The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Once Muhammad Ali had died, French attempts to convince the viceroy of the financial benefits Egypt, or rather the rulers of Egypt, could draw from a canal began to succeed. Its great proponent, Ferdinand de Lesseps, turned his charm on the new viceroy, Said, whose passion for macaroni had made him thoroughly obese; but he was a clever enough political operator, and he fell in with de Lesseps’s attempts to sell shares in the scheme. This did not work out well for Said: when the shares offer was undersold, Said had to pick up the remaining shares, but at least the project was well under way by the time that Said died in 1863, and the viceroy received a special bonus: the new port at the northern end of the canal, where work had begun, was named Port Said in his honour. Said raised a labour force through a corvée imposed on Egyptian peasants, which was deeply unpopular with his subjects. His successor, Ismail, had never much liked the use of corvée labour, and its abolition left de Lesseps in a dilemma. The solution was to use machines rather than men, and a French machine-tool factory jumped at the opportunity to design a whole range of diggers and dredgers suitable for different soils, so that, by the time work was completed late in 1869, most of the hard work had been done by machine.

  The financial situation was less satisfactory. Ismail spent 240,000,000 francs on the canal, and the political price was high: the Suez Canal Company assumed ever greater powers over the project and over the affairs of the Europeans living in the canal zone, to Ismail’s consternation. The viceroys were promised 15 per cent of the profits, but by the time the canal was open Ismail had run out of money, and was paying hefty rates of interest on loans that de Lesseps had secured in Paris. Looking back, what is astonishing in the case of this canal and the Panama Canal is the willingness of investors to place money in projects which would, at best, produce returns far in the future, assuming the project proved viable. This reveals deep-rooted optimism about the desirability, even inevitability, of progress, and of man’s mastery over nature. Traffic took time to pick up: although just under 500 ships passed through Suez in the first full year of operations, 1870, they accounted for less than 10 per cent of the cargo Ismail had expected to see; and the financial outlook was grim enough for the Suez Canal Company in Paris to declare no dividend.11 Nor is this surprising: shipping companies had to adapt to the novelty of a route out East that was almost entirely different to the Cape route. Sadly, Ismail did not reap the rewards he had been promised. Ever deeper in debt, spending more on servicing his debts (roughly £5,000,000 per annum) than he was receiving from the canal, the khedive, to give him the grand title conferred by the Ottoman sultan, made the reluctant decision to sell his shares, upon which Benjamin Disraeli stole a march on his French rivals and bought up 44 per cent of the canal for £4,000,000 in 1875. He understood perfectly the importance of the canal in assuring quick access to British India, and assured Queen Victoria that ‘it is vital to Your Majesty’s authority and power at this critical moment, that the Canal should belong to England’.12 Ten years later the number of ships peaked, with, on average, ten a day passing through the waterway, and the tonnage easily exceeded the 5,000,000 Ismail had been told to expect.

  The Suez Canal was, then, much more than a link between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea – it was a new and shorter route from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and Pacific. The route from Britain to the Far East became more than 3,000 miles shorter in distance and ten or twelve days shorter in time.13 The principal beneficiary was Great Britain, not just politically but commercially: in 1889 more than 70 per cent of the goods sent through the canal were carried in British bottoms, while the French accounted for roughly 5 per cent. In London, the Board of Trade reported that ‘the trade between Europe and the East flows more and more through the Canal, and the British flag covers an ever increasing proportion of this trade’.14 Whether the cities around the Mediterranean benefited much from the canal is a moot point: Trieste, then under Austrian rule, did send ships through the canal, but the number was tiny by comparison with British numbers; and Alexandria lost its importance as a bridge between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean now that it could be bypassed through Port Said. Britain expanded its power and influence in the Mediterranean, but always with an eye on its route to India, along which its colonies of Gibraltar, Malta and eventually Cyprus became stepping stones. For British, German and other northern European ships, the Mediterranean became a passageway between two oceans, rather than a sea of interest in its own right.

  III

  The Panama Canal too was not created to service the needs of the local sea, the Caribbean, that lay on its Atlantic side, but to meet the interests of trading companies in Atlantic North America and Europe with ambitions in the Far East. Travelling by way of Cape Horn, the journey from New York to San Francisco would cover 13,000 miles, and it could take several months. By way of Panama, the journey covered only 5,000 miles.15 However, war between Spain and Britain rendered Panama unsafe, even less safe than the Cape Horn route that Spanish treasure ships began to use from 1748 onwards, in the hope of avoiding British predators in the Caribbean. Meanwhile the French had been thinking that it might be possible to carve a waterway through Central America ever since 1735, when an astronomer was sent out in the hope that he could identify a suitable route. What he suggested, after five years of exploration, was a passage upriver through Nicaragua, then across Lake Nicaragua itself. This would have minimized the need to cut through difficult terrain, but it was a long way to go, assuming the river could carry ships all the way; and as the British built up their interests along the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, in competition with Spain, political sensitivities made this plan unworkable. A British alliance with the Indians who lived around the mouth of the river killed the project. The future Lord Nelson was given command of a small squadron whose task, he wrote, was ‘to possess the Lake of Nicaragua which, for the present, may be looked upon as the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America’. Not for the first time, tropical diseases rather than a human enemy frustrated British attempts to hold on to Nicaragua.16 Still, it was generally agreed that the best route across Central America lay through Nicaragua, and this opinion was confirmed when, in 1811, the great German geographer Alexander von Humboldt declared that there was no suitable alternative. He was taken seriously because he knew South America so intimately, but the truth was that he had never visited either of the two sites.17

  Political conditions proved to be crucial in solving the problem of where to place a route between the oceans. In the years around 1820 Spain lost control of its colonies in northern South America, resulting in the creation of ‘Gran Colombia’, known for a time as New Granada, which included the narrow neck of Panama as well as modern-day Colombia and several of its neighbours. Its inhabitants, and the government of New Granada, were keen to see a canal built through the isthmus. Licences to explore were put up for sale. Among the bidders were the Americans, encouraged by Andrew Jackson, the president, even though Jackson preferred them to bid for a Nicaragua route. And, while a canal would obviously take a good many years to plan and build, a railway across Central America could be constructed much more quickly.

  Here the French, the British and the Americans jostled for position. The United States was keen to keep the British, the French and the Dutch out of Central America, and made a treaty with New Granada in 1848 that granted the Americans the right to send troops to Panama if other foreign forces began to interfere. The Americans avoided all foreign entanglements, and the decision, uniquely, to go ahead with the New Granadan treaty showed how greatly the United States valued the potential of Central America as a strategic route into the Pacific. Finally, in 1849, Lord Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary, accepted that tension with the United States had risen to a dangerous point and negotiated a deal with the USA under which neither side would try to gain exclusive rights over a canal across Central America. But the effect of this agreement was that neither side was really able to move ahead with its own project. That did not prevent an American busines
sman, William Aspinwall of New York, from buying the right to build a railway (and possibly a canal) between Panama City and the Caribbean. His plan was to meet the needs of passengers aboard his new shipping service from San Francisco to Panama, which would connect to shipping bound for New England.18

  Events rushed ahead of Aspinwall. In 1848 news reached the eastern United States that gold had been discovered in California, which had only just been acquired from Mexico. By the end of the year a steamboat, the Falcon, was heading south by way of Louisiana, bound for the isthmus of Panama, where a couple of hundred passengers were to be transported across land in dreadful conditions that they had not stopped to consider before sailing. This was only the first wave of a flood of people who imagined that they could enrich themselves at a stroke in the goldfields of California. Even the sailors who had manned the boats that took gullible Americans from Panama to San Francisco often abandoned ship when they reached California, which left a great many rotting ships in San Francisco Bay, and fewer and fewer ships ready for boarding in Panama. Meanwhile Panama City mushroomed much faster than its very limited infrastructure could manage. It became a shanty town of brothels and bars, with plenty of violence on the streets. One of its good-natured pioneers was the British widow Mary Seacole, partly of West Indian extraction, who set up the ‘British Hotel’ and tried to offer acceptable food while also ministering to victims of shootings and stabbings, not to mention the many victims of yellow fever and malaria.19 Yet all this greed and gore showed ever more clearly that a manageable route across Central America was badly needed if the United States were to make full use of the opportunities created by the acquisition of a western seaboard.

  So the railway did come into being, after a route was hacked through the jungle by thousands of navvies, very many of whom had arrived from Jamaica, where jobs were few and pay was low. Physical conditions in the isthmus were far worse than back home, but the West Indians had more natural immunity to yellow fever and were generally regarded as good workers, even though they were treated less well than whites. The railway was opened in February 1855. One historian of the Panama Canal has observed: ‘Panama was the railway.’ European governments, especially Great Britain, wondered if the United States had become too powerful in the isthmus, not just because of the heavy capital investment in the railway but because an American elite had installed itself there, and the new town of Colón, long to remain the principal American base there, was to all intents an American settlement, even if it had an extreme Wild West flavour. The cutting of the railway proved that Humboldt had been wrong: the mountains were not impassable, even if building a waterway was vastly more complicated than building a railway track that could handle reasonably steep gradients.20 And, although the line had been laid mainly by sheer human muscle power, the railway, like the shipping routes from New England to Colón and from Panama City to San Francisco, made use of steam power, which was transforming communications in these decades.

  The fact that a well-functioning railway now existed through Panama did not dent enthusiasm for a canal taking a completely different route. Nicaragua did seem to make good sense, and on the decision to go for Panama turns not just the future history of Central America but that of the United States as a world power. The wealthy American Cornelius Vanderbilt had it in mind to build a Nicaraguan canal in 1851, but he could not raise sufficient capital. A quarter of a century later the US government received a report that insisted Nicaragua was the only suitable route, and Nicaragua, not Panama, became the agreed way forward.21 This left the Panama route available to interlopers, with the French at the head of the queue, inspired by de Lesseps’s rhetoric and his sense that anything was possible – he even thought it should be possible to flood the Sahara by creating a channel through Tunisia.22 With the Americans still talking of Nicaragua but not actually doing anything, the French were able to send their own explorers into Panama in 1876, led by the youthful Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse, a relative of the French emperors. Wyse’s first discovery was how awful the conditions were in the isthmus jungle, where malaria was rampant and constant downpours meant that it was very hard to survey the land; much of his report was guesswork. Yet Wyse managed to win over the Colombian president, whose republic at this point still included the isthmus – not that it would if the French plan went ahead, as France was to be granted a 99-year lease on the canal, while Colombia would reap a 5 per cent profit on gross revenue from the canal. His clear preference was for a sea level canal, which would mean cutting right through the mountains, and one idea was to run the ships through a massive tunnel. Then there would be the literally overwhelming problem of the rush of water as the canal met the River Chagres, which flowed into the Caribbean close to Colón, and in full flood would sweep away anything that stood in its way.23 But the superhuman nineteenth-century engineers of the generation of Brunel assumed they could achieve anything.

  That is why the story of the French attempt to build a canal across the isthmus, mainly alongside the railway, is so tragic. No account was taken, even after Europeans had been poking around the area for several decades, of the threat of disease, particularly yellow fever, with its 50 per cent mortality. Enthusiasm for the scheme ensured that capital could be raised, reaching 700,000,000 francs by 1883, by which time 10,000 workers needed to be paid, a figure that doubled within fifteen months. Jamaicans still dominated the work force, attracted by good pay; ships reached Colón every four days carrying Jamaican labourers; back home in Kingston they fought to get a place on board.24 Meanwhile the engineers faced a terrible fate as they saw their families die of yellow fever, like the wife, daughter, son and would-be son-in-law of the director-general of operations, Jules Dingler. Dingler expressed his despair by ordering the execution of his beloved horses.25 French officials often brought their own coffin to Panama so that their remains could be repatriated if they caught one of the rampant diseases of Central America.26 Observers increasingly wondered whether the plan for a canal was viable. In Paris, the mood was made darker still by the vicious anti-Semitic attacks launched by the publicist Drumont against Baron Jacques de Reinach, a wealthy Jewish banker who had been advising the Canal Company. As much as the Dreyfus Affair, the Panama Affair fuelled French anti-Semitism. Reinach died just as he was coming under investigation following accusations of bribery and corruption; he may well have committed suicide.27 But by 1890 it was obvious that the project had failed, despite the considerable amount of investment and sheer physical work that had gone into it. The collapse of the Canal Company was the largest financial crash in the entire century.28

  IV

  The financial disaster in France brought the canal project to an end, even though channels had been dug, machinery had been sent to Panama and a great many labourers were now left without work or wages. An American journalist visited the remains of the canal in 1896 and described the all-but-abandoned machinery, which was still, oddly, oiled and maintained in otherwise deserted yards.29 Yet the disaster did not kill the idea of building a waterway between the oceans. The French had no appetite left for the project; but the Americans were keenly examining their own strategic interests in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the argument for a direct link through Panama or Nicaragua now became overwhelmingly attractive. At the end of the nineteenth century American naval power grew prodigiously. The United States went to war with Spain in 1898 in defence of Cuban revolutionaries seeking independence. The casus belli was an explosion that destroyed the American battleship the USS Maine while it stood in Havana harbour. Nearly 300 sailors were killed, and, even though the reason for the explosion remains a mystery, this was enough to energize President McKinley. The outcome of the short conflict, which Spain was bound to lose, was that the United States occupied Cuba for several years and then imposed a treaty that seriously limited the new republic’s sovereign powers. Another acquisition, one that remains in American hands, was Puerto Rico.30

  Just as significant were gains in the Pacific. The United S
tates occupied the Philippines following the defeat of the Spanish navy in Manila Bay in May 1898, during the same war. Hawai’i and Guam were also acquired. These, along with the Caribbean acquisitions, marked a significant change in American foreign policy, the beginning of a process of empire-building that would culminate in the acquisition of the Panama canal zone. Of course, the Americans denied that this was empire-building, but it is hard to see it as anything else. Theodore Roosevelt, a rising star, governor of New York, announced: ‘I wish to see the United States the dominant power on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.’ At the same time, he emphatically denied that his views smacked of imperialism. As one American historian has pithily explained: ‘expansion was different; it was growth, it was progress, it was in the American grain.’31 Roosevelt cannot be accused of ignorance about naval affairs: he was the author of a book on the war of 1812 between Great Britain and the United States, and a great admirer of the prophet of a new naval policy, Alfred Thayer Mahan.

  Captain, later Admiral, Mahan’s The Influence of Sea-Power upon History, 1660–1783, a work first published in Boston in 1890, had a powerful influence on strategic thinking in London, Berlin and Washington on the eve of the First World War; it was required reading in naval academies both in the United States and in Europe. Mahan’s aim was to reveal the importance for the United States of an active naval policy at a time when isolationism had long been the order of the day, and when even American merchant fleets were, he said, playing only a modest role in world trade. He pointed to the three maritime frontiers of the greatly expanded United States of his day: the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the vast area of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.32 Yet one of his most revealing comments about the future direction of policy appears at first sight to concern the Mediterranean rather than the oceans: