Word: canal
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During the 1880s, Bunau-Varilla worked for a private French company that attempted to dig a canal through the muddy, mosquito-filled tropical jungle of Panama, then a province of Colombia. Any canal across Central America would have eliminated the 7,000-mile journey around Cape Horn for ships navigating between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. At the time, most U.S. engineers favored a canal at sunny Nicaragua. The crossing there would have been 131 miles longer than at the 50-mile Isthmus of Panama. But almost all of the extra miles would have required no digging, since a Nicaraguan...
...organizer of the French company was Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had built the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, and who preferred the Panama site because he believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that a Suez-style sea-level canal without locks could be built there...
...level canal required far more voluminous and difficult digging in mountainous Panama than had been necessary in the Middle Eastern sands. Few of the celebrated French engineers De Lesseps invited to inspect his plan approved it (among the doubters: Gustave Eiffel, the tower builder). The doubts were soon borne out: in 1889, De Lesseps' company went bankrupt. By that time, the French had moved 50 million cubic meters of earth?two-thirds of the amount moved at Suez. In the process, some 20,000 workers died of malaria and yellow fever (whose causes were thought to be noxious jungle vapors...
...Panama route was superior to the Nicaraguan. His chief argument: Nicaragua was prey to volcanic eruptions. On the morning of a crucial Senate vote, Bunau-Varilla sent every Senator a Nicaraguan five-peso stamp picturing an erupting volcano that could have been Mount Momo-tombo, near the proposed canal line. The Senate switched to Panama on June 19, 1902. Soon afterward, Roosevelt and Secretary of State John Hay began to press Colombia to agree to a treaty. Their offer: $10 million in gold, plus an annual rent of $250,000. Colombia would retain sovereignty over a six-mile-wide Canal...
...York, Bunau-Varilla went to Macy's to purchase colored silk for a red, white and blue Panamanian flag (which his wife sewed), and he advised Amador that the U.S. would support the revolution?provided that its leaders would appoint Bunau-Varilla envoy to Washington to draft the canal treaty. Reluctantly and a bit skeptically, Amador agreed. He sailed for Panama with Bunau-Varilla's promise of $100,000 to bribe Colombian troops; he hid his new flag under his clothing, wrapped around his torso. After arriving in Panama, Amador sent a coded cable: "Fate news bad powerful tiger. Urge...