And almost anyone was what turned up. The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 [McCullough, David] on Amazon.com.
The flannel shirt was to be worn next to the skin, and the day began with a tablespoon of whiskey and two grains of quinine per man.
New Granada guaranteed to the United States the exclusive right of transit across the Isthmus of Panama, “upon any modes of communication that now exist, or that may be, hereafter, constructed.” In exchange the United States guaranteed “positively and efficaciously” both the “perfect neutrality” of the Isthmus and New Granada’s rights of sovereignty there.
The ships operated to and from Panama on both oceans, providing regular passenger service and mail delivery to California.
He would, on this second expedition, sail far up the Atrato to the Napipi to explore the route Humboldt had thought so promising. If you A Presidential commission, the first Interoceanic Canal Commission, would be established to appraise all resulting surveys and reports and to declare which was the chosen path. . The steam-sloop The Department has entrusted to you a duty connected with the greatest enterprise of the present age; and upon your enterprise and your zeal will depend whether your name is honorably identified with one of the facts of the future.
But the horror stories to come out of Panama as the railroad was being pushed ahead mile by mile quite surpassed anything. “They believe in evil spirits, and . please use our [Commodore Thomas Selfridge with members of his party during the Darien Expedition, Panama, 1870] They came dragging into Panama City, rain-soaked, caked with mud, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, and ravenously hungry. Another sleepless night, on account of insects. They were experienced in command, meticulous about details, physically very tough; but without airs or pretense.
The Indians, impressed by the guns of the Verging on starvation, his men devoured anything they could lay hands on, including live toads and a variety of palm nut that burned the enamel from their teeth and caused excruciating stomach cramps. San Blas was a mere knife edge, where the two oceans came nearer to touching each other than at any other point in Darien or all of Central America.Selfridge took his men ashore to search the Mandinga, the one large river on the Atlantic slope between the Atrato and the Chagres. Left behind nine men who were shoeless. And the studious, likable Edward P. Lull, who was in charge of the These particular officers, moreover, had been imbued with a star-spangled sense of American destiny in the Pacific Ocean.
From Tehuantepec to the Atrato River in Colombia, the natural, easternmost boundary of Central America, was a distance of 1,350 miles as the crow flies, as far as from New York to Dallas, and there were not simply a few, but many points along that zigzagging land mass where, on the map at least, it appeared a canal could be cut. Two weeks later, on March 22, the chief telegrapher with the party, W. H. Clarke, sent the following message:I am at the front. . Recommissioned for the Darien Expedition in 1870. Once, while in command of a training cruise to Panama, he had settled a mutiny on the instant by calmly shooting the two leaders. negatives are particularly subject to damage. The Americans saw what was going on and said nothing, as “it was thought better not to offend them.”A few entries from the field diary kept by Selfridge give an indication of their days: 7.—Took up our March at 6:30 A.M., the Indian Jim and others with us . None of the prints bear photographer credits or dates of execution. “The weather was warm but we had a roof to our boat . Which data were reliable?The information available had been gathered in such extremely different fashions by such a disparate assortment of individuals, even the best of whom found it impossible to remain objective about his own piece of work. 96,000.On the Pacific slope, the climate, the whole character of the country, changed. As a young lieutenant, Daniel Ammen had sailed on Commodore James Biddle’s voyage to China and Japan, the voyage that resulted in 1846 in the first treaty between China and the United States. Not for another year and a half did the Senate act on confirmation and not until the government of New Granada had sent a special envoy to Washington, the very able Pedro Alcántara Herrán, to lobby for the agreement.The Bidlack Treaty, as it was commonly called, was Bidlack’s only diplomatic triumph. Thomas Oliver Selfridge, irrespective of any impression he may have made on Secretary Robeson, had been first in his class at Annapolis and distinguished himself as a commander of gunboats at Vicksburg and on the Red River. Nothing even remotely so systematic, so elaborate or sensible, had ever been attempted before.But the Darien Expedition was the first, and the fact that it was to Darien, one of the wildest, least-known corners of the entire world, was a matter of extreme concern at the Navy Department. Nor is it important, except that Selfridge, a serious and sober man on the whole, was to wonder for the rest of his days what influence the evening may have had on the way things turned out for him.His own planning and preparations had already occupied several extremely busy months. The Indians were very much surprised that the affair was taken so coolly, and two or three ran off to tell their chief.
A few years later, at Colón, having never fully recovered, Strain died at age thirty-six.Strain had found the mountains at Darien not less than one thousand feet.
“There are mountains, but there are also hands” was the lovely declaration of a Spanish priest of the sixteenth century, “and for a king of Castile, few things are impossible.” The priest, Francisco López de Gómara, was the first to raise the issue of location, naming Panama, Nicaragua, Darien, and Tehuantepec as the best choices, in a book published in 1552. . Selfridge also had begun his career with a South Pacific cruise and Shufeldt had been in command of the “Sufficient is it to add that advantageous as an interoceanic canal would be to the commercial welfare of the whole world, it is doubly so for the necessities of American interests,” Selfridge was to write. It required certain advances in hydraulic engineering, among other things; and it required the steam engine.The place most nineteenth-century North Americans expected to see the canal built, including the President, was Nicaragua.