The Panama Canal: An Informal History of Its Concept, Building, and Present Status. Donald Barr Chidsey

      Operating the Gatun Locks for the first time

      The S.S. Ancon got off to an early start and drifted up to the Gatun Locks at 8:00 a.m. Everything worked perfectly, and one hour and a quarter later she was floated without incident into Gatun Lake, the largest artificial body of fresh water in the world. At 11:15 she was passing the village of Gamboa and about to enter the Culebra Cut.1 In that channel, 150 feet wide and 35 feet deep, she passed without a tremor the unpredictable Cucuracha Hill, a hell of landslides, to arrive at the locks at Pedro Miguel at fifty-six minutes after noon. She was locked down into Miraflores Lake, a comparatively small body of water, also man-made, and crossed this to the Miraflores Locks, where she was locked down to sea level—Pacific sea level—at 3:20 p.m. She steamed solemnly out to the channel entrance, then turned and went back to Balboa, docking there at 5:10 p.m.

      A stupendous thing had happened, something very like a miracle, the “greatest liberty that Man has taken with Nature”;2 but the world, much more interested in the siege of Liege, paid almost no attention. The great seal of the Panama Canal Zone contained the motto the land divided, the world united. But the world, on August 15, 1914, was not in fact united; instead it was tearing itself to pieces.

      Chapter

      2

      Early Fumblings

      The briefest peek at history is enough to dispel the notion, widespread among norteamericanos, that the United States originated, as it carried through, the idea of a trans-continental canal at Panama.

      The canal, indeed, was a dream that existed and strongly moved men some centuries before the United States of America was born.

      Putting aside Leif Ericson, the somewhat shadowy claims for Thorfinn Karlsefni, Didrick Pining, Hans Porthorst, Johannes Scolvus (who might have been Jan Szkolony, a Pole), and the possible Prince Madoc from Wales, it is Christopher Columbus himself, the old Admiral of the Ocean Sea, who remains the discoverer if not of North America, then at least of the Caribbean islands and South America. On his third voyage to the New World, in 1499, he touched the mainland of South America near the island we know as Trinidad, and from there he coasted westward, discovering a bay he called Bastimentos. On his fourth voyage he also explored that coast, though this time from the north down. He was seeking an opening. He believed, as virtually everybody else did at that time, that the world was round, but small. He had no idea of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. These tropical shores he met with were to him mere islands, interesting enough in themselves but blocking his passage to the place he really wished to reach—Cathay, China, the Orient. Impatiently he sought a strait, a way through.

      Later that year, two experienced pilots, both of whom had served under the master, picked up and rather more closely examined that same Isthmus of Darien. Their voyage is of moment chiefly because their passenger, the learned Amerigo Vespucci, more or less by accident managed to give his name, as America, to the whole of the New World. Vespucci contributed nothing else.

      Rodrigo de Bastidas in 1500-1501 was probably the first explorer to see the mouth of the Chagres River; but he found no connecting waterway.

      Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the best of the conquistadores, a man who entertained the highly un-Spanish belief that it was better to deal kindly with the Indians than to slaughter them out of hand.3 It was he who first crossed the isthmus and who, on September 25, 1513, was the first white man to gaze upon the Pacific, which he called the Great South Sea; it was he too who first heard of the fabulously rich lands to the south, Peru. Had he lived a little longer, this period of history might have been much less bloody and much more edifying; but he was unfortunate in his political enemies, and his head, together with the heads of five of his associates, was lopped off in public.

      Six years after that a Portuguese, Magellan, working for the king of Spain, at last did find a passage between the two great oceans. This, however, was so far to the south, so tortuous and turbulent, that it was impractical.4 It was Magellan who named the newly found sea the Pacific. After what he had just been through anything would have seemed pacific.

      Vasco Nuñez De Balboa

      The widower king of Spain, Ferdinand, died January 23, 1516, and was succeeded by his grandson Charles. Charles V, who soon afterward was to become as well the Holy Roman Emperor, was interested in the possibility of a passage between the seas. When a hitherto unknown subject, Hernando Cortes, conquered all Mexico, then known as New Spain, Charles instructed him to seek diligently for such a strait, and if he failed to find one to consider the possibility of digging a canal. It was a lieutenant of Cortes, Alvaro Saavedra, who drew up the first plan for a Venta de Cruces-Panama canal at the next-to-narrowest part of the whole isthmus; but nothing came of this.

      The search was not confined to the Atlantic side. In 1522 one Gil Gonzáles Dávila crossed the mountains from the Gulf of Nicoya and discovered Lake Nicaragua. (Incidentally, on that same trip he converted to Christianity 32,000 Indians, or so he said.) The natives there told him that from the eastern end of that lake there fell into the Atlantic a great river; and he duly reported this to his superiors. It was in this way that the Nicaraguan scheme was started. Most of the early and many or most of the later explorers favored the Nicaraguan route over that of Panama. It would have been longer, but lower: It is the lowest point in the whole chain of mountains that stretches from the Arctic to Patagonia. The lake in the middle—101 miles long, and the largest body of fresh water between the Great Lakes and Lake Titicaca, which lies between Bolivia and Peru—would of course have helped immeasurably.

      There were others. There was the “waist” of Mexico, Tehuantepec. The distance across this isthmus was greater than that across any of the others, but the land was generally flatter, the rivers more docile, the climate less poisonous. Cortes had looked into this possibility early in his career, and the government of the Republic of Mexico, when it came into being, was assiduous in its examination. Again, nothing resulted.

      There was the Darien route across Panama, the route Balboa had taken, which was slightly shorter than the Chagres-Venta de Cruces route, but much more rugged, and higher.

      There was the Atrato River route in Continental Colombia, near the Isthmus of Panama. This stream falls into the Gulf of Darien, and its upper waters are only a few miles from another fair-sized stream that goes west into the Pacific. Rumor had it for many years that the transoceanic canal already had come into existence at this point, where a missionary had persuaded the natives to dig a ditch connecting the two rivers, a ditch that in the rainy season would be filled with water enough to float a canoe. No proof of this has been found, and even the name of the enterprising missionary is missing. The route still remains a possibility.

      As early as 1524, Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian employed by Francis I of France, while cruising the Atlantic seaboard of what is now the United States, missed the opening of Chesapeake Bay. He did, however, land on the eastern shore of Maryland, and marched across the peninsula to the bay, which he thought was the Indian Ocean, and which he claimed for France. A little later, still looking for the strait sought by all the world, Verrazano sailed north to what might have been, from his description, the entrance to New York Bay.5 This was more than eighty years before the arrival on that scene of Henry Hudson.

      Charles V had been succeeded by his son Philip II, who reigned for a long while. Philip in 1567 sent an Italian engineer, Juan Bautista Antonelli, to Nicaragua for a good look around. Antonelli reported back that the difficulties were too great to make the building of a canal practical; and that was the end of that.

      Historians generally have remarked that Philip II was opposed to the idea of an interoceanic canal on the ground that if God had wanted there to be a water route at this place He would have created it Himself, so an artificial passage would be a sacrilege. This is possible, though not an established fact; for Philip was a fanatic. It was he who ruled Spain at the height of the Inquisition, which he encouraged, and he who sent out the Armada that was as much religious in purpose as it was imperialistic.

      Yet there were other reasons why he might have