A tale of roughriding diplomacy and engineering miracles
One Panamanian diplomat was said to be so upset when he learned of the original U.S. canal treaty that he punched his country's envoy to Washington, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, in the face. Secretary of State John Hay wrote to a U.S. Senator: "You and I know very well how many points there are in this treaty to which a Panamanian patriot could object."
Could—and did. The treaty was pushed along by the big stick of Teddy Roosevelt, whose roughriding diplomacy virtually ensured long-smoldering resentment. As noted only last year in a Panamanian-made documentary film, The Treaty No Panamanian Signed, Roosevelt's Administration received inside help from Envoy Bunau-Varilla, who was not a Panamanian but a Frenchman. Bunau-Varilla, it turned out, was less interested in the well-being of the newborn country than in the realization of his years-old dream: completion of the canal.
During the 1880s, Bunau-Varilla worked for a private French company that attempted to dig a canal through the muddy, mosquito-filled tropical jungle of Panama, then a province of Colombia. Any canal across Central America would have eliminated the 7,000-mile journey around Cape Horn for ships navigating between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the time, most U.S. engineers favored a canal at sunny Nicaragua. The crossing there would have been 131 miles longer than at the 50-mile Isthmus of Panama. But almost all of the extra miles would have required no digging, since a Nicaraguan canal would feed into Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River.
The organizer of the French company was Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had built the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, and who preferred the Panama site because he believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that a Suez-style sea-level canal without locks could be built there.
But a sea-level canal required far more voluminous and difficult digging in mountainous Panama than had been necessary in the Middle Eastern sands. Few of the celebrated French engineers De Lesseps invited to inspect his plan approved it (among the doubters: Gustave Eiffel, the tower builder). The doubts were soon borne out: in 1889, De Lesseps' company went bankrupt. By that time, the French had moved 50 million cubic meters of earth—two-thirds of the amount moved at Suez. In the process, some 20,000 workers died of malaria and yellow fever (whose causes were thought to be noxious jungle vapors and immoral living rather than bacteria-carrying mosquitoes). Originally known as "the Great Frenchman," De Lesseps came to be called "the Great Undertaker."
All the sacrifice notwithstanding, steam shovels, dredges and swarms of black West Indian laborers wielding picks and shovels scarcely scratched Culebra, an eight-mile stretch where the lowest mountain pass was 275 ft. above sea level. The main hope of the company's creditors was that the U.S. would buy the French rights to the Panama project. Bunau-Varilla, at one time the company's acting director-general, began to lobby the U.S. government to do precisely that.