National Geographic: Adventures - Panama Canal: The Mountain and the Mosquito

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The Panama Canal is completed.

The Atlantic and the Pacific are joined.

The most ambitious construction project

since the great pyramids of Egypt.

The work has spanned nearly

half a century,

and claimed the lives of

Now it is finished and the world

is suddenly smaller.

But behind this epic tale,

there is another story

of two unsung heroes.

One is an engineer from the Rockies

with the vision to move mountains.

The other, a soft-spoken

Alabama physician

whose enemies are ignorance,

disease and death.

Together, they take on a wilderness

that had defeated the best engineers in the world.

Without either one,

the Panama Canal could not be built.

And yet, one of these visionaries

will suddenly and mysteriously

walk away

before the canal is finished.

And take the secret of his departure

to his grave.

The Republic of Panama,

Central America.

A barricade between two oceans.

With a blanket of jungle.

And a spine of mountains.

Today, 14,000 ships sail through

these peaks and forests each year.

Their miracle highway

is the Panama Canal.

One of the wonders of the modern world.

A miracle that,

on a rain-soaked day in July, 1905,

no one in Panama would

have believed possible.

At the port of Colon,

a new American field boss has

arrived to take control

of a dying dream.

At age 52, John Stevens has built

more miles of railroad than

any other engineer in the world.

The Rocky Mountains

have been his home.

And spanning them his

greatest challenge... until now.

In Panama, yellow fever has killed

hundreds of workers,

most of them from the West Indies,

and terrified the rest.

The men call it The Great Scare.

But his orders come directly

from the President of the United States.

In his first address to Congress

Roosevelt vows to chop

the Isthmus of Panama in half

and complete The Big Ditch.

"We must build the Isthmian Canal...

No single great material work

which remains to be undertaken

on this continent

is of such consequence

to the American people."

Roosevelt's motives are patriotic,

economic and military.

A canal would trim nearly a month

from the travel time

between New York and San Francisco.

Making the shortest path

between the oceans a superhighway

of American commerce

and the lifeline of

the nation's burgeoning two-ocean Navy.

Roosevelt inspires thousands of

young American laborers

to set off for Panama.

But they disembark in

a steaming hell.

Soaring heat...

punishing rains...

ancient jungles.

Temperatures top 130 and it can

rain daily for eight months.

In the unbroken forests,

lethal predators await the

innocent arrivals.

But the most mortal dangers

are too small to see

Confused, chaotic, and deadly.

Teddy Roosevelt's Big Ditch Project

is a quagmire

sucking up millions of dollars,

and hundreds of lives.

To slice through the

bureaucratic nightmare,

Roosevelt authorizes John Stevens

to ignore any orders

that do not come directly

from the White House.

Stevens agrees.

And he advises the

much younger president

to keep his promise.

I'm to have a free hand.

I'm not to be hampered

or handicapped by anyone high or low.

And I'm to stay on the Isthmus

only until success is assured.

It is no accident that

Stevens has been recruited.

For the Canal to succeed,

it must find a way

through the mountains

of the Continental Divide,

the backbone connecting

North and South America.

Roosevelt hopes America's

greatest railway man

can save his Canal

- and ensure his political future.

Stevens is a railroad man,

not a Washington insider.

Day after day he tramps

through the construction zone,

focused on every detail of the job.

His cigars are so enormous

that the men call him "The Big Smoke."

But they respect him immediately.

Finally, they have a boss

who will listen.

"Mr. Stevens did not talk much

but asked questions

and could that man ask questions!

He found out everything I knew.

He turned me inside out and shook out

the last drop of information."

Frank Maltby, Division Head

After decades of back-breaking labor,

workers have slashed a route

through the jungle

that the canal is to follow.

By 1905, excavation is concentrated

in a mountainous area

of the Continental Divide.

Stevens is appalled at what he finds.

Trains lie rusting off their tracks.

Steam shovels lay idle.

Workers have no blueprints,

no guidance, no hope.

"I believe I faced about

as discouraging a proposition

as was ever presented

to a construction engineer.

I found no organization...

no answerable heads...

Nobody was working

but the ants and the typists."

In Panama, it has been this way

for more than 30 years.

For the Americans now;

for the French in the 1880s.

Having succeeded at linking Europe

and the Orient by building

the great Suez canal in Egypt,

the French try to repeat their success

in Central America.

They believe that slender Panama

should be an easy target.

It is a fatal miscalculation.

Disease, accidents, and exhaustion

take the lives of 22,000 laborers.

One man must succeed

where the world's best have failed.

Workers tell The Big Smoke

that their greatest worry

is the treacherous Culebra Cut,

the mountain pass where the French

lost the most men.

At Culebra, they must dig out

a man-made Grand Canyon.

A twisting, nine mile,

water-filled chasm as deep as a

Like the French, the Americans

don't know what to do

with the staggering amount of dirt

that is being dug out of Culebra.

It is simply dumped

wherever space can be found.

Creating unstable mountains of debris

that crumble in the continual rains.

At Culebra,

the Spanish word for snake,

John Stevens,

the great American engineer is stymied.

Here, the French finally surrendered.

Here, John Stevens must

find a way through.

Topography is only half the problem.

In the work camps,

where three quarters of the work force

are impoverished West Indians,

the human toll is appalling.

Even Roosevelt's eager

American volunteers,

in their segregated barracks,

are barely surviving on rations of

crackers and sardines.

Crammed into hovels

with no toilets or running water.

Tormented by dysentery,

parasites and fear of yellow fever

- The Great Scare.

Desperate to defeat The Great Scare -

to restore the spirits of

his frightened workers -

Stevens visits Dr. William Gorgas,

chief medical officer of the canal.

In the yellow fever ward of the

Ancon hospital,

Dr. Gorgas introduces the victims

of this horrible plague.

Like Stevens, Gorgas has been

hand-picked by the President.

At 49 years-old,

he is a light-hearted Southerner

plunged into a nightmare

of tropical sickness.

In Cuba, newly freed from Spanish rule

by Roosevelt and his Rough Riders,

Gorgas has succeeded in virtually

eliminating yellow fever.

Panama has proved to be a far

more difficult assignment.

"When the United States

took possession in 1904

the Isthmus was generally looked on as

...the most unhealthy spot in the world

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