The country is literally poisoned,” complained senior French engineer Adolphe Godin de Lépinay. “There is too much water, the rocks are exceedingly hard, the soil is very hilly and the climate is deadly. On top of everything, an earthquake rocked the country, and fire destroyed the city of Colón when a civil war ignited. Floods swept away construction equipment. Seeking to duplicate his success in leading the construction of the Suez Canal, French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps found that building a 51-mile sea-level canal through Panama’s mountainous jungle would be far more difficult than a 120-mile passage through the flat Egyptian desert.Ĭeaseless rains triggered mudslides that buried workers alive. READ MORE: 7 Fascinating Facts About the Panama Canal A French Attempt Ends in Death and FailureĪ French venture started construction of the Panama Canal in 1881. I shall never forget the train loads of dead men being carted away daily, as if they were just so much lumber.” “The working condition in those days were so horrible it would stagger your imagination,” recalled laborer Alfred Dottin. Over the span of more than three decades, at least 25,000 workers died in the construction of the Panama Canal. There was no sun to dry them.”ĭeath could strike in the form of an 18-ton boulder or miniscule, malaria-carrying mosquitoes that bred by the millions in festering swamps and puddles. “In the morning you had to put your clothes on damp. “Sometimes you didn’t see sun for about two straight weeks,” recalled laborer Rufus Forde. In the wet season, torrential downpours transformed the flood-prone Chagres River into raging rapids and soaked workers. The builders of the passage attempted to re-engineer the natural landscape, but nature didn’t give up without a fight.Ĭonstruction crews literally had to move mountains in a snake-infested jungle with an average temperature of 80 degrees and 105 inches of rainfall a year. The Panamanian isthmus proved to be one of the most difficult-and deadly-spots in the world in which to construct a channel. In a quest to fulfill a centuries-old dream to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the builders of the Panama Canal quickly learned that the construction of a waterway across a narrow ribbon of land looked easier on a map than in reality.
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