Mitchell Smyth: COLON, Panama-They said it couldn’t be done. And it couldn’t. “It” meant a ditch, at sea level, across the Isthmus of Panama, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the place where only 80 kilometres of land separates the great waters. A century ago debate was swirling here in the newly created nation of Panama -which until 1903 had been a province of Colombia - over how to build the canal. The advantages were obvious: it would slice 12,500 kilometres off the sea journey between the U.S. east and west coasts, a tremendous saving in time and money for an emerging industrial nation. The French had tried it, between 1881 and 1898, but the heat, the rain, the diseases (especially yellow fever and malaria) defeated them. And their engineering was suspect. Having built the Suez Canal, they thought they could do the same in Panama. But Suez was a sea-level canal, through sandy desert; in Panama the mountains of the Continental Divide ran through the middle of the country. Still the French insisted they could build a sea-level canal. And the American company, which took over the job in 1904, said the same.
The first thing the Americans did when they took over in 1904 was deal with the disease problem, which had killed an estimated 20,000 French workers. Their answer was to spray the swamps and ponds with kerosene to stop mosquitoes breeding. By that time, it had been discovered that the insects spread malaria and yellow fever, something the French had not known. And the Americans built better housing and established hospitals and clinics. By 1906 they were ready to get down to the real work. That, it was thought, meant literally moving mountains.
“But John Stevens, the chief engineer, was horrified when he examined the terrain,” says historian Mike Millwood. “He said, ‘We can’t go through the mountains. We have to go over them. We must have a lock canal.’ ” But the U.S. government was still keen on the sea-level idea.
Millwood, a history professor from England and a guest lecturer on the cruise ship Zaandam, transiting the canal, goes on: “Then (U.S. President) Teddy Roosevelt came down to Panama and while he was here Stevens showed him his plans for locks, to lift ships up and over the mountains, and Roosevelt said ‘Go ahead.’ ”
An advisory board was still insisting on a sea-level ditch, so it all came to a head 100 years ago this summer when, after much lobbying by Roosevelt, U.S. legislators voted for a lock canal. That was on June 21.
The word was telegraphed to Panama and the next day, June 22, the huge steam shovels - which could gobble eight tonnes of earth in one “bite” - began work building a dam on the Chagres River to form a lake that would feed the locks’ insatiable demand for water. That was the real beginning of the project.
The story is told by lecturers like Millwood aboard the dozens of cruise ships that transit the canal every year, and in an excellent visitor centre at the Miraflores Locks, on the Pacific side of the mountains. Here pictures, dioramas, artifacts and a video fill in a lot of the background on one of the most thrilling engineering and human dramas in history.
And there’s also the very real drama of standing in the bow of a cruise ship as she enters the locks, ready to be lifted up 26 metres to the level of the canal. Only then do you realize the scope and complexity of Stevens’ vision. The figures have very little meaning - 305 metres long by 33.5 metres wide - until you realize that if you stood any one of the 12 locks on end it would be more than half the height of the CN Tower in Toronto and just 76 metres shorter than New York’s Empire State Building.
The canal experience - assuming you’re going from the Atlantic to the Pacific - begins a little before your arrival at the Gatun Locks. As your ship approaches the locks, passengers can see a waterway off the starboard decks; this is the remnants of the French effort. Farther away they glimpse the Gatun Dam, built to create the huge lake that feeds the locks.
Most people have a mental picture of the canal as something like a river wending its way through the Panama jungle. In fact, half its length is through Gatun Lake. Ships weave their way among the islands - mountain peaks in pre-canal days - on a set course, for much of the lake is too shallow for ships. Guides on the intercom point out such landmarks as the island of Barro Colorado, now a facility of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Just past the port of Gamboa the lake narrows and the waterway becomes the Gaillard Cut. The excavated banks are now covered by jungle, so that sailing through the cut is much like river cruising.
Off to port can be seen, through breaks in the jungle here and there, the Panama Railway, which goes from ocean to ocean in just under an hour (cruise ships take about eight hours). A lock at Pedro Miguel takes ships down one “step” to Miraflores Lake; then another two locks take them to sea level on the Pacific side of the isthmus.
There’s one more sight for the cruisers: the magnificent 1,654-metre Bridge of the Americas, built in 1962 as part of the Pan American Highway connecting North and South America. After that, the high-rise buildings of Panama City come into view.
And all the time the cruise ship guides are telling the story. They explain that when engineer Stevens said he’d lift ships up and over the mountains he wasn’t being strictly accurate.
Even at eight storeys above sea level - the level of the artificial lake created by damming the Chagres River - the engineers still had to carve a channel through the narrowest part of the San Blas Mountains to get to the Pacific.
So the gangs of men and the great steam shovels (and a lot of dynamite) got to work and removed 80 million cubic metres of rock, shale, mud and sand, creating a 12.6-kilometre channel. (How much “spoil” is that? Well, if it were loaded on railway flatcars it would circle the globe four times!). Sailing through this 192-metre-wide cut, with the hills and the rainforest rising on either side, is almost as thrilling as transiting the locks.
Of a workforce of 100,000, some 5,600 died, mostly of disease, during the eight years the Americans took to build the canal. Combined with the French total, it meant one death for every three metres of canal.
The canal has been widened and deepened in parts, but the locks are pretty much as they were when the first ship sailed through in January 1914. There are three sets of double locks (meaning ships can pass in the locks) at each end, making 12 locks in all.
It comes as a surprise to many people transiting the canal that, going from the Atlantic to the Pacific, you’re sailing east (actually southeast), for Balboa, on the Pacific coast, is 23 nautical miles east of Colon, on the Atlantic. So if you’re on the canal you’ll find that the sun rises over the Pacific and sets over the Atlantic.
Amazingly, for the biggest engineering job in history, the canal was finished six months ahead of schedule and $23 million under its $375 million budget. (All figures in U.S. dollars.) Counting what the French spent - and some of their work was incorporated in the American effort - the total cost comes to $639 million.
By the summer of 1914 everything had been tested, ready for the official opening on August 15. It was the culmination of, as one writer observed, “the greatest liberty that man has taken with nature.” But the world didn’t notice. The story, if it made the papers at all, was in the back pages. For on August 3, Germany had declared war on France and on August 4, Britain went to war with Germany. With the planet tearing itself apart in the First World War, the words on the Great Seal of the Panama Canal Zone seemed ironic: “The land divided. The world united.”
If you go:
Most cruise lines offer Panama Canal transits. A travel agent can help.
For more information on the Panama Canal, including the Miraflores Visitor Center, visit the Panama Canal Authority website at www.panamacanal.com.
For information on travel in Panama visit the IPAT (Panamanian Tourism Institute) website at www.visitpanama.com.
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Source: VIP Panama
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