The Path Between the Seas

The creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914

By David Mc Cullough

I've been asked to contribute to to Blog as the resident History Nerd.  I've been reading history ( along with a ton of other genres) all my life.  I have read pretty much all of the Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, W.E.B. Griffin, Nelson DeMille, and Brad Thor out there, but I keep coming back to Biographies and history. I'll take my first shot with a book from 1977.  A Pulitzer prize winner by one of the best historians of the late 20th Century.

     This a a very readable history of the building of the Panama Canal.  Common misperception is that it was the brainchild of Theodore Roosevelt. This cannot be further from the truth. Explorers, business tycoons, hustlers and con men talked about a canal across Cental America as far back as the 17th Century.  In the 1840's the American Navy even sent a surveying team to look at the possibility of a canal across Nicaragua or the Columbian owned Ithmus of Panama. 

     The first attempt at acual construction of a canal was started in 1880 by a French consortium led by Ferdinand  de Lesseps, financed by stock sold to the French public.  de Lesseps was at the time looked at in Europe as the greatest builder of the time, having been the driving force behind the sucessful building of the Suez canal. By 1889 the French company and de Lesseps were bankrupt and broken by the enormity of the task of trying to build a sea level canal through one of the most inhospitable enviornments in the world.

     After the assasination of William McKinley, the new President, Theodore Roosevelt,  reopened the process.  Through a fully immoral if not illegal, set of mechinations, a revolt (financed by Wall Street and aided by the presense of an American Navy cruiser)  occured in the Columbian province of Panama. Quickly the leaders of the new "country" sold the rights to a strip of land across Panama to the US for 99 years.
    
     The building of the actual canal was as much a triumph of effective railroad management  and public health management as anythig else. Names such as Dr William Gorgas, engineer John Stevens, and Colonel George Goethals had as much to do with the sucess as Roosevelt.

    Any time I have a friend plan a Pamama Canal cruise, I try to have them read this book first.  It really helps make the canal experience more understandable.   This book is very well researched and very much up to McCullough's standard.