The Big Ditch: How America Dug the Panama Canal (1881-1914)

In August 1914 a steamship crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the jungle of Panama. Behind that nine-hour trip lay more than thirty years of failure, disease and dynamite. This film follows the Panama Canal from De Lesseps' failed French attempt, through Roosevelt's Canal Zone, the mosquito campaign of William Gorgas, John Stevens' change of plan and George Goethals' Culebra Cut, to the workers who dug it and the locks that lift ships over the isthmus. CHAPTERS 0:05 Prologue 0:49 Chapter 1: The dream 2:04 Chapter 2: The French attempt 3:39 Chapter 3: A president's canal 5:13 Chapter 4: Chaos 6:19 Chapter 5: The mosquito 7:49 Chapter 6: The new plan 9:00 Chapter 7: The Cut 10:49 Chapter 8: The workers 11:56 Chapter 9: The lake and the locks 13:23 Chapter 10: The last dike 14:27 Chapter 11: What it left behind A NOTE ON NUMBERS Death tolls, costs and excavation volumes vary between sources; the film uses widely cited estimates and says so. The story of the hospital bed-legs standing in bowls of water is a popular anecdote that may be polished by time. KEY SOURCES Library of Congress and Smithsonian Panama Canal collections Wikipedia: History of the Panama Canal; Culebra Cut; Gatun Locks; William C. Gorgas Britannica: Panama Canal Panama Canal Authority history pages PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS Every image is in the public domain: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division; U.S. National Archives Panama Canal series; Isthmian Canal Commission photographs; Digital Public Library of America; via Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons. No image is used more than once. MUSIC "Dark Times" and "Long Note Two" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/