The Panama Canal

Look at a map of the Americas and the temptation is obvious. Where the canal now runs, the isthmus of Panama is about fifty miles wide — a thin green bridge between two continents, Atlantic on one side, Pacific on the other. Spanish officials noticed within a generation of the conquest, and in the sixteenth century Charles V ordered a survey. Nothing came of it: the technology of the age could not move the earth involved, and the isthmus was a fever swamp. The idea slept for three hundred years, until the California gold rush made the crossing urgent. American investors built the Panama Railroad, finished in the 1850s, and it proved two things at once. First, that a crossing here was worth an extraordinary sum. Second, that the ground would take its payment in lives: workers died of fever in such numbers that no true figure was ever established, and the stories told afterwards — a dead man for every sleeper — belong to legend rather than the records. Anyone paying attention could have read the warning. Almost nobody did.

In 1881 the French began to dig. Their company was led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, seventy-five years old and carrying the authority of Suez, where he had managed to drive a canal through the Egyptian desert and had become, in the eyes of Europe, the man who moved continents. De Lesseps was not an engineer, and Panama was not Egypt. He insisted on repeating the design that had worked at Suez: a canal at sea level, cut straight through, with no locks at all. But Suez is flat sand, while Panama has a mountainous spine, some of the heaviest rainfall on earth, and the Chagres River, which in the wet season can rise many metres in a day. To excavate a sea-level channel there meant removing a mountain and taming a river at once. They set to work with steam shovels and dynamite, and for a while the spoil came out in impressive quantities. Then the slopes began to move. Each landslide slid wet clay back into the cutting, sometimes burying the machines that had dug it, and the men never succeeded in getting ahead of the hillside.

The greater killer was invisible. Yellow fever and malaria swept the camps in waves, and nobody yet knew that mosquitoes carried them; the doctors of the day blamed bad air rising from the swamps, and it is often said that hospital bed-legs were stood in pans of water to keep ants off, breeding the very insects that were killing the patients. The rate of attrition was appalling. Estimates for the French period commonly run to twenty thousand deaths or more, most of them West Indian labourers whose names were never recorded; new men arrived by ship and were buried within months. By 1889 the company had run out of money as well as luck. It collapsed, taking with it the savings of tens of thousands of small French investors, and the scandal that followed reached deep into French politics, putting respected men, including Gustave Eiffel, in the dock. De Lesseps died a broken figure. The French had failed to conquer Panama, and were forced to abandon the works to the jungle.

The United States picked up what France had dropped, and Theodore Roosevelt wanted it badly. Washington first debated a rival route through Nicaragua, where French interests pressed the case that volcanoes made it unsafe. Panama it was — but Panama was then a province of Colombia, and the Colombian senate refused to ratify the treaty on Washington's terms, judging the price too low and the loss of authority too great. Roosevelt was furious. When Panamanian separatists moved in November 1903, an American warship was on hand and Colombian troops were prevented from crossing the isthmus to put the rising down. Panama was independent within days and recognised by Washington almost immediately. The treaty that followed, the Hay–Bunau-Varilla treaty, granted the United States a ten-mile-wide Canal Zone in perpetuity. It was signed for Panama not by a Panamanian but by Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a French engineer from the old canal company acting as the new republic's envoy — a fact Panamanians have resented ever since, and one that sits underneath every later argument about sovereignty.

Before a single ship could pass, the Americans had to solve what had killed the French. Dr William Gorgas, an army doctor who had seen the mosquito theory proved in Cuba, was given the job — though the commission in Washington at first thought him a crank and nearly gave up funding him. What he ran was less a medical campaign than a military one. Whole towns were fumigated house by house; swamps were drained; standing water was oiled so larvae could not breathe; buildings were screened; water was piped so people stopped storing it in open jars. This programme of sanitation cost a fortune, and it worked. Yellow fever disappeared from the Canal Zone within a couple of years, and although malaria was never fully eradicated, it fell far enough for the work to become survivable. Deaths continued — several thousand are recorded in the American period, again mostly Caribbean workers — but the difference was of another order. The canal was arguably won by the sanitary inspector before the engineer.

The engineering was rethought just as radically. John Stevens, and after him Colonel George Goethals, gave up the dream of a sea-level cut and built a canal of locks. The Chagres, the French enemy, was dammed at Gatún to create a vast artificial lake; ships would be lifted eighty-five feet into that lake in a staircase of chambers, sail across, and be lowered on the far side. Every lock is filled and emptied by gravity, using fresh water from the lake. Between lake and ocean the diggers still had to cut through the continental divide at Culebra — the Culebra or Gaillard Cut — where the slopes went on sliding as they had for the French, and trains hauled spoil away day and night. The workforce was largely Caribbean, above all Barbadian, and was paid and housed under a frankly segregated system: a "gold roll" of mostly white American staff on good pay in comfortable quarters, and a "silver roll" of black West Indian labourers on far less. The canal opened in August 1914 — and the world barely looked up, because Europe had just gone to war.

For most of the twentieth century the Canal Zone was a strip of the United States running through the middle of another country: American courts, schools, police and flags. Panamanians could see it from their windows and could not govern it. The pressure built for decades and broke in January 1964, when a dispute over whether the Panamanian flag could be flown beside the American one at a school in the Zone turned into days of rioting. Students, police and American troops clashed; more than twenty people were killed, most of them Panamanians, and Panama briefly cut diplomatic relations with Washington. The dead are commemorated each year as the Martyrs, and the date is a national holiday. After that it grew ever harder to defend a treaty signed in 1903 by a French engineer, handing a foreign power a strip of Panamanian earth for ever. The question was no longer whether the arrangement would end, but when, and how violently.

The answer came in 1977, when General Omar Torrijos and President Jimmy Carter signed the treaties that set a date for the end. The American Senate ratified them the next year by the narrowest of margins, against loud opposition at home; Carter paid a political price. The Zone was wound up and control passed gradually to Panama, with full handover at noon on the last day of 1999. The intervening years were not smooth — in 1989 the United States invaded to remove General Manuel Noriega, once its own ally, and hundreds died — but the timetable held. Since 1999 the waterway has been run by the Panama Canal Authority, and the doubters who predicted that Panama would fail to manage it have been answered: traffic and revenue rose, and in 2006 Panamanians voted in a referendum to enlarge the canal themselves. A third, much larger set of locks opened in 2016, with water-saving basins, so that the biggest modern container ships could be taken through.

Which brings the story to its strangest weakness. This is a canal that runs on rain. Every ship that climbs the staircase spends tens of millions of litres of fresh water from Gatún Lake, and that water flows away to the sea; the same lake supplies drinking water to much of Panama's population. A serious drought therefore does not slow the canal down, it closes it down. In 2023 and 2024 a dry season sharpened by El Niño dropped the lake so low that the authority was forced to cut daily transits and limit how deeply ships loaded. Queues formed at both ends, freight rates rose, and cargo was diverted around South America or sent across the US by rail. Plans for new reservoirs are under discussion, and they will displace people who live where the water would stand. More than a century on, the canal still shapes the price of goods on the far side of the world — and its future depends less on engineering than on the weather.