Description

In 1878 the government of Colombia granted to the French businessman and adventurer Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse a concession to build an interoceanic canal across Panama, which at that time was a province of Colombia. Wyse sold the concession to a French company, La Société internationale du Canal interocéanique, headed by Ferdinand Marie De Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal. Digging began in 1881, but the firm soon ran into difficulties, which included tropical diseases and a far more challenging terrain than De Lesseps had faced in Egypt. In ...