The megaproject imposed immense changes on the Panamanian landscape.
To control the insect-borne diseases that had killed so many of de Lesseps’s workers, sanitarians drained wide swaths of wetlands, installed drinking-wa-ter systems in the port cities of Colón and Panamá, and sprayed hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil and larvicide.51 To carve out the canal bed, workers excavated over 150 million cubic meters of rock and soil—enough to create both the two-mile-long Amador Causeway guarding the waterway’s Pacific entrance
and the world’s largest earthen dam. Closer to the Atlantic side, the 1.5-mile-long Gatun Dam channeled the Chagres River into the world’s largest reservoir, Gatun Lake, to serve as the canal’s water and electricity source. To move so much soil, crews from Barbados, Jamaica, and many other nations mobilized massive steam shovels and hydraulic rock crushers shipped from the booming factories of the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes. They also installed three pairs of Pittsburgh-forged locks—each measuring 110 feet wide by 1,000 feet long—to lift ships 85 feet above sea level. The ingenious “bridge of water” used fifty-two million gallons of fresh water from the Chagres for every transit.52
U.S. officials also disrupted the region’s human communities by depopulat-ing towns to make way for the ten-mile-wide Panama Canal Zone, an enclave designed to house the waterway’s civilian employees and military defenders (map 1.3). The radical reshaping of central Panama’s human-dominated land-scape was not an unavoidable byproduct of canal construction. Rather, it re-sulted from specific decisions that benefited the United States—choices that were easy to forget as second-growth forests took root in cleared fields, and as the waters of Gatun Lake submerged what had been for over three centuries an intensively cultivated valley.53
Creating the massive bridge of water and its buffer zone required technolog-ical, scientific, and organizational expertise, which countless magazine spreads, postcards, popular books, and world’s fair exhibits commemorated with jingo-istic flair.54 “Every American can take a just pride in this girdle which we have flung across the isthmus,” enthused one author, especially since “we are the na-tion which . . . Providence . . . has decreed should build the canal . . . to con-fer a lasting benefit on the world at large and usher in a new age of culture.”55 Americans also took pride in photographs depicting Roosevelt, who defended his actions against Colombia, visiting the construction site. The image of him operating a steam shovel in a white linen suit became a powerful icon of the conquest of nature and other nations. Grade school U.S. history textbooks repli-cated such heroic representations throughout the twentieth century, reinforcing belief in the project’s inexorableness and righteousness among generations of U.S. citizens.56
Publicity regarding the Panama Canal played up its international commercial benefits and the munificent U.S. policy of keeping tolls low rather than trying to recoup the $400 million cost. Of course, as later analyses revealed, low tolls functioned as a subsidy for U.S. shippers moving goods from coast to coast.57 The elderly Mahan, not surprisingly, stressed the incalculable national security benefit of moving the U.S. naval battalion between oceans as needed. While
the fleet would have to be maintained in the Atlantic for the foreseeable future due to the West Coast’s inferior coal deposits and high labor costs, ships could steam from Norfolk, Virginia, to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in four weeks rather than four months.58
Perhaps less expectedly, the retired naval historian-officer also promoted the waterway as a bastion against what Roosevelt and other nativist contemporaries called “race suicide.”59 Viewing the West Coast as underpopulated and in need of more white immigrants, Mahan declared, “The great effect of the Panama
Map 1.3. A 1914 U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey map of the Panama Canal Zone, which extended 5 miles from each side of the waterway and covered 550 square miles.
NOAA Central Library, Silver Spring, Md.
Canal will be the indefinite strengthening of Anglo-Saxon institutions upon the northeast shores of the Pacific, from Alaska to Mexico, by increase of inhabitants and consequent increases of shipping and commerce.” Passenger ships transiting the new canal would enable white Europeans and East Coast residents to make the journey at a lower cost than the transcontinental railroad or Great Lakes steamers.60
Conclusion
How would Humboldt have responded to such martial and white supremacist rationales for the transisthmian canal? Probably not favorably. He had expressed explicit concern about nations fighting to control such a conduit, and more broadly, he rejected scientific racism and its allied institution, slavery. “Whilst we maintain the unity of the human species,” he wrote in the blockbuster first volume of Cosmos in 1845, “we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men.”61 Moreover, his critiques of Spanish colo-nial policies that degraded human and ecological communities had bolstered the Latin American independence movement led by Simón Bolívar.
At the same time, Humboldt’s canal advocacy must be seen in the context of his contested role as an agent of imperialism.62 Speculation that he shared his canal intelligence prior to publication with U.S. president Thomas Jefferson supports the view of him as a proponent of using scientific knowledge and tools to promote Euro-American dominance and Northern Manifest Destiny.63 Due to the problematic imperial as well as environmental dimensions of the canal enterprise, more historiographical attention to his private and public writings on the subject might help address the question of whether Humboldt deserves his reputation as the founder of modern environmental thought.64
For the purposes of this book, Humboldt’s English language publications in favor of the canal illustrate the historical contingencies of megaproject planning.
Despite being the world’s most famous scientist—one who succeeded in getting other projects off the ground (such as networks of magnetic and meteorological observatories)—he failed for forty years to convince officials to conduct com-prehensive surveys of all the routes he had identified. Conducting the scientific reconnaissance work, let alone the large-scale engineering of the actual structure, required favorable political, economic, and technoscientific forces to coalesce at the right moments.
Humboldt’s advocacy also challenges notions of geographical and histor-ical determinism that permeate popular writings on the Panama Canal.65 A
determinist perspective emphasizes notions of inevitability and predestination.
Consider this quote, crafted the year after the maritime highway opened for business: “The valley of the Chagres was framed by the hand of Nature in such a way as to fit admirably into the plans of the canal engineers for a lock canal across the isthmus, with the Atlantic locks at Gatun.”66 Of course, for Humboldt and other nineteenth-century canal enthusiasts, it was not obvious that a lock design would prevail nor that the Chagres River valley in central Panama offered the ideal site. As a U.S. senator wrote in 1837 of the southern Atrato River valley,
“Nature seems to have designed this for the passage. The Andes are here for a moment lost, and in obedience to the will of Providence and the wants of man, seem to have defiled [narrowed], that commerce may march from the old world to the new.”67
By the time of the Panama Canal’s completion, people had already begun to forget the alternatives that had been the subject of intense debate for decades.
Popular authors depicted de Lesseps’s failure as a foil to the U.S. initiative, con-ceding that the French provided “the knowledge that made it possible for us to avoid their mistakes and profit by their experience.”68 Knowledge of the tangible and intangible things needed for a sea-level canal was indeed valuable and worth remembering, as events would prove sooner than expected.
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