10 OCTOBER 1913

                                           THE PANAMA CANAL

At 1401 this afternoon, in a media event, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a button in the Executive Building of downtown Washington DC.  Two thousand miles to the south, dynamite charges blasted the last construction dike in the Culebra Cut, the final section of the Panama Canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific.  The largest single Federal expenditure to that day, $352 million, had resulted in the removal of 262 million cubic yards of earth, three times the volume of the Suez Canal.  Ten more months of finishing work was necessary before the first grand crossing by the civilian steamer SS Ancon on 15 August 1914.

Between 1883-89, the French tried and failed in an ambitious attempt at a sea-level canal.  Though the route across Panama was only some 40 miles in distance, the terrain featured a central mountain range, the lowest point of which, the Culebra Pass, reached 275 feet above sea level.  There was the raging Chagres River with which to contend, and the jungles were plagued with dreaded diseases.  Unlike the French experience with the Suez Canal, there was no native labor force nor infrastructure in Panama to tap.  Unanticipated costs, both in francs and in human life, ran the French Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique into bankruptcy.  Ironically, they might have succeeded had they listened to Baron Godin de Lepinay of the French Department of Bridges and Highways.  He proposed a plan the Americans would later pursue–the damming of the central highlands to create an artificial lake, with locks ascending from each coast.

In the US previously, Theodore Roosevelt had seen an inter-ocean canal as key to US leadership in the Western Hemisphere.  He endorsed RADM Alfred T. Mahan’s call for a strong Navy with easy mobility from Atlantic to Pacific.  Roosevelt too, had winced in 1898, when the Pacific based battleship OREGON (BB-3) was delayed in reaching the Caribbean during the Spanish American war by having to cruise 67 days ’round the Horn.  In 1902, Roosevelt’s drive led to our purchase the rights to the French excavations.  And, once the political roadblocks had been removed, the able engineer John Stevens was sent south with orders to “make the dirt fly!”

San Diego, the first American port north of the canal, stood as a major benefactor and staged the gala Exposition of 1914-15 to coincide with the canal’s opening.  (Many of the buildings constructed for this exposition still stand in Balboa Park today).  Plans to inaugurate the canal justly with a transit by the aging OREGON complete with retired RADM Charles E. Clark at the helm, fell through.  The first Navy ship to cross was the collier USS JUPITER (AC-3), on 10-12 October 1914.

Watch the POD for more “Today in Naval History”  16 OCT 22

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

McCullough, David.  The Path Between the Seas:  The Creation of the Panama Canal – 1870-1914.  Simon and Schuster, New York, NY, pp. 589-615, 1977.

Minter, John Easter.  The Chagres:  River of Westward Passage.  New York, NY: Rinehart & Co. 1948.

Sweetman, Jack.  American Naval History:  An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3^rd ed.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, p. 117, 2002.

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