The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914
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ISBN-13: 9780743262132
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 06-01-2004
Pages: 704
Product Dimensions: 6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 2.00(d)
David McCullough (1933–2022) twice received the Pulitzer Prize, for Truman and John Adams, and twice received the National Book Award, for The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback. His other acclaimed books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Brave Companions, 1776, The Greater Journey, The American Spirit, The Wright Brothers, and The Pioneers. He was the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. Visit DavidMcCullough.com.
Chapter 1Read an Excerpt
Threshold
There is a charm of adventure about this new quest...
The New York Times
I
The letter, several pages in length and signed by Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson, was addressed to Commander Thomas O. Selfridge. It was an eminently clear, altogether formal document, as expected, and had a certain majesty of tone that Commander Selfridge thought quite fitting. That he and the Secretary were personally acquainted, that they had in fact become pleasantly drunk together on one past occasion and vowed eternal friendship as their carriage rolled through the dark capital, were in no way implied. Nor is it important, except that Selfridge, a serious and sober man on the whole, was to wonder for the rest of his days what influence the evening may have had on the way things turned out for him.
His own planning and preparations had already occupied several extremely busy months. The letter was but the final official directive:
Navy Department
Washington, January 10, 1870
Sir: You are appointed to the command of an expedition to make a survey of the Isthmus of Darien, to ascertain the point at which to cut a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The steam-sloop Nipsic and the store-ship Guard will be under your Command...
The Department has entrusted to you a duty connected with the greatest enterprise of the present age; and upon your enterprise and your zeal will depend whether your name is honorably identified with one of the facts of the future...
No matter how many surveys have been made, or how accurate they may have been, the people of this country will never be satisfied until every point of the Isthmus is surveyed by some responsible authority, and by properly equipped parties, such as will be under your command, working on properly matured plans...
So on January 22, 1870, a clear, bright abnormally mild Saturday, the Nipsic cast off at Brooklyn Navy Yard and commenced solemnly down the East River. The Guard, under Commander Edward P. Lull, followed four days later.
In all, the expedition comprised nearly a hundred regular officers and men, two Navy doctors, five civilians from the Coast Survey (surveyors and draftsmen), two civilian geologists, three telegraphers from the Signal Corps, and a photographer, Timothy H. O'Sullivan, who had been Mathew Brady's assistant during the war.
Stowed below on the Guard was the finest array of modern instruments yet assembled for such an undertaking — engineers' transits, spirit levels, gradienters, surveyors' compasses and chains, delicate pocket aneroid barometers, mercurial mountain barometers, current meters — all "for prosecuting the work vigorously and scientifically." (The Stackpole transits, made by the New York firm of Stackpole & Sons, had their telescope axis mounted in double cone bearings, for example, which gave the instrument greater rigidity than older models, and the introduction of a simplified horizontal graduation reading allowed for faster readings and less chance of error.) There were rubber blankets and breech-loading rifles for every man, whiskey, quinine, an extra 600 pairs of shoes, and 100 miles of telegraph wire. Stores "in such shape as to be little liable to injury by exposure to rains" were sufficient for four months: 7,000 pounds of bacon, 10,000 pounds of bread, 6,000 pounds of tomato soup, 30 gallons of beans, 2,500 pounds of coffee, 100 bottles of pepper, 600 pounds of canned butter.
The destination was the Darien wilderness on the Isthmus of Panama, more than two thousand miles from Brooklyn, within ten degrees of the equator, and, contrary to the mental picture most people had, east of the 80th meridian — that is, east of Florida. They would land at Caledonia Bay, about 150 miles east of the Panama Railroad. It was the same point from which Balboa had begun his crossing in 1513, and where, at the end of the seventeenth century, William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England, had established the disastrous Scottish colony of New Edinburgh, because Caledonia Bay (as he named it) was to be the future "door of the seas." Harassed by the Spanish, decimated by disease, the little settlement had lasted scarcely more than a year. Every trace of it had long since vanished.
Darien was known to be the narrowest point anywhere on the Central American isthmus, by which was meant the entire land bridge from lower Mexico to the continent of South America and which included the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Guatemala, Honduras, British Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, the last of which was still a province — indeed a most prized province — of Colombia. From Tehuantepec to the Atrato River in Colombia, the natural, easternmost boundary of Central America, was a distance of 1,350 miles as the crow flies, as far as from New York to Dallas, and there were not simply a few, but many points along that zigzagging land mass where, on the map at least, it appeared a canal could be cut. A few years before, Admiral Charles H. Davis had informed Congress that there were no fewer than nineteen possible locations for a Central American ship canal. But at Darien the distance from tidewater to tidewater on a straight line was known to be less than forty miles.
Because of the particular configuration of the Isthmus of Panama — with the land barrier running nearly horizontal between the oceans — the expedition would be crossing down the map. The men would make their way from the Caribbean on the north to the Pacific on the south, just as Balboa had. (Hence Balboa's designation of the Pacific as the Sea of the South had been perfectly logical.) The Panama Railroad, the nearest sign of civilization on the map, also ran from north to south. Its faint, spidery red line looked like something added by a left-handed cartographer, with the starting point at Colón, on Limon Bay, actually somewhat farther west than the finish point at Panama City, on the Bay of Panama.
They were to measure the heights of mountains and the depths of rivers and harbors. They were to gather botanical and geological specimens. They were to take astronomical observations, report on the climate, and observe the character of the Indians encountered. And they were to lose as little time as possible, since the rainy season — the sickly season, Secretary Robeson called it — would soon be upon them.
Six other expeditions were to follow. A Presidential commission, the first Interoceanic Canal Commission, would be established to appraise all resulting surveys and reports and to declare which was the chosen path. The commission would include the chief of the Army Engineers, the head of the Coast Survey, and the chief of the Bureau of Navigation. Nothing even remotely so systematic, so elaborate or sensible, had ever been attempted before.
But the Darien Expedition was the first, and the fact that it was to Darien, one of the wildest, least-known corners of the entire world, was a matter of extreme concern at the Navy Department. Sixteen years earlier, in 1854, well within the memory of most Americans, an expedition to Caledonia Bay had ended in a disaster that had the whole country talking and left the Navy with a profound respect for the terrors of a tropical wilderness. What had happened was this.
In 1850, Dr. Edward Cullen, an Irish physician and member of the Royal Geographical Society, had announced the discovery of a way across Darien by which he had walked from the Atlantic to the Pacific several times and quite effortlessly. He had been careful to mark the trail, Cullen said, and at no place had he found the elevation more than 150 feet above sea level. It was the miracle route everyone had been searching for and the story caused a sensation. A joint expedition to Darien was organized by England, France, Colombia (then known as New Granada), and the United States. But when the American ship, Cyane, reached Caledonia Bay ahead of the others, Navy Lieutenant Isaac Strain and a party of twenty-seven men started into the jungle without waiting, taking provisions enough for only a few days and fully expecting to pick up Cullen's trail. Balboa, when he started into this same jungle, had gone with a force of 190 heavily armed Spaniards and several hundred Indians, some of whom knew the way.
Strain was not seen again for forty-nine days. His troubles had begun from the moment he set foot on shore. The Indians, impressed by the guns of the Cyane, agreed to let his party pass, but refused to serve as guides. Cullen's trail was nowhere to be found. Within days the expedition was hopelessly lost. Food ran out; rifles became so rusted as to be useless. Strain picked up a large river — the Chucunaque — which he thought would take him to the Pacific but which, in reality, was leading him on an endless looping course eastward, through the very center of the Isthmus. When a band of Indians warned him that it was the wrong way, he decided they were deliberately trying to mislead him.
Verging on starvation, his men devoured anything they could lay hands on, including live toads and a variety of palm nut that burned the enamel from their teeth and caused excruciating stomach cramps. The smothering heat, the rains, the forbidding jungle twilight day after day, were unlike anything any of them had ever experienced. Seven men died; one other went temporarily out of his mind. That any survived was due mainly to the discipline enforced by Strain and Strain's own extraordinary fortitude. Leaving the others behind, he and three of the strongest men had pushed on in search of help. When they at last staggered into an Indian village near the Pacific side, Strain, who was torn and bleeding and virtually naked, turned around and led a rescue mission back to the others. A British doctor who examined the survivors described them as the most "wretched set of human beings" he had ever seen. "In nearly all, the intellect was in a slight degree affected, as evinced by childish and silly remarks, although their memory, and the recollection of their sufferings, were unimpaired...They were literally living skeletons, covered with foul ulcers..." Strain's weight was seventy-five pounds. A few years later, at Colón, having never fully recovered, Strain died at age thirty-six.
Strain had found the mountains at Darien not less than one thousand feet. From what he had seen, Darien was "utterly impracticable" as the route for a canal. Just the same, others were not quite willing to abandon the idea. While Strain's ordeal was taken as a fearful object lesson at the Navy Department, there were some who were still willing to accept the possibility that Edward Cullen had been telling the truth after all.
Cullen, who had come out with one of the British ships but then made a hasty retreat to Colón (and from there to New York) the moment it appeared something was amiss, turned up later as a surgeon with the British Army in the Crimean War. He also kept persistently to his story. The expedition had been deplorably misled, he argued. Strain had had no business proceeding without him or without his map, which by itself would have made all the difference.
Admiral Davis, Commander Selfridge, and, most importantly, Admiral Daniel Ammen, chief of the Bureau of Navigation, were among those who considered the case still very much open. "It is to the isthmus of Darien that we are first to look for the solution to the great problem," Davis had informed Congress. "The statements of Dr. Cullen had been so severely criticized," Selfridge was to explain, "and so persistently advocated by him, that I was inclined to put some faith in his representations." To Admiral Ammen, who had pored over every recorded detail of the episode, the critical clue was in Strain's own report. Days after he had started inland, at a time when he should have been well beyond earshot of Caledonia Bay, Strain had written in his journal of hearing the evening gun on the Cyane, and this, Ammen believed, was evidence of a low-lying valley running inland from the bay; otherwise the sound would have been blocked by intervening hills.
Interest in the new expedition was considerable in numerous quarters. The very times themselves seemed so immensely, so historically favorable. If there was one word to characterize the spirit of the moment, it was Confidence. Age-old blank spaces and mysteries were being supplanted on all sides. The summer before, the one-armed John Wesley Powell, in the interests of science, had led an expedition down the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon. The great geological and geographical surveys of the West had begun under the brilliant Clarence King. Poking about in godforsaken corners of the western desert, Othniel C. Marsh, of Yale, who was not yet forty and the country's first and only professor of paleontology, had unearthed the fossils needed to present the full evolution of the horse, the most dramatic demonstration yet of Darwin's theory.
People were reading Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The Roeblings had begun their Brooklyn Bridge. Harvard had installed a chemist as its president. In Pittsburgh, experiments were being made with a new process developed by the English metallurgist Bessemer. And within the preceding nine months alone two of the most celebrated events of the century had occurred: the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad and the opening of the Suez Canal. All at once the planet had grown very much smaller. With the canal, the railroad, the new iron-screw ocean steamers, it was possible — in theory anyway — to travel around the world in a tenth of the time it would have taken a decade earlier, as Jules Verne would illustrate in his next voyage extraordinaire.
The feeling was that the revealed powers of science, "the vast strides made in engineering and mechanical knowledge," as Commander Selfridge would say, had brought mankind to a threshold. It was said that the power generated by one steamship during a single Atlantic crossing would be sufficient to raise from the Nile and set in place every stone of the Great Pyramid. Men talked confidently of future systems of transport that would bring all peoples into contact with one another, spread knowledge, break down national divisions, and make a unified whole of humanity. "The barrier is down!" a French prelate proclaimed on the beaches of Port Said when Suez was opened. "One of the most formidable enemies of mankind and of civilization, which is distance, loses in a moment two thousand leagues of his empire. The two sides of the world approach to greet one another...The history of the world has reached one of its most glorious stages."
There really seemed no limit to what man might do. While an official report of the kind Commander Selfridge was to submit might contain the expression "under Providence" (in conjunction with certain accomplishments), such terms seemed perfunctory. Man, modern man — the scientist, the explorer, the builder of bridges and waterways and steam engines, the visionary entrepreneur — had become the central creative force. In the summer of 1870, the summer Selfridge returned from Darien, thirty, perhaps forty, thousand people would fill London's Crystal Palace for a public reception that only a Nelson might have been accorded in an earlier day. Thousands of rockets would hurtle into the night and two hundred boys from the Lambeth Industrial Schools would wave four hundred colored flares in an "Egyptian Salute," all to honor the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. This was jubilation of a kind not known before and, that future generations would have some trouble comprehending. De Lesseps' desert passage of 105 miles had brought Europe 5,800 miles closer to India. The Near East had been restored to its ancient position as a world crossroads. Africa had been made an island at a stroke. And the fact that the project had been denounced by men reputedly far wiser than de Lesseps — most especially by Britain's own Robert Stephenson — made the ultimate triumph all the more thrilling.
Victoria, who was to give a name to the era, its elegance, its sense of purpose, its heavy, varnished furniture, its small and large hypocrisies, was very much in her prime at age fifty-one. Samuel Smiles, that most eminent Victorian, had published his Lives of the Engineers, wherein good and useful giants — Brindley of the English canals, Rennie of the Waterloo Bridge, the genius Telford — did good and useful work for the betterment of all. Paris was newly transformed by the brilliant Georges Haussmann, prefect of the Seine, and the picture-book troops of Napoleon III, in their kepis and pantalons rouges, were thought to be the most formidable on earth, the Franco-Prussian War being still over the horizon.
Among the American tourists to be found strolling Baron Haussmann's magnificent boulevards as the Nipsic and the Guard sailed for Darien was an undersized eleven-year-old in the company of his parents, Theodore Roosevelt, whose ambition at the moment was to be a naturalist.
The President of the United States at this juncture was Ulysses S. Grant and it was he, the year before, who had instructed Admiral Ammen to organize the series of expeditions — "practical investigations," he called them. Grant, despite his subsequent reputation as a President of little vision or initiative, was more keenly interested in an isthmian canal than any of his predecessors had been. He was indeed the first President to address himself seriously to the subject. If there was to be a water corridor, he wanted it in the proper place — as determined by civil engineers and naval authorities — and he wanted it under American control. "To Europeans the benefits of and advantages of the proposed canal are great," he was to write, "to Americans they are incalculable."
Grant's blind faith in old friends was to prove his greatest failing as time wore on, but in Admiral Ammen, a friend since boyhood, he had made an excellent choice. Ammen had been reassigned from sea duty and put at the head of the Bureau of Navigation almost the moment Grant became President. A picture of authority, Ammen was whiskered, grizzled, like Grant himself, but with a large, imposing nose and a permanent scowl. Once, while in command of a training cruise to Panama, he had settled a mutiny on the instant by calmly shooting the two leaders. He also had an agile and resourceful mind.
The Navy was to provide the ships and most of the personnel. Ammen selected the officers. Thomas Oliver Selfridge, irrespective of any impression he may have made on Secretary Robeson, had been first in his class at Annapolis and distinguished himself as a commander of gunboats at Vicksburg and on the Red River. En route to Darien he would celebrate his thirty-fourth birthday. Captain Robert Shufeldt, who would lead the Tehuantepec Expedition in the fall of 1870, had had thirty years at sea. He was a physical giant who appeared equal to any wilderness and he had, besides, considerable tact. (Though it had been more than twenty years since the Mexican War, there was much apprehension over the reception an American expedition might receive in Tehuantepec.) And the studious, likable Edward P. Lull, who was in charge of the Guard, and who was later to command both the Nicaragua and Panama expeditions, was as able a young officer as was to be found in the Navy.
These particular officers, moreover, had been imbued with a star-spangled sense of American destiny in the Pacific Ocean. As a young lieutenant, Daniel Ammen had sailed on Commodore James Biddle's voyage to China and Japan, the voyage that resulted in 1846 in the first treaty between China and the United States. Selfridge also had begun his career with a South Pacific cruise and Shufeldt had been in command of the Wachusett in the Orient only the year before the Tehuantepec Expedition.
"Sufficient is it to add that advantageous as an interoceanic canal would be to the commercial welfare of the whole world, it is doubly so for the necessities of American interests," Selfridge was to write. "The Pacific is naturally our domain."
"It may be the future of our country lies hidden in this problem," Shufeldt would address his crew when the Kansas sailed for Tehuantepec. And from the rail of a battered little river steamer laboring against the brown current of the San Juan, his eyes squinting against the hard glare of a Nicaragua morning, Edward Lull would envisage American ships of the line riding the same path to the Pacific.
These were professional sailors, not remarkable men, or so they undoubtedly would have said. They were experienced in command, meticulous about details, physically very tough; but without airs or pretense. In the field, with their sun hats and field glasses, their blue northern eyes, they would look much like other English-speaking harbingers of civilization in other so-called "dark" corners of the world. But there was no overflowing ego among them, no Burton or Speke or Stanley possessed by visions of personal destiny. Nor were they great men in the way a Powell or a King was, intellectually and in orginality of purpose. Had they been asked, they undoubtedly would have said they were doing their job.
II
The seven Grant expeditions to Central America between 1870 and 1875 can be seen as a sharp, clean line through the whole long history of canal plans and proposals reaching back to an obscure reference concerning an obscure Spaniard, Alvaro de Saavedra, a kinsman of Cortez', who supposedly "meant to have opened the land of Castilla del Oro...from sea to sea." There had never been any serious possibility of a canal during Spanish times. "There are mountains, but there are also hands" was the lovely declaration of a Spanish priest of the sixteenth century, "and for a king of Castile, few things are impossible." The priest, Francisco López de Gómara, was the first to raise the issue of location, naming Panama, Nicaragua, Darien, and Tehuantepec as the best choices, in a book published in 1552. But he was sadly deceiving himself. Not for another three hundred years, not until the nineteenth century, would a canal, even a very small canal, become a reasonable possibility. It required certain advances in hydraulic engineering, among other things; and it required the steam engine.
The place most nineteenth-century North Americans expected to see the canal built, including the President, was Nicaragua. If not Darien, it would be through Lake Nicaragua; if not there, then probably it would have to be Panama. Tehuantepec had the virtue of being so much closer to the United States, but that was about all that could be said for Tehuantepec. The great overriding problem, however, was the extremely low level of reliable geographical information on Central America, and this despite more than fifty years of debate over where a canal ought to go, despite volumes of so-called geographical research, engineering surveys, perhaps a hundred articles in popular magazines and learned journals, promotional pamphlets, travel books, and the fact that Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec had all been heavily traveled shortcuts to the Pacific since the time of the California gold craze. As Admiral Davis had quite accurately stated, there were not in the libraries of the world the means to determine even approximately the most practicable route.
The earliest authoritative study of the problem, or rather the first to be taken as authoritative, appeared in 1811 and designated Nicaragua as the route posing the fewest difficulties. The author of this rather tentative benediction was Alexander von Humboldt, the adventurous German-born naturalist and explorer, and Nicaragua thereafter had been "Humboldt's route." Humboldt, as it happens, had never set foot in Nicaragua, or in any of the four alternatives he named. He had built his theories wholly from hearsay, from old books and manuscripts, and the few pitiful maps then available, all of which he plainly acknowledged. The precise location of the City of Panama was not even known, he warned. Nor had anyone determined the elevation of the mountains at Panama, or at any other point along the spine of Central America.
Panama he judged to be the worst possible choice, primarily because of the mountains, which he took to be three times as high as they actually are. Tehuantepec appeared to be too broad, as well as mountainous, and he feared the "sinuosity" of the rivers. About the best that could be done at either Panama or Tehuantepec would be to build some good roads for camels.
Humboldt was still comparatively unknown when he wrote his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, the book containing his long canal essay; his renown was limited still to scientific circles. No Peruvian current or glacier or river had been named for him; Humboldt, Kansas, and Humboldt, Iowa, were still unbroken prairie grass. His views, nonetheless, were to have more influence on the canal issue than everything that had been written previously taken together, for by mid-century he was to tower above all others as the beloved high priest of modern science, a university unto himself, as Goethe would say.
Humboldt's Political Essay was the result of a five-year journey through Spanish America, the likes of which would never be equaled. He had been up the Orinoco and the Magdalena; he had been over the Andes on foot. In Ecuador he had climbed Chimborazo, then believed to be the highest mountain on earth, and though he failed to reach the top, he had gone to nineteen thousand feet, which was higher — considerably higher — than any human being had ever been before, even in a balloon. If he had not been in Nicaragua or Panama or Tehuantepec or anywhere along the drenched, green valley of the Atrato River, the location of his two other possible pathways to the Pacific, he had been almost everywhere else and no one was assumed to have more firsthand knowledge of the American jungle. The rather vital fact that his canal theories were almost wholly conjecture was generally ignored. Moreover, those who used his name to substantiate their own pet notions, those who would quote and misquote him endlessly, would find it convenient to forget that it was he who insisted that no canal should be considered until the comparative advantages and disadvantages of all possible routes were examined firsthand by experienced people and according to uniform standards.
The Nicaragua canal he visualized was much along the lines of Thomas Telford's Caledonian Canal in Scotland, then the most ambitious thing of its kind. Lake Nicaragua, besides being navigable, would, like Telford's Scottish lakes, provide a natural and limitless source of water for the canal — a vast "basin" — at the very summit of the canal.
Should Nicaragua be found unsatisfactory, then perhaps one of the two routes on the Atrato would serve best. The Napipi-Cupica route, as he named it and as it is still known, would follow the Napipi River, a tributary of the sprawling Atrato, to its headwaters, then continue down to the Pacific at Cupica Bay.
The other Atrato scheme, the so-called "Lost Canal of the Raspadura," appealed mainly to his imagination. Years before, he had heard, a Spanish monk "of great activity" had induced some Indians to build a secret passage between the Atrato and the Pacific, a passage large enough only for small boats, but one that followed a near-perfect path for a canal of larger size, somewhere off the Raspadura River, another distant tributary. All one had to do was find it.
How much of all this he may have discussed with Thomas Jefferson in the spring of 1804, at the end of the Spanish-American odyssey, is not known. But probably his stay at the White House marks the start of Presidential interest in the canal. It is known that Jefferson had shown prior curiosity on the subject while he was minister to France. Furthermore, the visit coincided with the departure of Lewis and Clark from St. Louis to seek, on Jefferson's orders, a northwest water passage to the Pacific. And Humboldt, a lean, deeply tanned, explosively energetic young man, had so enthralled Jefferson with accounts of his travels that Jefferson kept him on as a guest for two weeks. So it is difficult to imagine them not discussing a Central American corridor as they strolled the White House grounds or sat conversing, hours on end, at the big table in Jefferson's first-floor office, maps and charts all over one wall and Jefferson's pet mockingbird swinging in a cage overhead.
Humboldt's Spanish-American travels had been the result of an unprecedented grant from the Spanish Crown to investigate wherever he wished in the cause of scientific progress. Until then explorations of any kind by foreigners within Spain's New World realm had been strenuously discouraged. But once Spanish rule began to dissolve in the 1820's the way was open to almost anyone. And almost anyone was what turned up. Engineers, naval officers, French, English, Dutch, Americans, promoters, journalists, many of whom expressed grand visions of a canal, in the event political permission could be obtained, in the event the necessary capital could be assembled. A few of these were able people, but very few had any technical competence. Many of them were also perfectly genuine in their