Who built the Panama Canal?

While America prepared for war in Cuba, the American battleship Oregon, stationed off the coast of California, was ordered to Cuba. Steaming around South America, the Oregon was followed in the press like the Kentucky Derby. The voyage took two months, and while the Oregon arrived in time to take part in the Battle of Santiago Harbor,rift platinum it was clear that America needed a faster way to move its warships from ocean to ocean.

This wasn’t a new idea. The dream of connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific had been held almost since Balboa stood on the cliffs of Darien in modern Panama. President Grant sent a survey team to look for the best route to dig a canal tera gold across Central America, and an American company later built a small railroad line to take steamship passengers across the isthmus, drastically cutting travel time from coast to coast.

Plenty of other people saw the commercial as well as strategic advantages of this undertaking. In 1880, a French group led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, chief architect of the Suez Canal, put together a company with the capital of thousands of investors rift gold to build a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, then still a part of Colombia. In the growing macho mood of America’s leaders, President Hayes announced that no European country would control such a canal, saying, “The policy of the country is a canal under American control.”