| French Canal Company effort to Build the Panama Canal |
The French Canal Company, coming off a very successful construction job of building the Suez Canal, felt very confident in their plan to build the Panama Canal. In spite of all the advice of other experts to not proceed with the plan as they proposed to build the Canal, Ferdinand de Lessups, the front man in the French Canal Company went ahead with his plan. It failed and by 1898 the French effort was no more.
I will be adding additional words and special photos in the near future to tie this whole section together.
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| Ferdinand de Lesseps |
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My friends at CZBrats have a lot of written material on Mr. De Lesseps, his history, the conference that he presided over in France in 1849, and his effort to build the Panama Canal. Go to the following reference for an excellent review.
http://www.czbrats.com/MiNombre/Paniguana/delesseps.htm |
| The Killers that almost won the war against the Canal |
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| The Anopheles mosquito that carried malaria |
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| Aedes aegypti yellow fever carrier |
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Unfortunately for thousands of hard working men who were part of the labor force for the French canal building effort, no one had yet discovered the cause of two of the world's worst epidemic diseases, malaria and yellow fever. Every cause but these two little flying animals was suspected as causing the diseases. It wasn't until after the French Canal Company had failed and folded its business that some American doctors, working in Cuba after the Spanish-American War discovered that the two little mosquitoes were the culprits that killed so many. |
Ferdinand de Lesseps was told at a planning conference in Paris in 1849 that his plan for the Panama Canal would not work. He wanted a sea level canal and this was shown to be a faulty plan by a famous French engineer. De Lesseps plunged ahead with his glorious plan, and the French people supported him in a magnificent manner. Equipment used on the Suez Canal effort, such as this "ladder digger" shown below worked well in the sand of the desert, but in the rock, mud and shale of the Panama mountains, it failed.
The French Canal Company failed because of three major reasons: (1) a faulty plan for the building of the Canal through the Isthmus, (2) improper equipment to do the job, (3) the lack of knowledge, not of their doing, of the major cause of the thousands of deaths during the effort. The tenacity of the French workers has to be applauded because even as people were dying by the hundreds, hundreds more would show up to continue the work. But the funding was also faulty and the eventual bankruptcy ended any hopes of success.
Those leaders of the French Canal Company ended up in disgrace and were charged with the theft of funds of thousands of people in many countries. |
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| A French digger brought from recent success digging in the loose sands of the desert on the Suez Canal |
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