The Great Frenchman's Folly (Panama Disaster 1)

the Grand Francis. They call him the great Frenchman, Ferdinand the Lesser. He looks younger than he is. He'd never guess he's eighty. Here's how the New York Herald had once described La grand Francais. He bears his years with ease and grace, showing no signs of age in his movements. His face is tanned and ruddy, with the evidence of perfect health. His bearing is erect, his manner suave, courteous, and polished. Ferdinando les Seppe might be surprised that the

other passenger hasn't recognized him, but he's not offended. He's amused his line of work. He flashes a smile and says isthmuses. Ferdinand Lessppe built the Suez Canal. Everyone told him it couldn't be done, the waterway slicing one hundred and twenty miles through the Egyptian Isthmus. It was too ambitious, but Ferdinand Lessseppe did it. The new canal was an

instant hit, slashed journey times between Asia and Europe. Instead of going thousands of miles around the southern tip of Africa, ships could pay to take the shortcut from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Today, twelve percent of global trade goes through Suez. De Leasseeppe made a lot of French investors very, very rich, and now he's trying to do it all over again in Panama. But for Ferdinand de les Seppe, Panama will not be a happy isthmus. I'm

Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Ferdinando Lesseppe was born in eighteen oh five in Versailles into a distinguished family. His cousin would later become Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon the Third. Like his father, De la Seppe became a diplomat. He served in Portugal, Spain, and Tunisia. He spent five years in Egypt as France's vice consul. De Leeseppe was charming and charismatic. He made friends wherever he went. It is wonderful, said his first wife, to

have a husband so liked by everyone. Fernando Lesseppe was a fine horseman, a crack shot and accomplished fencer. He was not an engineer, or a financier or an administrator, all skills you might expect someone to need if they were going to embark on a groundbreaking one hundred and twenty mile canal. So how did de Lesseppe get put in Chos of Suez? In his five years in Egypt, he had become firm friends with the ruler's son. By the time the ruler's son took over, De Lesseppe had

left the diplomatic service and recently been widowed. He went to visit his old friend. They talked about canals. The idea had been around for years, but nobody had ever got very far with it. I'll put up some money, the ruler told De Lesseepe if you can raise the rest. As the historian David McCulloch puts it, de Lesseppe had no experience faintly related to such an undertaking. He had no backing from France's government or from banks, but why

should that stop him. De Lesseppe convened a committee of experts to come up with a plan. He formed a company, and he barn stormed around France selling his scheme to small investors. He was magnetic, a compelling speaker. Thousan of French families entrusted him with their savings. The British Prime Minister called the Lesseppe a swindler and a fool, but then he would say that if the canal were actually to happen, the British didn't want it controlled by a

French company. But could you really cut a canal right across the Egyptian desert? It can't be easy to dig in sand. De Lesseppe had no time for the doomsters and gloomsters. They never achieve anything, who do not believe in success, He liked to say. By eighteen sixty seven they'd been digging for eight years and gone way over budget. De Lesseppe was running out of cash. He went back to the French public with another scheme to raise more money.

Lottery bonds, invest in finishing the Suez Canal. With a chance of winning big cash prizes, public snapped up the bonds, and two years later the very first ship steamed through the newly opened canal, the state yacht of Empress Eugenie. Somehow de Lasseppe had pulled it off. The two sides of the world approached to greet one another, said one commentator. Another gave de Lesseppe his new nickname, La Grange Franseille. The triumph made him a symbol of France's self image

and the age of globalism and technological progress. In the words of Matthew Parker, the author of Hell's Gorge, he represented a new patriotism based around not war, but achievement for all mankind. De Lesseppe married again. He was sixty four, his glamorous new wife just twenty. Soon they had a child, then another, and another. The photogenic family was never out of the newspapers. The Grand Francais set his heart on conquering another isthmus. As with Egypt, the idea of a

canal across Panama had been discussed for years. As with Suez, such a canal would save ships. A detail of thousands upon thousands of miles instead of sailing all around South America, they'd be able to shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic. Surveyors had scoped out the lie of the land in Panama. Various routes were proposed for locks that might convey a ship over the hills between the oceans, like a set

of steps. To Lesseppe had strong views about locks. He hated them more the ship close one set of gates, open another wait for the water to gush in or out. Locks make a canal journey slow and cumbersome, And as far as de Lesseppe was concerned, there was only one right way to build a canal at sea level. That's what had done at Suez. You sail in at one end and out the other. Simple and the Suez Canal was one hundred and twenty miles. It's only forty odd

miles across the Panama isthmus. How hard could it be? In eighteen seventy nine, De Lesseppe had the Saciete de Geography convene a congress in Paris to study all the possible routes. He invited delegates from twenty two countries, explorers, economists, engineers, an expert. After expert explained very clearly why the sea level canal that had worked in Egypt was never going to work in Panama. For a start, Egypt was pretty flat, Panama was hilly. How much earth would you have to dig,

how much would it cost? How long would it take? And Egypt was dry. Panama's river Chagres cut across any route the canal might take. Have you ever seen the chuglis, asked one delegate to de Lesseppe's conference. I have. I've watched it after a storm rise ten feet in an hour. I've seen it gushing like a torrent fifteen hundred feet across. What's going to happen to the ships in your sea level canal when all that floodwater hits them? Problems, problems, problems,

said de Lesseppe. Of course there are problems. There were problems at Suez too. People had said you could never dig through sand, but men of genius came forward to solve every problem by inventing machines, massive steam powered dredges. Men of genius will invent whatever is needed for Panama too. The Congress ended with a vote on which plan to support. A surprising number of delegates were nowhere to be found.

One later explained that it was obvious which way de le Seppe wanted the vote to go, and he didn't agree with it. But he'd also dined very well in Paris, and he'd hate to upset his hosts. Others were braver in order not to burden my conscience, said one with unnecessary deaths and useless expenditure, I say no. De le Seppe got up to cast his vote and make an announcement. I vote yes, and I have accepted command of the enterprise.

The room erupted. Lesseeppe was seventy four years old. It has been suggested he said that after Suez I ought to take a rest. But I ask you, when a general has just won one battle and is invited to win another, why should he refuse. By the end of the vote, Yes had a resounding majority. Look more closely, and the result seems less reassuring. Most of the Yes delegates were French, not many were engineers, and of the engineers only one had ever actually been to Panama, and

he had a financial interest in del Sepe's plan. Still, now de la Seppe could go to the French public to seek investment and claim the packing of experts, just as it done with Suez. De la Sepe's son from his first marriage, his loyal right hand man, Charles, wasn't sure this was wise. You succeeded at Suez by a miracle, he said to his father. Should not one be satisfied with completing one miracle in a lifetime. Cautionary tales will

be back in a moment. If Ferdinand de Lesseppe was going to persuade ordinary French families to invest in his Panama Canal company as they had in Suez, it would probably help if he'd actually been to Panama. On December thirtieth, eighteen seventy nine, his ship docked in the small town of Cologne. Down the ramp walked de Lesseppe with his beautiful young wife and three of their little children. In a white linen suit. De Lesseppe gave a rousing speech.

The canal will be made, he said, again and again. The canal will be made. On was a railway town, and not somewhere travelers like to linger. Unpaved streets strewn with garbage, a couple of seedy hotels, and that was about it. You landed in Colon only to get the train to Panama City. The railway across Panama had been built by American investors in the mid nineteenth century, when the easiest way to get from the east coast of America to the west was not to go through America

at all. Instead, you'd take a ship down to Panama, make your way by land across the forty mile Isthmus, and take another ship back north. De Lasseppe had arrived at the start of the dry season. The skies were blue, the breeze was pleasant. It was the perfect time of year to visit Panama if you wanted to enjoy a vacation, the most uninformative time if you wanted to understand how hard it might be to build a canal. De la Seppe and his entourage bordered the train for Panama City.

It took them across a swamp, through a jungle, and up into the hills. The scenery was stunning, and on board the train, the Champagne flowed freely. De la Seppe was captivated La plu Bergen dumand he declared the most beautiful place in the world. Then the train ground to a halt. Everybody out. It was time to cross the Chaghlis River, which flowed gently down a valley forty feet below. There was, however, a problem. A few months earlier, after a storm in the rainy season, the river had swelled

forty six feet. The railway bridge, huge and sturdy and made from iron, had been battered and mangled out of shape. It wasn't safe to take a CA train across it, but another train was waiting on the other side to take them on to Panama City if they'd cared to cross the bridge on foot. Some of the passengers looked down at the drop and across the twisted bridge and decided and had had too much champagne to risk it. De Leasseeppe gathered up his small children and led them

happily across. It was all a big adventure. If the destructive power of the floods had impressed him, he kept it to himself. Writing back to France, he mentioned only that there'd been a small delay on the railway in Panama City. On New Year's Day, they'd arranged a boat for the three mile trip to the bay where the canal would meet the ocean. De Leeseppe had brought a shiny new pickaxe from France to strike the symbolic first blow, but her heads were saw from the night before, and

the boat was late to leave. After more Champagne, they neared the bay and realized they'd missed the tide. They couldn't land. No matter, said de la Seppe. If the first blow is only symbolic, we can do it right here on the boat. He handed the pickaxe to his seven year old daughter and lined up an old Champagne crate emptied of bottles. The Bishop of Panama blessed the work, and the little girl brought the pickaxe swinging down onto

the wooden box. Construction of the Panama Canal had big gun, sort of, and after his trip across the Isthmus, Ferdinand Lesseeppe was in a confident mood. Our work, he declared, will be easier at Panama than at Suez. The Congress in Paris had made a rough guess at what might be involved, how much earth they'd have to shift, how long it would take, and how much it would cost. De Lesseppe had brought with him to Panama a technical

committee to give those numbers a sense check. They decided their need to do even more excavation, half as much again. But they also decided oddly that this would be quicker, not twelve years, but eight and cheaper two de Lesseppe once again barnstormed around France, drumming up interest in shares

in his Panama company. Everywhere he went he flew the flags of France and America, though the French government had nothing to do with his scheme, and the Americans were just as wary of this Panama project as the Brits had been of Suez. A single share in the company would cost something like a year's wages for a typical worker in the Suez company had cost the same, and now they were trading at four times as much and paying dividends of seventeen percent a year. The French public

had a question to resolve. Why had Suez succeeded. Was it because of la craent Francis the sheer force of personality of Ferdinand Lesseppe. If so, it might be worth betting that it'd put it off again. But there was an alternative explanation. Perhaps everyone had initially overestimated how challenging Suez would be. Maybe with hindsight, it wasn't that hard. If that were the case, we shouldn't be quite so impressed that de Lesseppe had managed it. Psychologists now have

some jargon for thinking about questions like this. We have to weigh up two types of explanation, dispositional and situational. We might attribute an event to someone's disposition, what type of person they are, or to their situation, chance and circumstance. For example, suppose someone's late to a meeting, sorry, they say, stuck in traffic. That's a situational explanation. Do you believe it? What? Do you suspect that they're probably just the type of

person who's late to everything. Researchers have found that humans are innately biased. We're too quick to jump to the dispositional explanations, too slow to believe the situational. Even if we know the traffic was bad on some level, we tend to think that it must have been their fault. In one famous experiment in nineteen sixty seven, subjects read articles that are either praised or damn Fidel Castro. The experimenters told them how the articles had come about. It

was an exercise, they explained. We flipped a coin heads and we told the writer they had to make the case for Castro tales, and we told them to argue against. Then they asked, what do you think the writer's attitude is towards Fidel Castro? The answer is obvious, right, You simply can't tell. But even though the experiments subjects knew the article came from a coin toss, they couldn't quite

bring themselves to believe it. They were more likely to say that the writer of the pro Castro article probably liked Castro and the writer of the anti Castro article probably didn't. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error. We're inclined to attribute things to people, not chars, and that leads us astray because it makes us too likely to expect the same outcome when the person's the same but the situation is different. The sale of shares in the

Panama Company was a huge success. Tens of thousands of ordinary French people applied to buy more than twice as many shares as were available. The world of finance had never seen anything like it. In January eighteen eighty one, the first group of French engineers went out to Panama. Their task higher local laborers and clearer path along the route the canal was to take. It soon became clear

that Panama was nothing like Suez. The jungle was so dense, said one worker, you could only see a few yards in any direction. Hacking away with machetes and axes, you had to watch out for the snakes, some of the world's deadliest species, and you couldn't avoid the mosquitoes, the spiders, the ants, the ticks, and the jiggers that laid eggs under the skin. The workers would spend their evenings trying to pick them out. De Leasseeppe had enjoyed Panama in

the dry season. When the rains came, said one engineer, it was like working in a steambark. The tools rusted, colorful mold sprouted up on belts and bags and boots. Nothing dried. Did sleep, then put back on the sweat soaked, rain drenched clothes you'd taken off the night before. After just six months, only one in ten workers was still on the job. And the worst of it wasn't the

climate or the bites. It was the illness. Typhoid, cholera, dysentery, pneumonia, the biggest cause of death, malaria, chills and shivering, then fever, thirst and sweat, and often those who lived never really recovered, and yellow fever too, which we heard all about in another cautionary tale. Less common than malaria but much deadlier. The cause of all these tropical diseases at the time nobody really knew. There were vague ideas about bad air, hence mal area, but many people had no doubt the

cause was moral turpitude. Workers in Panama didn't have much to do for entertainment. There were no theaters or concert halls or galleries. There were, however, plenty of brothels. You could gamble, and you could drink. In fact, you probably should drink, because wine was a lot less likely to make you ill than the local water. Was all this debauchery being punished by the fates through disease and death.

It's the fundamental attribution error, again, that innate human tendency to look for explanations in people's characters, not their circumstances. One man was especially convinced, Jule Donglais. He was France's top civil engineer, and in eighteen eighty three, with costs mounting and workers dying and nowhere near enough earth being dug de Lesseppe offered him a huge salary to go out to Panama and sort everything out. Was Joule Donglais afraid of disease, not at all. I intend to show

the world. He announced that only the drunk and the dissipated will die of yellow fever. Cautionary tales will be back after the break. When Jule Donglais arrived in Panama, he found a mess of waste, mismanagement and corruption. Some workers were collecting wages for five different jobs because nobody was tracking who was spending time on what. Somehow, more than one hundred thoroughbred race horses had been shipped over from Europe, and the canal company was paying the stabling costs.

Although this particular extravagance seems not to have offended Donglais too much, as he promptly arranged for his own horses to be shipped over as well. Along with his wife, his twenty year old son, his eighteen year old daughter, and his daughter's fiancee, they rode in the hills, exploring the countryside. The work, meanwhile, was being done with a mishmash of badly planned tools. The company had built railroads to reach parts of the planned canal route, but they'd

managed to build them in six different gages. Trucks from one couldn't run on the others. Donglais surveyed the route and found seventeen types of rock formation, an engineering nightmare. The hard volcanic rock was bad enough. Even worse was the clay. Utterly impossible, said one engineer. For a man to throw off his shovel, he has to have a

little scraper to shove it off. And then when the rains came the sides of the ditch, your doug would come slipping right back in again, great avalanches of sodden clay that swept away train tracks. The only thing to do, Donglais realized, was make the sides less steep by digging them wider. Donglais did some sum In total, he reckoned that have to shift one hundred and twenty million cubic meters of earth. That'd be like digging two meters down

across the whole of Manhattan. More to the point, it was also two and a half times the amount that Paris Congress had initially estimated. Back in Paris, de Lesseppe took the news calmly. He decided there was no need to revise his estimates of the cost or the timescale, Everything he said, is proceeding as planned. Donglais too was optimistic. It only requires that we quadruple our efforts, he said, which is absolutely possible. And for a while it seemed

it might be. New machines arrived, custom built for the challenge, monstrous contraptions on wooden legs, with a tall tower and a wheel hauling huge buckets on a chair, and great pipes spewing jets of water to fire the earth in the buckets far away from the ditch. It looked just like the sort of fantastic invention that de Lesseppe had promised men of genius would come up with. Maybe, just maybe,

Jule Donglais could turn the project around. But then donglais eighteen year old daughter fell ill and died yellow fever. My poor husband is in a despair, which is painful to see, wrote Madame Donglais. My first desire was to flee as fast as possible and carry far from this murderous country those who were left to me. But my husband is a man of duty. A month later, the sun fell ill and died yellow fever. Madame Donglais controls her health with courage wrote Monsieur Donglais, but she is

deeply shaken. Then the daughter's fiance died yellow fever, and then yellow fever came for Madame Donglais too. After his beloved wife died, Jule Donglais ordered that the family's horses be shot. It was too painful to think of someone else riding them into the Panamanian hills. He quit his job and returned to France a broken man. The United States had never been keen on the idea of a

French owned canal through Panama. It would, as President Rutherford B. Hayes put it, be virtually a part of our coastline. American newspapers sent reporters to see how things were going. The news they sent back was dumbfounding hospitals with a seventy five percent death rate, a ship that arrived with thirty three workers and twenty seven died in the first

three weeks. Corpses left on streets for buzzards to pick at, laborers dropping dead on the job, and being unceremoniously rolled down the embankment to be covered up with excavated spoil. None of this made the newspapers in France The French media had been on side ever since they pushed that successful share issue. Oh Ye of little faith, wrote La Libertee. Hear the words of Monsieur de le Sep and believe

they didn't ask many questions. When an earthquake struck Panama, journalists allowed de le Sepe to get away with blithely promising there will be no more earthquakes. By the time he entered his eightieth year, de Lesseppe was still as vigorous as ever. His wife was expecting child number twelve, but he was being forced to divert his energies to maintaining the project's reputation. This wasn't easy, As a writer in the New York Tribune explained, every difficulty by which

the company is beset requires two distinct efforts. It must be overcome, and it must also be kept secret from the supporters of the project, who would otherwise be discouraged. How long could the awful secret of the true situation in Panama be kept from France? Too? Many French families were starting to discuss how sons and husbands went out to Panama and didn't come back. The price of shares

in the Panama Canal company started to wobble. De le Seppe tried to shore up the situation with an upbeat speech at the annual shareholders meeting. The efforts actually put forth, he announced, may be considered as more than half the total efforts necessary, more than halfway there. It was a strange thing to claim. In fact, they dug only about ten percent of the canal. Then de Lesseppe casually proclaimed that they had changed the course of the Chagles River.

He meant they'd come up with a new plan for a dam that would change the course of the river, but the newspaper reports made it sound like it had happened already. For all the Lesseeppe tried, the company's finances were becoming stretched. Every new bond issue got fewer and fewer takers, Borrowing money became more and more expensive. De Leeseppe reached for another tactic from his Suez playbook, a lottery bond. France's laws said the government had to approve

every lottery. Debate was fierce. The amount de les Seppe wanted to raise was more than he had said the whole thing would cost, But the vote went in his favor, and the Leasseeppe barn stormed round the country for one last time. His message was simple, you can't stop now. Hundreds of thousands of French men and women had money on the line in Panama. They'd mortgaged their houses, they had sold off their jewelry. If the lottery bond failed, they'd be ruined. But if each one bought a bond,

it would raise the cash to finish the canal. I appealed to all Frenchmen, he said. I appealed to all my colleagues whose fortunes are threatened. Your fates are in your own hands. Decide. In December eighteen eighty eight, it fell to de le Sppe's son and right hand man, the loyal Charles, to announce the results of the investment drive. They had sold fewer than half the bonds they needed to The company was bankrupt. It was over A reporter

tracked down Ferdinand de Lesseppe. The blood had drained from his face. Sitting possible, he said, set indign It's impossible, and indignity all at once. Ferdinand de Lessepe's age caught up with him as the liquidators picked over his company's books. The Grand Francais hold up in his country house, His prodigious energies finally spent, the liquidators found a scandal. The company had bribed politicians to approve the lottery. For years,

they'd been paying newspapers not to print negative news. Over two thousand, five hundred editors had been secretly on the company's pay roll, including not just the big dailies, but such unlikely outlets as Marriage Journal, the bee Keeper's Journal, and the Choral Society's Echo. Some people had set up publications just to be able to take the company's money. The losses were astronomical. The Lessep's company had burned to the kind of money only usually spent on a war.

It's hard to be sure about the cost in workers' lives. A reasonable estimate is that twenty five thousand people died in the failure to build the canal. Of course, the canal does now exist, and will pick up the story of how that happened. In the next episode of this two part Panama special, Ferdinand and Charles de l'eseppe went on trial for fraud. Both were sentenced to prison. Charles served his time, but nobody had the heart to lock

up his father. Now a doddering, bewildered old man who spent his days at home staring blankly at the fire or out through the window. There was sympathy because amid all the corruption, Ferdinand Leseseppe had never tried to enrich himself. It was never about the money for La Grand Francis. Instead, he'd been guilty of one big error, the fundamental attribution error.

Having led one triumph, he assumed, like many others, that the essential ingredient for a second triumph was Legrand Francis himself. You succeeded at Suez by a miracle, Charles had once told his father de Lesseppe had wrongly concluded that he could work a second miracle whenever he wanted. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with

support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melany Guttridge, Stella Harford, Jama Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded

at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review, tell your friends and if you want to hear the show ad free. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus