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Updated: June 12, 2025
The impossibility of making even approximate estimates of the cost of the work in such a deadly climate and through such an uncertain geologic formation was one of the greatest difficulties to be overcome. The De Lesseps plan provided for an open cut throughout at the sea-level, at an estimated cost of $170,000,000.
England had originally fought the canal project, opposing it in every way open to her power and influence at Continental capitals. The belief in time dawning upon the judgment of Britain that the canal would be finished and would succeed, her statesmen turned their energies to checkmating and minimizing the influence of De Lesseps and his dupe Ismail.
'There was much laughter when M. de Lesseps mentioned that on his first visit to England the publisher who brought out the report of his meeting charged, as the first item of his bill, "£50 for attacking the book in order to make it succeed." "Since then," observed M. de Lesseps, "I have been attacked gratuitously, and have got on without paying." The Times, Feb. 19, 1884.
"Well, captain, what the ancients hesitated to undertake, Mr. de Lesseps is now finishing up; his joining of these two seas will shorten the route from Cadiz to the East Indies by 9,000 kilometers, and he'll soon change Africa into an immense island." "Yes, Professor Aronnax, and you have every right to be proud of your fellow countryman.
The trip was made on a Wright biplane, and was the third Channel crossing by air, Bleriot having made the first, and Jacques de Lesseps the second. Rolls was first to make the return journey in one trip. He was eventually killed through the breaking of the tail-plane of his machine in descending at a flying meeting at Bournemouth.
He had overseen the flying of the kites, the impudent invasion of the upper depths when a button was touched, and then he had seen the white cumulus clouds gather and become nimbus, followed by a brief rainfall upon a hot and yellow land. He had felt as Moses may have felt when he smote the rock, as De Lesseps may have felt when he brought the seas together.
At least that is as I then understood it. De Lesseps was not an engineer and knew little of science. His Company's failure was directly due to his ignorance and disregard of the advice of competent men. Manual labour on the canal has been done mostly by Jamaica negroes.
A few years since there was a movement in France to perpetuate De Lesseps's name by officially calling the waterway the Canal de Lesseps. But England withheld its approval, while other interests having a right to be heard believed that the stigma of culpability over the Panama swindles was fastened upon De Lesseps too positively to merit the tribute desired by his relatives and friends.
In such a country, especially as war was in progress, the only government able to maintain itself was despotic. Civil troubles were intensified by dissension between Catholics and Protestants. Revolution accompanied any change in administration. Under Ferdinand de Lesseps, creator of the Suez Canal, the French company had performed extensive excavations at Panama.
Lesseps sailed with Le Peyrouse, but left him in Kamschatcha, and travelled by land to France with despatches from him; his narrative gives a lively picture of the inhabitants of the northern parts of Asiatic and European Russia. The work has been translated into English; there is also a German translation by Forster.
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