Panama fever (10 page)

He was back in Darién at the end of the year, still chasing shadows. On December 29, 1870, he sailed to the deep, beautiful Gulf of Urabá into which flows the Atrato River. This was where Balboa had founded the now abandoned town of Santa María more than three hundred years before and where Kelley's explorers had hoped to find the “Lost Canal.”

Selfridge himself was now succumbing to the wishful thinking, or “excessive optimism,” that is a recurring part of the canal story. He was much taken by the Atrato basin and allowed himself to imagine that “it [would] one day be covered with sails from every clime.” Self-ridge had been joined by fellow naval officer Edward P. Lull, who carried out a hydrographic survey of the river's gulf, while Selfridge himself headed upstream. He eventually came up with a plan that involved more than twenty locks and a tunnel five miles long. Tunnels were particularly problematic, even without geological considerations. They had to be high enough for the tallest sail-bearing masts, but there was also the problem presented by the accumulation of steam from engine-powered vessels. Nevertheless, Selfridge was keen, and further expeditions were sent to take another look.

Meanwhile, separate expeditions had set off to investigate the other possibilities suggested by Humboldt, Davis, or both. On November 11, 1870, a party of surveyors landed at Tehuantepec, the narrowest point in Mexico, where the Isthmus is 130 miles wide, with a low range of mountains. Although it was the possible canal site nearest to the United States, the surveyors found little else to recommend it. The lowest pass was over 750 feet above sea level, and the only possible canal would be 144 miles long and need an impossible 140 locks.

There were two Grant expeditions to Nicaragua. The first got off to a calamitous start, when the commander of the expedition was drowned while attempting to land. But a second expedition headed by Selfridge's previous companion Edward Lull and Cuban-born Ancieto Menocal (who had worked on the Vanderbilt survey back in 1849) conducted a thorough survey, running a line of levels from coast to coast, measuring river flows and depths, and preparing tables, maps, and charts. They confirmed the earlier survey's findings that there existed a pass only 153 feet above sea level in the narrow neck of land between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific. This was more than 100 feet lower than anything found at Panama. Lull and Menocal suggested a canal with ten locks on either side, estimated to cost nearly $65 million.

It was not until the beginning of January 1875, after a further expedition had explored other routes around the Atrato River, that the Panama survey team left New York for Colón. From the surveys conducted for the railway, the Panama route had been the best known at the outset, so it was left to last. The expedition was led by Lull and Menocal, and for two and a half months some one hundred men explored and measured the land between Colón and Panama and up into the Chagres watershed. Nevertheless, both Lull and Menocal had pretty much decided on their preference for the Nicaragua route, and they were unable to imagine a realistic design for a canal at Panama. The line of their proposed waterway largely followed that of the present-day canal. It was to be a lock canal, with a summit level of 124 feet, reached by twelve locks at either side. The problem with Panama, they correctly judged, was the volatility of the Chagres River. They suggested that what was needed was a huge, 2,000-foot-long viaduct sufficiently high to allow the floodwaters to pass under it. But the river was required as well, to supply water to the summit level, so the engineers decided that ten miles of aqueducts would have to be built. In all, it was just too impractical and expensive.

When the Inter-Oceanic Canal Commission reported in February 1876, there was a firm majority in favor of a route through Nicaragua. Tehuantepec was dismissed out of hand. Darién was too remote and wet; and the various Atrato schemes were too ambitious. All myths about “lost canals” and low passes in those areas had been exposed. Panama was too expensive, and what's more, “the deep cut would probably be subject to land-slides, from which the Panama Railroad has suffered seriously, and the canal would be exposed to serious injury from flood.”

From then on, for the next twenty-five years, U.S. canal policy was firmly focused on Nicaragua, which became lodged in the minds of the public as well, who were beginning to demand an American canal under American control rather than the neutral and open-to-all arrangement favored by the Grant Commission. In 1877, treaty negotiations were started with the Nicaraguan government. In contrast, the United States did not even have a diplomatic representative in Bogotá. Slowly, draft treaties were drawn up, while private companies jostled for the concession, and Ancieto Menocal prepared another, even more thorough, Nicaragua-bound surveying party.

Then, in May 1879, the United States public read in their papers news from Paris that upset all previous plans. Le Congrès International d'Etudes du Canal Interocéanique had approved the digging of a canal at Panama and events were moving fast. It seemed that there would be a canal, but it was going to be built by the French.

CHAPTER SIX

“LE GRAND FRANÇAIS”

Paris in the spring of 1879 was awash with frenetic financial speculation. Money was more plentiful and mobile than ever before. The expansion of the railway and telegraph networks had brought new branch banks to provincial France, and the reach of those seeking to raise capital had widened considerably. Penalties for debt and bankruptcy had been eased, and restrictions on issuing shares had been lifted. In the Paris bourse, young stockbrokers noisily wheeled and dealed, betting on pretty much anything and often making huge sums for themselves. One such was the artist Paul Gauguin, who would later work on the Panama Canal. In 1879, he made 30,000 francs, a fortune at the time.

In spite of endemic political instability, everywhere there was optimism and energy, a spirit of
revanche.
Humiliated by the Prussians in the war of 1870, France was determined that it would be great again, and would recover its prestige not through fighting, but through, as Victor Hugo put it “astonishing] the world by the great deeds that can be won without a war.” In the spring of 1878 Paris held a great exposition, which covered sixty-six acres of the city and attracted thirteen million visitors. It cost a fortune, but it demonstrated to the world France's recovery and new ambition.

The embodiment of this spirit of
revanche
was the builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, called by Gambetta
“Le Grand Français.”
Untainted by the events of 1870, he represented a new patriotism based not on war but on achievement for all mankind.

De Lesseps had followed his father into the diplomatic service, and in 1832, aged twenty-seven, had been appointed vice-consul at Alexandria and served in various roles in Egypt for the next five years. During this time he befriended the son of Egypt's viceroy and also became interested in the idea of a canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

After several positions in Europe, de Lesseps left the diplomatic service in 1849, but returned to Egypt six years later as the guest of the new viceroy, his friend Said Pasha, who had just succeeded his father. Although de Lesseps had neither expertise nor money, after just over two weeks’ stay he had persuaded Said Pasha to sign the concession that gave the Frenchman the right to build the Suez Canal.

A plan was drawn up by two French engineers and approved by an international commission of civil engineers, but there were plenty of critics of the scheme. In Britain, Robert Stephenson said he believed it to be a folly on a huge scale, and Lord Palmerston, now prime minister, called it “an undertaking which, I believe, in point of commercial character, may be deemed to rank among the many bubble schemes that from time to time have been palmed upon gullible capitalists.” In fact, the British feared the alterations in the status quo that the canal would bring. Other doubters at home and abroad predicted that the trench would fill with sand from the desert as quickly as it was dug.

But nothing could dishearten Ferdinand de Lesseps. Supported by Emperor Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie, who was a cousin of his, de Lesseps succeeded in rousing the patriotism of the French and obtaining by their subscriptions more than half of the required capital of 200 million francs. The other half of the shares were taken up by the Egyptian government, who also forced thousands of local laborers to work on the project in conditions of semi-slavery The excavation operations through the desert took nearly eleven years, during the course of which numerous technical, political, and financial problems had to be overcome. The final cost was more than double the original estimate, but the canal opened to traffic on November 17, 1869. De Lesseps, then sixty-four, was world famous.

Celebrated as the greatest living Frenchman, he was honored around the world. In 1870 he visited England, and
The Times
eulogized him as a “man eminent for originality enterprise courage and persistence … moral qualities of the highest order.” At a banquet in his honor at Stafford House he was toasted by both Gladstone and Disraeli, and six days later more than twenty thousand people filled London's Crystal Palace for a reception in his honor.

He was praised for having the unshakable confidence to believe in his project even when virtually no one else had done, but in France in particular he was also seen as a man of the people for having built the canal with the capital of twenty-five thousand small investors, rather than the big banks. Following Suez he was never out of the Paris papers, and the fact that he had a pretty, young wife and a brood of adorable children made him perfect fodder for the new illustrated magazines. When in the early 1880s he ascended to the pantheon of the French Academy, he was praised thus: “You exercise a charm. You have that supreme gift which works miracles … the true reason for your ascendancy is that people detect in you a heart full of sympathy for all that is human… people love you and like to see you and before you have opened your mouth you are cheered. Your adversaries call this your cleverness; we call it your magic.”

There was a special magic, too, about the nature of his achievement in Egypt. In a stroke, India had been brought nearly six thousand miles closer to Europe. Furthermore, in a Victorian age determined to take on and conquer the world with innovation, engineering, and entrepreneurship, the Suez Canal was the perfect marriage of commerce, transport, and industry, the forces that were changing the world. It was also seen as a great civilizing achievement, which “will help to wed the whole universe into one great unit, politically, industrially, and religiously,” as was written at the time.”The two sides of the world approach to greet one another …” wrote a British commentator in a similar vein.

But it was not just about high ideals. By the late 1870s, the benefits of the canal to European manufacturers were more than apparent, as the raw materials of the East, as well as its markets, had been brought so much nearer. More than anything, the canal gave Europe a critical advantage over the frighteningly fast-growing economy of the United States’ East Coast. For the canal's original backers, too, it was a bonanza. Initially the share price of de Lesseps's company had slumped. It soon turned out that his promises made during the construction for the traffic through the canal had been wild overestimates. But by 1879 a 500-franc ($100) share was trading for over 2,000 francs, and the company was paying dividends of 14 percent. Suez had made a lot of people rich.

Bathed in public adulation, de Lesseps, although by any reckoning now an old man, was not going to content himself with just the Suez Canal. “Is it not a glorious thing for us to be able to carry out… vast projects,” he wrote, “thus affirming the progress made by our race and age, in which all obstacles seem to have disappeared.” In 1873 he became interested in a project for uniting Europe and Asia by a railway to Bombay, with a branch to Peking. He subsequently got involved in a harebrained scheme to break through a low-lying ridge in Tunisia to create a huge inland sea in the Sahara.