The Panama Canal

In the Age of Discovery, the only sea route westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean--and eastward the other way--turned out to be the treacherous Drake Passage off Cape Horn at the southern tip of the Americas. (At the opposite end, the search for the Northwest Passage ran into a dead end.) Many saw the potential of the Isthmus of Panama that ran between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific: indeed, a Scottish colony in Darien failed spectacularly in 1700, causing an economic crisis back home and leading indirectly to the Act of Union with England.

The California Gold Rush of 1849 demonstrated the area's canal potential to Americans: the quickest route from the eastern USA to the gold fields was a sea voyage interrupted by an arduous jungle trek across the isthmus, at that time part of Colombia. But the first attempt, in the 1880s, was by a French consortium under Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose Suez Canal had transformed international trade and travel. But he pursued an impracticable plan with ill-suited machines, and yellow fever killed thousands of canal workers, largely from Caribbean communities like Barbados. This attempt ended in a financial scandal that rocked the Third Republic.

An American scheme was more successful. US President Theodore Roosevelt made the canal's construction a priority, to the point of promoting a local revolution when the Colombian government held out. Panama declared independence in 1903 and quickly granted the Americans control over the Canal Zone, dividing the nation in two. The Americans used a more practical plan, using bigger machines to build a series of locks. Medical experts like William Gorgas took sanitary measures to reduce yellow fever. The canal opened in 1914 and would transport over 10,000 ships in a typical year.

In 1977 the Carter administration signed an agreement promising to cede the canal to Panama in 1999. Conservatives like Ronald Reagan loudly disapproved and the Senate only ratified the treaty by a narrow margin, but it stands out as a rare enlightened measure in the USA's mostly dishonourable dealings with Central America. (A 1989 US invasion to remove Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega didn't stop the process.) Today the canal's future is somewhat uncertain: a drought recently lowered the artificial Gatun Lake and slowed down shipping, and rival corridors have been proposed for Nicaragua and Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

For background reading, you can try Matthew Parker's Panama Fever.

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