The Panama Canal, cut across the narrow isthmus joining North and South America, opened to shipping on 15 August 1914 after more than three decades of effort. A French company under Ferdinand de Lesseps began the work in 1881 but collapsed in ruin; the United States, after backing Panama's breakaway from Colombia, finished it. The canal transformed world shipping, and its control shaped relations between Washington and Panama for most of the twentieth century.
An old idea
Ever since Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus in 1513, Europeans had dreamed of a waterway linking the Atlantic and the Pacific. Many routes were later proposed, with Nicaragua the chief rival to Panama.
The French attempt
De Lesseps, celebrated for building the Suez Canal, obtained a concession from Colombia, which then ruled Panama, and planned a canal at sea level. Digging began in 1881. The task proved far harder than expected: the route crossed rainforest and mountains, the Chagres River flooded violently in the wet season, and landslides kept refilling the great cutting at Culebra. Worst of all were yellow fever and malaria, whose spread by mosquitoes was not yet understood. By 1884 more than 200 workers a month were dying. De Lesseps accepted a plan with locks only in 1887, far too late. The company went bankrupt in 1889 with the canal perhaps two-fifths built. An estimated 22,000 people had died, the savings of some 800,000 investors were lost, and a political corruption scandal followed in France.
Panama breaks away
In the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt made a canal a priority and won approval to buy the French company's assets rather than build in Nicaragua. In 1903 Colombia's Senate rejected a treaty that would have leased the canal zone to the Americans. Panamanian leaders, eager for the canal, planned a revolt with tacit American encouragement. In November 1903 the warship USS Nashville prevented Colombian troops at Colón from using the railway to reach Panama City, and Panama declared independence, which the United States quickly recognised. Critics at home called it an act of conquest; Colombia accepted Panama's independence only in 1921, in return for 25 million dollars.
Within weeks, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a French engineer serving as Panama's envoy in Washington, signed a treaty giving the United States control of a Canal Zone. Many Panamanians resented its terms from the start. In 1904 the Americans paid 40 million dollars for the French works and 10 million to Panama.
Building the canal
John Frank Stevens, who replaced the first American chief engineer in 1905, built up much of the infrastructure the project needed and argued forcefully for a lock canal rather than one at sea level. William C. Gorgas led a campaign against the mosquitoes that carried disease, which greatly improved the health of the workforce. After Stevens resigned in 1907, the army engineer George Washington Goethals took charge. The Gatun Dam on the Chagres created a huge lake that ships would cross, with sets of locks lifting them up from each ocean, while Major David Gaillard directed the immense excavation through the Culebra Cut.
At its peak about 40,000 people worked on the project, most of them labourers from the Caribbean, above all Barbados. Between about 5,600 and 5,900 workers died during the American period, the great majority of them black West Indians, who lived in poorer conditions than white employees. The canal cost the United States about 375 million dollars and was finished two years ahead of schedule. The outbreak of the First World War cancelled the planned celebrations, and the SS Ancon made the first official commercial transit.
From American to Panamanian control
The canal cut a sea journey from New York to San Francisco by about 12,500 kilometres and proved vital to American strategy in the Second World War. After that war, resentment of the American-run Canal Zone grew in Panama. The Torrijos–Carter Treaties of 1977 began a handover, completed on 31 December 1999. A wider set of locks for larger ships opened in 2016.
On our maps
Our 1880 map shows the isthmus as part of Colombia; our 1914 and later maps show Panama as an independent country.