The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 |  | Author: David McCullough
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
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Rating:  170 reviews
Sales Rank: 2858
Media: Paperback
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 698
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0671244094
Dewey Decimal Number: 972.87504
EAN: 9780671244095
ASIN: 0671244094
Publication Date: October 15, 1978
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Amazon.com Review
On December 31, 1999, after nearly a century of rule, the United States officially ceded ownership of the Panama Canal to the nation of Panama. That nation did not exist when, in the mid-19th century, Europeans first began to explore the possibilities of creating a link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the narrow but mountainous isthmus; Panama was then a remote and overlooked part of Colombia. All that changed, writes David McCullough in his magisterial history of the Canal, in 1848, when prospectors struck gold in California. A wave of fortune seekers descended on Panama from Europe and the eastern United States, seeking quick passage on California-bound ships in the Pacific, and the Panama Railroad, built to serve that traffic, was soon the highest-priced stock listed on the New York Exchange. To build a 51-mile-long ship canal to replace that railroad seemed an easy matter to some investors. But, as McCullough notes, the construction project came to involve the efforts of thousands of workers from many nations over four decades; eventually those workers, laboring in oppressive heat in a vast malarial swamp, removed enough soil and rock to build a pyramid a mile high. In the early years, they toiled under the direction of French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, who went bankrupt while pursuing his dream of extending France's empire in the Americas. The United States then entered the picture, with President Theodore Roosevelt orchestrating the purchase of the canal--but not before helping foment a revolution that removed Panama from Colombian rule and placed it squarely in the American camp. The story of the Panama Canal is complex, full of heroes, villains, and victims. McCullough's long, richly detailed, and eminently literate book pays homage to an immense undertaking. --Gregory McNamee
Product Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Truman, here is the national bestselling epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal. In The Path Between the Seas, acclaimed historian David McCullough delivers a first-rate drama of the sweeping human undertaking that led to the creation of this grand enterprise. The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. Applying his remarkable gift for writing lucid, lively exposition, McCullough weaves the many strands of the momentous event into a comprehensive and captivating tale. Winner of the National Book Award for history, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, and the Cornelius Ryan Award (for the best book of the year on international affairs), The Path Between the Seas is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the history of technology, international intrigue, and human drama.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 170
 Dig We Must For A Better New World July 24, 2010
J. H. Minde (Boca Raton, Florida and Brooklyn, New York)
David McCullough is well-known for his exhaustively-researched and eminently readable histories, most of which have won the National Book Award. McCullogh has written about The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, about Theodore's Roosevelt's youthful Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt, about Presidents Truman and John Adams, and about The Johnstown Flood. In THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS he turns his historian's eye toward the grandest construction project ever, the Panama Canal.
Ferdinand DeLesseps is customarily credited with having built the Suez Canal. In actuality, DeLesseps had little to do with the actual engineering of that Canal. He was an impresario, not an engineer; and he was a visionary.
For the 100 years between 1814 and 1914, Europe was largely at peace. Excepting such an atypical war as the Crimean and the American bloodbath of the Civil War, this era, lived predominantly under the shadow of Queen Victoria, was one of peace and technological progress. It was an era in which mankind came to believe (with some justification) that he could remake his world in his image of it. It was an era that took us from the sailing ship to the airplane. It was an era during which the price paid for human advancement seemed reasonable. Man might have developed the ability to span and cleave continents, but his footprint was still small and the rewards huge.
DeLesseps was a man of his era. And if his visions were not entirely original they were daring and they were attainable. A canal connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Sea was the stuff of Pharaoh's plans. It was not until DeLesseps though that a workable canal was built in 1869. Likewise, a canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had been the dream of the Conquistadores, an impossible dream. So when it came time to create such a canal, DeLesseps was the logical choice to lead the project.
DeLesseps was able to imbue everyone around him with his own sense of belief and wonder, but like the rest of the world, DeLesseps underestimated Panama. Suez, for all its complexities and hard work, was an easy precursor, a straight-ahead mostly sea level excavation in a hot, arid but not particularly challenging environment. Panama was different. Though needing a much shorter canal, Panama was a vertical mountainous landscape of trackless steaming jungles, torrential downpours, flooding, landslides, and pestilence. Yet DeLesseps never wavered in his belief that a canal---and a sea level canal, at that---could be built across the isthmus.
Related to Napoleon III, friends with the British Prime Minister, and a mentor of the King of Egypt, DeLesseps handily convinced both governments and ordinary citizens of the practicality of his plan. Such was his hautre that no one seriously challenged his decisions though they were based on incomplete information. Tens of thousands of small investors put their last francs into the private company responsible for building the canal, including DeLesseps himself. It seemed a sound investment. The canal at Suez had, in only a few years, made its own small investors wealthy.
DeLesseps may have been the Pied Piper of Panama. Even in the face of staggering economic losses and endless cost overruns, even in the face of tens of thousands of deaths as tropical diseases ravaged the workmen, people believed in DeLesseps' vision. There's no evidence that he intentionally defrauded or misled anyone, but his own unshakeable faith in the realization of the canal led him to see the project through rose-colored glasses, blinding himself to the fact that the project was failing. His advertising and announcements were full of puffery. When he visited Panama he did so in the dry season, thus avoiding malaria, yellow fever, landslides, and tropical rainstorms. He marveled at the work being done, not recognizing that after years only about ten percent of the canal was dug. When the "French Project" finally imploded, DeLesseps himself avoided censure, but those around him (including his son) were jailed for misappropriation of funds.
Were they guilty? Perhaps only of excessive optimism. The fact (as McCullough amply illustrates) is that the French Project could not have succeeded. The technology to build the canal---such as sufficiently heavy digging equipment and necessary sanitary precautions---simply did not exist or was nascent in the period 1870-1900. Human technology was evolving at a pace faster than any but that of our own time, and even a few months past or future made a significant difference in the "possible." The French suffered as well from a strange myopia, failing to adjust their plans to on-site conditions or changing circumstances. A sea level canal was a practically unrealizable result, but rather than going back to the drawing board, the French engineers persisted in building the canal according to the initial vision provided by DeLesseps.
In the last analysis, of course, DeLesseps was right. A canal could be built, it would be built, and it was built, though the Panama Canal is a far cry from the simple deep ditch contemplated at the outset. It became a lock canal; and it was widened far beyond what DeLesseps imagined. It became more of what a little-known French engineer, Godin de Lepinay envisioned, a series of lakes connected by a channel.
The last French project manager was a DeLesseps-like dreamer, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who continued to promote a canal in Panama despite the fact that the American government (which inherited the French mantle) was in favor of a canal in Nicaragua. Bunau-Varilla hated the idea of a Nicaraguan canal, not least because if the canal was built there he faced a complete loss of his investment in Panama. He became a one-man public relations firm for Panama, courted Congressmen, met with Presidents, hyped the dangers of the Nicaraguan volcanoes, downplayed the dangers of Panamanian earthquakes, of the yellow fever, of malaria, of the physical difficulties he had seen, and promoted Panama as a politically stable place, which it was not as a province of Colombia, but Bunau-Varilla fixed that by staging a bloodless coup in Panama. In a matter of hours, Panama was independent. Scant minutes later, it was recognized by the United States.
While there's no real evidence supporting the supposition that the U.S. staged the Panamanian revolution, it certainly guaranteed its success. President Theodore Roosevelt sent American warships down to Panama to "keep the peace." The American Consul and the American owners of the Panama Railroad quickly bought off the local Colombian authorities who fired a single shot in symbolic defense (that one shot killed a sleeping civilian), and then departed. Bunau-Varilla, moving at a 21st Century pace, negotiated a treaty with the U.S. that allowed the Americans not only to build the canal, but to control it and a twenty mile-wide coast-to-coast swath of Panama into perpetuity. Before even the Panamanians knew what was happening, Roosevelt ordered work on the canal to resume, and "made the dirt fly."
But first Roosevelt how to overcome the natural and man-made difficulties which had bedeviled the French Project. He did this in his customary straight-ahead fashion:
Roosevelt appointed Dr. William Gorgas as head of Panama's Sanitary Department. Gorgas did away with standing water, installed sewage and plumbing systems, cleared the jungle, and cleaned the streets of Panama. In eighteen months he had effectively ended the twin threats of malaria and yellow fever that had caused Panama to be a deathtrap since time immemorial.
Roosevelt appointed Engineer John Stevens to reorganize the work; in fifteen months, Stevens had re-tracked the railroad, upgraded the digging equipment, built numerous new station towns from which an army of workmen could issue, and thoroughly modernized Panama.
Roosevelt appointed Major George Washington Goethals of the Army Corps of Engineers to supervise the digging, which restarted in earnest in 1904. Goethals was indomitable. A man of single-minded determination he cold-welded the project into a virtually seamless whole that operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, rain or shine for seven more years. After a major landslide undid months of work, Goethals shrugged and said, "What the hell...dig it all out again," and they did. McCullough is clearly admiring of Goethals, who was tough but fair and not constitutionally predisposed to accept "No" for an answer to anything.
Very importantly for morale, Roosevelt traveled to the dig, becoming the first U.S. President to leave home during his term. The papers mused that "perhaps this portends that a President may someday visit Europe."
The Canal Zone, unified in purpose, quickly became a utopia, especially for the predominantly white American administrators of the project who numbered in the thousands. Pay was high, prices low, and anything and everything was available at the PX. Medical care was free. Housing was inexpensive or free, and comfortable, with modern conveniences. Board was a fraction of its U.S. price. Entertainment was readily available at the YMCAs and USO clubs, while the K of C, the K of P, the Elks, the Rotary, and the Shriners all had chapters. The Zone sprouted hundreds of homegrown social organizations besides ranging from book clubs to amateur theatrical groups. The death rate was lower than in the U.S., the birth rate higher. In many ways, the American middle class would not have it again as good until the 1950s. Some people, even in the Zone, called it "Socialism," but nobody really objected.
The lot of the tens of thousands of black employees was nowhere as good, though McCullough is quick to point out that they too had free healthcare, and that inexpensive board was available to them. They lived in countryside work camps or in the back streets of Colon and Panama City. The large majority of black workmen were Barbadian, and though their toil was wretched, dangerous, and poorly rewarded, it was more than most of them earned in Barbados at the time. Many died of the terrible accidents that were part and parcel of digging and blasting the canal and dragging the millions of tons of rock and soil away. Others died of the tropical maladies that white "Zonians" no longer had to face. Somewhat cynically, of course, as McCullough reports, the large majority of black workers were not United States citizens and had no advocates. The ones that were Americans were hardly better off. The Zone was a Jim Crow community.
McCullough refers to the nine miles of Culebra (now Galliard) Cut as "the chief point of attack." It was. A supremely difficult stretch that traversed the Continental Divide, the Cut was prone (even after completion) to terrible landslides that undid much of the builders' work.
Unfortunately for THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS McCullough spends so much time on the challenges of the Culebra Cut that he overlooks, or nearly so, the immense tasks involved in damming the Chagres River, rerouting the Panama Railroad, resettling the populations displaced by the waterway, creating Gatun Lake and Lake Madden, and in building the vast hydroelectric plant that powered the locks. And although the locks themselves get good coverage, it is clear that the engineering involved in the building of the locks outstrips even McCullough's considerable storytelling skills. Given the over 400 pages of this impressive book, a chapter or two more would not have detracted from the story.
 Different point of view July 15, 2010
Wayne Krouse
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book quality was described as "good" . I have had multiple pages fall out of the book. If that is what they call "good" - I couldn't agree.
 Can't put it down! June 28, 2010
Sheila Tharp (GRIZZLY FLATS, CA, US)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
My husband has not talked to me for days. He cannot put the book down. One of the best historical books he has read. A must read for anyone inerested in the history of the Panama Canal.
True history more amazing than fiction June 7, 2010
Stanley Gorcik (Buffalo Grove, IL)
Earlier this year I took a trip to Panama, and several fellow travelers recommended this book. I've read other David McCollough work and knew I couldn't go wrong with one of his. This is great history, greatly written. I knew a little about the history of the Panama Canal but this book excited my imagination while making it clear that I didn't know much. McCullough had a way of writing that is as good as or better than the best fiction. A rip-roaring true adventure.
Excellent telling of an excellent story June 6, 2010
J. Steffens (Iowa, USA)
I had no idea that a book on the building of the Panama Canal could be so fascinating, mostly because I had no idea that the story itself was so fascinating. David McCullough's 1977 telling of that story, in The Path Between the Seas, is excellent. From the debate over the path and the method, to the somewhat disastrous French attempt, through the triumph of the United States' completion of the canal, this 600 page history moves fast. The technological (sea level or locks?), natural (the landslides and the annual flooding of the Chagres River), and health (malaria and yellow fever) obstacles were enormous. The scale of the project was, literally, unprecedented. This book is just as much biography (de Lesseps, Bunau-Varilla, Roosevelt, Gorgas, Goethels) and political history as it is a description of just how the canal was built.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 170
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