A big chunk of history for the longest chunk of time ever known
Since everyone knows that January 2022 would be the longest month ever, I was in need of “a big chunk of history.” A history book to exemplify one month alone was just a tiny blip in the universe. Luckily, this is precisely how the New York Times described The Path Between the Seas when it debuted in 1977. David McCullough, signing off from Martha’s Vineyard in the Author’s Note, wrote an eerily relevant masterpiece.
In the latter half of the 19th Century, the titans of industry wanted to avoid the thirteen thousand miles, a month-long trip around the horn to arrive in San Francisco from New York. So the question became- which Central American country would get sliced in half? Nicaragua or Panama. The premier engineers were from France, and through a public offering, raised the cash to fund a project to begin dredging in Panama.
The entrepreneur to lead this venture, Ferdinand De Lesseps, was a showman, with all “the requisite traits for the role: nerve, persistence, dynamic energy, a talent for propaganda, a capacity for deception, imagination.” De Lesseps was a “bit of an actor and as shrewd and silky a diplomat as anyone of his time.”
De Lesseps helped build the Suez, so he had the track record of raising capital, and his networking skills would make any budding entrepreneur envious.
Mccullough weaves together the story of a new kind of corporation stemming from the hopes and dreams of the average French citizen. They bought into De Lesseps’s vision for the public good that would hopefully lead to an abundance of economic wealth.
Six hundred thousand shares were offered at $500 francs each ($100each). It was very expensive stock to the average person, but the terms were mouth-watering good. “Only 25% down, with six years to pay off the rest.” And the Suez public offering was entirely out of reach of the ordinary citizen and was a raging success. It was listed at the Bourse (the French stock exchange) at more than $2,000 and paying a dividend of 17%. Nobody wanted to sit the next one out, but they would wish they had shown more constraint this time around.
As soon as the international community descended upon the shores of Colon, disease followed. The swampland was a feeding ground for mosquitos — and if it was yellow fever, a patient had less than a fifty-fifty chance at survival. Unsurprisingly, it was hard to prevent a disease when its transmission method was still completely unclear. To complete the Canal and reap the economic benefits, the workers needed to die less frequently from tropical diseases. Without clear and effective public health measures, the Canal’s progress lagged.
Ultimately, the timelines for completion were naive, and the budget estimates were completely off-base — the downfall of any swashbuckling 1880s businessman or 21st-century tech entrepreneur.
Things unraveled quickly, and the French’s fast start would soon peter out. Thousands would fall prey to the female Linneaus mosquito as it thrived off human blood, and bred almost infinitely in the shallow pools of water everywhere in the country.
Just as the Panama Canal would become a relic of 1880s French optimism, another colonial power would take the mantle. And in America, Teddy Roosevelt’s America, the Panama Canal’s disease and engineering challenges found its match
For as much as it would be an engineering feat to dredge so much ground, it could not happen without the disease prevention of Dr. Gorgas.
“As Dr. Gorgas was to write, had the French been consciously trying to propagate malaria and yellow fever, they could not have provided conditions better suited for the purpose.”
When I thought a six hundred page tome might begin to stale, McCullough weaves together one juicy anecdote after another. Like the public health efforts to cut the Panama cities into quadrants and do more advanced contact tracing than anything we have seen in the American plague years of ‘20-’22.
Or how Edouard Dumont, a prominent and very anti-Semitic newspaper publisher, exploited the economic anxiety the Canal corporation caused in France to blame its demise on the Jews. Observing how effective the scapegoating became, he next turned his sights on a military officer, Alfred Dreyfus, which became a harbinger of the Jewish people’s problems in Europe in the 20th Century.
There are great engineering feats full of explosions and extreme dredging, which I found the least engaging when the economic, public health, and political stories weave such rich and engaging tales. There are the stories of how William Nelson Cromwell (founder of that fancy Wall Street firm, Sullivan and Cromwell) helped orchestrate an American-backed coup d’etat to put an American-friendly politician into power in newly created Panama. It was also the largest real estate transaction ever when America bought the land from France at the turn of the Century. And Cromwell was paid more than any Lawyer at the time for his lobbying efforts.
When the Canal was returned to Panama in the 1970s, McCullough advised President Carter. It is clear why. Mccullough dedicated most of the decade to learning about this subject, and Carter thanked him for his dedication and depth of knowledge, and so do we all. It truly was a masterpiece, and almost fifty years after it was published, I am in awe of how relevant and insightful it is — truly a “big chunk of history.”
