Growing up, I was intrigued by a soup can shaped building facing the Mississippi River at the foot of Canal Street in New Orleans. Years before the gonzo artist, Andy Warhol, rode his soup can imagery to international fame, that building held two entities central to my boyhood dreams: Lykes Steamship Lines and the Panama Canal Commission.
I’d sit on the bank of the river, just up the hill from the old French Market, watching the Lykes cargo ships loading at the old Bienville Street pier and speculate about their ultimate destinations. I could see the ships, but as a kid, it was difficult to visualize what went on up the street inside the Panama Canal Commission. I did know it was the administrative center, where one went to apply for a job on the Canal in Panama. Regardless of how it played out, that odd-shaped building was a magical place for me: I wanted to sail the world on steamships, or as a default I wanted to work on the Panama Canal. It held the tickets to both dreams.
The thesis of this discussion is that, since Jimmy Carter “gave away” the Panama Canal in 1978, completely effective in 1999, we have gone from “Pana-max” to “Pana-mini,” and without control of the canal, we are militarily and economically vulnerable in ways that we were not before. “Pana-max,” of course, refers to the new, enlarged canal. We’ve found its antipodes. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway: we’ve gone from “to have and to have not.” It wasn’t just the loss of the canal. The Carter administration started a long decline in naval readiness that continues until this day, with our Navy currently only having around 296 commissioned ships, with one/third of these generally laid up in the yards for repair. There’s no way we could fight the classic “two ocean war,” which has long been the benchmark of preparedness. The Carter administration so under-funded the military that ships in the Mediterranean once literally ran out of gas. I was on a destroyer that was laid up in Barcelona, Spain, for 30 days over Christmas and New Year because there was no fuel. We were even wondering if we would get paid.
During my travels, I saw the Panama Canal turn from a well-oiled, highly efficient example of American resolve and ingenuity into a mismanaged, deteriorating, and rust bound precursor of woke foreign policy. Strategic thinkers as far back as Spain’s Charles V, then Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, saw in 1524 the value of a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In modern times, such a canal cuts almost 8,000 miles off an ocean voyage from New York City to San Francisco around Cape Horn.
I first wrote about the Panama Canal ten years ago. A man in Panama, who had read the newspaper article online, took me to task. He emailed: “The Canal wasn’t Jimmy Carter’s to give away. It belonged to the Panamanian people. It was a violation of our sovereignty.” As someone who transited the Canal in the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s, I have an informed opinion, and the writer did have a point. I would be upset if some checky European power had built the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, which runs 234 miles from roughly Amory, Mississippi, to Demopolis, Alabama, effectively splitting two states, and ultimately connecting the Tennessee River with the Gulf of Mexico, and then mandated that everyone had to show identification and get their bag checked whenever they crossed over the Waterway.
This, essentially, is what went on in the Canal Zone for 64 years, as the Canal split the country in half. In the late 1960s, I was caught in a student demonstration against American ownership of the canal on the campus of the University of Panama, in Panama City, and I can attest to the level of hostility against our presence. I was once caught in a similar anti-American demonstration, this time a riot, while I was on shore patrol in Athens, Greece. I don’t mind the “Yankee, go home” signs, but I don’t care for somebody screaming that in my ear. I thought it was ironic in Athens, as I ran for my life, that we were on a street reconstructed after World War II using U.S. taxpayer-funded Marshal Plan money.
On the other hand, I seriously doubt the Panamanian government would have been able or willing to spend the billions necessary to build the canal, the 8th wonder of the world. As far as that goes, there wasn’t even a Panamanian country before the canal. We created the Republic of Panama “alquid ex nihilo” (Latin for “something out of nothing.”). It’s a complicated history, and the canal is still vitally important today. For example, 40% of all containers arriving by ship (automobiles, appliances, clothing, etc.) in the U.S. each year come through the canal. Six percent of all the world’s yearly commerce transits the canal.
The United States and Great Britain proposed a joint effort to build a canal through Nicaragua in 1850, but it never went beyond the planning stage. The French, however, began excavating in Panama in 1880. The leader of the French enterprise, La Societe Civile Internationale du Canal Interoceanique, was an entrepreneur named Ferdinand de Lessups who had successfully built the sea-level Suez Canal which connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas. He was a promoter, and not an engineer, and did not consider the mountainous spine of Central America, which rises to a height of over 110 feet above sea level as it crosses Panama. He had an abundance of “sang froid,” but, unfortunately, for de Lessups, water will not flow uphill. Consequently, his “La Grande Tranchee” (The Great Trench) was doomed to failure from the beginning because of the prodigious amount of earth a sea-level canal would require.
During my first transit of the canal, over 60 years ago, you could still see the wreckage of abandoned French machinery (huge steam digging machines, rusty rail cars, etc.) lying in the jungle. It was tropical diseases, however, particularly yellow fever and malaria that ultimately stopped the French effort after the expenditure of countless millions of francs and the loss of over 22,000 workers’ lives. Young French professionals taking jobs on the Canal often took their own coffins with them because of the high death rate.
When Teddy Roosevelt, who had previously served as Undersecretary of the Navy and understood the importance of sea power and being able to move military ships quickly from coast to coast, became President in 1901 after William McKinley’s assassination, he made building the canal a priority for the United States. However, he had to manipulate a revolution and create the Republic of Panama to do it. The best site for a canal across the isthmus, other than in Nicaragua, was in Colombia.
Although the U.S. Senate voted to construct the canal, the Colombian government found the financial terms unacceptable and rejected the offer. President Roosevelt responded by sending in the muscle. He dispatched warships to Panama City (on the Pacific coast) and to Colon (on the Atlantic coast) in support of Panamanian independence. Columbian troops marched but were unable to cross the jungles of the Darien Strait, and Panama declared its independence from Colombia on 3 November 1903. The newly declared republic immediately signed a treaty giving the U.S. rights to a 10-milewide strip across the country in perpetuity in return for $10 million up front and a yearly payment of $250,000. I was stationed at the Pentagon when Carter “gave away” the canal, and I wanted to ask him what part of perpetuity did he not understand? Respectfully, of course.
Other events aided the United States’ efforts. Most notably, in 1897, Britain’s Ronald Ross proved in India that yellow fever and malaria were spread by the mosquito and not the medieval “miasma,” or malevolent wind, which had also been blamed for the plague and the Black Death. For example, when the wall around the recently competed hospital at Naval Station, Pensacola, Florida, was completed in 1835, it was made 12 feet tall, high enough, it was though, to keep out the miasma flowing off Pensacola Bay, a “cordon sanitaire” as it were. You can see the wall today. While you are there, in the old cemetery just up the street, you can visit the grave of one of Geronimo’s wives who died there in captivity in the 1880s.
It took two years for American medical officers to get the mosquitos under control along the canal route. In the meantime, plans were drawn up for a canal that would utilize water from the Chagres River to form a reservoir (now Gatun Lake) of water needed to operate three huge locks (Pedro Miguel, Miraflores, and Gatun) that would raise and lower ships on their 82-kilometer (49.2 miles) journey across Panama.
The canal was completed in 1914, and it has been in use ever since, serving as a source of revenue for both the United States and Panama. Ships are charged by weight, and the record for the canal, before Panamax, was set in 1997 when the cruise ship, Rapsody of the Sea, paid
$153,662.66 to cross the waterway. On August 23, 1928, Richard Halliburton transited the canal swimming, and he paid a toll of 36 cents, since he only weighted 150 pounds.
Probably the most interesting time I transited the canal was on the Battleship New Jersey (BB-62) in the early 1980s. We were steaming from Hong Kong to Beirut, Lebanon, and were about two feet too wide to fit through the canal. We had to put a boat in the water and remove the drain scuppers on each side of the ship so that we would fit. During the interregnum, I talked the Old Man into getting all the crew not on watch (800 or so) topside for a group picture. We did, and the photo later appeared on the back cover of an issue of Life Magazine.
Even today, Panama has a lot going for it. For example, slightly smaller than South Carolina, it is the only place in the world where you can see the sun rise on the Pacific and set on the Atlantic. It was the first country outside the United States where Coca Cola was sold. Panama adopted the U.S. dollar as its official currency in 1904 following its independence from Columbia. The first Roman Catholic diocese in the American continent was established in Panama (1510). It was in the city of Santa Maria la Antigua, now in the province of Darien on the Atlantic side, which was also the first city in the American continent built by Europeans.
Panama has more bird species (986) than the entire continental United States (914), so it’s a birdwatcher’s paradise. I have noticed, however, that I see more birds when I ride the train across the isthmus (about 40 miles from Colon to Panama City) than when I go through the canal on a ship. You do see more monkeys when you float through the jungle. The national bird of Panama is the Harpy Eagle. It is one of the largest eagles in the world, with a wingspread of up to 6.5 feet. As an aside, we have at least two Bald Eagles flying around the Ski Lake at Lake Serene early in the morning. I see them on my daily walks. Finally, the inventor of “Murphy’s Law,” Edward Murphy, Jr., was born in Panama in 1918. Right or wrong, he popularized the axiom that “Anything than can go wrong will go wrong.”
A widened Panama Canal (Panamax) opened in 2016, and because of this, then Governor Haley Barber diverted $570 million in federal Hurricane Katrina relief dollars to the restoration and expansion of the Port of Gulfport so it could handle those bigger ships that were sure to come calling. As part of the puzzle, Hattiesburg was touted as an important rail center and distribution point for the “ro-ro” (roll on, roll off) containerized cargo. The Gulfport ship channel was also to be dredged to a deeper depth of 45 feet, but our single channel is still not wide enough or deep enough to handle Panamax-sized ships. I am signed up for a public tour of the Port of Gulfport in October, and I’m looking forward to hearing what progress has been made and what challenges remain. Unfortunately, the piers still look dead to me except for the occasional banana boat.
Incidentally, the first ship through the new, enlarged Panamax Canal was the Chinese-flagged “Cosco Shipping Panama.” As part of its “New Silk Road” project, China has invested heavily in Panama, including in Panamax; however, they don’t own it outright, yet. For now, they are content to own and control the shipping operations of the ports at each end, Colon and Panama City.
One of my favorite Humphrey Bogart movies is “Across the Pacific” (1942), a John Huston-directed movie about a Japanese plot to construct a torpedo bomber in Panama and use it to blow up the canal locks. After much intrigue and bloodshed, Bogart’s character defeats the enemy and saves the canal for the American war effort – our ships continued to pass freely from coast to coast. I know you can’t compare a movie to real life, or then to now, but that’s probably a movie Jimmy Carter should have seen. Would that life imitated art.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
