The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal

TWO: Before the Ditch

T w o B E F O R E T H E D I T C H Regarding Your Majesty’s other command, that it be seen where one sea can be joined with the other: this counsel was given by a man of very scant intelligence, who has travelled and understood little of this land . . . I pledge to Your Majesty that I believe there is not a prince in the world with the power to accomplish this. —Pascual de Andagoya, 1534 The difficulty of accomplishing such a work, and its utter inefficiency when accomplished, were . . . apparent to all men, whether of common or uncommon sense. —Charles Biddle, 1836 Centuries before the Panama Canal was built, commercial traffic used the Isthmus of Panama to cross between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In fact, Panama experienced two economic booms in the pre-canal era. The first economic boom occurred practically right after the Spanish established Panama City in 1519. A geopolitical event, the Spanish conquest of Peru, triggered the boom. The sailing ships of the sixteenth century had a difficult time navigating the Strait of Magellan; there were only nine successful passages of the Strait in the sixty years after Magellan’s discovery.1 Peruvian silver therefore passed through Panama on its 14 | ChapTer Two way to Spain. As a result, the Isthmus of Panama became a major commercial center, although the hostile disease environment kept the population down. The second economic boom on the Isthmus of Panama occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century. Just as in the first boom, a geopolitical event was the trigger: the American conquest of California . U.S. diplomacy obtained British and Colombian agreement to allow American private capital to build a railroad across Panama . Competing attempts across Nicaragua and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico floundered on hostile geography and unstable politics. As a result, Panama boomed in the 1850s and 1860s, although again, the hostile disease environment on the isthmus took its toll. Both booms came to an end for the same reason: competition . Overland commercial routes via Buenos Aires undercut the Panama route in the seventeenth century. The Spanish Crown attempted to maintain Panama’s privileges via legislation, but ultimately failed. Similar events occurred two centuries later. The opening of the Transcontinental Railroad across the United States in 1869 undercut the Panama route, and both the Panama Railroad and Panama’s commercial fortunes declined. TraDe aCross The isThMus Before CoLuMBus Enough archaeological and textual evidence remains to sketch the outlines of how pre-Columbian societies used the Panamanian isthmus to bridge the oceans. Panama was home to extensive local exchange networks, although it remains debatable whether these networks represented commerce in the modern sense.2 The natives of the isthmus traded pearls between the Islas de Perlas in the Pacific and the Caribbean coast, and salt between the extensive salt marshes on the Pacific coast and other locations along the isthmus. There was also an extensive trade in shells (most likely used as penis sheaths) and objects made of gold and tumbaga, a gold-copper alloy known in the indigenous Caribbean as guanín and later called “base gold” (oro bajo) by the Spanish.3 Before The DiTCh | 15 Pre-Columbian Panama also enjoyed trading contacts with Mesoamerica. The conquistador Pascual de Andagoya recorded a group of “Chuchures,” who had come by canoe from the direction of Honduras, spoke “with a language different from that of the other Indians,” and possessed a small colony near the Chagres River. (The colony was on the later site of the Panamanian town of Nombre de Díos.) The Chuchures were most likely Mayan traders .4 They proved no better to resist the area’s disease environment than later European settlers. Their numbers rapidly decreased, and as Andagoya grimly concluded, “Of these few none survived the treatment they received after Nombre de Díos was founded.”5 The accounts of the earliest Spanish arrivals provide more evidence of Panamanian trade links between North and South America .6 In 1525, the Spanish navigator Bartolomé Ruyz encountered a raft off the Pacific coast of Colombia. Its passengers carried embroidered clothing and jewelry to exchange for red-colored shells.7 Ruyz’s description of the shells matches those of the thorny oyster (genus Spondylus), called mullu in Quechua.8 This genus of oyster is not typically found in the cooler waters of the Peruvian coast. Rather...