Panama Canal

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Shari is modeling part of a specialty dinner we had very recently.  The theme was Cuisine From Great Britain.  She was interested due to the beer battered fish and chips, while I wanted to finally taste a Yorkshire pudding.  In the lower left on her plate is the 'pudding' which was more like an air filled muffin with a few bacon pieces.  It was a bit of let down, but the slow cooked brisket and veggies were excellent.  The round white thing with green specks is chive butter.

Our cruise is partially named after the Panama Canal for good reason. It is the only multi-day stop on the cruise and it was an amazing achievement with incredible importance back when it was built over a hundred years ago and still today.  

We were unaware that prior to the United States commitment to build a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the French had started construction of a canal that would be much like the Suez Canal which they had built in 1869.

The Suez Canal was built through largely desert sands and is an 'open' canal with no locks.  This is the same sort of canal the French bragged they could build in Panama.  The geology associated with the jungles of Panama was completely different.  The narrow waterway angling to the right in the picture below is of the abandoned canal the French started but never finished.

During Teddy Roosevelt's Presidency, he and the Congress decided it would be wise to have the U.S. Corps of Engineers build the Panama Canal and bought the right-of-way from the French.  

The first problem in the construction was to control canal enemy number one:

The French had been plagued by malaria and yellow fever and thousands upon thousands of workers had died.  To drastically reduce this health issue, places where there was standing water were treated to suffocate mosquito larvae.  

Secondly, the engineers added a feature to make the length of the canal much shorter.  They added a dam on a nearby river to make a huge lake - a lake we entered shortly after starting up the canal.   I think they call that Yankee ingenuity.

It is primarily an earthen dam that was the longest of its type in the early 1900's.

Lastly, the jungle soil was mostly clay that as you dredged it would fall in upon itself as well as slide in from adjacent lands.  They built a series of locks at the east and west entries to the lake created by the dam.

The locks were also designed to keep the ocean salt water separate from the fresh water of the lake.  You'll notice the picture shows two gates at each lock.  If one gate failed, the second would back up the other.

The cargo ship we are passing fits in the 100+ year old locks.  Within the last 20 years, an alternate larger set of locks have been built by the Panamanians to accommodate super tankers.

During World War II when the greatest generation fought that war in both the Atlantic and Pacific, the Panama canal had more forts to protect it than there were around Washington D. C.  One of the ship's historians explained that between submarine nets at both entrances and modifying the entrances to have curved channels, enemy torpedo tubes never disrupted the locks.  BTW, even small aircraft carriers of the day moved through the canal.

This saved two weeks of travel (blue line) in which ships traveled around Cape Horn at the south end of South America.

Our guest speakers are good at showing the range of whatever is the daily topic.  Our favorite was this historic tunnel canal in England where two guys on opposite ends of a plank use leg power to move a ten ton barge.  I always thought the British term 'footman' meant something else.  

We have been cruising and have not seen land since leaving Panama. We still find interesting views to look at from our small balcony.