THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120061
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
AMERICA'S FIRST 20th century moon shot, the Panama Canal, is hard to appreciate these days because achievements of this magnitude have become commonplace.
Passing from Atlantic to Pacific now is just an uneventful 51-mile day trip aboard a cruise liner or a container megaship. Fact is, if you been through one lock, you've been through them all. These in the Panama Canal are just bigger - the biggest anywhere, the chambers measuring 110 feet wide and 1,000 feet long.
I find myself pondering two things during the eight-hour trip: How did Balboa ever find this place to start with, and how does one grasp the magnitude of the accomplishment that is the canal?
Suppose it is 1513. From the crow's nest of a Spanish galleon this coastline we now call Panama must have looked much as it does today from the stateroom balcony of a modern cruise ship. The landmass rises formidably like large emerald mounds out of the deep blue water, much as the Massanutten range rises out of the floor of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.
How did Balboa know what modern maps tell me, that over there, maybe 40 miles as the bird flies, there's a whole new ocean? He didn't have satellite imaging and the such; he didn't even have a map.
Well, Balboa didn't know, actually, until he took a hike. But what even made him take the hike? For all I know - without my map, just looking off in the distance - for all Balboa must have known, it could be 4,000 miles of mountains and jungles out there.
For some reason Balboa did hike across this isthmus where the land bridge between North and South America is at its narrowest, and he claimed for Spain all the land this new ocean touched - the largest land grab in the history of the world.
You learn a lot of stuff about the canal as you make the transit. People don't say, ``Is this all there is?'' so often if you keep their mind boggled with other things. Like. . . .
The amount of earth moved in building the canal is equal to a building 19 miles high, a city block square at its base. Can you picture that?
Well, how about this? It takes 52 million gallons of water to move each ship through the canal's six locks.
Toll rates for canal passage are based on weight and type of cargo. The least expensive transit bill was 36 cents, paid by 140-pound adventurer Richard Halliburton, who swam through in 1929. That's not allowed any more.
Maybe you can use this info if you ever get on Jeopardy.
I'd like to have been around here back at the beginning when the United States took over from the French, who found themselves throwing a lot of francs down a hole that was not nearly big enough.
Theodore Roosevelt was running things then, walking softly and carrying a big stick. Colombia, which owned the isthmus, wanted a lot of money from the United States to assume canal rights from France. Roosevelt expressed displeasure at ``these wretched little republics that cause me so much trouble.'' His solution was fairly straightforward and relatively simple for the times: Make a new country that is more agreeable.
The local Panamanians dutifully staged a revolution (after they were shown how to do it), the American battleship Nashville pointed her big guns toward Colombia and Panama was born . . . and quickly recognized by the United States.
The U.S. began work on the canal in 1904 and opened it for business 10 years later. Nothing that you see along the route - not even the widening and dredging that continues even today - truly captures the scope of the accomplishment.
The engineering challenges alone involved digging through the Continental Divide (an eight-mile stretch of solid rock), constructing the largest earth dam ever built up to that time, building the most massive locks ever envisioned and constructing the largest gates ever swung. They also had to pretty much conquer yellow fever and malaria along the way.
The cost was about $387 million (early 20th century dollars), or more than five times the combined cost of the Louisiana Purchase, Alaska and the Philippines. Still, thanks to an Army engineer named George W. Goethals, it came in under budget and six months early.
That is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of all. by CNB