A Panama Canal Journey

Scenes from a May 2024 journey through part of the Panama Canal, starting at Panama City, at the Pacific Ocean entrance to the canal, and ending in Gatún Lake, about halfway along the canal's route. The video follows the Taiwanese-owned tanker FPMC 30 as she passes beneath the Bridge of the Americas, is guided by tugs and pilot boats into the two chambers of the Miraflores Locks, rises again through the single chamber at Pedro Miguel, and enters the Culebra Cut beneath the Centennial Bridge, where container ships pass through Panama's continental divide on their way to the Caribbean. The canal runs about 82 km from ocean to ocean and lifts ships 26 m above sea level to Gatún Lake, which was the largest artificial lake in the world when the Chagres River was dammed to create it. A quirk of the isthmus's geography means a ship traveling from the Pacific to the Atlantic actually moves from southeast to northwest, and ends its transit farther west than it began. The canal was first attempted by a French company under Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, between 1881 and 1889. Committed to a sea-level design and devastated by yellow fever and malaria, the effort collapsed in bankruptcy and scandal. The United States took over in 1904, following Panama's separation from Colombia, and adopted the lock-and-lake design seen in this video. The canal opened in August 1914. Across both efforts, some 25,000 workers died. The United States handed the canal to Panama at the end of 1999, and a third set of larger locks opened in 2016. My visit to Panama and this video were inspired by David McCullough's excellent book "The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870–1914." Music: "The Sky of our Ancestors" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...