Before Sir Francis Drake, the daring pirate whom destiny and patriotism made into an explorer and an admiral, died in his ship off the Isthmus in 1596, a survey had been made of the trail along which the Spanish adventurers had been carrying the plunder of their conquests in South America across the narrow neck of land from the town of Panama to Porto Bello, where it could be loaded on great galleons and taken to Spain. For three centuries men of different nations--Spain, France, Colombia, and the United States--made surveys and considered various routes for a canal, but when they came face to face with the project at close range, the tropical jungle and the great rocky hills put a check on their ventures before they were begun.
In 1875, however, when the Suez Canal was triumphantly completed by the French canal company it seemed as if Count de Lesseps, the hero of this enterprise, might well be the man to pierce the New World isthmus. Blinded by his brilliant success, the venerable engineer (de Lesseps was at this time seventy-five years old) undertook the leadership of a vast enterprise to dig a similar canal across Panama. A canal was a canal; an isthmus was an isthmus. Of course, the man who had made a way for ships through Suez could join the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific at Panama. No one seemed to realize that the digging of a ditch through one hundred miles of level, sandy desert was an entirely different problem from cutting a waterway through solid rock and removing mountains, to say nothing of diverting into a new channel the flow of a turbulent river and reconciling the widely different tides of two oceans.
Other engineers realized that the difficulties in the way of a sea-level ditch were stupendous and that the lock canal was the type for Panama. Trusting, however, in the careless plans of Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse of the French Navy, who did not cover in his hasty survey more than two thirds of the territory through which the canal was to pass, Count de Lesseps estimated that the work could be completed for $120,000,000, and promised that in six years the long-sought waterway to the Pacific and the East would be open. None could doubt that the tolls paid by ships which would no longer be compelled to round Cape Horn in order to reach the western coast of the continents of North and South America, the islands of the Pacific, and the rich trading centers of the Orient, would repay tenfold the people who supplied the money for the great enterprise.