The idea of building a canal that, through Panama, would allow us to avoid the long and dangerous journey to the more southern Drake Passage, Strait of Magellan or Beagle Channel, is anything but recent. The first references to such a work date back to the 16th century. In 1534, Charles V of Habsburg – Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain – ordered to explore the possibility of creating a route through the Americas in the Panamanian Isthmus. Well known to the indigenous population, the fact that the two oceans were separated by a thin strip of land had been ascertained by Western explorers a few decades earlier, in 1513, when the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the southern coast of Panama passing through the dense jungle. However, the interest gained at the time was not enough to materialize the construction of the canal: ideas and projects (more or less started) between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ended up foundering. Then came the turning point in the 19th century. Following the collapse of Spanish imperial power in Latin America, in 1843 the United States stepped forward by signing the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty with the emerging Republic of New Granada (a state which then included present-day Colombia, Panama and small portions of belonging today to Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela). With this pact, Washington obtained not only the right of transit in the area of the Isthmus of Panama, but also the right to intervene militarily to defend this transit. Although the United States' interest in the region was now evident – in 1855 they opened the Panama Railroad, a railway line that connected the port of Colón (on the Atlantic) to the port of Balboa (on the Pacific) – to undertake the first truly great work The excavator was a French company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French entrepreneur who had already successfully promoted the creation of the Suez Canal. The Panamanian undertaking, which began in 1881, however, proved to be much more difficult, in particular due to the diseases – malaria and yellow fever – which wreaked havoc among the workers. Added to those of accidents, there were 22 thousand victims in 8 years of work: enough to shatter the French aims.
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