and constructed the locks. Power? Its all gravity or electric power generated by water passing through the new dam which created Gatum Lake.
How chief of project Colonel George W. Goethals organized and managed the most complex engineering project in history up to that time.... and maybe at any time... to a successful conclusion.
Inspiration, delegation, follow up, "managing up" to Washington... has a Harvard Business School on the Panama Canal been written? It would provide valid insight on management, even today.
Colonel Goethals was the third of the chief engineers to work the canal. He brought the canal under military (US Corps of Engineers) management for final two thirds of the project.
Goethal's predecessor, John Stevens, beginning in 1906 had very successfully built the work force, with Gorgas' aid had made headway in eradicating disease, and set Canal Zone living and working infrastructure in place.
Stevens was a private citizen CEO with a railroad background. Stevens' MO was to contract out various functions, a practice disdained by Goethals who brought the whole operation under the auspices of the US Government, US Army Corps of Engineers.
For reasons still unknown, in 1908 Stevens decided to resign from the position to become a higher paid CEO building and running the Great Northern Railway. Roosevelt felt betrayed by Stevens and did not mention Stevens' contribution to the canal effort in his memoirs.
The first chief engineer of the Canal was John Henry Wallace, 1904 to 1906. Wallace was removed as no or little progress was happening under his administration. However, in Wallace's defense, the Washington bureaucracy set up at the project's inception presented a very difficult obstacle for him. Wallace's replacement, Stevens, saw these impediments and insisted that red tape problems be dealt with before he took the job. As an example, the managing commission of the Canal Zone was taken from seven members to three members, with cleaner and easier reporting channels.
It should be noted, that though Stevens left unexpectedly; though he took more credit than he might have deserved for the Canal's completion; though Stevens had been critical of Goethals at various times during the canal's construction; Goethals always praised the contribution of Stevens. He never made a critical comment about his predecessor.
Goethal's contribution to America should be right up there with Eisenhower, Grant, Patten and Pershing. Right?
Parting Notes
I supplemented my reading of Book Three with National Archives You-Tube footage of the actual Panama Canal construction. The Bucyrus steam shovels and steam dredges... and the locomotives.... and the blasting at the Culebra Cut is all there. It was emotionally thrilling to see McCullough's beautifully written descriptions of the construction process actually brought to life!
In one of those odd quirks of history, the Panama Canal completion, in August 1914, occurred at the start of WWI (about which I've been reading a lot recently). Planned celebrations for the completion of the Panama Canal were downplayed and the world's press had other matters to headline and as the world's leaders had other priorities.
The Panama Canal was constructed under the administration of three US presidents. TR, Taft, and Wilson. TR gets all the PR for the canal, but his presidency ended in 1906, eight years before the canal's completion.
Taft made five or six trips to the Canal Zone during his four year presidency. He was Secretary of War during the TR administration and was in the reporting channel for the canal during that period. Taft's leadership in the Canal management process might be under reported... under appreciated.
In a very moving McCullough account about an important step in the Canal's construction, Wilson, during early 1918, flipped a telegraph switch that triggered the explosion which broke the final barrier in the Culebra Cut, thereby connecting the two oceans for the first time. This reminds of the ceremony in 1868 when the Golden Spike was hammered into the transcontinental railway at Promentory Point, Utah. Both events, the railway and the canal... both great engineering accomplishments.... brought the world closer together.
By 2011, a million ships had passed through the canal.
In 2016, new, wider locks were completed to accommodate the huge Panamax container ships. As a testament to the "rock star" engineers of 100 years ago, the concrete of the original locks remains as strong as ever. Concrete from the newly completed locks (Spanish construction consortium), is already starting to crack in some places. Worries are growing about the new construction's ongoing viability.
Whether its the writer (McCullough) of the subject matter, or both, as non-fiction goes, this book reads as a page turner. It is a wonderful - and essential for me - complement to the 1000 word "cruise picture" I saw while plying the Panama canal by cruise ship earlier this year. of the construction process actually brought to life!