You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [43]
De Lesseps’s surveyors discovered that their major obstacles were that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were indeed of different levels, and that though Panama is narrow, its mountainous spine is the vestige of the Continental Divide that runs unbroken through North and South America. The tides of the Pacific fluctuate far more than those of the Atlantic, between twelve and twenty feet a day, which would have the effect of swamping ships heading westward. A sea-level course was not feasible.
Work began in 1881, but two years later de Lesseps’s workforce of 20,000 had yet to move even a tenth of the earth necessary. There were countless landslides, owing to the practice of piling up the rubble on either side of the trenches as they went, and the torrential tropical rainstorms’ effect upon same. Men were killed in mudslides and accidents, and a good deal of the work that had been done was undone by Mother Nature. The plan, for a channel with a uniform depth of 29.5 feet, a bottom width of 72 feet and a width at water level of 90 feet, meant that they had to move over 10 million cubic meters of earth, and they had not dealt with the natural bodies of water in the way.
Soon, another factor decimated the workforce: disease. Yellow fever began to spread throughout the camps. The French were plagued by biting insects called umbrella ants and set their bunk legs in bowls of water to discourage the pests from invading their beds. These proved to be marvelous breeding grounds for female Stegomyia fasciata mosquitoes, the carriers of yellow fever and malaria. In 1880, U.S. Navy Commander Thomas O. Selfridge, on that mission to map the Panamanian wilderness, described “mosquitoes so thick I have seen them put out a lighted candle with their burnt bodies.” (The disease was not halted until after the Americans took over the project many years later, and Dr. Walter Reed sent his protégé, Colonel William C. Gorgas, to the site to wage a campaign against the insects.) There were tarantulas and scorpions, tropical spiders of truly horrendous size and coloration, biting flies and deadly snakes. Poor sanitation, including open toilet pits, claimed many more lives.
By 1888, it was clear that de Lesseps’s project was a failure. The grandly named Compagnie was forced to declare bankruptcy. It had spent over $234 million, only a third of it spent on the construction itself, and killed over 20,000 men, without digging more than 40 percent of the way between the oceans it had been intended to unite. In 1889, the remaining assets of the company went into receivership. De Lesseps died in Paris in 1894. The Panama Canal was completed in 1914, with the financial support of the U.S. government and after some serious improvements in earth-moving technology.
You Put Him in Charge of What?
Politicians provide an endless supply of gaffes, mistakes, and blatant stupidity. Normally these annoy or even hurt those they represent. It is nice to see how some mistakes, even if they seemed a disaster to those making them, may have worked out quite well for the rest of the United States.
PRESIDENT MCKINLEY AND UNDERSECRETARY OF THE
NAVY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
WASHINGTON, 1896
Paul A. Thomsen
By the 1890S, many thought the country had settled into its place as a contented democratic power, defined by a self-indulgent domestic bourgeois orientation, and a relatively minor political player on the world stage, but they had considered neither the rising expectations of the American working class nor their resourceful grassroots leadership.
With the decline of an active executive branch after the Civil War, the American corporate sector rapidly outgrew the shopkeeper and storefront to become heavy competition in the Industrial Age