Empire: World History - 277. America Drills Through Hell’s Gorge (Part 5)

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

How did the US orchestrate the Panamanian Revolution to be able to build the Panama Canal? Why did French engineer Bunau-Varilla and the US sign a treaty about Panama without a single Panamanian in the room? How did Americans impose Jim Crow laws in The Canal Zone?  William and Anita are joined by Matthew Parker, author of Hell’s Gorge: The Battle To Build The Panama Canal, to discuss how America finally completed the building of the Canal and entered the dawn of the American Century… Empire Club: Become a member of the Empire Club to receive early access to miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to live show tickets, bonus episodes, book discounts, our exclusive newsletter, and access to our members’ chatroom on Discord! Head to empirepoduk.com to sign up. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Drimple. So we are joined once again by the brilliant Matthew Parker, author of Hell's Gorge, to discuss our final chapter of the building of the Panama Canal. Now, in the last episode, we saw the complete failure of the French attempt,

and Buna Varia, convincing the Americans to build a canal in Panama over Nicaragua. But Colombia does not want to hand over the rights to the US. So the US is going to have to help Panama get its independence. And we have before us now the first American scaldagri of fiddling the politics of Latin America to suit themselves. Something, of course, that we will see more. much more of in the 20th century. So Matthew, tell us more about how the Americans managed to separate Panama off into a much smaller and more bulliable independent state. Okay, so the leader of the wannabe Panama independence movement, a guy called Manuel Amador, travels to the United States

to get help with basically freeing his country from Colombia and therefore getting the canal in his country rather than someone else's. He meets Cromwell, the lawyer, obviously, who was so important in getting the Americans to change their mind and choose the Panama route. And he is basically promised help from him. He also meets Buno Veria and one of his compatriots meets John Hay, the Secretary of State, who he can't say exactly, but basically says the Americans will support an independence movement in Panama. Without American help, the Colombian army will just move in and close them down. But if America joins in, this can just get rid of that whole Colombian issue and create a small, easily dominated central American state that America can lord over and get its way with.

Yes. And there's a very happy sort of background to this in that much earlier sort of 50 years before the Americans had signed a treaty with the Colombians which allowed them to land troops on the Isthmus in order to keep the transit open or suppress. any sort of civil revolt. And they've done this many times, often actually to suppress independence movements, ironically enough. So they've got that sort of card to play. And also they've got sort of Buna Maria promises to give Amador a hundred thousand dollars, which he needs to bribe the Colombian garrison. They work out how much they need. But, you know, a general gets this, a colonel gets that, an ordinary soldier gets that. And it adds up to about $100,000. This is astonishing, because this is only 1903, and we're already. getting American doing the stuff it's going to do for the whole of the rest of the 20th century

of picking and choosing Latin American leaders. Yeah. The one thing we haven't mentioned, which normally goes hand in hand with this, is American gunships. Now, when do they suddenly, you know, arrive on the scene? Well, what happens is they announced the revolution. And unfortunately, the plotters had taken in someone into their group, into their confidence, who then looked like he was going to flake. So in order to get rid of him, they invent an invasion from Nicaragua, and they send him and his soldiers north to deal with it. So he's off the scene. But word has got to Bogota, and acting with really unusual haste, the Colombians send 500 expert marksmen and three generals to Panama to help deal with this fictional. So that's

really backfired. So these troops arrive, and the date has already been set. Buna Vria told, hey, and he actually had a meeting with Roosevelt as well, that the... there'd be a revolution on the 3rd of November. Oh, if they put it in their day planner? It's in the planner because it's the day that were the results of the midterm elections. So it's going to be, it's a good day for bad news or for the rather exciting news. They arrive, all of these soldiers and these three generals were splendid in their braid and their big hats and everything. I mean, the Americans are up to their neck in this. The American owner of the railroad says, oh, we haven't got any trucks here to take your men

over to Panama City, but we've got a special luxury train. We can just take you generals. So they rather reluctantly agree. They're taken to Panama City where they're whined and dined, and then they come out to inspect a load of troops, and then the troops wheel round, point their guns at them and say, you're under arrest. Brilliant. So they've separated, they've sort of decapitated this Colombian force.

One of the generals rushes off, but it's found hiding in a toilet stall. So he's forked out. This is 45 years before the CIA is formed, and yet all the fingerprints are sort of already there. But also it's farcically easy. I mean, just to, you know, sort of saying the carding officers, it's just so, you know. There are some wobbles. There are some wobbles because you've still got these 500 soldiers and a colonel in Cologne.

And the revolution is announced in Panama City. And they need the money. They need the money now from Bruneo Veria to wire them the $100,000. And he goes, well, hold on. The deal was, you make me your plenipotentiary ambassador in Washington in exchange for the money. And they haven't done that yet. This man is a mover, isn't he? He is a mover.

he's a mover. So he sends 25,000, which isn't enough. So they borrow the money from the American-owned Panama Railroad in order to pay off these men. And at one point, there's a tent standoff, but eventually they managed to get all these soldiers bribed and away. You know, the revolution is success. There's one fatality, which is a donkey. That's the only... Oh, what happened to the donkey? Wait, wait, what happened to the donkey? The donkey was caught in some sort of crossfire that. I haven't got the details or haven't got the donkey research done on that. You haven't done the donkey work?

Oh, look at that. That's very, very good. Meanwhile, Bonavria is moving with extreme haste to do a deal as the temporary ambassador for this new republic with John Hay. So in the meantime, after these sort of American gunboats have now arrived on both sides of the isthmus. He's still, though, a French national. He's a French national. He wants to be the ambassador to Panama. He is briefly. He is briefly. So what happens is Amador and another leader of the revolution get on a boat and hurry to New York to do a deal with the Americans

who have already recognised the new Republic of Panama in indecent haste. Right. The Americans are right, they've got gunboats on either side, so the Colombians can't come by sea. And there's this sort of patriotic upfeeling of anger in Colombia and loads of people volunteered to take back Panama. But the only way can get there is through the Darien jungle and they get about halfway before they're done for.

Darian has no, I mean, it's just merciless, Darian. So many are defeated by it. Century after century, yeah. So the Americans have basically made the revolution safe, and now they want to do a deal with the new Republic, but they want to do it quickly, because the Colombian general is rushing to New York as well, and they know that he will offer anything

in order to get the canal and Panama back. So they've got to move quickly. So while Amador and his companion are going to New York, Bune Averill is in Washington talking to John Hay, who produces the fastest treaty document ever. He's working day and night. Which doesn't have a single Panamanian in the room when it's signed? No.

Well, they're nearly there. Amador arrives at New York, and the treaty hasn't been signed yet. By a happy coincidence, he's met by a guy called Roger Farnham, who is part of William Cromwell's organisation, and said, well, he's going to be here tomorrow. Can you just wait for 24 hours?

And they do. And that 24 hours gives Buno-Varria enough time using Lincoln's Inquil to sign the treaty, which is, for Panamanians, an absolute disgrace. But it gives the Americans pretty much everything they want in order to get a canal zone and build a canal. So his inky fingers have left the paper, which is actually known as the Hé, Buno-Varria Treaty of 1903. And the provisions of that treaty are that the United States would pay Panama up to $10 million and an annual fee of a quarter of a million dollars for the right to a canal zone, five miles

either side of the canal route. So basically, the Americans get everything that they want. No Panamanian is in the room. The Colombians, in whose territory this was in, have been basically robbed from their point of view of their own sovereign territory. And this has all happened pretty much in the matter of two weeks, a fortnight. Yes, and it causes a huge ruptures everywhere, obviously in Colombia, but also in the United States. It's very, very controversial. Obviously, going back to the Spanish War, there was the Anti-Imperialism League that had a lot of followers. It's not quite at that level.

The sort of more liberal press described the canal as stolen property, and they say it's might makes right. And Roosevelt has dragged the United States down to the sordid land grabbing sort of levels of the Euro. and powers, and something unique about America has been lost. And in the Senate, they have to obviously pass the bill to ratify the treaty. And one of the people says, stands up and says, you know, you're saying that the Isthmus rose as one man. I say that one man was in the White House. And that's really the sum of it. It remains controversial for, you know, well, ever since. And it becomes a fact on the ground, so to speak, with the creation of the Panama Canal zone, established February the 26th, 1904, and this is a zone over which the United States

has complete sovereignty. Yes, well, the exact wording is as if it was sovereign, but effectively, yes, it is. And they also, originally the Americans wanted the terminal cities, Cologne and Panama City included, but Bruno Veria, even Bruno Veria, I couldn't agree to that, but they have huge rights to go into the city for sanitation, law and order. The Panamanians originally, you know, they're very grateful to the Americans that have helped them, you know, without whose help, they couldn't have had their independence, but the honeymoon period is incredibly short. Short.

Very short. Very short. Yeah. With the zone, the American zone, and what tickles me hugely is that the people who live in the zone, which is a predominantly white area, are called zonians. And it becomes very, very apparent, very quickly. It's going to be run on an apartheid system. I mean, it is, I mean, talk a little bit more about what the Americans want.

from their zone and what the Panamanian reaction might be, because as you said before, this is, you know, a mixed melting pot of a place. And the two-tier system, the golden roll and the silver roll. Tell us about that. Yes, that's to do with the labour force, which obviously they have to assemble to build the canal. They have pretty much political control over the whole country. No one is really elected unless they are, you know, agreeable to the US interests. What happens initially is a guy called Wallace is sent down as chief engineer. And because of all of the heat that Roosevelt had taken over the effectively annexation of the canal zone, it's very important that he makes the dirt fly in order to satisfy, you know,

they were some nice pictures of sort of digging happening. So he starts all of that straight away. And it's really completely the wrong thing to do because there's hardly an equipment there, there's hardly a new workforce, and it really causes more problems than it solves. And then, very soon after they start the work, there's the first yellow fever case. And rather like Louise Dianclay, we heard about in the last episode, it's a pretty young girl, it's the wife of Wallace's secretary, they've only been married for two months, and she dies this hideous, agonising, yellow fever death, and panic breaks out. And what happens is that something like three quarters of the

the white American workforce, desert. They just, they'd leave, they run. Just leave? With this one death? There were several others, not huge numbers, nothing like the French period. But there's none of the sort of heroic, you know, sort of self-sacrifice of the French period. They scuttle. And the whole work is in crisis.

And people think that it's going to suffer the same fate as the French project. Wow. Okay, so Zonians have left and fled for their lives. America, the press is starting to turn against Roosevelt or has been actually doing critical things. He hated what the press did. He called them all muckrakers and they gave them quite a hard time. So how do they sort of pull this project out of the fire, the Americans? What do they do? Wallace was a sort of slightly unfortunate appointment because he was totally terrified of yellow fever of the world. To the extent he actually brought two coffins with him for him and his wife should the need arise.

Anyway, so he resigned and he's replaced with a guy called John Stevens, who is one of the sort of key figures in the American period. He's a very Rooseveltian figure. He built railways across northwestern, the United States, you know, fighting walls and hostile Native Americans and blizzards and everything. And he was a brilliant railway engineer. And he arrives and looks around and he says, this is the most discouraging project I've ever seen. You know, the Panama Railroad, he describes as two streets. of rust going through the jungle. Everywhere he sees fear and hunger and there's no accommodation.

And he says, right, I'm stopping. However much Roosevelt's going to be annoyed, however much the press are going to stop. And let's just plan it properly. And he spends a year planning how he's actually going to do this. For him, the key thing is he describes as transportation. It's getting the spoil away. One of the problems with the French is they dumped the spoil by the side of the canal and it just fell back in or it became unstable. And it was a night.

So the most difficult thing about the excavation is what you do, getting the soil away. He was absolutely the right person to do this. Also, he orders in some real state-of-the-art equipment. You know, in the generation between the French and the American, there have been huge improvements in sort of technology of steel and of mechanics. And so he's got these state-of-the-art massive shovels, all of which travel on rails. And there's all sorts of other sort of very clever little sort of inventions like a sort of self-emptying train where with a plough at 45 degrees, you can empty it in one swoop rather than digging it, emptying one by one. There's ingenious things that lift track and move it without having to disentangle. So he really, he really sort of gives it the American technical ability and sets it up for the to task ahead.

I guess you're saying that. I mean, this really is the first time that, you know, canal madness has some method behind it because everybody else who's tried has basically had a suck it and see attitude. You know, you've got sort of de Lesseps who hadn't even been there before he was promising everybody at a canal. And then, you know, all these other people who are not engineers who are promising a canal. And then suddenly you've got a man who does know railways and does know how to put these things in saying, actually, can somebody give me the plan? Can anyone show me a plan? Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Let's take a break here. American engineers are finally setting up a proper plan and using all their technological prowess. But how will they get over the major obstacle that broke the French attempt first time round when building the canal? Yellow Fever. Welcome back. So Matthew, let's talk about how the Americans tried to combat yellow fever in Panama. You know what? We haven't said what yellow fever does to a person? Yes, give us a really gruesome description. We've had two people dying in great pain and agony. Yes. So what happens to somebody when they have yellow fever? What are the states?

ages of yellow fever. What happens? You get bitten by an infected mosquito. Originally, you'll have headaches, loss of appetite, muscle pain, a high temperature, and then really, really severe back pain that is described like being on a rack. This is a bit like dengue fever, which everyone gets in Delhi everyone soon. It sounds hideous. You have about a sort of half, one in two chance, as a fits adult of surviving. Right. And so you've got agonising back and then thirst, and then you get jaundiced as your liver packs it in. And then probably the most sort of terrifying thing about the vomitonegro it's called where you're coughing up black blood.

Because by this stage you've got multi-organ failure and sort of hemorrhage. And the brain is often affected as well, producing delirium, seizures and coma. And the medical shock alone caused by extreme fluid loss can be fatal. Oh, it's horrific. It's a horrific way to die. And so you said, you know, or the plan. He plans and plans and plans. Yellow fever strikes. So how does he respond to that, the great planner?

I mean, what can you do? Well, what the Americans have done if they'd sent their top yellow fever doctor to the Isthmus, a guy called William Gorgas, who was a sort of frontier doctor, and he'd actually contracted yellow fever on the borders of Mexico, but it survived. And once you survive, you're immune. And he made it his life's work to combat yellow fever, yellow jack, as it was known in the States. and part of that he was sent to Havana after the end of the Spanish War

where, during where something like five times the number of American soldiers had died of yellow fever than in combat. This was something that urgently and there was all sorts of experiments. The mosquito theory of transmission is emerging. It's emerging from India and it's emerging in Cuba itself. And they do all sorts of experiments. So they put people in a cell with all the disgusting

vomito Negro covered blankets of someone who's died and they're fine. Okay, so it's not about dirt. It's not carried in air and dirt and yeah. And then they actually, with volunteers, people volunteer to have themselves stung by a yellow fever mosquito to see what happens. And one of these volunteers actually died. Why would you volunteer to do that? What possible inducement?

This is an American doing it for the greatness of mankind and obviously for his country as well. Matthew, were they really volunteers? Because so much of the time you hear the word volunteer and actually it's people who are were sort of corralled into doing it. They were. James Lazia, he was called. Oh, good. Well, it's good to remember his name. Yeah. A gorgas arise with the knowledge of how to deal with the mosquito. So you exterminate the mosquito. It's a particular mosquito. It's either a gypsy, which is actually

quite vulnerable because it stays very close to humans. The female relies on human blood to produce its eggs. And it also lays its eggs close to human habitations in ideally the cleaner water. So he knows you've got to kill the, you've got to kill the, you've got to kill the larva and anyone who's infected with yellow fever, you've got to keep them from being bitten by an unaffected mosquito because that's how it travels. A mosquito bites someone and then takes away and then bites them and that's how it's spent. And they have to be unimmune people, which is why all these American incomers were so vulnerable. So Gorgas has the tools to do it, but he asks the commission of old gents who are in Washington who are overseeing the project

is, I need a million dollars and I need a workforce of 2000s. They give him $50,000. and a workforce of about 20 of the most feeble people, that's why yellow fever happened. And once it's happened, there is a crucial meeting between Roosevelt and his Dr. Lambert. The head of the commission says, Gorgas is useless. We've got to sack him, and we've got to bring in this friend of mine who's an osteopath with no experience of troublements. Oh, God! Oh, God! I hate these stories so much. God, how many lives could have been saved? The commission, they didn't believe. They didn't believe the mosquito theory, even though Ronald Ross had won a Nobel Prize for it. This is the early 20th century equivalent of modern anti-vaxxers, ignoring all the science.

Yeah. So Gorgas is saying, look, I can do this. I can do this. But if I have the backing, and Roussville's Dr. Lambe, who's a friend of his, has this meeting with Roosevelt. And, you know, Roosevelt saying, well, they want to get rid of Gorgas because they think it's just dirt and dead rats and that kind of thing. And the terminal cities are filthy. And Lambe says, no, no, no, no, no. Gorgas knows what he's doing. If you don't back him, it'll be like the French. if you back him, you'll have your canal. Wow, okay, so good. And so Roosevelt puts his weight behind and then bang, the most expensive sanitary campaign in history is launched in the spring of 1905.

And then by November, Gorgas can say to his staff, they gather in an autopsy room where there's a yellow fever victim. He says to them, this is the last yellow fever death you will ever see in Panama. I mean, that's extraordinary. And that's how it was. What a brilliant man. Well, their Nobel Prize is handed out for this because it's just like, epochs. changing. Gorghaz is one of the heroes. He then launches a huge campaign later against malaria, which is a massive problem, which is huge. He describes yellow fever is like making war on the,

on the family cat. Malaria is like taking on all the beasts of the jungle because they are everywhere. But as what he said, they studied them and if they cleared vegetation from around the habitat, there were ways to lessen it. But there's one thing that I found that he wrote later that really made me sort of do a double take. Because in Havana, he cleared that, he'd saved Havana. in Cuba and Panama will be looked upon as the earliest demonstrations that the white man could flourish in the tropics and the starting point for the effective settlement of these reasons by the Caucasian. Oh God, okay.

All right. Before we elevate him to... It's the nuance in Imperial Medicine, I don't need to tell you, is so interesting. So we talked about sort of, you know, the white suffering due to diseases, but what we haven't talked about is the suffering amongst those West Indian workers who, again, you know, the Americans are going to rely on to do the work. for this canal. And just give us a little picture of how, you know, they are treated. Are they getting treatment? Are they getting access to this kind of groundbreaking science that is coming

from Gorgas? I mean, is anyone looking out for them at all? The idea of who was going to build the canal was much debated. And Stevens actually had very little respect for what he called Black Labor. He said they were lazy, they were stupid or whatever. He tried bringing in sort of others. Originally he wanted Chinese and Japanese, but people from Tokyo came and had it around said, no way, no, no, you're not. And the Chinese thing, it was kind of, you know, there'd been terrible scandals in South Africa about Chinese labor, and the whole sort of indenture thing was very unpopular. So eventually they did have to look to the West Indies. And originally, they went to Jamaica, and the governor of Jamaica was actually rather anti-American. So you're

not recruiting from here because it costs us a fortune to bring back all the people from the French effort. You know, it cleaned us out. So they go to Barbados, and there they have much more luck. The Barbados government is married to America, which may be helped. And Barbados is chronically poor. This is the island that used to be the richest place in the whole British Empire, made fortunes for people through sugar and slavery, and now it's described as the empire's darkest slum. It has infamortality rate, over 50%, malnutrition. So it's a very fertile recruiting ground. And the Americans offer a contract, which is you work 10 hours a day, six days a week, you'll get paid 10 cents an hour

and we'll give you accommodation and we'll ship you over and back. Originally people go, oh no, Panama, but then a couple of people who went earlier come back and land in Bridgetown in Carlisle Bay and they get off the boat and they're wearing this really fancy suit, they've got hats, they're smoking, and then they get in a cart and carriage

and a driven home, which is just for a young black person is just not usual at all. And then suddenly there's this rush everyone wants to go to Panama and thousands and thousands are shipped over, something like 45,000 Barbagians worked on the canal out of a population of only 200,000. Gosh, that's extraordinary. So it's major, major, major. So Matthew, there's two tiers of workers, aren't there? There's the silver workers and then there's the gold workers. And that makes massive difference, whether you're one or the other. Yes, I mean, it becomes something like a sort of euphemism for the sort of Jim Crow.

segregation, which of course was sweeping across southern United States. And visitors to Panama would say it's very much south of the Mason-Dixon line in terms of the setup there. And everyone assumed that all the Americans were Southerners, which of course they weren't at all. Originally, it's non-skilled workers get paid in silver and skilled workers get paid in gold. And that's something they inherited from the railway and so on. But very soon this becomes a sort of way to segregate the workforce. So every shop, every drinking fountain, every toilet, every post office has separate entrances for gold and silver. There's no sort of pretense that these are separate but equal facilities. A shocking example from schools that were set up. They were originally

sort of mixed, but then this is a gradual process. The whites are taken and set up in different schools to everyone else. In 1909, there were 17 pupils per teacher in the white schools. In the black schools, it was one to 115. Cricy. And in every way, they set up hotels and restaurants for the white workforce. And they do for the black workforce as well. But in the black workforce, there are no tables or

chairs. You have to sort of stand with your food. And there's many, many examples like this that really made it clear that this was really sort of stratified racist system. You know, very unlike anything that

Panama had experience. before. For many Americans are, you know, a severe embarrassment. The experience of some of these workers, I mean, apart from where they're housed and how their loved ones are educated and all of that, is that they are facing such danger at work. So, I mean,

there was the guy that you quote in your book, Alfred Dotten, who's a West Indian worker, talks about this. He says, I shall never forget the trainloads of dead men being carted away daily, as if they were so much lumber. It was a living hell. You talk about, you know, sort of cartfuls of limbless,

who were taken away from the scene. And, you know, yellow fever, okay, I mean, Gorgas has done some amazing work here, but I'm guessing that, you know, the West Indian workers are still having to face it down pretty much themselves. Yes, I mean, a lot of them, as we suggested earlier, had some immunity to yellow fever. The big, rather sickeningly, the biggest killer of West Indians, you know, over 5,000 of the workers died, was viral pneumonia, which was caused directly by their very poor diet, the fact that a lot of them were sort of weakened by malnutrition. But also for the white workforce, there were these laundries and there were these drying rooms. Because remember, Panama is incredibly wet. So you would return back from work absolutely soaked to the

skin. But none of these were laid on for the West Indian workers. So they're putting on wet clothes and sleeping in wet clothes. Putting on wet clothes. And thousands of them, died from pneumonia. Not one single white person died of the disease. Which brings us, Matthew, to the gorge of your title, Hell's Gorge, the Kulebara Cut. This is the last great challenge faced by the engineers as this canal becomes closer to a reality. Tell us about it. Well, this is the nine-mile stretch going through the continental divide. Which is a mountain range, just to make that clear. The rocky spine of the Americas. And something like three quarters of the total excavation came from

just those nine miles. There was a huge amount to do. And it was incredibly difficult. The more they dug, the more the rock slid. If you talk to any engineer who's running some big, big, really big program, like a bridge, a tunnel or airport, whatever, they will say the biggest cause of delays or overruns is unforeseen ground circumstances. And Panama had this absolutely in spades because of its history of sort of up above the sea, below the sea, the volcanoes. It was the most chaotic geology that anyone had ever come across. So you'd dig something and you'd expose some rock to the air and it would crumble and then everything would come crashing in. And it was just landslide after landslide. That was one of the problems they had. Just to give the figures that you have in your book, the trench of the

Colabra cut is more than 290 feet wide, 10 stories deep over the length of something like 130 football fields. And they're using pretty basic equipment, better than what the French had, but still not at all what a modern engineer would have at their disposal. Yeah, they had much better material than the French as it was established. If you sort of time travel back and you went to Hell's Gorge and you stood there, you know, towards the end of the construction period. I think the first thing you'd be struck by was the noise, because you've got hundreds of pneumatic drills, you've got explosions from dynamite going off, you've got hundreds of trains, whistles, and all of this bounces off the rocky sides of the, you know, amplified by

the rocky sides of the big ditch. And in the rainy season, it was just muddy, you know, sticky mud. And in the dry season, it could reach 50 degrees centigrade down there where you could sort of hardly breathe to work. And it was incredibly dangerous. The dynamite technology is fairly primitive. You know, it can go wrong. And on one occasion, there was an explosion that killed 23 people and injured 60. And a West Indian who saw it said, flesh was hanging on the faraway trees. It was something terrible and awkward to look at. So these accidents are happening all of the time. And the Americans, they actually blamed the West Indians for a lot of this. They'd do an autopsy and they'd weigh the brain and measure the skull and conclude the West Indians

had a very undeveloped sense of danger. Eugenics at there. A lot of the Americans were sympathetic to the West Indians. There's one who visited one of the main hospitals, Black wards, which is obviously situated on the least favourable side of the building, as you'd expect. And he described sturdy black men in pajamas sitting on the verandas or in wheelchairs, some with one leg gone, some with both. One could not help but wonder how it feels to be hopelessly ruined in body early in life, for helping to dig a ditch for a foreign power that, however well it may treat you materially, cares not a whistleblast more for you than for its old worn-out locomotives rusting away in the jungle. What a beautiful bit of writing. That's amazing.

So after all these years, with a death toll now reaching 5,609, of whom only 350 were white, which is a very telling statistic, the canal reaches. its conclusion in 1914. They're coming from two sides and they meet in the middle. Is that right, Matthew? Yeah, there's two steam shovels. Actually, back in 1930s, they meet at the bottom of what is going to be the final depth of the Calabra Cuts.

In the meantime, the sort of temporary dams have been built at either end to keep the water out. They've built the biggest dam ever built at Gatoun, which solves the problem of the Shagas River and creates the largest man-made lake ever seen, Gatoo, until that time. And then in 1914, they blast away the dam holding back the lake, and it rushes through the cut, and the two seas are joined together. A magnificent moment. They were cheers, there were tears, and there was lots of celebrations. And they had planned this great opening ceremony for August 1914, when the international

fleets of warships would assemble, including the Oregon ship that started all, you could argue started all this in the first place. And then they'd sail through and go to a big exposition in San Francisco. But before that, they have a trial run with the first ocean steamer, which is called the Ancon. And on board is Claude Mallet, who was present at the Delessup's opening. And also, Philippe Boulou Verrilla is on that boat as well. Yeah, we hadn't heard from him for a while. He's there, and the practice goes really well.

And then news comes through, this is the 3rd of August, that Germany. has declared war on France. 1914. 3rd of August, 1914. Bunaveria announces to the assembled people, gentlemen, the two consuming ambitions of my life are fulfilled on the same day. The first to see an ocean liner sail through the Panama Canal. The second, to see France and Germany at war.

Oh, how quickly did he revise that idea? Yeah. But this is also the kind of beginning of the American century. The Americans have succeeded, French failed. The timing is exquisite when the Americans have really, they've demonstrated their global power by cutting this canal. They have complete control over the Western Hemisphere at exactly the time that the old hegemony of Europe is collapsing in itself in this absolutely ruinous war. You can almost smell the tectonic plates sort of shifting. And this is the beginning of

the American century. This is the moment. And the American century, you know, this powerful superiority continues, and it's really only until the era of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, that anybody from America thinks, you know what, what was done was not well done. And actually, maybe the people of Panama deserve better. And maybe what, you know, we did our part in it as Americans, is not honorable at all. Can you tell us what Carter did and made it hugely unpopular at the time with great swath to the public? As I said, the honeymoon with the Panamanians didn't last very long and there was endless sort of clashes between panamanians and Americans. The Americans sort of, they didn't really sort of wear it very likely. They put flags everywhere and in the zone,

you could only, if you're a Panamanian, you can only really go in there if you're a gardener or a maid. It became increasingly humiliating for Panamanians or Panamanian nationalists. And gradually, over the, so certainly sort of the 50s and the 60s, there are increasingly large and violent protests against the American presence there. And in fact, the Americans have, and the Americans have, had, looking back, even Wilson, you know, in 1914, tried to sort of do a deal with Columbia and pay the money. And Roosevelt was still alive. Said, no, you can't do that. When Roosevelt dies in 1919, then when he's off the scene, the Americans actually pay the Colombians $25 million. It was dubbed Canalimony. Is that under Wilson? Woodrow Wilson did that.

I was actually Harding by that stage. Wilson tried to do it, but it was Harding. He did it. And it was partly because there had been great oil discoveries in Colombia, and Anger, Dutch Shell was kind of getting in there first. They was trying to improve relations. But they realized that the Canal Zone was a sort of open saw for relations with the whole of Latin America. And the UN condemned it. And, you know, as early as Eisenhower and certainly Ford, Nixon, Johnson, they all knew that something had to change that this treaty,

that the treaty with Panama was absolutely shocking. A travesty. It was a travesty. A treaty, just to remind people, in which not one Panamanian was present when it was signed. A Frenchman who, you know, blown a huge amount of money, was pretty much bankrupt and Americans, yeah. Yeah.

And so Carter's there, and in Panama there's President Turreas, who's the military dictator. And as I said, in 64, there was this awful, it's all about a flag, and a lot of people were killed. And the Panamanian authorities didn't support the white zoning community at all. And so it had kind of become untenable. I mean, you had to realize that a lot canal is really vulnerable.

It doesn't take much to blow a couple of locks, and the whole of Lake Gatun flows out into the Atlantic. Oh, wedge a big tanker in there. I mean, we've seen that. We saw the chaos caused by a tanker in Suez, Strait of Hormuz. So that would be disastrous for America, more than anyone else, is the biggest use of the canal. And Torres described the canal as vulnerable as a newborn baby.

And the American military had been saying, well, since 64, they said, look, if the canal is in a hostile population, it will take 100,000 soldiers to defend it. So it's just not on. So Carter had to do this deal. You know, obviously the Zonians were appalled and they lobbied hard and they had a great effect on the US public opinion who were very opposed to the treaty that agreed to end the zone in 79 and then hand the canal back in 99. And it went to a single vote. And Reagan, of course, exploited this in 76 in the Republican primary. which he lost, saying, we built the canal, we shouldn't, you know, we own it, we don't want to give it back. And this is why Trump says this. It's political dog whistle, because it really

galvanized the right, you know, and it led to big midterm elections, and it led to a landslide for Reagan, who was never going to do anything about it, because, you know, the grown-ups knew that this treaty had to happen. Do you think the same is true of Trump, or do you think Trump is quite crazy enough to send some troops in and retake the canal? When I saw his announcement on whatever channel it was that 38,000 people of our people had died in the canal, I just thought this is deranged. I know you can't say that about the elected political leader of our closest ally, but this is deranged. Did no one check this before it went out? But I guess that's his appeal.

It's sort of unfiltered. How many would the real figure be in your view? As you said, sort of 350, if that refers to Americans, which I'm sure it does. And so if he can be that sort of off-kilter, maybe. But, you know, as I said, if it's, you know, the military. are going to say to him, as they did say to Carter and to, you know, Nixon and everyone else, you can't defend the Lock Canal against a hostile population or in a war zone because it's, it's too vulnerable. I mean, Trump's concession speech in March, taking a more consideratory tone,

was the Panama Canal was built by Americans, for Americans, not for others, but others could use it. I mean, the other last thing, we might let others use it. Well, I suppose that's true to an extent. You know, I think American commerce and American military was absolutely the priority. Yeah, I mean, it's all so interesting. Thank you so much for taking us through this. I mean, you are the ultimate navigator. We must get you back through other books in due course. Absolutely. You're welcome any time.

Yes, my most recent book, One Fine Day, which is about the British Empire and its maximum territorial extent in September 1923, which is a fascinating story. I feel a Matthew recall coming up on the horizon. It will be a great pleasure. We are out of time. So, till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me. Anita Arnan. And goodbye for me, William Duremple.