Highlights from The Path Between the Seas

• Nicaragua was the favored location for a canal by most of the French and Americans involved in the project.
• The amount of dirt excavated from the canal was enough to build a Great Wall from San Francisco to New York—or 63 Great Pyramids. A train carrying said dirt would encircle the planet four times at the equator. And, if all the dirt were stacked in a column on a New York City block, it would extend 19 miles up in the air.
• In the final year of construction, there were 414 recorded deaths—30 white Americans, 384 black immigrants.
• In general, local Panamanians did not benefit economically from the construction of the canal, largely a result of U.S. commissaries supplying provisions to workers at low prices. Many locals had their homes and land taken from them and were arbitrarily relocated.
• The gap between Panamanian and U.S. cultures was wide—Americans were seen as loud, arrogant, rude and drunk and Panamanians as ignorant and grouchy.
• Corruption in the Panamanian government began with the very first president who reportedly stole $200,000 to $300,000 from the treasury, either directly or by inflating expenditures.
• The U.S. government had spent a total of $75,000,000 to acquire the Louisiana Territory, Florida, California, New Mexico and other western land, the Gadsden Purchase, Alaska and the Philippines. This was one fifth of cost of the Canal.
• In 1914, canal tolls totaled $4,000,000; in 1970, without any increase in the amount of the tolls, the total was $100,000,000. In 1974, tolls were raised for the first time; a 20% increase resulted in total tolls of $140,000,000 that year.
• The Canal remains fundamentally the same since the day it opened in 1914, a massive testament to the engineers who designed it.
• One of the biggest champions of the Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt, never saw it after completion.