The Path Between the Seas
by David McCullough
Summary
The Path Between the Seas tells the whole story of the Panama Canal, 1870 to 1914, and it is really two epics joined at a grave. The first is French: Ferdinand de Lesseps, the hero of Suez, launches a sea level canal through Panama on charisma and public subscription, and the jungle destroys it, twenty thousand workers dead of yellow fever and malaria, small investors ruined across France, and the word Panama turned into a synonym for scandal. The second is American: Theodore Roosevelt's theft of an opportunity, as Panama detaches from Colombia under a US naval umbrella, and then the engineering triumph, William Gorgas defeating the mosquito once science finally accepted that the mosquito was the enemy, John Stevens redesigning the work around railroads and locks, and George Goethals driving the Culebra Cut through the continental divide. David McCullough tells it through people, from chief engineers to the West Indian laborers who did the dying, drawing on archives, letters, and interviews with survivors and their families, and his gift for making enormous undertakings humanly legible has never had better material. The book won the 1978 National Book Award in History along with the Francis Parkman, Samuel Eliot Morison, and Cornelius Ryan awards, and it had the rare distinction of changing a live political debate: during the Senate fight over the Torrijos Carter treaties returning the canal to Panama, both sides quoted it, which its author counted as proof it was fair. It remains the standard account of one of the largest things human beings have ever built.
Historical Context & Significance
McCullough published the book in 1977, precisely as the canal's future became the hottest foreign policy fight in Washington, and President Carter credited it with informing the Senate debate over the treaties, signed that September. The four prizes it collected, capped by the 1978 National Book Award, established McCullough as the leading narrative historian of his generation, a position Truman and John Adams later confirmed. The French chapters preserved a catastrophe Americans had largely forgotten, and the book's insistence on the fever dead, most of them Black Caribbean workers, quietly corrected the triumphal version of the story told for most of a century. When the canal actually changed hands at the end of 1999, the commentary quoted McCullough once again.