CHAPTER IV.
THE FRENCH FAILURE.
The French company began work on the isthmus in February, and such a rake's progress set in as the world has seldom seen. The name of Ferdinand de Lesseps inspired such confidence that plenty of money was forthcoming from the French people. A great deal of it was subscribed by small investors who could ill afford to lose their savings, and no fewer than 16,000 women took shares in their own names. The beginning of the excavations was celebrated with a "gala" performance in the little theatre at Panama, among the artistes being Sarah Bernhardt. Then began a drama or a melodrama of extravagance and profligacy lasting seven years. Money was poured out like the torrential flood-waters down the river Chagres. I have mentioned the exorbitant sum which the company paid for the Panama Railway. All the expenditure was on the same scale. Princely salaries were paid to the managers and directors, and elegant mansions erected for their accommodation. Building operations—warehouses, hospitals, hotels, etc.—were carried on "regardless." Mr. W. F. Johnson tells of a man who owned thirty acres of land useful mainly as a breeding-place for mosquitoes, but lying right across the route of the canal. It was worth perhaps 300 dollars. The man demanded just a thousand times that sum; the Colombian courts awarded it, and the French paid it. For one great mistake the French made was that they failed to secure a canal zone in which they would have exercised full powers of administration. They began to build their canal on Colombian territory, under Colombian control, and the consequence was that they were fleeced on every side. Probably this mistake was inevitable, as the United States would have vetoed any territorial concession by Colombia to France as a transgression of the Monroe doctrine.
The isthmus rapidly degenerated into a moral as well as a climatic pest-house. Froude described the condition of things at Panama in one terrible sentence: "In all the world there is perhaps not now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disease, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination." In fairness, however, it must be said that Lesseps himself cannot be held directly responsible for this state of affairs. He lived in Paris, and had probably little notion of what was happening at Panama. He furnished an example of the proverbial effects of too much success and prosperity. He seems to have become a superstitious believer in his own star, and to have thought that nothing could fail with which he was associated. Still less can the French nation be blamed for the wild doings of their representatives at the isthmus. And there is at least one redeeming feature in the conduct of this enterprise. In the midst of the moral and physical abominations that infested the isthmus during the French occupation, the engineering work went on steadily and conscientiously. Much of the French work was available for the Americans when they took over the task, and the engineers of the United States have always testified generously to the excellence of the French excavation and construction along the Canal route.
It must be carefully noted that the French canal was to be sea-level like the Suez, Corinth, and Kiel Canals. The construction of such a waterway differed in many important ways from that of the high-level lock canal which the United States have completed. To understand this we must consider briefly the character of the country which lies between Panama and Colon. The dominant and decisive features of the isthmus at this point are the Chagres River and the Culebra Mountains. The Chagres enters the Caribbean a little west of Colon. Its valley runs right across the isthmus south-south-eastwardly towards Panama for about twenty-six miles, then, at a place called Bas Opisbo, suddenly swerves away to the north-east into the trackless and jungle-clad hill country. This valley is the only transverse trench which the isthmus affords at this stretch, and it has always fixed the attention of surveyors looking out for a canal site. If the isthmus had been a rainless desert like that of Suez, a canal could have been constructed by a further preparation of this river valley and some heavy excavations along the nine-mile reach from Obispo to the Pacific. The sea would then have been admitted, the ebb and flow of the Pacific (the Atlantic shore is almost tideless) being regulated by a tidal lock. But the problem is not nearly so simple. The isthmus is one of the rainiest places in the world, enjoying on the Atlantic side 140 inches of rain a year. At Panama the rate is much smaller, not more than 60 inches. In the central hills the rainfall averages 90 to 95 inches. The average number of rainy days in the year is 246 at Bohio (inland on the Atlantic side), 196 at Colon, and 141 at Panama. The reader must not imagine a perpetual downpour or drizzle. The rain comes down in thundering tropical cataracts, leaving spaces of fine weather between the storms. Still, the isthmus is undoubtedly rainy and damp, and it is this humidity which makes the climate so trying, though the variations of the thermometer are by no means extreme and the average air temperature not particularly high. For example, the average temperature at Panama ranges from 81.6 Fahrenheit in November to 86.1 in March—that is, during the hottest time of the day, from two to four o'clock p.m. The coolest time is from six to seven a.m., when the average temperature ranges between 74.0 in January to 76.6 in June. The yearly average daily temperature is 79.6. The thermometer seems never to have recorded 100 degrees Fahrenheit at Panama, whereas 104 has been touched even at Washington.
But to return to the Chagres River. The tropical rains convert this stream very quickly into a raging torrent. The Chagres is capable of rising over forty feet in twenty-four hours. If the Chagres valley was to be the site of the canal, as was obviously necessary, how did the French propose to "care for" this tremendous and capricious flow of water? Mr. Johnson remarks that "those who have seen the antics of the Chagres under the stress of a characteristic isthmian rain must be pardoned if they regard the harnessing of the Chagres to the canal as something much like the harnessing of a mad elephant to a family carriage." The only course open to the French with their sea-level project was to divert the Chagres with its twenty-six tributaries, chief of which are the Gatun and the Trinidad, from its old valley into another channel, along which it could rage as it pleased on its short journey to the Caribbean. This would have been a tremendous, though probably not an impossible, task. The New Panama Company, which took the French work from the Lesseps Company in 1893, dropped the tide-level in favour of a lock or high-level canal, and adopted the plan of a dam across the river valley at Bohio, creating a lake above this point and discharging the flood waters to the level below by means of a spillway in the adjacent hills. We shall see later how the Americans adopted the same principle but modified it in practice.
So much at present for the Chagres problem. The other main feature of the isthmus is met with about the point where the river suddenly changes its direction—that is at Bas Obispo, or Gamboa, about nine miles from the Pacific outlet. Here are the hills, the backbone or "continental divide," averaging over 300 feet high but rising to much higher points, which connects the Cordilleras of South with the Sierras of North America. For eight or nine miles the canal must run through this central barrier on its way to the Pacific. The earliest French notion was for a ship tunnel—a project perhaps never seriously contemplated. The only other course was to cut right down through this hilly country. That was a tremendous undertaking, which required, even for its inception, a good deal of the faith which is said to be able to "remove mountains." We shall look more closely at the famous "Culebra Cut" when we come to the American canal. Most of the work of the French companies consisted of the dredging of the sea-level channels at the Atlantic and Pacific ends. But they drove a pretty deep furrow as well through the Culebra Mountains, excavating in all about 22,600,000 cubic yards.
With their sea-level scheme the French had, of course, a bigger proposition before them at the hills than their American successors. They would have had to cut right down below sea-level, whereas the bottom of the cut in the American lock-canal is forty feet above that level. Considering the difficulty the United States engineers have had with "slides" and "breaks" along the sides of their cutting, one suspects that the much deeper and narrower channel of the French would have proved impracticable. The French scheme gave a width to the channel at this point of only 74 feet, while the bottom width of the American canal is 300 feet. The French work at the "Cut" was all utilizable by the Americans, who, though with different machinery, adopted the same general method of excavation.