Robert Hargrove

The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time

In researching my mentoring story about Ike, I read something in his memoir, At Ease, that captured my interest about the building of the Panama Canal. It turns out that the Canal Zone is one of the wettest regions in the world, where there are torrential downpours eight months out of the year, to the tune of three inches an hour. One day after Ike and Connor were inspecting the trails around the canal, they returned to find the entire army encampment, including Ike’s house, buried by a gigantic mud slide.

This roused my curiosity and I pick up a copy a great new book by Matthew Parker, Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time. As the book portrays, the Panama Canal had a number of firsts: engineering, financial, and medical. Yet one of the most striking was the astronomical loss of life.

Three quarters of the workers, mostly from the British West Indies, were hospitalized every year and suffered loss of arms and legs almost every day. According to the most conservative estimates, over 25,000 people, most of whom worked in conditions of semi-slavery, died every year during the Canal’s construction due to yellow fever, malaria, and small pox. People worked under conditions of rain, sun, gunpowder, mud, and millions of mosquitoes for officials that did not give a whistle-blast more of care for their lives than a rusting ship wrecked along a desolate sea coast.

Yet interestingly enough, most of the British West Indies workers who toiled in the project operated like soldiers going off to fight a great war. They were fiercely proud to be part of a heroic effort that would permanently change the world. As one worker put it after the completion of the canal, “Many times I have met death at my door; but thank God I am alive to see the great difference that the Canal has made and the wonderful fame it has around the world.”

The story of the Panama Canal shows the innate desire of human beings to make a difference in the world. The Canal was completed in 1914 and it was only 7 years later in 1921 that Fox Connor and Ike went there to defend it. In my next blog, I will return to the tail of how Fox Connor launched Ike’s career after his three year stint with him in the Canal Zone.