History Of The Panama Canal

In 1877, the same French entrepreneurs, who had created the Suez Canal, turned their attention to Panama. A misguided attempt to dig a sea-level canal not only drove up costs up to £217 million, but the dirt piled up on the sides of the excavation created malarial swamps that sent death rates up ending over 22.000 workers lives before the project was cancelled in 1888 after the French canal company went bankrupt, nearly dragging the French economy down with it (The big ditch, page 61). During the time the French attempted to build the canal, the U.S. was experimenting with a new canal in Nicaragua, which failed, while fighting the Spanish-American war. The war convinced American politicians that the United States needed to be able to shift vessels quickly between the oceans. As a result, in the early 1900s, The United States of America announced their plans to continue with the construction of the Panama Canal, an artificial 48-mile waterway in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean, where the French left it in 1889. The resulting acquisitions of Hawaii and the Philip-pines only reinforced that conviction (The big ditch, page 53).
The American effort to build the Panama Canal official began in 1904.
A budget of £109 million (The big ditch, page 98) was agreed with the U.S. Department of Treasury. The Panama Canal would mark a before and after in international maritime trades and military domination by saving ships 14 days or 7,872 miles around South America and over £1.63 million in fuel (Erwin
Bernhardt)