the History of Panama Canal: Where Dream Refused to Die

In 1886, Ferdinand de Lesseps stood before the newly dedicated Statue of Liberty as the most celebrated engineer alive, the man who had connected the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Nine years later, at eighty-three, he stood in a French courtroom convicted of fraud, his company bankrupt, and more than twenty thousand labourers already dead in a Central American jungle that had shown his reputation no mercy at all.This is the story of two failed attempts and one successful one to connect two oceans across fifty miles of Central American jungle. Of a disgraced engineer who tried to repeat his Suez triumph on terrain that could not have been more different - dense rainforest instead of flat desert, extreme flooding instead of dry stability, and a disease nobody yet understood. Of the corruption scandal that followed, so vast it gave the French language a new word for fraud. Of an American president who openly boasted about engineering an entire national revolution to get the treaty terms he wanted, and the doctor who finally defeated the mosquito-borne diseases that had defeated France.It traces the deliberately segregated system under which the canal's true builders - overwhelmingly West Indian labourers - actually lived and worked, the sixty-five years of American colonial administration that followed, and the flag that tore in 1964 and set off riots that helped force a reckoning. It closes with a climate crisis nobody who built the original dam could have anticipated: droughts so severe they forced Panama to restrict ship traffic through one of the world's most vital trade arteries, and the two very different attempts - one an almost total failure, one a genuine success - that have emerged in response.Part of The History of... series.