"The Path Between the Seas"

[fiefoe]

Champions for the Panama route:

• (William Nelson) Cromwell was a .. corporation lawyer, a kind of mutation sprung forth in the Wall Street jungle during the rise of the railroads.
• Cromwell failed to block the appointments of Hains, Haupt, Noble, and Walker (in the Isthmus Canal Commission), but the three other civil engineers chosen were from Cromwell's acceptable list.
• It was the "silver-tongued" Cromwell who convinced Admiral Walker that the place to commence his studies was in Paris, not Central America.
• (Philippe Bunau-Varilla) saw himself as... the central figure in a spacious romance.
• The shame is that he also felt compelled to unfold it all in such high-blown fashion... Moreover, there is ample evidence that the man himself bore little resemblance to the character he becomes in his books.
• (He had) the capacity to invigorate others with his vision... He had... "a sort of resourceful energy which some people are accustomed to regard as peculiarly American."
• He told Witte that a Panama canal and the Trans-Siberian Railroad, then under construction, could be the perfect Franco-Russian counterpart to the Anglo-American combination of the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroads.
• The difference in the handwriting was.. astounding. So, convinced of Dreyfus' innocence, the brothers had published pictures of both letters in Le Matin.. (which) led to the reopening of the case.
• Bunau-Varilla had more than Fate working for him... Baker, who met the Frenchman at the ship, was being reimbursed for his expenses and services by Pavey, who himself was serving as Bunau-Varilla's "man" in New York.
• What have the Nicaraguans chosen to characterize their country on their coat of arms, on the postage stamps? Volcanoes!... (Bunau-Varilla) knew the exact one, a pretty little one-cetavo Nicaraguan stamp showing... Momotombo "in magnificent eruption."
• In an inverse way, the downfall of the French, the sheer unpleasantness and difficulty of taking the Panama route, began to have a peculiar, compelling kind of attraction. A railroad contractor told Morgan..: "Engineers are sometimes the least practical of men, they may be attracted by difficulties..."
• Morgan had cited the preference of past canal commissions for Nicaragua; Hanna urged his colleagues to think not of the past but of the future.
• (Of Hanna:) It was the voice of common sense speaking.. of power and "stubborn facts".
• If the United States were to build a Nicaragua canal, what then was to prevent some other power - by which (Hanna) meant Germany - from finishing the French canal?
• Morison emerges a bit like the butler at the end of the mystery - as the ever-present, frequently unobstrusive, highly instrumental figure around whom the entire plot turned.
• It was the technical view, the considered judgment of the engineers, the triumphed in the Senate.
• But the law bored (Morison) - as it had Ferdinand de Lesseps, as it had Roosevelt - so he had decided to be an engineer.

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