How the Big Ditch Was Dug

A tale of roughriding diplomacy and engineering miracles

One Panamanian diplomat was said to be so upset when he learned of the original U.S. canal treaty that he punched his country's envoy to Washington, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, in the face. Secretary of State John Hay wrote to a U.S. Senator: "You and I know very well how many points there are in this treaty to which a Panamanian patriot could object."

Could--and did. The treaty was pushed along by the big stick of Teddy Roosevelt, whose roughriding diplomacy virtually ensured long-smoldering resentment. As noted only last year in a Panamanian-made documentary film, The Treaty No Panamanian Signed, Roosevelt's Administration received inside help from Envoy Bunau-Varilla, who was not a Panamanian but a Frenchman. Bunau-Varilla, it turned out, was less interested in the well-being of the newborn country than in the realization of his years-old dream: completion of the canal.

During the 1880s, Bunau-Varilla worked for a private French company that attempted to dig a canal through the muddy, mosquito-filled tropical jungle of Panama, then a province of Colombia. Any canal across Central America would have eliminated the 7,000-mile journey around Cape Horn for ships navigating between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the time, most U.S. engineers favored a canal at sunny Nicaragua. The crossing there would have been 131 miles longer than at the 50-mile Isthmus of Panama. But almost all of the extra miles would have required no digging, since a Nicaraguan canal would feed into Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River.

The organizer of the French company was Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had built the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, and who preferred the Panama site because he believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that a Suez-style sea-level canal without locks could be built there.

But a sea-level canal required far more voluminous and difficult digging in mountainous Panama than had been necessary in the Middle Eastern sands. Few of the celebrated French engineers De Lesseps invited to inspect his plan approved it (among the doubters: Gustave Eiffel, the tower builder). The doubts were soon borne out: in 1889, De Lesseps' company went bankrupt. By that time, the French had moved 50 million cubic meters of earth--two-thirds of the amount moved at Suez. In the process, some 20,000 workers died of malaria and yellow fever (whose causes were thought to be noxious jungle vapors and immoral living rather than bacteria-carrying mosquitoes). Originally known as "the Great Frenchman," De Lesseps came to be called "the Great Undertaker."

All the sacrifice notwithstanding, steam shovels, dredges and swarms of black West Indian laborers wielding picks and shovels scarcely scratched Culebra, an eight-mile stretch where the lowest mountain pass was 275 ft. above sea level. The main hope of the company's creditors was that the U.S. would buy the French rights to the Panama project. Bunau-Varilla, at one time the company's acting director-general, began to lobby the U.S. government to do precisely that.

His first accomplishment was convincing the U.S. Senate--and Ohio's powerful Republican Mark Hanna--that the Panama route was superior to the Nicaraguan. His chief argument: Nicaragua was prey to volcanic eruptions. On the morning of a crucial Senate vote, Bunau-Varilla sent every Senator a Nicaraguan five-peso stamp picturing an erupting volcano that could have been Mount Momo-tombo, near the proposed canal line. The Senate switched to Panama on June 19, 1902. Soon afterward, Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay began to press Colombia to agree to a treaty. Their offer: $10 million in gold, plus an annual rent of $250,000. Colombia would retain sovereignty over a six-mile-wide Canal zone, but the U.S. would have the right to enforce its own regulations there. The U.S. Senate approved the treaty, but Bogota rejected it on Aug. 12,1903.

T.R. bristled. "I do not think that the Bogota lot of jack rabbits should be allowed permanently to bar one of the future highways of civilization," Roosevelt wrote Hay. Earlier that summer the New York lawyer for the French company, William Cromwell, left a meeting in Washington with the President to issue a press release stating that the province of Panama might secede from Colombia, in which case the U.S. would recognize Panama as an independent nation and conclude a treaty with the new state. This scheme seemed to violate an 1846 U.S. agreement to guarantee the sovereignty of Colombia in the isthmus. Violation or not, the plot was shortly put into effect.

As Historian David McCullough recounts in his current bestseller, The Path Between the Seas, a Panamanian secessionist who would soon become the first president of Panama, Dr. Manuel Amador Guerrero, met with Bunau-Varilla in room 1162 of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on Sept. 24, 1903. Bunau-Varilla later called that room "the cradle of the Panama republic." The frail, bespectacled Amador wanted assurance that the U.S. would support a Panamanian revolution. Bunau-Varilla left for Washington to put the question to Roosevelt. The Frenchman received "no assurances," Roosevelt said later, but the President added: "He is a very able fellow, and it was his business to find out what he thought our Government would do. He would have been a very dull man had he been unable to make such a guess."

Back in New York, Bunau-Varilla went to Macy's to purchase colored silk for a red, white and blue Panamanian flag (which his wife sewed), and he advised Amador that the U.S. would support the revolution--provided that its leaders would appoint Bunau-Varilla envoy to Washington to draft the canal treaty. Reluctantly and a bit skeptically, Amador agreed. He sailed for Panama with Bunau-Varilla's promise of $100,000 to bribe Colombian troops; he hid his new flag under his clothing, wrapped around his torso. After arriving in Panama, Amador sent a coded cable: "Fate news bad powerful tiger. Urge vapor Colon." It meant that Colombian troops were arriving in five days, and the revolutionary plotters requested a U.S. steamer at Colon. Bunau-Varilla hurried to Washington and soon afterward the U.S.S. Nashville arrived at Colon--triggering the Panamanian revolution, which remained peaceful due to the presence of U.S. troops.

In Washington, Envoy Bunau-Varilla now raced against time. Amador and his party were en route to Washington, expecting that Bunau-Varilla would await their arrival before entering negotiations. But the Frenchman was already at work, revising the proposed canal treaty to ensure Senate approval. He expanded the proposed canal zone from six to ten miles, gave the U.S. the right to expropriate additional Panamanian land and granted it "all the rights, power and authority ... which [it] would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign" of the zone. These rights were not promised for renewable periods of 100 years, as America had earlier proposed; now they were to belong to the U.S. "in perpetuity." Bunau-Varilla told Hay: "So long as the delegation has not arrived in Washington, I shall be free to deal with you alone. When they arrive, I shall no longer be alone. In fact, I may perhaps soon no longer be here at all." Rushed through in seven days, the treaty was approved at 6:40 p.m. on Nov. 18, 1903--only two hours before the Panamanians arrived at the railroad station in Washington. To secure approval of the treaty from the provisional government of Panama, Bunau-Varilla cabled the false message that Washington would withdraw its protection of the revolutionaries unless they promptly accepted the treaty.

"From the beginning to the end, our course was straightforward and in absolute accord with the highest standards of international morality," Roosevelt would claim in his Autobiography. A more typical reaction at the time was that of Attorney General Philander Knox, whom Roosevelt asked to defend the U.S. role. "Oh, Mr. President," Knox reportedly replied, "do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality."

The true grandeur of the achievement lay not in Washington but in the jungle, where the triumphs of American engineering and medicine surpassed anything the world had seen. Using techniques he had pioneered earlier with Dr. Walter Reed in Cuba, Dr. William Gorgas introduced a program of mosquito control that banished yellow fever from the isthmus (in the jungle and the cities) within eighteen months. Soon malaria too was under control. Between 1904 and 1914, when the canal opened, there were 5,600 deaths from accidents and disease.

The total volume of the U.S. excavation was 232 million cu. yds.--almost three tunes the excavation of Suez. Much of it was removed near Culebra, the area that had thwarted De Lesseps, in the breathtaking Gaillard Cut, where the canal slices through the continental divide. The U.S. spent $352 million, and the number of workers eventually totaled 50,000. Six pairs of locks were used to lift ships 85 ft. above the ocean into the Panamanian highlands and to lower them again to sea level.

Miraculously, it all worked perfectly. Thanks largely to the efforts of Major General George W. Goethals and his predecessor as chief engineer, John Stevens, the canal was not only completed on time, in 1914, but for $23 million less than had been estimated by the U.S. in 1907. By the time the steamship Ancon sailed through the canal in the official grand opening on Aug. 15,1914, World War I had just erupted and the celebrations were subdued. Even so, the canal was--and is--one of mankind's most memorable achievements, the moon shot of its day.

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