History:When, late in 1848, gold was discovered in California, the quickest way to travel from the American east coast to the new Eldorado was by steamer to the town of Chagres, on the Atlantic coast of Panama (at the time a province of the Republic of New Grenada), to cross, by any possible means, the isthmus that bore the same name, and to sail from Panama City - on the Pacific coast - to San Francisco.
The sudden explosion of passengers travelling over the isthmus led both to the building of a railroad, completed in 1855, and to serious consideration being given, once again, to a canal uniting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, an idea at least as old as the European presence in the Americas.
The strategic importance of the proposed waterway was so great that both the United States and Great Britain concentrated their respective efforts on preventing the other from taking the first step. A way out of the impasse was found in 1879 when a French bid to build the canal was announced by former diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had already built the Suez Canal. Matthew Parker makes much of the fact that this French effort was a private venture, backed by the savings of hundreds of thousands of French shareholders, while the later American bid to build the canal was paid for and run by the government. So much for the French not having a word for entrepreneur.
De Lesseps and his Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique failed because they massively underestimated the task before them, believing it to be similar to what had been successfully completed in Egypt. Political instability, disease, labour troubles, and difficulties with the soil and the temperamental Chagres river all conspired to make the digging of the canal, which de Lesseps wrongly insisted should be built at sea level, harder than predicted.
All of the money raised in successive share offers was lost as a result, and no amount of bribing of politicians and journalists could hide the fact that, by the end of 1888, the French bid, for all the enthusiasm shown by the idealistic young engineers and administrators who had died in droves in Panama, was over. A second company was established but could do little more than fight a losing battle to preserve what had already been dug from the encroaching jungle.
INTO THE BREACH stepped Theodore Roosevelt, the US's empire builder and president from 1901. Unlike many in Congress, Teddy Roosevelt did not need to be convinced of the canal's economic and strategic advantages to the United States, whose territory had recently grown at the expense of Spain. And unlike de Lesseps, Roosevelt could channel the seemingly limitless resources of his expanding country into the Panama venture. One by one the difficulties that had defeated the French were overcome. The puppet state of Panama was created and immediately stripped of any say on the building of the canal; the mosquito was identified as the carrier of yellow fever and malaria and largely eradicated from the canal zone; West Indian labour was supplemented by southern European, notably Spanish, workers, in a divide-and-rule policy that paid rich dividends; and the acceptance of a system of locks and dams resolved most of the remaining difficulties.
The previous 20 years had also seen significant technological advances, making the American dig, once rationally organised, much more efficient than its French predecessor. Nevertheless, it took until August 1914 for the Panama Canal to be completed, and its inauguration was overshadowed by the outbreak of war.
Matthew Parker has written an informative and enjoyable book, which, although over- reliant on English-language sources, mixes social and labour history with the history of science, medicine, and colonialism. He is remarkably sensitive to the plight of the thousands who worked and died in the canal zone, especially the West Indians. These free men had to endure the ever-hardening official racism of their employer, the American government, which established a society as stratified as that of any European colony in order to finish the canal in the shortest possible time while preserving the "moral" health - supposedly imperilled in a tropical setting - of its white American employees.
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses lectures in the department of history at NUI Maynooth
Panama Fever: The Battle to Build the Canal By Matthew Parker Hutchinson, 444pp. £20