The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914

Typical of David McCullough's other books that I have read (John Adams, 1776, The Johnstown Flood, and The Great Bridge) this one includes volumes of careful research and first hand accounts jam-packed into a fully realized examination of the subject.

Sometimes this amounts to a bit too much information to the detriment of energetic storytelling, but in this case, I believe the story is SO complex that it deserves to have all its many layered facets exposed and examined. While I always "knew" that the building of the Panama Canal had been a complicated and often daunting undertaking, I never realized how close to disaster the project remained throughout most of its planning and construction. The story behind the original French effort to show more build the canal was completely unknown to me marking the first half of the book as "new history". For me there is always a thrill in discovering new information and hearing new stories, especially those that have simply been outside of my radar. Ah! to have the time to read all the fascinating stories that have made up our human history would be paradise, but then of course one would need to time to read them again just to savor the experience.

Path Between the Seas is sometimes hard to read only because it is disquieting to follow along with faulty decision making with the full advantage of hindsight. It gives one pause to consider what generations of the future will pick out as the follies within our own decisions as a society, a people, an individual (if we should even make it into future stories!). What seems so reasonable in the present, often becomes slightly ridiculous in hindsight. It's a lesson for us all.

My favorite quote comes from John Stevens, the railroad construction engineer ultimately given the task of actually building the canal for the United States. He told his new division head, "You won't get fired if you do something, you will if you don't do anything. Do something and if it is wrong you can correct that, but there is no way to correct nothing." show less

This massive history of the making of the Panama Canal begins with France's attempt to carve out a canal and create a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Central America. France had recently led the charge to create the Suez Canal, a huge success, and that initiative's leader, Ferdinand de Lessup, decided the Panama Canal would be his next project. There was argument over where to put it (Nicaragua?) and certainly lots of argument over how to engineer it - a sea level canal or a raised series of locks? The French initiative was tangled up with tons of issues from funding, to illness, to corruption, to lack of a feasible construction plan. Eventually it failed and the canal that had been begun sat there for quite some time show more until a Frenchman, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, reinvigorated the idea in America. Teddy Roosevelt quickly took it up and America built the canal in the early 1900s, after wresting the land from Columbia and granting Panama independence through a rather shady treaty. Advances in engineering meant that the whole building process went much more smoothly than when the French had tried it two decades earlier. The Americans also made the correct decision to forego the sea level canal and use the elevated Chagres River to create a series of above sea level locks and lakes.

It's a fascinating stretch of time. I was most fascinated by some of the details of the work, such as having to figure out what caused yellow fever and malaria and how to prevent it in order to achieve success. The engineering feat was, and still is, a marvel. It's hard to comprehend the amount of earth that was moved and controlled to make this venture successful, and McCullough does a fantastic job describing it. I was also fascinated by the section that describe the politics around America taking over the building of the canal.

All in all, this is a very readable and interesting book that I definitely recommend. Very interesting moment in history and quite a feat of engineering. I thought it got off to a bit of a slow start, but once I got into it, it read pretty quickly. show less

David McCullough ably captures the grand spirit of the age in this book about the Panama canal. For centuries, men had dreamed of a canal through the American isthmus, which would elimate the fraught passage around Cape Horn, opening up the riches of the Far East and the Pacific Coast to traditional Atlantic powers.

The first man to seriously attempt a canal across the isthmus was Ferdinand de Lessup, builder of the Suez Canal and an entrepreneur par excellence. In the wake of the bitter defeat of the Franco-Prussian War, the elderly yet hale Lessups, and his eternal optimism for the canal, represented a possibility for a new France. Thousands of ordinary Frenchmen and women invested their savings in his canal company.

But Lessups, for show more all his reputation and energy, scorned technical matters. He had decided on a sea level canal at Panama, and manipulated his board into backing him without a thorough survey or solid plans. His company leaped into action, assuming that "men of genius" would arrive to meet challenges as they arose, just like at Suez.

There were definitely men of genius among the French, but they couldn't meet the challenges of the canal. Yellow fever began to slay men, first by the scores and then by the thousand, including the entire family of the local director. The Culebra Cut, the most critical part of the canal, slid continuously. Everything had to be imported to Panama, from massive dredges to Jamaican laborers, and the money ran out. The collapse of the French Panama Company destroyed Jessups reputation and nearly brought down the republic. Work stalled for decades.

Until the unlikely, almost accident figure of President Theodore Roosevelt. Americans had long favored a Nicaraguan canal, closer to the United States and with a more pro-American government. However, the Nicaraguan route was relatively long and twisty, and in a complex series of international intrigues, Roosevelt's administration bought the remains of the French company for $40 million (a song, relatively speaking), and fomented a revolution in Panama, when the Colombian government balked.

The American canal project succeed because it lead with medical hygiene, including a massive anti-mosquito campaign based on recent breakthroughs in epidemiology, as well as a cadre of tough railroad managers. The canal was essentially a matter of rail transport, of moving spoilage from the cut to dump piles as efficiently as possible. The French effort broke down continuously. The American effort was a well-oiled machine.

McCullough covers the grandeur of the effort, as well as it's darker side. There was a color line in Panama stricter than any Jim Crow law, where white Americans had every luxury and the best of healthcare, and the mostly black labor force from Trinidad and Tobago had comparatively high death rates and no amenities. The scale was monumental, from the cut to the the 1000 foot locks. The Panama Canal was the largest engineering project in history, a masterpiece of technological sublime. This book is the proper marker of its origins and place in history. show less

Qualities that built the Panama Canal: nerve; persistence; dynamic energy; imagination; ambition; propaganda; deception; desire for power.
Pleasantries involved in its building: yellow fever; malaria; typhoid fever; smallpox; pneumonia; dysentery; beriberi; food poisoning; snakebite; sunstroke.
David McCullough captures it all.

Two events were pivotal in making the canal’s construction a success. The first was acquiring the right to build it. The second was dealing with yellow fever, the most horrifying of those “pleasantries.” Success in both helped assure U.S. emergence as a world power.

The venture’s imperialist character wasn’t unappreciated at the time even though Theodore Roosevelt impatiently insisted “our government was show more bound by every consideration of honor and humanity . . . to take exactly the steps we took.” Those steps included violating our treaty with Colombia, aborting negotiations to modify or replace the treaty, and deploying the U.S. military to help effect the taking of Panama from the Colombians.

After acquiring the right even to build the canal, challenges remained that were gigantic. An essential matter was disease, especially yellow fever. By the time the canal became an American project, scientists had established as fact that yellow fever’s source was a specific mosquito. Then, as now, men with power distrusted scientists and dismissed their consensus: “The Isthmian Canal Commission…did not seriously entertain the notion that mosquitos could be the cause of yellow fever or malaria.” The head of the Canal Commission called the theory “balderdash.” Governor Davis thought it a “wild” idea. Chief Engineer John Wallace believed “good health on the Isthmus was nothing more than a question of personal deportment.”

As someone might tweet today, or have telegraphed back then: SLEAZEY SCIENCE LIES. MOSQUITOS?—FAKE NEWS BITES!!!

Roosevelt realized the news was not fake after listening to his friend, Dr. Alexander Lambert, who told him, “Smells and filth, Mr. President, have nothing to do with the malaria or the Yellow fever. You are facing one of the greatest decisions of your career…If you fall back upon the old methods…you will fail…If you back up [U.S. Army physician] Gorgas and his ideas…you will get your canal.” TR’s decision to follow Gorgas defeated the yellow fever scourge that frightened workers most. The incidence of malaria fell dramatically too, an even more important victory for the project.

There is much else of outstanding interest in David McCullough’s history of the canal, particularly his recounting of the previous French effort that American engineers in Panama concluded was heroic. I won’t tell more except to comment about the final chapter. In it McCullough shows in great detail what happens when a ship passes through the canal, not skimping on technical aspects of how the locks work, what must be done on the ship, etc. It’s just the sort of thing to blunt my interest. But here, after living with the canal for some 600 extraordinary pages, I could not have been more engaged by his descriptions. By this I mean to say, The Path Between the Seas is a great book. show less

On December 31, 1999, after nearly a century of rule, the United States officially ceded ownership of the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama. That nation did not exist when, in the mid-19th century, Europeans first began to explore the possibilities of creating a link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the narrow but mountainous isthmus; Panama was then a remote and overlooked part of Colombia.
All that changed, writes David McCullough in his magisterial history of the Canal, in 1848, when prospectors struck gold in California. A wave of fortune seekers descended on Panama from Europe and the eastern United States, seeking quick passage on California-bound ships in the Pacific, and the Panama Railroad, built to serve that show more traffic, was soon the highest-priced stock listed on the New York Exchange.
To build a 51-mile-long ship canal to replace that railroad seemed an easy matter to some investors. But, as McCullough notes, the construction project came to involve the efforts of thousands of workers from many nations over four decades; eventually those workers, laboring in oppressive heat in a vast malarial swamp, removed enough soil and rock to build a pyramid a mile high. In the early years, they toiled under the direction of French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, who went bankrupt while pursuing his dream of extending France's empire in the Americas.
The United States then entered the picture, with President Theodore Roosevelt orchestrating the purchase of the canal—but not before helping foment a revolution that removed Panama from Colombian rule and placed it squarely in the American camp. show less

Written in 1976, this is the excellent story of the building of the Panama Canal - both the French attempt and the American success. It starts in 1870 with the French forming a company to build a canal across the Isthmus. First, they had to determine the best location and eventually settled on Panama. After their attempt failed, the United States bought out the company and the rights to the land and in the process, created the country of Panama. After 7 years of incredible work, the canal was opened. Along the way they eradicated yellow fever and malaria from the canal zone (only), moved millions of cubic yards of rock and soil and created the largest artificial lake of it's time. The book flows very well, with excellent detail about show more the personalities and politics involved. It is not overly technical, but McCullough is clearly impressed with the engineering feat of building the canal. At no time was this a slow read, even when describing the fund raising or politics. Really excellent. show less

History of the building of the Panama Canal, including the debate about its location, construction of the railroad, initial failed attempt by France, the US involvement, engineering challenges, depiction of the many diseases, hardships endured by the workers, and much more. It is structured chronologically in three segments. The first includes the scouting of the site and describes the failed privately financed French project, the second covers the interest of the Americans and Panama’s independence, and the third includes the start and completion of the canal. I enjoy the way David McCullough takes a comprehensive approach. He includes the personalities of the main players, the politics behind decisions, financial considerations, show more vast improvements in medical treatments over the course of the project, and the technological advancements that facilitated overcoming several former obstacles. It encompasses the entire time frame (1870-1914). It immerses the reader in a past time period and highlights the many cultural differences. It shatters a few myths. It felt a little too detailed at times, but I am not sure what I would have left out. Overall, I found it fascinating.

4.5 show less