Forgotten Facts

PANAMA Canal

What is the Caribbean?

In my youth, Bahamians were proud that the Bahama Islands were not in the Caribbean. We preferred not to be called West Indians and the South Sea Islands were a romantic dream of friendly ‘native’ inhabitants. I never stopped to wonder how those faraway islands got their name, until I read James A Michener’s Caribbean.

I was relieved that Michener wrote, “The Caribbean, nearly nineteen hundred miles wide from Barbados to Yucatán, does not include … the Bahama Islands.”

To the south, the Caribbean Sea is bordered by South and Central America, to the north by Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

Panama, used as a land-bridge to shorten the journey between Spain and the Spanish colonies in South America, became the centre of Spanish America and it was natural that the sea on the two sides if the isthmus were called the North Sea (now the Caribbean Sea) and the South Sea (now the Pacific Ocean), which is how the South Sea Islands got their name. In 1881, France started to build a canal through Panama to the Pacific, but engineering problems, plus a very high worker-mortality rate, brought construction to a halt in 1894, until the United States took over the project on May 4, 1904, and opened the canal on August 15, 1914.

The Canal is an artificial 82 km waterway that cuts across the Isthmus of Panama, connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific

Ocean, and is a vital conduit for maritime trade. Around one million ships transit the canal each year. It is interesting to note that the Bahamas played a role in its construction, by providing stevedores and workers. Cargo ships from Europe would stop at Long Cay (Fortune Island) to pick up workers to unload the ships at Panama – then drop those workers off to their homes, on the return journey to PAUL C ARANHA Europe. Long Cay got the name Fortune Islands because people from all over our Bahama Islands travelled FORGOTTEN FACTS there to make their fortunes. A lesser-known fact about the Canal is that ships from Europe have to steer a westerly course on the way to Panama, where they make a left turn into the Canal and, when they emerge into the Pacific, they are east of where they were when they entered the Canal.