Panama Canal (1904-1914): Building the Path Between the Seas

The Panama Canal was built by the United States between 1904 and 1914 across the narrow Isthmus of Panama, creating a shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. After a failed French attempt, American engineers defeated tropical disease, cut a channel through the mountains of the Continental Divide and built enormous locks to lift ships over the land. The canal opened on 15 August 1914, cutting the sea voyage from New York to San Francisco by roughly 13,000 kilometres (8,000 miles).

Background: the French failure

People had dreamed of a canal across Central America since the 16th century. After completing the Suez Canal in 1869, Ferdinand de Lesseps led a French company that began work in Panama, then part of Colombia, in 1881. He insisted on a sea-level canal like Suez, ignoring the mountains and the flooding Chagres River. The French nonetheless excavated a substantial part of the later route, especially around Culebra, and left behind machinery, buildings and the Panama Railroad, which they had bought, for their successors.

Yellow fever and malaria killed thousands of workers, landslides buried excavations, and money ran out. The company collapsed in 1889 amid a financial scandal that ruined many French investors (see the French Panama Canal attempt). Commonly cited estimates put deaths during the French period at around 20,000 or more.

The American decision

The Spanish–American War of 1898 highlighted the need: the battleship USS Oregon took more than two months to steam from San Francisco around South America to the Caribbean. President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901, was determined to build a canal. Congress chose Panama over a rival route through Nicaragua in 1902, and agreed to buy the French company’s assets for 40 million dollars.

In 1903 the Colombian Senate rejected the Hay–Herrán Treaty, which would have leased a canal zone to the United States. Panamanian separatists, encouraged by the French engineer and lobbyist Philippe Bunau-Varilla, declared independence on 3 November 1903. US warships prevented Colombian troops from intervening, and Washington recognised the new republic within days.

On 18 November 1903 Bunau-Varilla, acting as Panama’s envoy, signed the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty. It granted the United States control “in perpetuity” of a Canal Zone about 16 km (10 miles) wide in return for 10 million dollars and an annual payment of 250,000 dollars. Many Panamanians resented the treaty, which had been signed by a Frenchman on their behalf, and it remained a source of tension for decades. Disputes over sovereignty in the Zone led to repeated protests, most seriously the riots of January 1964, and eventually to the Torrijos–Carter Treaties of 1977, under which Panama took full control at the end of 1999.

A slow start, 1904–1907

The United States formally took over on 4 May 1904. The first chief engineer, John Findley Wallace, faced chaos: worn-out French machinery, no proper housing and a yellow fever outbreak in 1905 that caused panic. He resigned in June 1905.

His successor, the railway engineer John Frank Stevens, transformed the project. He stopped digging until the infrastructure was ready, rebuilt the Panama Railroad, and built housing, warehouses, water supplies and sewers. Stevens also argued persuasively for a lock canal instead of a sea-level one, and Congress approved the lock plan in June 1906. In November 1906 Roosevelt visited Panama, the first sitting US president to travel abroad.

Stevens resigned in 1907, and Roosevelt gave the job to an army engineer, George Washington Goethals, who led the project to completion with firm, centralised control.

Defeating disease

The decisive change was medical. In 1900 an American commission led by Walter Reed in Cuba had confirmed the theory of the Cuban physician Carlos Finlay that yellow fever was spread by a mosquito, now called Aedes aegypti. Malaria had been linked to Anopheles mosquitoes in the 1890s.

Dr William Crawford Gorgas, chief sanitary officer, organised a campaign against the insects. Teams fumigated buildings, screened windows, installed piped water in Panama City and Colón so that people no longer kept open water barrels, drained swamps and spread oil on standing water. Yellow fever was eliminated from the Canal Zone by 1906, and malaria rates fell sharply, though it was never eliminated.

Gorgas faced scepticism. Some officials considered mosquito control a waste of money, and in 1905 the head of the canal commission tried to have him replaced. Roosevelt, advised by doctors who supported the mosquito theory, kept Gorgas in place. The success in Panama became a model for public-health campaigns in other tropical regions, and Gorgas later served as Surgeon General of the US Army.

The Culebra Cut and the locks

The hardest task was the Culebra Cut, about 13 km (8 miles) long, through the hills of the Continental Divide. Steam shovels loaded rock blasted by dynamite into trains that carried it away along constantly moved tracks. The unstable clay and shale repeatedly slid back into the cut; the Cucaracha slide alone buried work again and again. The engineer in charge of the cut, David du Bose Gaillard, died in 1913, and the cut was renamed Gaillard Cut in 1915 in his honour.

To control the Chagres River, engineers built the Gatun Dam, an earth dam that created Gatun Lake, then the largest artificial lake in the world. Ships would cross much of the isthmus on the lake, about 26 metres (85 feet) above sea level.

Three sets of paired locks raise and lower ships: Gatun on the Atlantic side, with three steps, and Pedro Miguel and Miraflores on the Pacific side. Each chamber is about 305 metres (1,000 feet) long and 33.5 metres (110 feet) wide. Built of concrete, the locks were among the largest structures of their time, with steel gates operated by electric motors and ships guided by electric locomotives nicknamed “mules”.

The locks are filled and emptied by gravity alone. Huge culverts in the walls and floors carry water down from Gatun Lake into a chamber to raise a ship, or release it towards the sea to lower one, with no pumps needed. Each transit uses millions of litres of fresh water from the lake, which depends on the heavy rainfall of the Panamanian rainforest. A full passage through the canal, about 80 km (50 miles) from deep water to deep water, typically takes eight to ten hours.

The workforce

At its peak around 1912–1913, the project employed some 40,000 to 45,000 workers. Most were from the Caribbean, particularly Barbados, with others from Jamaica and other islands, Spain, Italy, Greece, the United States and Panama.

Workers were divided into a “gold roll”, largely white Americans paid in gold dollars, and a “silver roll”, mostly Black West Indians and southern Europeans paid less in Panamanian silver. The two groups had separate housing, commissaries and facilities. Official US records list about 5,600 deaths from disease and accidents between 1904 and 1914, the great majority among silver-roll workers.

Daily life in the Canal Zone was tightly organised by the commission, which ran housing, food stores, schools, hospitals, clubs and police. For American employees, the government provided comfortable houses and subsidised food to attract skilled workers to the tropics. West Indian workers lived in crowded barracks or rented rooms in Panama City and Colón, and many stayed after construction ended, forming lasting communities in Panama.

Opening

The crane boat Alexandre La Valley made the first complete transit, without ceremony, on 7 January 1914. The official opening came on 15 August 1914, when the cargo and passenger ship SS Ancon passed from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The First World War had broken out in Europe a few weeks earlier, and the celebrations were muted. The canal had cost the United States about 375 million dollars, at the time its largest public works project.

The canal soon proved its value. Traffic grew rapidly after the war, landslides in the Culebra Cut that closed the canal for months in 1915–1916 were gradually brought under control, and by the 1930s several thousand ships passed through each year.

Key people

• Theodore Roosevelt pushed the project through and backed Panama’s independence.
• John Frank Stevens set up the infrastructure and championed the lock design.
• George Washington Goethals directed construction from 1907 to 1914 and became the first governor of the Canal Zone.
• William C. Gorgas led the campaign against yellow fever and malaria.
• Philippe Bunau-Varilla negotiated the 1903 treaty for Panama.

Timeline

• 1881: French company under Ferdinand de Lesseps begins work.
• 1889: French company collapses.
• 1903, 3 November: Panama declares independence from Colombia.
• 1903, 18 November: Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty is signed.
• 1904, 4 May: The United States takes over the canal works.
• 1906, June: Congress approves a lock canal.
• 1907: George Washington Goethals becomes chief engineer.
• 1913, 10 October: The Gamboa dike is blown up, flooding the Culebra Cut.
• 1914, 15 August: SS Ancon makes the first official transit.
• 1999, 31 December: The canal passes fully to Panama.

Why it matters

The Panama Canal reshaped world shipping and naval strategy, making the United States a two-ocean power and tying the economies of the Americas, Europe and Asia more closely together. Its construction was also a landmark in public health, while its treaty and segregated labour system shaped Panamanian history until the canal was handed over in 1999.