Panama II: The Canal That Almost Wasn't

In Brief

Last time, Spaniards and Frenchies alike died wantonly from malaria, yellow fever, and starvation in the sunny tropics. This week, the engineer who oversaw the construction of the Suez Canal gets into the act. Unfortunately, he puts his complete faith in a beardless whelp of a boy who doesn’t know a transit from a mango. The U.S. Navy presents its plans and is ignored; a competent French engineer sniffs in defeat. All this, plus a European polygamist who creates a religion and digs trenches!

Party On

You might also be interested in: Panama I: Things to do in Panama when you Have Yellow Fever Malaria and Yellow Fever building the Panama Canal Panama III: Death and Dying in Panama Disease and squalor nearly squash the plans of Panama's canal builders.

Ferdinand de Lesseps of France, until 1892[1], was a national hero. He had completed the Suez canal in 1869, bridging the waterway gap between Europe and west Asia.

De Lesseps had been inspired by an engineer named Prosper Enfantin, self-proclaimed "half of the Couple of Revelation". His better half, Enfantin purported, was a divine female waiting to produce herself. To ferret her out, he regularly auditioned candidates. He founded a church based on these delusions, and soon got in trouble with the authorities for such an open embrace of harlotry (nineteenth century France could never quite decide if it liked orgies or not).

He appeared [in court] in Hessian boots and a velvet cloak trimmed with ermine. Asked to defend his behavior, he stood motionless and silent, then explained that he wished the court to have a quiet moment to reflect on his beauty.[2]

After a jail term, Enfantin suspected his true love lay waiting for him in the cradle of civilization, so he departed for Egypt. There, he construed a plan to connect the Red and Mediterranean seas. Enfantin was, despite his megalomania, a truly competent engineer and well-connected financier. Unfortunately, after some digging in the sand, he gave up. He convinced the ruling viceroy of Egypt to let him stay and dig in the sand some more. In some months, he gave up again, and nobody else was allowed in. Through good fortune (to de Lesseps, anyway), the viceroy was later murdered and succeeded by Mohammed Said

...whom de Lesseps had befriended years before when Mohammed Said was a fat, unattractive, and friendless little boy... [who] had since become a walleyed mountain of a man, a great eater and drinker and jovial teller of "French stories," a ruler who liked to have [servants] wade through gunpowder carrying lighted candles to test their nerve.[3]

Dig Like an Egyptian

De Lesseps jumped on the chance. For ten long years engineers, laborers and slaves toiled in the Egyptian sun, and when the canal was completed, shareholders grew wealthy overnight. As president of the Suez Canal Company, de Lesseps enjoyed his public role and invented one crackpot scheme after another. He proposed a railway from Moscow to Peking, with Paris and Bombay in between. He wanted to create a sea in the middle of the Sahara by destroying a ridge and flooding an area the size of Spain. A commission of engineers investigated this last plan, and failed to convince him that it was impossible. As one of the engineers would later recount, de Lesseps was willing to pitch their expertise and spend millions on a fruitless project. A few years later, he tried another one.

In 1875 de Lesseps sent a twenty-nine year old French naval officer named Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon-Bonaparte Wyse and a scant seventeen men to Colombia with instructions to look for a place to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. After six months, the party returned with insect bite scars, sorry tales and little else:

Everyone suffered from malaria, two men died in the jungle, a third died during the voyage home... [Wyse] was thoroughly discouraged and made little effort to hide it. Though they had managed to cross the divide, the terrain, punishing heat, and the rains, had defeated them. The best he could recommend -- and purely by guesswork -- was a... canal with a tunnel as much as nine miles in length.[4]

If At First You Don't Succeed

De Lesseps, disgusted, sent Wyse and a few men back. One of them got malaria inside of a week. Another, afflicted with an earache, was disgusted enough to give up entirely. The trio headed back to Panama City. The expedition had taken a total of eighteen days. Realizing that he had failed to complete his job yet must present something, Wyse decided to go to Washington and pick up a copy of the survey published by the United States Government Printing Office. Such a document, properly pilfered, could make up for his shoddy, lackluster work -- the young lieutenant would have six of the finest surveys ever produced by the United States Navy at his fingertips, and could boldly claim the work was done in a piddling eighteen days by himself and two assistants. Plan formed, Wyse traveled to the eastern seaboard of the United States from Nicaragua, by way of California.[5]

Upon arrival, Naval officers listened with interest to Wyse and stories of his travels. They quietly accepted his laudatory comments concerning their own efforts, and their eyes narrowed when he asked for summaries thereof.

It was the maps and plans that Wyse had come for and he was politely told that these were not available, that the department "did not feel disposed" to grant his request.

Panicked, Wyse and his chief engineer feverishly slapped a plan together to present to de Lesseps. It was of a canal along the railway, with a large tunnel, and it was mostly the fruit of their wild imaginations, no doubt concocted late in the evening by the light of candles and warmth of stern liquor. Upon receipt of the plan, de Lesseps did not express worries that the expedition had proved a failure, nor did he dismiss the plan as preposterous; he rather fancied Wyse like a son.

Frank-ly, The Plan Stinks

Design firmly in place, de Lesseps realized that cooperation with other nations might be necessary. In order to gain favor with the international community, de Lesseps held a great meeting, complete with delegates and votes, to try and convince everybody who wasn't French that they ought to contribute to this project. However, more than half of the delegates present were French, and less than a quarter were engineers. It became obvious that this "democratic" congress was de Lessep's rubber stamp.

When Wyse presented his plan, it grew swiftly clear that he knew less than nothing -- he could not defend his rushed choices on any level. The Pacific tide, with its twenty-foot daily fluctuations,[6] was not discussed. The U.S. Navy pointed out that not only did the Chagres river flood seasonally but that any canal would have to cross it at least three times. Mudslides would be rampant. Wyse demanded to know where these data came from, and was promptly told they were all field measurements taken by the very expedition whose report he had tried to steal.

Humiliated, Wyse dropped the tunnel idea and concocted some nutty scheme to pass the Chagres under the canal (the canal itself would already be almost 50 feet below the river). Wyse suffered attacks from all nations, including his own, and was "very excited" as he threw his hands in the air and cursed onstage. De Lesseps himself, who was supposed to be an impartial observer, spent hours behind the scenes trying to turn his countrymen to this moronic plan.

But Who Cares?!

Meantime, Baron Godin de Lepinay, another French engineer, came up with a truly brilliant scheme. He proposed to dam the Chagres river itself, make a huge lake, and thereby allow a wide spot for ships to pass one another. The river would be out of the way (seasonal flooding would be absorbed by the lake), and there would be less digging, because much of the land would be covered with water.[7]

Nobody paid him any heed. Nobody paid the Americans any heed, either. The majority of delegates, securely in de Lesseps's pocket, voted for Wyse's preposterous design. At the role call for the vote, de Lesseps himself leapt up and shouted, "I vote 'yes'! And I have accepted command of the enterprise!"

The slighted engineer de Lepinay announced, "In order not to burden my conscience with unnecessary deaths and useless expenditure I say 'no'!" He was heartily booed.

Next time: De Lepinay is right. De Lesseps is wrong. Folly, injury, death, and bankruptcy ensue.

Footnotes

1. This is what we here at History House refer to as "ominous foreshadowing."
2. McCullough, p.49
3. McCullough, p.62
4. McCullough, p.49
5. Yes, a lengthy route. Perhaps he felt obliged to try the newly-minted transcontinental railway.
6. Years before, during the construction of the Panamanian railroad, engineers had determined that "sea level" was truly level, and that the Atlantic was at the same height as the Pacific. However, tides on the Pacific side were some eighteen to twenty feet, as compared to a single foot in the Caribbean. Mud flats stretched out into the Pacific more than a mile at low tide.
7. This design was adopted decades later, after nothing else worked.

Bibliography

1. David McCullough. The Path Between the Seas. Simon and Shuster, 1977.
2. Sandra W. Meditz, Dennis M. Hanratty, eds.. Panama: A Country Study. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989.
3. Marion J. Simon. The Panama Affair. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971. [Out of Print]

 
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