Fact or Fiction . . . The Panama Canal

The justly world-famous Panama Canal, opened officially on August 15, 1914—almost 122 years ago to the day—transformed more than the world of oceanic commerce. It also brought with it revolutions in medicine and health, construction technology, and, um, revolution.

So today, less than a month away from the appearance of my next novel, The Mosquito God: Theodore Roosevelt’s Spy Game, I offer a little quiz to see how much you really know about the ‘Big Ditch.’ Test your wits and enjoy!

Fact or Fiction? The canal was built by the United States.

Partly fact, and partly fiction. A series of French public/private enterprises began digging the canal in 1881. When in 1903 the Americans took over the effort—after the French had run out of money, patience, and political support—what is today’s canal was at least half-finished, though there was some very hard going still ahead. It took another eleven years for the Americans to complete the great canal.

Fact or Fiction? Panama is the best place for a canal uniting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Another tossup. For years, the lead contender for an American transoceanic canal—a parallel and competitive attempt to beat the French, who had been beavering way for two decades—was Nicaragua, to the north. Only some very cunning lobbying and an American-inspired revolution in Colombia kept the canal out of Nicaragua.

Fact or Fiction? Colombia isn’t the same country as Panama.

Fact now, fiction then. Until 1903, what we know today as the sovereign nation of Panama was simply a district belonging to Colombia. It was only after some very high-stakes maneuvering by President Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of Stare, John Hay, that what was the Panama part of Colombia declared its independence from the mother country. Naturally the Colombians weren’t too happy about this, but they had a civil war going on, and Roosevelt’s Navy was already steaming for Panama. So the newly independent nation became, for lack of a better word, an American vassal state.

Fact or Fiction? The United States was stupid to give the Canal back to Panama.

This depends entirely on your point of view. If you’re Panamanian, the 1999 return of the Canal Zone (following a treaty signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977) to Panama was long overdue. The Canal Zone had never belonged to the United States; in 1903, the fifteen-day-old independent nation of Panama granted the USA a license or commission to administer the Canal Zone in perpetuity. But as these things go, as time passed resentment grew in Panama—and with resentment, protests and riots and lots of other unpleasantness. There can be no doubt that the Panama Canal was, still is, and likely always will remain of enormous strategic significance, so in that sense giving up control is, well, giving up control of something very important. But it’s not unlikely that the American ‘administration’ (as Americans see it) or ‘occupation’ (as Panamanians did) would have become ever-more-costly to maintain.

Fact or Fiction? Engineering and earthwork were the most difficult parts of the big dig.

In terms of the massive challenge of digging a 51-mile-long canal through swamps, jungles, and the Continental Divide itself, you bet it was an engineering challenge—arguably the greatest since the Pyramids. And the organization of manpower and machinery was a staggering task, too. But really the biggest challenge to the success of a Panama Canal was the lowly mosquito. Over twenty years, the French lost some 22,000 lives to malaria and yellow fever, which we know today are both spread by mosquitoes. And at least as many Americans would have followed them to the Great Beyond had not Army Doctor Walter Reed and others figured out—during the American occupation of Cuba, after the Spanish-American War—that mosquitoes were the culprits. Once the enemy had been identified, eradication programs could begin, and the deadly insects were driven away from the Canal Zone proper and into less-populated parts of Panama. Where, of course, they still thrive today, as they do in many parts of the globe. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that each year some 800,000 human lives are claimed by mosquito-borne disease.