You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [42]
The first company to obtain rights from the Colombian government tried and failed in 1878. Two years later, Ferdinand de Lesseps, famed as the engineer of the recently completed Suez Canal, stepped forward to undertake the project.
In 1880 de Lesseps, who had been French consul to Egypt, was already seventy-five years old. The Suez Canal had taken him ten years to build, from 1859 to 1869. Over 1.5 million workers, many of them Egyptian slaves, were employed to dig the canal, and of those, over 100,000 died from exposure, exertion and disease. The project had begun under the viceroy of Egypt and was completed under Napoleon III. (It’s interesting to note that there had been a rudimentary canal that dated from the days of the pharaohs up to the Roman occupation of Egypt, but it had been abandoned and allowed to become derelict when shipping around the Cape of Good Hope became possible.)
The Suez project had originally been delayed because of a belief that the two seas, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, were of different levels. When this was proved wrong by an international team of engineers, de Lesseps was able to construct a sea-level canal. The resulting channel was a great success, making de Lesseps a national hero. The grand opening in November 1869 was an enormous occasion. Giuseppe Verdi had been commissioned to compose the opera Aida, which was performed for the first time in the new Cairo Opera House, also built in celebration of the new canal.
Six years later, de Lesseps let it be known he was ready to tackle the next great canal-building project, “La Grande Tranchee.” When he went to backers to ask for money for the Panama enterprise, they were eager to support him.
De Lesseps himself was not an engineer. In 1880 he formed the Compagnie universelle du canal interoceanique with his investors’ money. He was certain that he could build a sea-level canal as he had in Egypt. (In fact, flush with the success of the Suez, he had come up with various other insane plans, including linking Moscow and Peking by rail, with Bombay and Paris en route, with a total disregard of geography.) He held a congress in Paris to discuss routes for the project, attended by participants from the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany and many other countries. The U.S. Navy in particular had surveyed the area closely and had a lot to say about the difficulty of accomplishing what de Lesseps had in mind. He did not listen to them. He did, however, listen to his own handpicked engineer, Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon-Bonaparte Wyse, who slapped together a plan for him, probably put together out of documents obtained illegally from the United States survey team’s reports. Unbelievably, he proposed a tunnel through the mountains, following the line of the existing railway, to avoid having to excavate the path completely. It was pointed out to Wyse that the water course he proposed moving, the Chagres River, was subject to seasonal flooding, like the Nile, and would inundate the tunnel frequently. Thinking on his feet, Wyse then proposed that they would pass the Chagres under the tunnel instead.
Almost unheard, an engineer named Baron Godin de Lepinay proposed an alternate plan that would use a man-made lake as a staging area for ships to pass one another. He was voted down. The congress, packed with de Lesseps’s supporters, voted in favor of the plan.
The company seemed to have been in disarray from the beginning. To supply the enterprise with men and goods over the course of the construction, it laid down railroad tracks in Panama, without checking to make certain that the gauge of the existing tracks was the same. In fact, it wasn’t. In the company’s records were inexplicable purchases, such as an order for 10,000