The Panama Canal
1855 – 201643 items
canalstechnologyEighty kilometres, thirty-three years
In 1881 a French company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of Suez, began to dig a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Eight years later it was bankrupt, its shareholders ruined and thousands of its workers dead of yellow fever and malaria. In 1904 the United States took over what was left, and on 15 August 1914 the steamship Ancon made the first official passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The canal that opened was not the one de Lesseps had promised. It climbs 26 metres on three flights of locks to a lake made by damming the Chagres River, and crosses the continental divide through the Culebra Cut, where the hills kept sliding back in. It was built by tens of thousands of workers, most of them from the Caribbean, and it cost thousands of lives.
How it is laid out
Periods: the French company and its successor, the American era with its three chief engineers (Wallace, Stevens, Goethals), the fight against yellow fever, the Culebra Cut, Gatun Dam and the locks, and the Canal Zone that the United States governed until 1979.
Threads to filter by:
engineering,medicine,diplomacy,finance,labourandlosses.The map: the railway and the canal drawn as routes across the isthmus, with the decisions made in Paris, Bogotá, Havana and Washington and the workers’ home port of Bridgetown, Barbados.
Epilogue: the 1977 treaties, the handover to Panama on 31 December 1999 and the larger locks of 2016.
The dead
Nobody knows how many died. The figures here are the ones the standard histories give, with their sources: an estimate of about 22,000 for the French years and 5,609 deaths recorded in American hospital returns for 1904–1914, a count that almost certainly misses many West Indian workers. See Panama Canal for a wider overview.
I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on the canal does also. — Theodore Roosevelt at the University of California, Berkeley, 23 March 1911
Items
The Panama Railroad opens, ocean to ocean
- ≈ 23 years
The Wyse concession
The Paris congress votes for a sea-level canal
A ceremonial first blow
The company sells its shares to the French public
Finlay names the mosquito
Yellow fever takes Jules Dingler’s family
Eiffel is hired to build the locks
The company stops paying
Work stops on the isthmus; counting the French dead
De Lesseps and Eiffel are sentenced
The Reed board confirms the mosquito
The Senate chooses Panama over Nicaragua
Colombia rejects the Hay–Herrán treaty
Panama breaks away from Colombia
The Hay–Bunau-Varilla treaty
The United States takes possession
Congress chooses a lock canal
Roosevelt at the controls of a steam shovel
Stevens resigns
The Cucaracha slide
Two steam shovels meet at the bottom of the Cut
The first ship lifted through Gatun Locks
Wilson blows up the Gamboa dike
The Alexandre La Valley makes the first full transit
The American toll
The Ancon opens the canal
The Torrijos–Carter treaties
- ≈ 20 years, 3 months
Panama takes over the canal
- ≈ 16 years, 5 months
The expanded canal opens