Posted on by bugsy122019

Happy Birthday Panama Canal đźĄł

August is the 107th anniversary of the commercial opening of the Panama Canal. It was initially discussed in 1513, when Vasco de Balboa was the first to walk across the Isthmus of Panama and people began thinking about ways to build a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Yet it wasn’t until the 19th century that any serious work began.

Recently you may remember I was talking about Ferdinand de Lesseps who built the Suez Canal which began operations in 1869. Well, a few years later he decided that it would be a great ideal to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. In 1876 he set up La Societe international du Canal interoceanique. He received a concession from Colombia, of which Panama was a province in those days, and set to work.

De Lesseps believed that he would again be able to build the canal at sea-level, but he wasn’t an engineer. He didn’t realize that even at the best spot to do the work it was still more than 360 feet above sea level. In addition, they also and would have to divert several rivers, the largest of which was the Chagres. And on top of that, malaria and yellow fever were rampant. Regardless, work started on January 1, 1881, and by 1888 40,000 men were toiling away at various parts of the canal. Sadly, between 1881 and 1888, 22,000 men had died, largely from malaria, yellow fever, and accidents. The company went bankrupt in 1889, and while de Lesseps tried to start over in 1894, the new venture failed within a year. Millions of cubic yards of dirt, and hundreds of buildings, machinery, even trains, were left to the mosquitoes. But not ten years later, work on the Panama Canal was well on its way to completion.

Panama Canal under construction, c. 1910

What happened was a combination of a break-away of Panamans from Colombia, and President Theodore Roosevelt. He believed that it would definitely be in the US strategic interest to have a canal so that ships could sail from the the east to the west of the US in a matter of weeks (less than a week these days), rather than having to take at least three months to sail all the way around Straits of Magellan. Negotiations between the US and Colombia resulted in the Hay-Herran Treaty in early 1903, but the Colombian Senate did not sign it. At that point, the Panamanians who were trying to break away from Colombia took the advantage to declare it’s independence on November 3, 1903. On the 18th of November, they signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty before the Colombian military could even get their troops to either Colon or Balboa.

General George W. Goethels

By May 1904 the Isthmian Canal Commission was up and running. John F. Stevens, the engineer who had built the Great Northern Railroad took charge. He immediately started rebuilding the houses, cafeterias, hospitals, old water system, repair shops and trains that de Lesseps had left. In 1907 Stevens resigned, and then-Colonel George W. Goethels took over. He had graduated from West Point in 1880 and served in the Corps of Engineers. Under his watch, the canal was built with locks, which would raise and lower ships 85ft above sea level allowing passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Ultimately, the men had excavated 170,000,000 cu. yds. of dirt, in addition to the 30,000,000 that the French had moved, the locks worked well, they had finished the massive Culebra (aka Gaillard) Cut and were proud of the fact that they had finished the canal two years earlier than expected.

William Gorgas

One of the reasons that the work moved along quickly was thanks to Colonel William Gorgas, an expert in tropical diseases. He had worked with Walter Reed to find the origin of malaria and yellow fever, so when ordered to Panama, Gorgas went to war against mosquitos. He oversaw the building of a state-of-the-art water system, fumigated buildings, installed thousands of screens, ordered that people use mosquito netting when sleeping, eliminated stagnant water, and sprayed for insect infestations. Though more than 5,500 workers died by the time the canal opened, it was a massive improvement from the days of de Lesseps. Since then, the US has expanded the canal, and has turned it over the Panama, but we should still thank all those visionaries.

For some fascinating information, take a look at http://McCullough. The Path between the Sea

Posted on by bugsy122019

Vicomte de Lesseps–HELP!!!

Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal (source: Maxar)

The Suez Canal is one of the most important thoroughfares on earth, moving more 10% of the world’s cargo every year. Last year more than 18,500 vessels covered the 120-mile-long canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. Last week, an ultra-large container ship, the Ever Given, on its way to the Netherlands from Malaysia ran aground after turning sideways while struggling with the wind. No ships have been able to move north or south since then, and maritime experts from around the world are trying to find a way to reopen the canal. That’s caused a $10 billion dollar lost in little more than a week.

People have been interested in a canal since the days of ancient Egypt. Several Pharaohs attempted a canal, though only Darius I managed to develop something similar to a canal. Venetians, the Ottomans, even Napoleon attempted to build a canal but for a variety of reasons, particularly cost, engineering, and manpower, none ever managed to built such a canal. There were several goods about attempts to build a canal, and while waiting under quarantine in Egypt, a young assistant consular agent, Ferdinand de Lesseps, spend his time reading Napoleon’s civil engineer, Jacque-Marie Le Pere’s book, The Ancient Suez Canal. De Lesseps was hooked.

Ferdinand Marie Vicomte de Lesseps (1805-1894) attended the College of Henry IV in Paris, and initially worked in the Commissary Department of the French Army. In the following years he served as the vice-consul in Lisbon, Tunis, and Alexandria. He became consul in Cairo, Rotterdam, Malaga, and Barcelona, and served as the French Minister to Madrid. However, after major elections in 1849, de Lesseps retired from public office.

While he had worked as assistant consul in Alexandria, he had become very friendly with Sa’id Pasha who, in 1854, became Khedive (viceroy) of Egypt. He and de Lesseps were extremely interested in a canal, so de Lesseps returned to Eqypt, and on November 7, 1854, the Khedive signed a bill giving de Lesseps the concession to build a canal. He immediately called in thirteen engineers to develop appropriate plans which were adopted by the International Commission of the piecing of the Isthmus of Suez in 1856, and on December 15, 1858, de Lesseps established the Suez Canal Company.

Work started in April 1859. Roughly 30,000 people from a variety of nations worked on the canal. Many from Egypt worked on the canal as required by the “corvee” —a specific amount of unpaid labor owed to the government in lieu of taxes. Sadly, they’re were thousands of deaths over the year, due largely to cholera. The canal doesn’t require locks and initially there was just a single lane, but it quickly made sense to included passages at the Ballah Bypass and the Great Bitter Lake, to allow limited north-south passages. The north terminal is at Port Said, with Port Tewfik at the southern end.

The Suez Canal opened on November 16, 1869, with a blessing of the waters of the canal by both Muslim and Christian clerics. It was followed a lavish banquet including the Khedive, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, the French Empress Eugenia and the Crown Prince of Prussia, along with other dignitaries who watched lavish fireworks. The following morning, ships set sail for the half-way point at Lake Timsah. However, the French ship Peruse anchored too close to the entrance, accidentally swung around and ran aground, blocking the way into the lake. The rest of the ships anchored in the canal itself, and managed to drag Peruse clear the next morning.(Portent of things to come??) They sailed on to Port Tewfik on the 19th. The following day, the S.S. Dido was the first ship to pass through the canal from south to north. Once the Suez Canal was in full swing, it cut 5,500 miles off the trip from Europe to the Far East.

One of the most important political issues regarding the Canal came in 1888 with the Convention of Constantinople, in which all of the European powers signed a treaty agreeing that the Suez Canal would be a neutral zone, even during times of war. However, during both World Wars, it was closed, as well as during the 1956 Suez Crisis. That ended with the first United Nations Peacekeeping Force which assumed control of the Canal and maintained open access for all until both Egypt and Israel withdrew.

Comte Ferdinand de Lesseps

Thanks to the tides, tug boats, a number of engineers and salvage teams and dredgers, the skyscraper/cargo ship is righted, and will move into the Bitter Lake, the widest area of the canal so that it can be thoroughly inspected while the hundreds of waiting ships can start moving again.