After reading Path Between the Seas, I decided that like Teddy, I would visit Panama during the height of rainy season unlike Ferdinand de Lesseps who brought potential stock holders in the failed Panama Canal Company to Panama in January during dry season.
On this day in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt, became the first U.S. chief executive to travel abroad while in office. He would visit several sites where construction of the Panama Canal was well underway.
The nation’s 26th president and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, embarked from Chesapeake Bay aboard the U.S.S. Louisiana, a 16,000-ton battleship that had been commissioned in June of that year. The flotilla also included two newly built cruisers, the U.S.S. Washington and the U.S.S. Tennessee. Before his four-day visit to the recently established Central American nation, Roosevelt stopped off in Puerto Rico. He returned to the United States on Nov. 26.
Roosevelt’s visit came three years after the Panamanians had revolted against Colombian rule to carve out their own country on the isthmus. Roosevelt had sent the battleship U.S.S. Nashville and a detachment of Marines to support the rebels. The chief engineer of the New Panama Canal Co. organized the revolt.
After the successful revolution, U.S. engineers accelerated their work on the project — an undertaking that eventually connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The Americans paid Panama $10 million — some $26 billion in 2015 dollars — to secure the rights to build on and control the Canal Zone. Construction began in 1904 and took 10 years to accomplish. It cut the ocean-going trip between San Francisco and New York by some 8,000 miles.
As part of the deal, Washington signed a protection treaty with the newly established Republic of Panama. “The canal,” Roosevelt said later, “was by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs during the time I was president. When nobody could or would exercise efficient authority, I exercised it.”
In 1978, the Senate approved an agreement negotiated by President Jimmy Carter to turn over the 10-mile-wide swath across the isthmus to Panama by Dec. 31, 1999.
SOURCE: “THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS,” BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH (1977)