In a quest to fulfill a centuries-old dream of connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the builders of the Panama Canal quickly learned that building a waterway through a narrow sliver of land looked easier on a map than it actually did. . The Panamanian Isthmus has proven to be one of the most difficult and deadly places in the world to build a canal. The builders of the passage tried to rearrange the natural landscape, but nature did not give up without a fight.
Construction crews literally had to move mountains through a snake infested jungle with an average temperature of 80 degrees and 105 inches of precipitation per year. During the rainy season, torrential rains turned the flood-prone Chagres River into raging rapids and drenched workers. “Sometimes you haven’t seen the sun for about two weeks straight,” recalls laborer Rufus Forde. “In the morning, you had to put on your wet clothes. There was no sun to dry them.
Death could strike in the form of an 18-ton boulder or tiny malaria-carrying mosquitoes that breed by the millions in swamps and festering puddles. Over more than three decades, at least 25,000 workers have died in the construction of the Panama Canal. “The working conditions at that time were so horrible that they would stun your imagination,” remembers worker Alfred Dottin. “Death was our constant companion. I will never forget the trains laden with corpses carried away every day, as if they were just lumber.
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French attempt ends in death and failure
A French company began construction of the Panama Canal in 1881. Seeking to replicate its success in leading the construction of the Suez Canal, French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps discovered that building a 51-mile-level canal from the sea through the mountainous jungle of Panama would be much more difficult than passing 120 miles through the flat Egyptian desert.
Relentless rains triggered mudslides that buried the workers alive. The floods washed away construction machinery. On top of everything, an earthquake shook the country and a fire destroyed the city of Colón when a civil war broke out. “There is too much water, the rocks are excessively hard, the ground is very rough and the climate is deadly. The country is literally poisoned, ”complained the French engineer Adolphe Godin de Lépinay.
Dysentery epidemics and epidemics of yellow fever and malaria are decimating the workforce. It is estimated that three quarters of French engineers who joined Lesseps in Panama died within three months of their arrival. A Canadian physician estimated that between 30 and 40 workers a day died during the wet seasons in 1882 and 1883, writes author Matthew Parker in Panamanian fever.
By the time France abandoned the project in 1888, accidents and illnesses had claimed the lives of 20,000 workers, according to the US State Department. Most of the dead came from Caribbean islands like Antigua, Barbados and Jamaica.
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The United States relaunches the construction of the canal
Workers take a break at a construction site, possibly canal locks, during the construction of the Panama Canal, 1913.
HN Rudd / Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
Sixteen years after the bankruptcy of the French company, an American ascendant resumed work on the partially excavated ditch. The Americans encountered many of the same obstacles as the French in the project’s first year, with yellow fever and malaria killing hundreds of workers. As death swept through the canal area, oppressed chief engineer John Findley Wallace made plans for his return trip by importing a metal coffin. By June 1905, three-quarters of the original American contingent had fled. Wallace followed suit and returned to the United States with his metal coffin occupied by the corpse of one of his workers.
Wallace’s successor, John F. Stevens, highlighted the work undertaken by health officer William Crawford Gorgas. For centuries, dirt, rotting garbage, and airborne bacteria released from tropical soil have been thought to cause yellow fever and malaria (derived from Italian for “bad air”). A yellow fever survivor, Gorgas was among the doctors whose research highlighted the role mosquitoes play in the spread of tropical diseases.
Spearheading a vast public health campaign in the canal area, Gorgas ordered houses to be fumigated, puddles drained and mosquito nets attached to windows and gutters. To suffocate mosquito larvae, health officials sprayed crude oil mixed with kerosene into water sources and puddles. As a result of these efforts, the cases of yellow fever on the isthmus were largely eradicated by the end of 1905. Although the number of cases had declined, malaria was found to be more persistent. Health inspector Joseph Le Prince estimated that 80 percent of the workforce had been hospitalized at some point in 1906 for malaria. Yet Gorgas is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.
WATCH: The locks of the Panama Canal
Accidents abound in the Culebra Cup
Workers line up for their wages at the Culebra Cut, formerly known as the Gaillard Cut, an artificial valley that cut the continental divide in Panama.
John van Hasselt / Sygma / Getty Images
With the threat of yellow fever diminishing, accidents replaced the disease as the leading cause of death in the canal area by 1909. The most dangerous work took place when workers dug a 45-foot ditch. depth and at least 300 feet wide across an eight-mile stretch of mountain. known as the Culebra Cut.
Nicknamed “Hell’s Gorge,” the Culebra Cut was a cauldron of noise with roaring locomotives and belching steam shovels where the risks of death ranged from drowning to electrocution. Workers detonated the mountains with more than 60 million pounds of dynamite, which could ignite prematurely in the tropical Panamanian climate. Excavation machines also detonated unexploded charges, as was the case in an accident in December 1908 that killed 23 men.
Floods regularly submerged equipment and the unstable ground could give way at any time. “The work of several months, even years, could be wiped out by an avalanche of earth,” lamented a senior American administrator.
Particularly for workers who had partially deafened from the consumption of quinine for malaria control, the inability to hear made fatal railway accidents common. In an oral history, George Hodges recalled a colleague who fell while trying to jump on a train and the wheel of another train “cut his body in two … as if he had been chopped with a machete “.
Worker Antonio Sanchez said cutting work was like “going to a battlefield”. With workers suffering horrific injuries, some of which required amputation, hospitals in the canal area resembled those in a war zone. So many Panama Canal workers were maimed during construction that manufacturers of artificial limbs fought over coveted contracts with canal builders. One such manufacturer, AA Marks, boasted that its waterproof arms and legs were “best suited to the local climate and conditions” and “the only type manufactured that would meet the requirements” of injured workers who were going back to work on Panama. Channel.
Between 1904 and the end of construction in 1913, the United States recorded the deaths of 5,855 canal workers. Combined with the deaths of the French company, Parker estimates it was 500 lives lost for every mile of the canal.
