This Week in History: The engineering feat of the Panama Canal
- ANTONE PIERUCCI
- Posted On
It couldn’t be done, they said. France had tried it a half century before, only for noxious bogs and swarms of insects native to the land to swallow and suffocate the unfortunate workers sent to complete the impossible task.
But this was a man not accustomed to failure. He was at the height of his comfortable arrogance – the leader of a country equally confident in its own ability. If Egypt should have the Pyramids and Rome the Coliseum, then America should have its Pacific-Atlantic passageway, that very waterway connecting the hemispheres that Lewis and Clarke had so ardently sought. They hadn’t found it in America, so President Theodore Roosevelt would build it in Panama.
For the past 50 years, America and European countries had quarreled among themselves over who would build a pan-isthmian canal through Central America – a region early identified as the shortest, and therefore best, route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
These titans of imperial power held backroom negotiations, completely ignoring those nations whose land would actually be trenched, and the lives of whose workers would be lost in the attempt.
Finally, at the turn of the century, America had won the right among western powers to build such a thoroughfare.
In 1902, America opened negotiations with Columbia for the rights to build and maintain a canal. The American offer was not enough for the Colombian Congress, who turned it down in no uncertain terms.
In response, President Theodore Roosevelt promptly dispatched two fleets of American warships to Panama City on the Pacific and Colon on the Atlantic in support of Panamanian Independence. If Columbia wouldn’t give us what we wanted, we would create a country that would.
America’s imperial foray was a success, and the new Panamanian government sold to its American patrons a 10-mile-wide strip of land that cut across the country. For its part, America agreed to pay Panama a one-time grant of $10 million and an annual annuity of $250,000.
In a shrewd move, the new Panamanian government also added the condition that America forever guarantee its independence against any future incursions from regional powers.
With the land secured, President Roosevelt dispatched a team of engineers to set the work in motion. The year was 1904.
Over the next decade, thousands of workers sweated under the oppressive heat of summer months, and withstood the harassing attacks of swarms of mosquitoes.
During the French attempt at building the canal, over 25,000 workers had died – largely due to malaria and other diseases. During America’s construction of the Panama Canal, a little more than 5,000 died – not necessarily because of better treatment, but largely because of new medicines that limited the ravages of jungle diseases.
At the height of construction, when workers faced cutting through the nine-mile stretch of mountains that marked the continental divide, upwards of 6,000 men were working at once.
In the end, some 3.4 million cubic meters of concrete went into building the locks and other works along the canal, and nearly 240 million cubic yards of rock and dirt were excavated during the decade of American construction.
Although President Roosevelt had started the project, it was President Woodrow Wilson – perhaps the polar opposite in his foreign policy from Roosevelt’s “big stick” approach – completed the construction when he triggered the final blast of dynamite via a telegraph wired from Washington D.C. in 1914.
At the time of its completion, the Panama Canal was America’s greatest engineering feat to date.
When the first wave of ships passed through the canal on August 15, 1904, the history of world trade – and America’s role in international affairs – changed forever.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.