Panama fever (13 page)

His adoring public in the onlookers’ seats were ecstatic. At the end of the Congress, the chairman, the elderly Admiral de La Ron-cière, underlined that it was
Le Grand Français
himself who had carried the day: “May that illustrious man, who has been the heart and soul of our deliberations,” he declared, “who has captivated us by charm, and who is the personification of these great enterprises, may he live long enough to see the end of this work, which will bear his name forever. He has not been able to refuse to assume its command, and in so doing he continues to carry out the mission which has made him a citizen of the whole world.”

With the benefit of hindsight there were warning signs everywhere. Thirty-eight delegates had conveniently absented themselves from the vote and 16 had abstained. The predominantly French pro votes did not include any of the 5 delegates from the French Society of Engineers. Of the 74 voting in favor, only 19 were engineers, and of those, only one, a Colombian who had a vested interest in the Wyse concession, had ever been in Central America.

o the Americans the whole affair had been an appalling travesty. At the heart of their displeasure was outrage that anyone else, particularly the French, should dare to presume to build a canal in their backyard, in what was effectively a United States protectorate. On his return to the United States, Menocal wrote an article for the
North American Review
entitled “Intrigues at the Paris Canal Conference.” It was introduced by a short piece by the journal's editor, which gives some indication of the vitriol of the Americans. As far as the editor was concerned, it was all a conspiracy among hard up prominent Bonapartists, who had lost their means of subsistence with the fall of Napoléon III. “A careful examination of the names of the French delegates to the Canal Congress shows how entirely it was packed with subservient friends of the fallen dynasty; nor is it well to overlook the fact that the shares of the Türr company were largely held by them.” “These people once went to Mexico to seek their fortunes in a Franco-Mexican empire,” he went on. “It seems passing strange that the conspicuous defeat of those plans, which embraced the destruction of the American Union, should have failed to teach them some degree of caution before affecting to… tamper with American interests in America.”

This suspicion predated the conference. In February 1879 Wyse had traveled to Washington to ensure American attendance at the Congress. He had met President Hayes and Secretary of State William Evarts. The latter was openly hostile to any further French “adventures” in Central America—it can't have helped that Wyse had “Napoleon” in his name—and might well have been instrumental in blocking Wyse and Reclus's access prior to the Congress to the detailed American maps and surveys.

When Menocal and Ammen reported back to Evarts at the end of the conference, they confirmed his misgivings, saying the decision for Panama had been determined not by “relative consideration of natural advantages,” but from “personal interests arising from the concession.” If Nicaragua had been chosen, then the Wyse concession would have been worthless. It had been a foregone conclusion, a shoo-in, what another American delegate, William E. Johnston, called “a comedy of the most deplorable kind.”

Menocal, for his part, was sure that the whole Panama project was doomed to early failure. But this was just as much a worry as the scheme's completion. Johnston, among others, feared that if de Lesseps could get the stock into the hands of a mass of ordinary Frenchmen, as he had done with Suez, the canal's inevitable failure would lead to the intervention of the French government. In terms of the sacred Monroe Doctrine, this was worse even than a French-controlled private company meddling in American affairs.

Ammen and Menocal's reports were widely covered in the U.S. press, the
New York Tribune
being particularly concerned by the “shenanigans” in Paris. In government too, there was disquiet about the outcome of the conference, a New England senator moving a resolution to the effect that the United States “viewed with serious disquietude any attempt by the powers of Europe to establish under their protection and domination a ship-canal across the Isthmus.” The
New York World
, which would be another implacable opponent of the French canal, went further, declaring that the project “prefigures for us an era of complications and difficulties in regard to the foreign policy and the commercial relations of this country more serious than any we have had to deal with in the last twenty years of our history.”

In Panama itself, where civil and political disturbances continued through June, the news from Paris was warmly welcomed, though not without a certain amused detachment. On May 29, the
Star and Herald
reported: “The Wyse Panama route is the one likely to be adopted. Indeed, many said before the Congress met that the acceptance of this route was a foregone conclusion.” The following day, reporting the final vote of the Congress as soldiers enforced martial law in the streets outside their offices, the same paper added, “It may amuse some of our readers in Nicaragua to know that a recent publication cites another objection to their route, and that is the ‘political instability’ of the country. We presume the author was satirizing Colombia at the time.” Nonetheless, to those in Panama it seemed that at last prosperity was around the corner.

n France, de Lesseps swung into action. Raising 2 million francs from selling “founders shares” to a syndicate of 270 rich and influential friends, he started negotiations to buy out the Türr syndicate, including their concession and all their maps and surveys. The deal, for 10 million francs, was concluded on July 5, 1879, and for the Türr syndicate it was almost all profit. Next, de Lesseps embarked on a whirlwind tour of France. As with Suez, he aimed to raise the starting capital, set at 400 million francs, directly from the public.

However, times had changed in France, and the power of the financial institutions and the press had risen considerably since the 1860s. This time, the banks showed their displeasure at being cut out of the lucrative issue by organizing a campaign against the canal venture. Costs had been underestimated, the venture would never pay, suggested Marc Lévy-Crémieux, vice president of the powerful Franco-Egyptian Bank. Emile de Girardin, proprietor of the mass-circulation
Petit Journal
, was another opponent. Panama's climate was a death trap, it was argued; plus, the Americans would never allow work even to start. It was rumored, too, that the vibrant de Lesseps was now in his dotage and had lost his winning ways. “The financial organs were hostile,” de Lesseps later told American reporters, “because they had not been paid.”

Consequently, the issue, on August 6 and 7, was a severe disappointment. Only 30 million francs of the desired 400 million was raised. Almost anyone other than de Lesseps would have given up right then.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE RICHES OF FRANCE

Public subscriptions live or die on confidence. It did not take a promoter of the experience and skill of de Lesseps to realize that some urgent public relations were now needed to allay fears about the Panama project. To calm concerns about the technical and practical issues of the canal, de Lesseps announced that he would himself go to Panama together with a Technical Commission of international experts. He would even take his young wife and three of his children with him, showing that fears about disease were unfounded. To counter claims that the United States opposed the project, de Lesseps would tour that country reassuring officials and drumming up support.

The first move, however, was to set up a bimonthly journal, the
Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique
, which aimed to counter the “lies” of the press with stories alleging, among other things, that Panama was “an exceedingly healthy country.” The magazine, which included extracts from favorable press coverage in France and abroad, was first published on September 1, 1879.

The following month a young engineer, Gaston Blanchet, from Couvreux, Hersent, went to Panama to investigate the route for his bosses. Already the Franco-Belgian company was being lined up to be the contractor for Panama. Blanchet himself had made his name building for the firm a metal bridge over the Danube near Vienna. When he returned from Panama with a favorable report, additional engineers were sent out in November to take test borings. In December, de Lesseps himself boarded the
Lafayette
at Saint-Nazaire bound for the Isthmus. The expedition was funded by Couvreux, Hersent, and on board was Abel Couvreux's son as well as Blanchet, who was particularly keen to return to Panama as he had met and fallen in love with a local girl, Maria Georgette Loew, the daughter of the proprietor of the Grand Hotel. Also on the trip was Jacob Dirks, a Dutch engineer who had built the Amsterdam Canal; Henri Bionne, who had been secretary of the Paris Congress; and a number of other technicians.