The Atlantic begins here, the Pacific over there, and between them lie 51 miles of deep ditch, aged machinery, steamy jungle, epic engineering, malarial history and murky politics. Every 45 minutes or so, another big boat floats past in the humidity, bearing oil or bananas or lumber or tourists through a 110-foot-wide passage of concrete and steel. This is the jewel that so many cruise-lovers are so eager to wear in their crowns.
The Panama Canal, which opened 80 years ago, is also the public-works project that English writer James Bryce called "the greatest liberty man has ever taken with nature," a shortcut that saves about 8,000 miles of South American circumnavigation on the journey between New York and San Francisco. That position makes it arguably the most valuable piece of real estate in the Western hemisphere, and it's no surprise that the world is watching to see how the U.S. and Panamanian governments handle their obligations to transfer ownership and operation of the canal on Dec. 31, 1999.What may strike some people as peculiar is the canal's parallel life as a tourist attraction.
After all, American tourists are seldom seduced by engineering prowess alone. Cruise customers most often seek out creature comforts, coastal panoramas of uncompromised nature and prime shopping opportunities, none of which are found at the Panama Canal. Yet instead of viewing the canal as an obligatory stop for cruise lines , cruise passengers embrace passage as a badge of worldliness, a chance to spend eight or 10 hours steeping, quite literally, in history.
The hour may be early, and the air outside may be moist, but cruisers merrily crowd the decks when the heavy machinery and narrow locks come into view. Some of these cruisers neither know nor care how the engines in their automobiles work at home, but they'll gather in throngs to marvel at the idea that the gates of these locks are driven by the sputterings of a mere 40-horsepower motor.
My canal ship was the Royal Cruise's newly reconditioned Star Odyssey, on a 15-day cruise, beginning in Aruba, calling at Curacao, the canal, Puerto Caldera (Costa Rica), Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Less than 20 years after the adventurer Balboa discovered Panama's unique geographic position in 1513, the Spanish were already contemplating a canal. But it was the 19th-Century French builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who gained the necessary rights from Colombia (which then controlled the land that is now Panama) and started work in 1881. De Lesseps' Suez desert techniques failed miserably. He underestimated the difficulty of the digging and didn't make the connection between mosquitoes and illness, which led to widespread malaria and yellow fever and contributed heavily to an estimated 20,000 deaths among canal workers. De Lesseps resigned in disgrace, and for more than a decade the construction site sat largely idle.
Once the 1898 Spanish-American War highlighted the need for an Atlantic-Pacific Navy shortcut, however, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt resolved that a Panama canal would be a good card for him to hold. By 1903, Roosevelt had secured a treaty with newly independent Panama, giving the U.S. jurisdiction over a 10-mile-wide canal zone. The work began again.
After a decade, another 5,609 deaths and more than 232 million cubic yards of digging, the canal opened to international traffic in August 1914. Americans reveled in "their" accomplishment, but Americans were actually a small part of the work force: Author David McCullough has estimated that as many as 50,000 construction workers labored on the canal, most of them descendants of the slaves who were brought from West Africa to the West Indies over several centuries. Surrounded by unstable earth and tropical humidity, many of them worked 10 hours daily, six days a week, for 10 cents an hour.
Eighty years later, remarkably little has changed in the canal's workings: Water rises and falls in three locks, and ships - mostly container vessels and cruise liners - putter across a man-made lake, paying weight-based tolls that last year added up to not quite $400 million. Almost all those ships bypass Panama's ports, which means that thousands of travelers have seen Panama but never set foot on its territory.
The canal is such a popular attraction that some of those ships have no need to use it, but do so anyway. Since 1985, Regency Cruises has been sending cruise ships on seven-day, Aruba-Jamaica-Costa Rica-Colombia itineraries that advertise a canal transit in the middle of the voyage. The Regent Star steers into the Caribbean end of the canal, passes through the first set of locks, makes a U-turn on sprawling, man-made Gatun Lake, and then leaves the way it came.
This utterly purposeless seven-hour maneuver has made the seven-day route so attractive (most canal cruises are 14 days) that the Regent Star retraces that path weekly from October to April.
What does a canal cruise passenger do with all those days at sea? I compiled a catalogue: Play ping pong. Lie in sun. Sit in sun. Read romances. Scan the sea for dolphin fins. Drink in shade. Drink in sun. Moisten oneself with a mister. Play cards for fun. Play cards for money. Take dancing lessons. Listen to lectures on transatlantic cruise history. Eat healthfully. Eat continuously. Sleep. Play bridge. Reminisce about previous cruises, other cruise lines, favorite routes. Talk about who's been dancing with the captain. Read David McCullough's definitive history of the canal, "The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914."
On canal day, the fourth day into the cruise, we woke early and scrambled to the rails in darkness. Around us lay a landscape simultaneously grimy, industrial, deeply green and intensely humid. Clouds were low and thick, the port buildings were boxy and utilitarian, and the water was still enough that birds could be heard twittering in the trees ashore. Directly ahead lay the 110-foot-wide, 1,000-foot-long passage of Gatun Locks, with walls of concrete and slowly swinging gates of steel.
"Isn't this exciting?" said a woman on deck.
"Isn't it wonderful?" asked another.
While we watched guidelines being tossed and engines being revved, rising waters pushed our ship skyward. A Panamanian canal pilot had boarded to confer with the captain and take over the ship, as canal rules require, and with him came a lecturer who immediately took to the public-address system, beginning a daylong disquisition on the canal's history and operations: The sodium-vapor lighting that allows 24-hour operation of the locks. The 26 million gallons of water it takes to lift a cruise ship 27 feet in Gatun Locks. The stunt that daredevil journalist Richard Halliburton pulled in the 1920s, swimming through the canal and incurring a 36-cent toll.
As the day progressed, we crossed broad Gatun Lake (one of three artificial lakes created in the canal zone by the harnessing of the Chagres River; it now includes an island wildlife reserve), rose to 87 feet above sea level, floated past the Continental Divide, then waited our turn to pass through the Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks. Somewhere out of public view, cruise line officials paid the ship's canal toll - about $80,000.
Soon we were back to familiar patterns: a day at sea, a day in port, another couple of days at sea, and so on, as the ship called along the coasts of Costa Rica, Mexico and California.
I went back to my catalogue of things people do on a canal cruise: Down in the pool, five women paddled through an exercise class. At a railing nearby, a man watched, smoked cigarettes and sipped beer. Inside, a crowd convened for bingo, and half a dozen gamblers slouched and leaned in the casino. In the Penthouse Lounge, afternoon tea was served.
From stem to stern, we idled, and daydreamed of jungles steaming and Theodore Roosevelt scheming.