It's an amazing feat of engineering with an interesting story behind it.
In this episode, we'll be talking about the complicated history of the Panama Canal and how it ultimately came to be.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about perhaps the most famous canal in the world, the Panama Canal.
[00:00:29] It’s an amazing feat of engineering, but it is much more than that.
[00:00:34] Its story is one of failure, corruption, ingenuity, cooperation, and ultimately, mankind versus mother nature.
[00:00:45] OK then, The Panama Canal.
[00:00:49] Around three million years ago, the bodies of water we now know as the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean were one, single ocean.
[00:01:00] But under the Earth’s surface, two plates were on a collision path.
[00:01:07] The Pacific Plate was moving towards the Caribbean plate. When the two met, the Pacific Plate slid under the Caribbean, pushing the Earth’s crust upwards.
[00:01:21] First, small islands were created. And gradually, these islands became greater in number and in size, then greater still, eventually forming a small piece of land that joined North and South America.
[00:01:38] The technical term for this, you might know, is an isthmus.
[00:01:43] And in 1513, a Spanish explorer by the name of Vasco Núñez de Balboa had made his way across this isthmus, becoming the first European to set eyes on what he called “the South Sea”, the vast ocean that we know today as the Pacific Ocean.
[00:02:05] This discovery was important because it provided clear evidence that the so-called “New World” was indeed a separate landmass, distinct from Asia.
[00:02:18] And it also planted the seed for the idea of a passageway, a body of water that would allow people, or rather, ships, to cross this continent rather than have to go all the way around the bottom.
[00:02:35] It would, however, be over 400 years until this dream was actually realised in the form of The Panama Canal.
[00:02:44] So, first, a little geography.
[00:02:47] As you will know, Panama is the small Central American country where our story takes place.
[00:02:55] It's relatively small by global standards, but it’s actually not so small by Central American standards. In fact, it is slap bang in the middle: of the seven Central American countries, three are smaller, and three are larger.
[00:03:12] But the one thing Panama certainly is is thin.
[00:03:18] At its narrowest point, Panama is a mere 61 kilometres wide.
[00:03:24] And if Panama weren’t there, or if there was an easy way of getting a ship to pass from one side of Panama to the other, this would be the most tremendous shortcut.
[00:03:37] For a ship to get from Europe to Asia, it would have to sail all the way around Cape Horn, at the bottom of South America, then travel up through the Pacific Ocean.
[00:03:50] But if it could somehow get over that tiny 60 kilometre slither of Panama, it could save around 20,000 kilometres of sailing.
[00:04:01] It would be quicker, safer, and cheaper.
[00:04:05] Even all the way back in the 16th century, shortly after de Balboa had clapped eyes on the Pacific, the Spanish investigated the possibility of digging a canal that would link the two oceans and allow ships to pass.
[00:04:21] A survey was conducted, but it came back with a resounding no.
[00:04:27] Panama might be a very thin country, but it is mountainous and difficult to cross in many parts.
[00:04:37] The mountains rise to three and a half thousand metres, and the part of the country that borders Colombia has terrain so treacherous and difficult to cross that, to this day, there still isn’t any way of crossing by road.
[00:04:54] It is in many parts a thick, mountainous jungle.
[00:04:59] Fast forward to the 19th century and it wasn’t just the Spanish that were interested.The French, the British, the Americans and the Colombians were all jostling for position, hoping to devise a plan to finally carve out a viable path through the Isthmus of Panama.
[00:05:20] Even the Germans got involved, with one German geographer called Alexander Humboldt proposing nine different routes across Panama.
[00:05:30] It’s important to note that, at the time that all of this was going on, the country we now know as Panama was going through great changes.
[00:05:40] In 1821 it went from being part of the Spanish empire to being part of Colombia, and then in 1903 it gained its independence.
[00:05:51] Ultimately, after careful consideration, in 1878, a 99-year concession was granted to a French company to build and operate a canal on the Isthmus of Panama.
[00:06:04] And if you’re wondering, the reason that a French company was granted the rights was because the French had successfully built the Suez canal in Egypt in 1869.
[00:06:16] The Suez Canal is about three times the length of the Panama Canal, and it certainly was an impressive piece of work that revolutionised trade and shipping in another part of the world.
[00:06:29] But, compared to the Panama Canal, building the Suez Canal was a piece of cake, it was incredibly easy.
[00:06:38] The Suez canal is essentially a long trench across the desert.
[00:06:43] The Panama Canal needed to go through mountains and jungle.
[00:06:49] The climate in Egypt is hot and dry, but predictable.
[00:06:54] The climate in Panama is hot and humid, and very unpredictable.
[00:07:00] Heavy rain can come at any time, causing landslides.
[00:07:05] What’s more, Panama’s tropical climate can quickly lead to diseases like malaria and yellow fever. These were not problems the French had to deal with when building the Suez Canal.
[00:07:18] Nevertheless, the French got started on January the 1st, 1880. It was a huge project, both in scale and ambition. Over 17,000 workers were shipped in, mainly from the Caribbean.
[00:07:35] And, attracted by the glamour and money-making potential of the project, and having seen the success of Suez, hundreds of thousands of ordinary French people invested their life savings into the company behind the project.
[00:07:51] The French plan was, in layman’s terms, to dig a trench from one side of the country to the other.
[00:07:59] It was more or less a replica of what had worked in Egypt a few decades before.
[00:08:05] It didn’t take long for the French engineers to realise that this plan wouldn’t work.
[00:08:10] For starters, whenever there were heavy rains there would be landslides, filling up the holes that the French workers had dug.
[00:08:19] They would work for months, and then in the space of 30 minutes of torrential rain, all of this work would be undone.
[00:08:29] It must have been hugely demoralising to the workers, but that was far from the only problem. The tropical diseases were killing men in their thousands. By 1888, a combination of accident and disease had cost the lives of 20,000 workers.
[00:08:51] You might have thought that the loss of life would have been enough to deter the French, but the grim reality is that most of the workers were not French; they were from the Caribbean, places like Antigua and Jamaica, so, to put it candidly, it was seen not as a human tragedy but as the cost of doing business.
[00:09:14] Still, if the loss of life wasn’t enough to deter the French, the impossibility of making money would be.
[00:09:23] In 1889, after the money ran out, the French company building the canal was forced to declare bankruptcy.
[00:09:32] The French effort had lost something like €2 billion in today’s money, erasing the investments of some 800,000 small French investors who had been drawn by the ambition of the project.
[00:09:46] The chief developer of the project, Ferdinand de Lesseps was prosecuted for corruption and misappropriation of company funds, as was the architect of the Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel, who had also been involved in the design of the canal.
[00:10:04] And, far more tragically, there were the graves of 20,000 workers who had lost their lives in what would be a completely futile effort.
[00:10:15] We need to fast forward now to the start of the 20th century, ten years after the failure of the French attempt.
[00:10:23] The Americans were sensing their opportunity, and had come to an agreement to pay the French for the rights to construct the canal.
[00:10:33] Remember, the French had been granted a 99 year concession, so, there was still plenty of time for them to try again if they wanted to.
[00:10:42] The added complication here was that Panama was still part of Colombia, and the Colombian senate did not accept this agreement, the agreement to sell the concession to the Americans.
[00:10:56] So, the US tried a different tack; it pushed for Panamanian independence, and was quick to support and protect the newly independent nation when it declared independence in November of 1903.
[00:11:12] The deal could now be signed, and the freshly independent Panama granted the United States the licence to build and administer the canal.
[00:11:22] This, as you might have gathered, is a very superficial summary of a complicated period in the political history of the region, but I hope you will forgive me as we need to move on the business of the actual construction of the canal.
[00:11:38] When American workers arrived in 1904, they found the construction site in complete disarray. It was a mess, full of falling down buildings and broken equipment. They would have to start from a clean slate.
[00:11:55] Importantly, the Americans took a different approach to the French.
[00:12:01] While the French tried to use brute force to dig a trench through the country, the Americans realised that they would have to change strategy.
[00:12:12] Instead of trying to dig a sea-level canal through the mountains in the middle of the country, the US engineers decided to create a large lake in this mountainous region through which the ships could pass.
[00:12:25] They would do this by building what at the time was the world’s largest dam, the Gatun dam. This dam would then flood the jungly mountainous area in the middle of the country, creating an artificial lake 26 metres above sea level.
[00:12:44] But, you are probably wondering, how does a ship get up to the lake and then down the other side.
[00:12:51] Well, here’s the clever bit.
[00:12:54] The engineers created a system of locks, chambers that allow boats to go up and down.
[00:13:01] A boat would go into a lock, the giant doors would close behind it, then the chamber would fill with water, the boat would rise and go into the next chamber, and the process would be repeated until that boat had climbed the almost 30 metres to the lake in the middle.
[00:13:20] Then the same thing would happen in reverse on the other side.
[00:13:24] And because you only need gravity to do the work of moving water from high to low, there are no pumps required.
[00:13:33] Now, locks were certainly no modern American invention, and in fact were first used in Song Dynasty China, in the 10th century.
[00:13:43] But the genius of the American engineers with the Panama Canal was to create this huge artificial lake which would then provide both a solution to the problem of how a boat can cross the mountains and also how to supply large amounts of water to the locks.
[00:14:01] Long story short, it worked, and the Panama Canal that’s in use today is more or less the same one that the Americans finished construction of in 1914.
[00:14:13] And its influence is hard to overstate. It operates 24 hours a day, with 14,000 ships passing through it each year carrying almost 300 million tonnes of cargo.
[00:14:27] This is huge, it’s 40% of the world’s cargo ship traffic.
[00:14:33] Using it, as you might imagine, is not cheap.
[00:14:37] The cost to use the canal depends on factors like the size and weight of the ship, and the average cost in 2022 was $211,000.
[00:14:49] It is expensive, but the alternative is taking a lot more time and spending a lot of money on fuel by going “the long way round”, around the bottom of South America.
[00:15:03] And this canal is also an amazing example of global cooperation - it is neutral, open to any ship, it is not used as a political tool.
[00:15:15] Now, as to the “future” of the Panama Canal, there is one large threat to its existence: climate change.
[00:15:24] And specifically, drought, the lack of rain.
[00:15:29] The Panama Canal uses a lot of water, as every time a ship goes through, the water from the lock is let out into the ocean. Specifically, anywhere from 200 to 500 million litres are required for every ship.
[00:15:48] Historically this wasn’t a problem, as the artificial lake that forms the middle of the canal would be constantly refreshed by rivers and heavy rain that brought more than enough water into it.
[00:16:01] But recently the region has had a particularly dry patch.
[00:16:07] At the start of September this year, September 2023, it was reported that the water level of the lake was down 2 and a half metres from normal levels. Ships have had to reduce their weight, and crossings have had to be limited.
[00:16:25] For some types of ships, waiting times have doubled, and there have been reports of ships opting for the long way round.
[00:16:34] After all, if you might actually get there more quickly, and save yourself a quarter of a million dollars in fees, you can understand why.
[00:16:43] So, to conclude, the story of the Panama Canal is one of politics, engineering, and mankind’s desire to bend Mother Earth to our will.
[00:16:55] The French found the task too great, their efforts foiled by climate and disease.
[00:17:02] The Americans learned from their predecessors' mistakes, almost literally moving mountains to overcome the challenge.
[00:17:10] But if the dry spells of the past few years are anything to go by, this battle of mankind vs. Mother Earth might not be over just yet.
[00:17:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Panama Canal.
[00:17:27] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:17:31] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:17:34] What can we learn from the construction of the Panama Canal? What lies ahead for the future?
[00:17:41] We have lots of curious minds in Central and Latin America, so I’d be particularly interested to hear your opinion.
[00:17:48] The place for that is, as always, community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:17:53] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:58] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about perhaps the most famous canal in the world, the Panama Canal.
[00:00:29] It’s an amazing feat of engineering, but it is much more than that.
[00:00:34] Its story is one of failure, corruption, ingenuity, cooperation, and ultimately, mankind versus mother nature.
[00:00:45] OK then, The Panama Canal.
[00:00:49] Around three million years ago, the bodies of water we now know as the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean were one, single ocean.
[00:01:00] But under the Earth’s surface, two plates were on a collision path.
[00:01:07] The Pacific Plate was moving towards the Caribbean plate. When the two met, the Pacific Plate slid under the Caribbean, pushing the Earth’s crust upwards.
[00:01:21] First, small islands were created. And gradually, these islands became greater in number and in size, then greater still, eventually forming a small piece of land that joined North and South America.
[00:01:38] The technical term for this, you might know, is an isthmus.
[00:01:43] And in 1513, a Spanish explorer by the name of Vasco Núñez de Balboa had made his way across this isthmus, becoming the first European to set eyes on what he called “the South Sea”, the vast ocean that we know today as the Pacific Ocean.
[00:02:05] This discovery was important because it provided clear evidence that the so-called “New World” was indeed a separate landmass, distinct from Asia.
[00:02:18] And it also planted the seed for the idea of a passageway, a body of water that would allow people, or rather, ships, to cross this continent rather than have to go all the way around the bottom.
[00:02:35] It would, however, be over 400 years until this dream was actually realised in the form of The Panama Canal.
[00:02:44] So, first, a little geography.
[00:02:47] As you will know, Panama is the small Central American country where our story takes place.
[00:02:55] It's relatively small by global standards, but it’s actually not so small by Central American standards. In fact, it is slap bang in the middle: of the seven Central American countries, three are smaller, and three are larger.
[00:03:12] But the one thing Panama certainly is is thin.
[00:03:18] At its narrowest point, Panama is a mere 61 kilometres wide.
[00:03:24] And if Panama weren’t there, or if there was an easy way of getting a ship to pass from one side of Panama to the other, this would be the most tremendous shortcut.
[00:03:37] For a ship to get from Europe to Asia, it would have to sail all the way around Cape Horn, at the bottom of South America, then travel up through the Pacific Ocean.
[00:03:50] But if it could somehow get over that tiny 60 kilometre slither of Panama, it could save around 20,000 kilometres of sailing.
[00:04:01] It would be quicker, safer, and cheaper.
[00:04:05] Even all the way back in the 16th century, shortly after de Balboa had clapped eyes on the Pacific, the Spanish investigated the possibility of digging a canal that would link the two oceans and allow ships to pass.
[00:04:21] A survey was conducted, but it came back with a resounding no.
[00:04:27] Panama might be a very thin country, but it is mountainous and difficult to cross in many parts.
[00:04:37] The mountains rise to three and a half thousand metres, and the part of the country that borders Colombia has terrain so treacherous and difficult to cross that, to this day, there still isn’t any way of crossing by road.
[00:04:54] It is in many parts a thick, mountainous jungle.
[00:04:59] Fast forward to the 19th century and it wasn’t just the Spanish that were interested.The French, the British, the Americans and the Colombians were all jostling for position, hoping to devise a plan to finally carve out a viable path through the Isthmus of Panama.
[00:05:20] Even the Germans got involved, with one German geographer called Alexander Humboldt proposing nine different routes across Panama.
[00:05:30] It’s important to note that, at the time that all of this was going on, the country we now know as Panama was going through great changes.
[00:05:40] In 1821 it went from being part of the Spanish empire to being part of Colombia, and then in 1903 it gained its independence.
[00:05:51] Ultimately, after careful consideration, in 1878, a 99-year concession was granted to a French company to build and operate a canal on the Isthmus of Panama.
[00:06:04] And if you’re wondering, the reason that a French company was granted the rights was because the French had successfully built the Suez canal in Egypt in 1869.
[00:06:16] The Suez Canal is about three times the length of the Panama Canal, and it certainly was an impressive piece of work that revolutionised trade and shipping in another part of the world.
[00:06:29] But, compared to the Panama Canal, building the Suez Canal was a piece of cake, it was incredibly easy.
[00:06:38] The Suez canal is essentially a long trench across the desert.
[00:06:43] The Panama Canal needed to go through mountains and jungle.
[00:06:49] The climate in Egypt is hot and dry, but predictable.
[00:06:54] The climate in Panama is hot and humid, and very unpredictable.
[00:07:00] Heavy rain can come at any time, causing landslides.
[00:07:05] What’s more, Panama’s tropical climate can quickly lead to diseases like malaria and yellow fever. These were not problems the French had to deal with when building the Suez Canal.
[00:07:18] Nevertheless, the French got started on January the 1st, 1880. It was a huge project, both in scale and ambition. Over 17,000 workers were shipped in, mainly from the Caribbean.
[00:07:35] And, attracted by the glamour and money-making potential of the project, and having seen the success of Suez, hundreds of thousands of ordinary French people invested their life savings into the company behind the project.
[00:07:51] The French plan was, in layman’s terms, to dig a trench from one side of the country to the other.
[00:07:59] It was more or less a replica of what had worked in Egypt a few decades before.
[00:08:05] It didn’t take long for the French engineers to realise that this plan wouldn’t work.
[00:08:10] For starters, whenever there were heavy rains there would be landslides, filling up the holes that the French workers had dug.
[00:08:19] They would work for months, and then in the space of 30 minutes of torrential rain, all of this work would be undone.
[00:08:29] It must have been hugely demoralising to the workers, but that was far from the only problem. The tropical diseases were killing men in their thousands. By 1888, a combination of accident and disease had cost the lives of 20,000 workers.
[00:08:51] You might have thought that the loss of life would have been enough to deter the French, but the grim reality is that most of the workers were not French; they were from the Caribbean, places like Antigua and Jamaica, so, to put it candidly, it was seen not as a human tragedy but as the cost of doing business.
[00:09:14] Still, if the loss of life wasn’t enough to deter the French, the impossibility of making money would be.
[00:09:23] In 1889, after the money ran out, the French company building the canal was forced to declare bankruptcy.
[00:09:32] The French effort had lost something like €2 billion in today’s money, erasing the investments of some 800,000 small French investors who had been drawn by the ambition of the project.
[00:09:46] The chief developer of the project, Ferdinand de Lesseps was prosecuted for corruption and misappropriation of company funds, as was the architect of the Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel, who had also been involved in the design of the canal.
[00:10:04] And, far more tragically, there were the graves of 20,000 workers who had lost their lives in what would be a completely futile effort.
[00:10:15] We need to fast forward now to the start of the 20th century, ten years after the failure of the French attempt.
[00:10:23] The Americans were sensing their opportunity, and had come to an agreement to pay the French for the rights to construct the canal.
[00:10:33] Remember, the French had been granted a 99 year concession, so, there was still plenty of time for them to try again if they wanted to.
[00:10:42] The added complication here was that Panama was still part of Colombia, and the Colombian senate did not accept this agreement, the agreement to sell the concession to the Americans.
[00:10:56] So, the US tried a different tack; it pushed for Panamanian independence, and was quick to support and protect the newly independent nation when it declared independence in November of 1903.
[00:11:12] The deal could now be signed, and the freshly independent Panama granted the United States the licence to build and administer the canal.
[00:11:22] This, as you might have gathered, is a very superficial summary of a complicated period in the political history of the region, but I hope you will forgive me as we need to move on the business of the actual construction of the canal.
[00:11:38] When American workers arrived in 1904, they found the construction site in complete disarray. It was a mess, full of falling down buildings and broken equipment. They would have to start from a clean slate.
[00:11:55] Importantly, the Americans took a different approach to the French.
[00:12:01] While the French tried to use brute force to dig a trench through the country, the Americans realised that they would have to change strategy.
[00:12:12] Instead of trying to dig a sea-level canal through the mountains in the middle of the country, the US engineers decided to create a large lake in this mountainous region through which the ships could pass.
[00:12:25] They would do this by building what at the time was the world’s largest dam, the Gatun dam. This dam would then flood the jungly mountainous area in the middle of the country, creating an artificial lake 26 metres above sea level.
[00:12:44] But, you are probably wondering, how does a ship get up to the lake and then down the other side.
[00:12:51] Well, here’s the clever bit.
[00:12:54] The engineers created a system of locks, chambers that allow boats to go up and down.
[00:13:01] A boat would go into a lock, the giant doors would close behind it, then the chamber would fill with water, the boat would rise and go into the next chamber, and the process would be repeated until that boat had climbed the almost 30 metres to the lake in the middle.
[00:13:20] Then the same thing would happen in reverse on the other side.
[00:13:24] And because you only need gravity to do the work of moving water from high to low, there are no pumps required.
[00:13:33] Now, locks were certainly no modern American invention, and in fact were first used in Song Dynasty China, in the 10th century.
[00:13:43] But the genius of the American engineers with the Panama Canal was to create this huge artificial lake which would then provide both a solution to the problem of how a boat can cross the mountains and also how to supply large amounts of water to the locks.
[00:14:01] Long story short, it worked, and the Panama Canal that’s in use today is more or less the same one that the Americans finished construction of in 1914.
[00:14:13] And its influence is hard to overstate. It operates 24 hours a day, with 14,000 ships passing through it each year carrying almost 300 million tonnes of cargo.
[00:14:27] This is huge, it’s 40% of the world’s cargo ship traffic.
[00:14:33] Using it, as you might imagine, is not cheap.
[00:14:37] The cost to use the canal depends on factors like the size and weight of the ship, and the average cost in 2022 was $211,000.
[00:14:49] It is expensive, but the alternative is taking a lot more time and spending a lot of money on fuel by going “the long way round”, around the bottom of South America.
[00:15:03] And this canal is also an amazing example of global cooperation - it is neutral, open to any ship, it is not used as a political tool.
[00:15:15] Now, as to the “future” of the Panama Canal, there is one large threat to its existence: climate change.
[00:15:24] And specifically, drought, the lack of rain.
[00:15:29] The Panama Canal uses a lot of water, as every time a ship goes through, the water from the lock is let out into the ocean. Specifically, anywhere from 200 to 500 million litres are required for every ship.
[00:15:48] Historically this wasn’t a problem, as the artificial lake that forms the middle of the canal would be constantly refreshed by rivers and heavy rain that brought more than enough water into it.
[00:16:01] But recently the region has had a particularly dry patch.
[00:16:07] At the start of September this year, September 2023, it was reported that the water level of the lake was down 2 and a half metres from normal levels. Ships have had to reduce their weight, and crossings have had to be limited.
[00:16:25] For some types of ships, waiting times have doubled, and there have been reports of ships opting for the long way round.
[00:16:34] After all, if you might actually get there more quickly, and save yourself a quarter of a million dollars in fees, you can understand why.
[00:16:43] So, to conclude, the story of the Panama Canal is one of politics, engineering, and mankind’s desire to bend Mother Earth to our will.
[00:16:55] The French found the task too great, their efforts foiled by climate and disease.
[00:17:02] The Americans learned from their predecessors' mistakes, almost literally moving mountains to overcome the challenge.
[00:17:10] But if the dry spells of the past few years are anything to go by, this battle of mankind vs. Mother Earth might not be over just yet.
[00:17:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Panama Canal.
[00:17:27] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:17:31] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:17:34] What can we learn from the construction of the Panama Canal? What lies ahead for the future?
[00:17:41] We have lots of curious minds in Central and Latin America, so I’d be particularly interested to hear your opinion.
[00:17:48] The place for that is, as always, community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:17:53] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:58] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about perhaps the most famous canal in the world, the Panama Canal.
[00:00:29] It’s an amazing feat of engineering, but it is much more than that.
[00:00:34] Its story is one of failure, corruption, ingenuity, cooperation, and ultimately, mankind versus mother nature.
[00:00:45] OK then, The Panama Canal.
[00:00:49] Around three million years ago, the bodies of water we now know as the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean were one, single ocean.
[00:01:00] But under the Earth’s surface, two plates were on a collision path.
[00:01:07] The Pacific Plate was moving towards the Caribbean plate. When the two met, the Pacific Plate slid under the Caribbean, pushing the Earth’s crust upwards.
[00:01:21] First, small islands were created. And gradually, these islands became greater in number and in size, then greater still, eventually forming a small piece of land that joined North and South America.
[00:01:38] The technical term for this, you might know, is an isthmus.
[00:01:43] And in 1513, a Spanish explorer by the name of Vasco Núñez de Balboa had made his way across this isthmus, becoming the first European to set eyes on what he called “the South Sea”, the vast ocean that we know today as the Pacific Ocean.
[00:02:05] This discovery was important because it provided clear evidence that the so-called “New World” was indeed a separate landmass, distinct from Asia.
[00:02:18] And it also planted the seed for the idea of a passageway, a body of water that would allow people, or rather, ships, to cross this continent rather than have to go all the way around the bottom.
[00:02:35] It would, however, be over 400 years until this dream was actually realised in the form of The Panama Canal.
[00:02:44] So, first, a little geography.
[00:02:47] As you will know, Panama is the small Central American country where our story takes place.
[00:02:55] It's relatively small by global standards, but it’s actually not so small by Central American standards. In fact, it is slap bang in the middle: of the seven Central American countries, three are smaller, and three are larger.
[00:03:12] But the one thing Panama certainly is is thin.
[00:03:18] At its narrowest point, Panama is a mere 61 kilometres wide.
[00:03:24] And if Panama weren’t there, or if there was an easy way of getting a ship to pass from one side of Panama to the other, this would be the most tremendous shortcut.
[00:03:37] For a ship to get from Europe to Asia, it would have to sail all the way around Cape Horn, at the bottom of South America, then travel up through the Pacific Ocean.
[00:03:50] But if it could somehow get over that tiny 60 kilometre slither of Panama, it could save around 20,000 kilometres of sailing.
[00:04:01] It would be quicker, safer, and cheaper.
[00:04:05] Even all the way back in the 16th century, shortly after de Balboa had clapped eyes on the Pacific, the Spanish investigated the possibility of digging a canal that would link the two oceans and allow ships to pass.
[00:04:21] A survey was conducted, but it came back with a resounding no.
[00:04:27] Panama might be a very thin country, but it is mountainous and difficult to cross in many parts.
[00:04:37] The mountains rise to three and a half thousand metres, and the part of the country that borders Colombia has terrain so treacherous and difficult to cross that, to this day, there still isn’t any way of crossing by road.
[00:04:54] It is in many parts a thick, mountainous jungle.
[00:04:59] Fast forward to the 19th century and it wasn’t just the Spanish that were interested.The French, the British, the Americans and the Colombians were all jostling for position, hoping to devise a plan to finally carve out a viable path through the Isthmus of Panama.
[00:05:20] Even the Germans got involved, with one German geographer called Alexander Humboldt proposing nine different routes across Panama.
[00:05:30] It’s important to note that, at the time that all of this was going on, the country we now know as Panama was going through great changes.
[00:05:40] In 1821 it went from being part of the Spanish empire to being part of Colombia, and then in 1903 it gained its independence.
[00:05:51] Ultimately, after careful consideration, in 1878, a 99-year concession was granted to a French company to build and operate a canal on the Isthmus of Panama.
[00:06:04] And if you’re wondering, the reason that a French company was granted the rights was because the French had successfully built the Suez canal in Egypt in 1869.
[00:06:16] The Suez Canal is about three times the length of the Panama Canal, and it certainly was an impressive piece of work that revolutionised trade and shipping in another part of the world.
[00:06:29] But, compared to the Panama Canal, building the Suez Canal was a piece of cake, it was incredibly easy.
[00:06:38] The Suez canal is essentially a long trench across the desert.
[00:06:43] The Panama Canal needed to go through mountains and jungle.
[00:06:49] The climate in Egypt is hot and dry, but predictable.
[00:06:54] The climate in Panama is hot and humid, and very unpredictable.
[00:07:00] Heavy rain can come at any time, causing landslides.
[00:07:05] What’s more, Panama’s tropical climate can quickly lead to diseases like malaria and yellow fever. These were not problems the French had to deal with when building the Suez Canal.
[00:07:18] Nevertheless, the French got started on January the 1st, 1880. It was a huge project, both in scale and ambition. Over 17,000 workers were shipped in, mainly from the Caribbean.
[00:07:35] And, attracted by the glamour and money-making potential of the project, and having seen the success of Suez, hundreds of thousands of ordinary French people invested their life savings into the company behind the project.
[00:07:51] The French plan was, in layman’s terms, to dig a trench from one side of the country to the other.
[00:07:59] It was more or less a replica of what had worked in Egypt a few decades before.
[00:08:05] It didn’t take long for the French engineers to realise that this plan wouldn’t work.
[00:08:10] For starters, whenever there were heavy rains there would be landslides, filling up the holes that the French workers had dug.
[00:08:19] They would work for months, and then in the space of 30 minutes of torrential rain, all of this work would be undone.
[00:08:29] It must have been hugely demoralising to the workers, but that was far from the only problem. The tropical diseases were killing men in their thousands. By 1888, a combination of accident and disease had cost the lives of 20,000 workers.
[00:08:51] You might have thought that the loss of life would have been enough to deter the French, but the grim reality is that most of the workers were not French; they were from the Caribbean, places like Antigua and Jamaica, so, to put it candidly, it was seen not as a human tragedy but as the cost of doing business.
[00:09:14] Still, if the loss of life wasn’t enough to deter the French, the impossibility of making money would be.
[00:09:23] In 1889, after the money ran out, the French company building the canal was forced to declare bankruptcy.
[00:09:32] The French effort had lost something like €2 billion in today’s money, erasing the investments of some 800,000 small French investors who had been drawn by the ambition of the project.
[00:09:46] The chief developer of the project, Ferdinand de Lesseps was prosecuted for corruption and misappropriation of company funds, as was the architect of the Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel, who had also been involved in the design of the canal.
[00:10:04] And, far more tragically, there were the graves of 20,000 workers who had lost their lives in what would be a completely futile effort.
[00:10:15] We need to fast forward now to the start of the 20th century, ten years after the failure of the French attempt.
[00:10:23] The Americans were sensing their opportunity, and had come to an agreement to pay the French for the rights to construct the canal.
[00:10:33] Remember, the French had been granted a 99 year concession, so, there was still plenty of time for them to try again if they wanted to.
[00:10:42] The added complication here was that Panama was still part of Colombia, and the Colombian senate did not accept this agreement, the agreement to sell the concession to the Americans.
[00:10:56] So, the US tried a different tack; it pushed for Panamanian independence, and was quick to support and protect the newly independent nation when it declared independence in November of 1903.
[00:11:12] The deal could now be signed, and the freshly independent Panama granted the United States the licence to build and administer the canal.
[00:11:22] This, as you might have gathered, is a very superficial summary of a complicated period in the political history of the region, but I hope you will forgive me as we need to move on the business of the actual construction of the canal.
[00:11:38] When American workers arrived in 1904, they found the construction site in complete disarray. It was a mess, full of falling down buildings and broken equipment. They would have to start from a clean slate.
[00:11:55] Importantly, the Americans took a different approach to the French.
[00:12:01] While the French tried to use brute force to dig a trench through the country, the Americans realised that they would have to change strategy.
[00:12:12] Instead of trying to dig a sea-level canal through the mountains in the middle of the country, the US engineers decided to create a large lake in this mountainous region through which the ships could pass.
[00:12:25] They would do this by building what at the time was the world’s largest dam, the Gatun dam. This dam would then flood the jungly mountainous area in the middle of the country, creating an artificial lake 26 metres above sea level.
[00:12:44] But, you are probably wondering, how does a ship get up to the lake and then down the other side.
[00:12:51] Well, here’s the clever bit.
[00:12:54] The engineers created a system of locks, chambers that allow boats to go up and down.
[00:13:01] A boat would go into a lock, the giant doors would close behind it, then the chamber would fill with water, the boat would rise and go into the next chamber, and the process would be repeated until that boat had climbed the almost 30 metres to the lake in the middle.
[00:13:20] Then the same thing would happen in reverse on the other side.
[00:13:24] And because you only need gravity to do the work of moving water from high to low, there are no pumps required.
[00:13:33] Now, locks were certainly no modern American invention, and in fact were first used in Song Dynasty China, in the 10th century.
[00:13:43] But the genius of the American engineers with the Panama Canal was to create this huge artificial lake which would then provide both a solution to the problem of how a boat can cross the mountains and also how to supply large amounts of water to the locks.
[00:14:01] Long story short, it worked, and the Panama Canal that’s in use today is more or less the same one that the Americans finished construction of in 1914.
[00:14:13] And its influence is hard to overstate. It operates 24 hours a day, with 14,000 ships passing through it each year carrying almost 300 million tonnes of cargo.
[00:14:27] This is huge, it’s 40% of the world’s cargo ship traffic.
[00:14:33] Using it, as you might imagine, is not cheap.
[00:14:37] The cost to use the canal depends on factors like the size and weight of the ship, and the average cost in 2022 was $211,000.
[00:14:49] It is expensive, but the alternative is taking a lot more time and spending a lot of money on fuel by going “the long way round”, around the bottom of South America.
[00:15:03] And this canal is also an amazing example of global cooperation - it is neutral, open to any ship, it is not used as a political tool.
[00:15:15] Now, as to the “future” of the Panama Canal, there is one large threat to its existence: climate change.
[00:15:24] And specifically, drought, the lack of rain.
[00:15:29] The Panama Canal uses a lot of water, as every time a ship goes through, the water from the lock is let out into the ocean. Specifically, anywhere from 200 to 500 million litres are required for every ship.
[00:15:48] Historically this wasn’t a problem, as the artificial lake that forms the middle of the canal would be constantly refreshed by rivers and heavy rain that brought more than enough water into it.
[00:16:01] But recently the region has had a particularly dry patch.
[00:16:07] At the start of September this year, September 2023, it was reported that the water level of the lake was down 2 and a half metres from normal levels. Ships have had to reduce their weight, and crossings have had to be limited.
[00:16:25] For some types of ships, waiting times have doubled, and there have been reports of ships opting for the long way round.
[00:16:34] After all, if you might actually get there more quickly, and save yourself a quarter of a million dollars in fees, you can understand why.
[00:16:43] So, to conclude, the story of the Panama Canal is one of politics, engineering, and mankind’s desire to bend Mother Earth to our will.
[00:16:55] The French found the task too great, their efforts foiled by climate and disease.
[00:17:02] The Americans learned from their predecessors' mistakes, almost literally moving mountains to overcome the challenge.
[00:17:10] But if the dry spells of the past few years are anything to go by, this battle of mankind vs. Mother Earth might not be over just yet.
[00:17:22] OK then, that is it for today's episode on The Panama Canal.
[00:17:27] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:17:31] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:17:34] What can we learn from the construction of the Panama Canal? What lies ahead for the future?
[00:17:41] We have lots of curious minds in Central and Latin America, so I’d be particularly interested to hear your opinion.
[00:17:48] The place for that is, as always, community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:17:53] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:17:58] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
