Ever since the Panamanian isthmus became a global route for conveying Pe-ruvian gold and silver to Atlantic ships during the sixteenth century, those searching for a natural maritime passage had pondered the possibility of creat-ing an artificial one. Eventually, the Spanish government developed a road-and
Map 1.1. A 1902 map of the Central American isthmus demonstrating nineteen possible routes for an interoceanic canal, several of which Humboldt addressed during the first half of the nineteenth century. William Hubert Burr, “The Panama Route for
a Ship Canal,” Popular Science Monthly 61 (1902): 257.
river-based transportation network that connected the oceans. Not until 1814, on the eve of independence of the Spanish Latin American colonies, did the crown manifest interest in cutting a canal from the Caribbean to the South Sea (as the Pacific Ocean was often called).2
Foreign institutions such as the French Academy of Sciences had raised the isthmian canal issue during the Age of Enlightenment, but the person who put the project on the agenda of nineteenth-century world leaders was Humboldt.
“The Philosopher” (as the front page of the New York Times memorialized him on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth) is well known to historians of science and postcolonial scholars as a pioneering biogeographer and critic of environmental mismanagement by the Spanish Empire.3 Because artificial wa-terways have a long history of disrupting ecological and social communities, his lifelong advocacy for a project as damaging as an interoceanic canal seems at odds with his reputation today as a “bracingly contemporary” prophet of the Map 1.2. The routes investigated by the Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Studies Commission. The two main nuclear routes, in eastern Panama and western Colombia
(Routes 17 and 25), are to the right. Atlantic-Pacific Interoceanic Canal Study Commission, p. 10, Entry A1 36040-D, Container 8, RG 220, U.S. National Archives
and Records Administration, College Park, Md.
Anthropocene.4 In fact, it demonstrates how taken for granted the idea of im-proving the environment via massive civil engineering works was (and in some contexts, still is).
Humboldt achieved worldwide fame through popular accounts of his travels and studies of geography, geology, astronomy, meteorology, and ecology, among other fields. A large inheritance enabled the thirty-year-old mining inspector to finance his own scientific expedition to the Americas from 1799–1804, for which he convinced the king of Spain to issue him and his partner rare passports.
Although he did not visit any parts of the isthmus south of modern-day Mexico, Humboldt’s access to maps, letters, and engineering reports in the archives of the Mexican viceroyalty and other Spanish territories provided crucial information about potential routes for a large artificial waterway.5 He discussed the issue in three best-selling books spanning four decades: Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811); Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America (1826), which contained the most detailed analysis; and Views of Nature (1849). Until his death in 1859, Humboldt endeavored to persuade the European and Latin American powers to overcome what he deemed their baseless concerns and invest in “a communication between two seas, capable of producing a revo-lution in the commercial world.”6
Which part of the New World would best accommodate a ship channel unit-ing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans? In the Political Essay, Humboldt described nine routes or, as his translator put it, “points” for cutting a canal. Five spanned the Latin American isthmus, at Tehuantepec (Mexico), Nicaragua, central Pan-ama (which he broke down further into three pathways), and two sites in north-western Colombia designed to utilize the Atrato River, which flows north into the Caribbean Gulf of Darién (one route connected to the Pacific Cupica Bay and the other to a rumored artificial waterway further south known as the lost Raspadura Canal).7
Humboldt lamented the failure of previous explorers to apply a rigorous scien-tific approach to the physical geography of these regions. In particular, although the fifty-mile route from the Caribbean to the Bay of Panama had “occupied every mind” since Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s crossing in 1513, fundamental ques-tions remained about the elevation of the cordilleras and whether the oceans on either side were of different levels. As he exclaimed in his interdisciplinary way,
“These are problems whose solution is equally interesting to the statesman and the geographical naturalist!”8
Humboldt revisited the issue in the sixth volume of his Personal Narrative, for which an English translation appeared in 1826. By that time, most of the Spanish
colonies in the Americas had gained emancipation, and the governments of the newly independent nations spanning the isthmus were beginning to explore the prospects of canal construction.9 In addition, the state of New York in the north-eastern United States had completed in just six years a 363-mile-long barge canal between Lake Erie and the Hudson River. The Erie Canal connected the Atlan-tic port of New York City with the upper Great Lakes, and rapidly recouped its cost. For Humboldt, upstate New York’s artificial river provided an impressive example of the ability to open up trade and overcome the enormous expenses of excavating mountainous terrain.10
Despite his dismay that statesmen and merchants still lacked the geodetic data needed to make the right choice about the isthmian waterway’s location and magnitude, Humboldt did not let the lack of evidence stop him from stating his opinions.11 Of the five routes, he declared, “The isthmus of Nicaragua and that of Cupica have always appeared to me the most favourable for the formation of canals of large dimensions, similar to the Caledonian canal,” the fifteen-foot-deep waterway across central Scotland linking the Atlantic with the North Sea.12 He had long since ruled out the central Panama routes on the erroneous assump-tion that the mountains there were too high for ditchdigging.13 He also now asserted—incorrectly as he found out toward the end of his life—that the moun-tain range between the Atrato River and Cupica Bay lowered to such a degree as to disappear. Despite the apparent topographical appeal of the Colombian Darién route, however, Humboldt conceded the primacy of geopolitics: “It ap-pears somewhat probable that the province of Nicaragua will be fixed upon for the great work of the junction of the two Oceans.”14 Nicaragua’s proximity to the United States did later make it very attractive to investors in the north.
Humboldt called for the new Latin American nations to fund engineering surveys of each of the five major routes so as to make an informed decision, and thereby persuade “governments and enlightened citizens” to buy shares in a joint-stock company to finance a transisthmian water communication.15 He warned that the construction process would present unprecedented challenges to the Old World’s hydraulic experts: “The facility of collecting an enormous mass of rain waters within the tropics [for feeding a canal], is beyond what the engineers of Europe can imagine.” Because the tropical forests received at least five times as much rain as Paris, the canal designers would have to take many more variables into account than, say, the landscape architects of Versailles’s fa-mous irrigated gardens.16
Despite his reputation today as a founder of modern environmental thought, Humboldt did not address the issue that would most interest modern
environmentalists: the destructive ecological effects of deforesting a large swath of the Continental Divide, removing one hundred million cubic meters of earth, and using the material to form new dams and causeways. That is not to say that deforestation and other transformative human activities did not concern him;
on the contrary, he published pioneering critiques of the damaging unintended consequences of clearing tropical lands for plantation agriculture and urban development.17 Yet having worked in the mining industry, Humboldt, like all civil engineers, sought to improve the natural environment for human use and convenience.18
For Euro-American captains of industry, what could be more convenient than a shortcut linking the Pacific and Atlantic realms? An isthmian waterway would revolutionize world trade by precluding the long voyages around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. Moreover, it would radically alter East Asian re-lations with western Europe and North America; in Humboldt’s words, “That neck of land against which the equinoxial current breaks, has been for ages the bulwark of the independence of China and Japan.”19 Subsequent events, such as the Anglo-Chinese Opium Wars and U.S. commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 expedition to Japan, undercut the patronizing idea of East Asian independence as a function of inefficient European access. Nevertheless, framing the Central American waterway as an agent of globalization and Asia-Pacific transformation was prescient.
The only concern Humboldt conveyed in public regarding the canal was the potential for military conflict. He foresaw the possibility that powerful nations might wage war to control the conduit, confessing, “I am not secured from that apprehension either by my confidence in the moderation of monarchical or of republican governments, or by the hope, somewhat shaken, of the progress of knowledge, and the just appreciation of human interests.”20 Indeed, his com-padre Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary leader who in 1819 became president of Gran Colombia (a nation encompassing present-day Colombia, Panama, Vene-zuela, and Ecuador), had rejected an application for a concession to build a canal in 1821 for fear that it “might afford facilities to the enemy” for recolonizing Latin America.21 Such events gave Humboldt reason to doubt that progress and allied Enlightenment values could be sustained far into the future—let alone in the present so as to overcome the epistemic, technological, economic, and political obstacles to solving the canal problem.
Humboldt returned yet again to the interoceanic transit issue in 1849’s Views of Nature. The discovery of gold in California had caused westward traffic to explode around Cape Horn and across Central America, especially in Panama.
The difficulty of crossing the Panamanian landmass, though only fifty miles long, by canoe and mule reignited interest in more efficient forms of transporta-tion infrastructure. Yet geographic data remained scarce. Granted, General Bolí-var had long since granted Humboldt’s request to commission a survey between Panama City (on the Pacific coast) and the mouth of the Chagres River (on the Caribbean/Atlantic coast).22 It had led to other investigations of central Panama, yet as Humboldt exclaimed, “The most important points on both the eastern and southeastern portions of the isthmus on both coasts have been ignored!” He reprised his call for precise topographical determinations of the entire isthmus, especially the southeastern portion “where it connects to the mainland of South America at the Darién Gap.”23 Yet he omitted the Nicaragua route from the 1849 discussion, a revisionist approach that was telling of the contingency of the canal problem.
In the last decade of his life, Humboldt’s hope for a Darién survey seemed on the verge of fulfillment. In 1854, fearing competition from British and French interests, the U.S. Navy launched the first Darién Exploring Expedition. The party planned to investigate the rumored forty-mile route from the Atlantic Caledonia Bay to the Gulf of San Miguel, an area north of the Cupica Bay route that Humboldt had appeared to endorse in an 1853 letter.24 However, ma-laria, madness, and starvation cut short the scientific reconnaissance. Popular accounts of the ninety-seven-day ordeal reified perceptions of the Darién as a dangerous wilderness inhabited only by remnants of Indigenous Guna who had survived Spain’s genocidal wars. Tropical diseases and famine had also doomed an infamous 1698 colonization effort that bankrupted Scotland. A century later, even the Spanish retreated from the dense forests and swamplands of the ten-thousand-square-mile mountain pass.25
Before, during, and immediately after the expedition’s mortifying failure, U.S.
corporations concentrated on developing new land-based transportation net-works to carry California-bound travelers across the isthmus. Central Panama became the site of the first transcontinental railroad in 1855.26 Despite its success, U.S., British, and French teams conducted private and state-supported canal sur-veys across the nations of Central America during the subsequent decades.27
Seven expeditions received funds from a Wall Street financier, sea-level canal enthusiast, and Darién canal concession holder named Frederick Kelley. Kelley credited the writings of “the illustrious Humboldt” and Admiral Robert Fitz-Roy, who had captained the famed Beagle voyage of Humboldt’s disciple Charles Darwin, with sparking his interest in the Darién routes.28 In 1856, Humboldt validated Kelley’s quest by receiving him at his home in Berlin and writing him
a letter that several outlets reprinted.29 In earlier publications, Humboldt had not said whether the ship channel should be at sea level, but he now came out on Kelley’s side: “The great object to be accomplished is, in my opinion, a canal uniting the two oceans without locks or tunnels.”30 However, Kelley lost his con-cession and fortune before he could fulfill his hero’s dream. Not until the 1870s did surveyors return to the southeastern Darién sites that had so interested the illustrious naturalist in his final years.31