"The Path Between the Seas"

[fiefoe]

A man, a (flawed) plan:

• What (Ferdinand de Lesseps) was - what he became- was the entrepreneur extraordinaire, with all the requisite traits for the role: nerve, persistence, dynamic energy, a talent for propaganda, a capacity for deception, imagination.
• "I am going to accomplish something without expediency, without personal gain."
• As Admiral David had quite accurately stated, there were not in the libraries of the world the means to determine even approximately the most practicable route.
• All French engineers.. regarded themselves as men of science. Their creations were the result of abstract computation. The Americans, in the French view, were merely adroit at improvisation.
• The French "plant" was in effect something of a mechanical Noah's Ark, with every imaginable species represented.
• When the news reached Paris, de Lesseps simply promised that there would be no more earthquakes.
• (Slaven dredges:) the smaller engines were used to run the powerful force pump that sent the blast of water to the top of the tower, or tomove th ehunge dredge forward, to to swing it from isde to side, or to hoist or lower huge legs,.."by means of which she walked step by step into the material to be excavated."
• "In tropical America, there is too much water, the terrain is mostly rock, the land has considerable relive, and finally the country is literally poisoned." To act in the same manner, in places of such opposite character, (Godin de Lepinay) declared, would be to "outrage nature" instead of to benefit by it, "which is the primary goal of the engineer".

Panama and its problems:

• Colon town: It was as if a western mining camp had been slapped together willy-nilly in the middle of an equatorial swamp, then left to molder and die.
• (Napoleon's) French army was to have occupied New Orleans and Louisiana. But yellow fever cut through the veteran troops like no enemy imaginable.. Haiti achieved independence.
• Out of some eight hundred known (mosquito) varieties, (Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay) had picked this one as the carrier of (yellow fever).
• Historically, malaria was the world's greatest killer and it was confined to no one geographical area.
• Bunau-Varilla would write of ships riding at anchor  in Colon harbor without a soul on board. Their crews were all dead of yellow fever.
• Within the forty-plus miles between Coon and Panama City was a total of seventeen different rock formations, six major geologic faults, five major cores of volcanic rock.
• The deeper the Cut was dug, the worse the slides were, and so the more the slopes had to be carved back. The more digging done, the more digging there was to do. It was a work of Sisyphus on a scale such as engineers had never before faced.
• One high hill.. had so many different contractors laboring away that it became known as Contractors Hill.
• Bunau-Varilla had to go most of the way by canoe (after the flood) and wrote afterward of gliding past half-drowned trees the tops of which were black with millions of tarantulas.

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