"MAP OF TH:t; PROPOSED
NICARAGUA CANAL ROUTE.
1his inset from an 1890 map ofMexico and Central America lays out proposed canal routes in both Panama and Nicaragua.
more difficult environment. And the Great Wall's builders did not have to attract investors by artificially underestimating the real costs. By 1888, the syndicate that funded the project was broke; the French government refused to bail them our. The syndicate's collapse rocked France-De Lesseps was discredited and was brought to trial for mismanagement. So was Gustave Eiffel, who at the time was also building the graceful Parisian rower that bears his name. The French failure opened the door for the Americans. It also encouraged many to favor an alternative route across the less pestilential Nicaragua. But what Nicaragua lacked in diseases it made up for in seismic activity-or, at least, that's how Panama Canal lobbyists spun it. Conveniently for them, 1902 was a seismically active year in the Caribbean. The American Congress, frightened by images of lava-spewing Nicaraguan volcanoes, reversed itself and supported building a canal in Panama. The Colombian government was not so easy to convince that replacing the bankrupt French with the justas-imperialAmericans was such a good idea. Luckily for the Americans, quite a number of Panamanians were eager to make a deal. A US-supported uprising in November
SEA HISTORY 148, AUTUMN 2014
1903 established the region as the independent Republic of Panama. (The timely arrival of USS Nashville discouraged Colombia's attempt to reclaim its lost province.) ,/ '
was given authority to protect the canal. It then purchased the assets of the defunct French canal company for $40 million. President Theodore Roosevelt played a key role in all these maneuvers. A disciple of Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of 1he Influence of Sea Power Upon Histo ry (1890) , Roosevelt began building the powerful fleet that Mahan argued was essential to national greatness. Roosevelt had decided that the Panama Canal was essential for his program of establishing the US as a major power on both the Atlantic and Pacific. Among the iconic shots of Teddy Roosevelt is one of him at the controls of a steam shovel at the canal. The canal's value to American military flexibility had become painfully apparent after the sinking of USS Maine in Havana in 1898. The battleship USS O regon could nor make the voyage from San Francisco to Havana around Cape Horn quickly enough to assert American authority. Such flexibility came at a cost, of course-$352 million. Ir was the most expensive project for the US to that date-the French had spent $287 million . Building on the French start, but abandoning the impractical sea-level requirement insisted upon by De Lesseps, the American plan called for six locks and the creation of
Within weeks, the Republic's representative, the Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla, negotiated a treaty with US Secretary of State John Hay. The US was given a ten-mile-wide strip of land across Panama in exchange for a lease payment of $10 million and $250,000 per year. The US President Teddy Roosevelt at the controls ofa steam shovel at the Panama Canal construction site, 1906
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