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In Washington, Envoy Bunau-Varilla now raced against time. Amador and his party were en route to Washington, expecting that Bunau-Varilla would await their arrival before entering negotiations. But the Frenchman was already at work, revising the proposed canal treaty to ensure Senate approval. He expanded the proposed canal zone from six to ten miles, gave the U.S. the right to expropriate additional Panamanian land and granted it "all the rights, power and authority ... which [it] would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign" of the zone. These rights were not promised for renewable periods of 100 years, as America had earlier proposed; now they were to belong to the U.S. "in perpetuity." Bunau-Varilla told Hay: "So long as the delegation has not arrived in Washington, I shall be free to deal with you alone. When they arrive, I shall no longer be alone. In fact, I may perhaps soon no longer be here at all." Rushed through in seven days, the treaty was approved at 6:40 p.m. on Nov. 18, 1903—only two hours before the Panamanians arrived at the railroad station in Washington. To secure approval of the treaty from the provisional government of Panama, Bunau-Varilla cabled the false message that Washington would withdraw its protection of the revolutionaries unless they promptly accepted the treaty.
"From the beginning to the end, our course was straightforward and in absolute accord with the highest standards of international morality," Roosevelt would claim in his Autobiography. A more typical reaction at the time was that of Attorney General Philander Knox, whom Roosevelt asked to defend the U.S. role. "Oh, Mr. President," Knox reportedly replied, "do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality."
The true grandeur of the achievement lay not in Washington but in the jungle, where the triumphs of American engineering and medicine surpassed anything the world had seen. Using techniques he had pioneered earlier with Dr. Walter Reed in Cuba, Dr. William Gorgas introduced a program of mosquito control that banished yellow fever from the isthmus (in the jungle and the cities) within eighteen months. Soon malaria too was under control. Between 1904 and 1914, when the canal opened, there were 5,600 deaths from accidents and disease.
The total volume of the U.S. excavation was 232 million cu. yds.—almost three tunes the excavation of Suez. Much of it was removed near Culebra, the area that had thwarted De Lesseps, in the breathtaking Gaillard Cut, where the canal slices through the continental divide. The U.S. spent $352 million, and the number of workers eventually totaled 50,000. Six pairs of locks were used to lift ships 85 ft. above the ocean into the Panamanian highlands and to lower them again to sea level.