LT STRAIN’S EXPEDITION (cont.)

After six weeks of indescribable tribulation, with his men now unable to continue, LT Strain bedded his party and selected three of the strongest to accompany him further.  On they pressed until finally on March 12^th, a naked, starved, torn, and bleeding Strain stumbled alone into a native village near the Pacific coast.  In spite of his condition, he turned immediately and led local natives back along his path.

Only 16 survivors were found strung along the trail.  When examined by a British physician after their 49-day ordeal this “wretched set of human beings” was described as, “living skeletons, covered with foul ulcers… In nearly all, the intellect was in a slight degree affected, as evinced by childish and silly remarks, although their memory, and the recollection of their sufferings, were unimpaired.”  Strain himself weighed only 75 pounds.  Indeed, he never fully recovered.  His health prevented his travel out of Darien, and he died in Colon a few years later at age 36.

Our nation shared our Navy’s shock at LT Strain’s experience.  Enthusiasm for a trans-isthmus canal immediately cooled.  Cullen’s claims fell under question when it was learned that Strain’s party had had to climb as high as 1000 feet to clear the central mountains.  For his part, Cullen stuck to his story.  From his new posting in a British military hospital in the Crimea, he claimed Strain had been horribly mislead in his search.

Not all in the Navy were willing to give up the search for a workable route across Darien.  LT (later RADM) Daniel Ammen, himself an explorer on the Water Witch expedition in Paraguay, perused the journal kept by LT Strain on his trek and discovered what he believed was evidence supporting the existence of Cullen’s trail.  Days after Strain had departed the coast his log records that his party heard the evening gun of CYANE being fired.  Ammen reasoned that by then, Strain should have been well beyond earshot of the coast, and the ability to hear the gun indicated the presence of a yet undiscovered low valley which conducted the sound inland.  Ammen was steadfast in this delusion, but in truth Strain’s party probably wandered for weeks near the coast.

The Civil War intervened in the next decade to distract American attention from the Panama canal project.  It was the persistence of Ammen, CDR Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr. and RADM Charles H. Davis that led to the embarkation of a canal surveying expedition sixteen years later.  This expedition surveyed three separate sites but was unable to locate Ammen’s illusive valley.  When the canal was eventually built 40 years later, the chosen route was 150 miles up the coast from Caledonia Bay.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  26 JAN 22

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

McCullough, David.  The Path Between the Seas:  The Creation of the Panama Canal – 1879-1914.  New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1977, pp. 22-24.

Sweetman, Jack.  American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 2^nd ed.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1991, pp. 60-61.

The post LT Strain’s Expedition (cont.) appeared first on Today in Naval History.

                     LT STRAIN’S EXPEDITION

In 1513, the Spanish explorer Balboa took 190 well-supplied troops and enlisted the aid of local natives as guides to make his famous march of discovery across Isthmus of Darien.  Since, the concept of a trans-Central American canal connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific had repeatedly arisen.  By the 19^th century, Darien, the land that would eventually become Panama, was a province of New Granada, the Spanish colony that would eventually become Colombia.  Its remote location, its wild, malaria-infested jungles, and the towering central mountains of the Continental Divide frustrated schemes for a canal.  Then in 1850, an Irish physician and member of the Royal Geographic Society, Dr. Edward Cullen, returned to England with startling news.  From Caledonia Bay on the Caribbean coast, Cullen claimed to have personally walked the 40 miles across the narrowest part of the isthmus several times.  At no point along this easy walk, he claimed, was the elevation greater than 150 feet above sea level.  Furthermore, he had plainly marked the trail for future reference.  The news electrified the Western public, and in 1853 a joint expedition was undertaken by England, France, the United States, and New Granada to explore this miracle route.

The United States’ contingent, aboard the sloop CYANE, 20, arrived at Caledonia Bay ahead of the others in the third week of January 1854.  Eager to capitalize on the discovery and unwilling to wait, LT Isaac Strain led a party of 12 officers and 13 bluejackets into the jungle this day.  Fully expecting to uncover an easy, well-marked trail, his party entered this forbidding jungle only lightly equipped, with food enough for only a few days.

As you might imagine they ran into trouble from the start.  Local natives, coerced by the guns of CYANE, allowed the party to pass but refused to act as guides.  Cullen’s trail was nowhere to be found.  The party quickly became lost in the heat, rain, insects, and constant twilight of the jungle canopy.  Their weapons rusted after the first week.  The food ran out.  With events conspiring against them, Strain now discovered a river which he began to follow in the sure hope that it led to the Pacific.  In truth he had discovered the Chucunaque River, which runs for miles up the center of the isthmus, parallel to the coast.  When natives along the river tried to convince Strain he was mistaken, he reasoned they were trying to delude and subvert him and pressed onward.

For weeks the party struggled.  Short rations forced them to eat anything they could find, including toads and strange nuts and fruits, some of which proved toxic.  Disease, starvation, exhaustion, and depression began to tell; men began dying and one went insane.  Strain’s discipline and strong personal fortitude had sustained them thus far, but as the month of February faded into March even that was flagging…

Continued tomorrow….

McCullough, David.  The Path Between the Seas:  The Creation of the Panama Canal – 1879-1914.  New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1977, pp. 22-24.

Sweetman, Jack.  American Naval History: An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 2^nd ed.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1991, pp. 60-61.

The post LT Strain’s Expedition appeared first on Today in Naval History.