The San Juan Route: The Nicaragua Canal Company 1887-93

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

The vision of a waterway through the Central American isthmus was entertained by monarchs and entrepreneurs from as early as the sixteenth century. Engineers and visionaries alike considered Panama and Nicaragua the prime locations. Panama, of course, eventually got its canal. But despite the myriad plans, surveys, contracts, and treaties over the decades for the Nicaragua route, only once did actual construction begin. That was in 1889. When the quixotic scheme of the French to dig a sea-level canal through Panama ended in bankruptcy in 1889, new life was breathed into the checkered career of a proposed Nicaragua trans-isthmian canal. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the Nicaragua route had been fancied over that of Panama, especially by Americans. But politics and national prestige had combined to permit Panama to routinely preempt the Nicaragua pathway. American interest in an interoceanic transportation route burst on the scene with the 1848 California gold rush and California's admission to the union two years later. Both the U.S. government and American entrepreneurs wasted no time in staking claims. Anything was preferable to the tedious wagon trek over the Great American Desert, or forging a mule-path through the Central American jungles, or making the long voyage around Cape Horn in order to reach the west coast Canaan. The American minister in Granada signed a canal treaty with the Nicaraguan government in 1849. It was rejected for its strategic implications by the U.S. Senate, but the next year a more business-like arrangement was arrived at with rival Britain. At the same time, American transportation mogul Cornelius Vanderbilt concluded a trans-isthmian contract, with provisions for a canal, with Nicaragua. Though Vanderbilt's canal was never built, the irrepressible Commodore did operate an efficient land-and-water route from sea to sea. Unfortunately for the Nicaragua route, while Vandy's passage was embroiled in a Nicaraguan civil war, three other American entrepreneurs completed a railroad across Panama in 1855. Not for the last time, a Panama route preempted the hopes for Nicaragua.(1) U.S. official interest was revived under President U.S. Grant, and in 1872 he authorized a joint military commission working out of the Navy's Bureau of Navigation to examine and compare feasible paths between the oceans. The commission's 1876 report specified eight possibilities, ranging from southern Mexico to northern Colombia, and unreservedly recommended the Nicaragua route. The report extolled the Nicaragua route as possessing both for the construction and maintenance of a canal, greater advantages, and offering fewer difficulties from engineering, commercial, and economic points of view, than any of the other routes shown to be practicable by surveys sufficiently in detail to enable a judgment to be formed of their relative merits.(2) Aniceto G. Menocal, a Cuban-American, was the chief engineer on the survey. Henceforth, every Nicaragua canal plan would be but a variation of Menocal's, and most were adjustments made by Menocal himself. Born in Havana in 1836, he was the son of a Cuban planter and a descendant of an old Spanish family. Educated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Menocal began his career working on the Havana water works. By 1870, he was with the New York City department of public works and, two years later, began work as a civil engineer with the U.S. navy department. Menocal would never surrender his belief in the efficacy of a Nicaragua canal, even when the government committed to the Panama project following the Spanish-American War.(3) But despite the American testimonial to the advantages of the Nicaragua route, when French promoter and septuagenarian Ferdinand de Lesseps presided over an international canal congress in Paris in 1879, Nicaragua's fate seemed to be sealed. De Lesseps was fresh off his great Suez triumph, his name and fame were celebrated world-wide, and he was anxious to add to his laurels by duplicating his Suez feat by constructing a sea-level canal in Panama. …