Transiting the Canal

The Mercury arrived at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal at 5:00am on Wednesday, June 25, 1980.  En route from San Diego, California, to Wilmington, North Carolina, she was fully loaded with a high-priority cargo for the U.S. Marine Corps, part of the American military response to the Iranian hostage crisis.  This cargo gave the Mercury precedence over several other cargo ships that lay at anchor waiting their turns to transit the canal.  Gliding easily through the placid water off the south coast of Panama, she slowed to take on pilots and linehandlers, and then proceeded into the canal entrance, past the port of Balboa, and under the large center span of the Bridge of the Americas.  Just ahead stood the Miraflores Locks.

This was the first of my two experiences with the Panama Canal.  I was very young and had a third mate’s license that was just over a year old.  Everything in Panama was brand new to me, and I found it all fascinating.  As the Mercury entered the Miraflores Locks, she was guided forward and into position by railroad locomotives called “mules” on the dock.  These were connected to both sides of the ship by heavy steel hawsers.  Then the lock gates were closed, valves were opened, and water gravitated into the chamber from the next and higher chamber just ahead of it.  Then the lock gates between the two chambers were opened, and the ship was eased forward into the second chamber.  This one was filled from Miraflores Lake, which lay between the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel Locks.  All this was orchestrated in a small Spanish mission style building adjacent to the locks.  After exiting the Miraflores Locks, the Mercury sailed the short distance across this intermediate lake to the Pedro Miguel Locks, and the process was repeated.  Here, though, there was only one step, that is, the ship passed through only one lock chamber, in order to reach the uppermost water level.

From the Pedro Miguel Locks, the Mercury transited the famous Culebra Cut through the backbone of the Latin American mountain chain.  Later renamed Gaillard Cut for the engineer who headed this feat of construction, it was a most impressive but also incongruous sight with jagged walls of rock towering along both sides of the ship.  After eight miles of this, the ship entered Gatun Lake, which stretched 23 miles across the center of the isthmus to the north.  Following a series of twisting and turning channels around islands and through the jungle, the Mercury at last arrived at the Gatun Locks.  Here the ship passed through three lock chambers in fairly quick succession and was lowered back down to sea level.  Seven miles later, she exited the canal at Limon Bay, next to the port of Cristobal.  After discharging the pilots, the vessel proceeded into the open Caribbean.  It was by now mid-afternoon; the transit had taken close to ten hours.  With Panama fading from sight, the Mercury increased speed and headed northeast into a strong wind and building waves.

Possibly unique among the world’s waterways, the Panama Canal was certainly distinctive in a manner that commanded my attention and has held my interest ever since.  On a shipmate’s recommendation, I later read David McCullough’s great book[1] about the canal’s construction, a tale replete with engineering, history, political intrigue, medical advances, and tragedy.  While the Panama Canal has been long and rightly recognized as one of the great man-made wonders of the world, it is sobering to consider the horrific price in human life that its construction cost.  We who benefit from the canal today owe an immense debt of gratitude to those who lost their lives building it.  Such thoughts came to me later in life, though.  When I was young, it just felt exciting to have even a very small part in something so famous.

My second experience with the Panama Canal took place a few years later aboard the Comet.  En route from New Orleans, Louisiana, to San Lorenzo, Honduras, she arrived off Cristobal and anchored there at 6:00pm on Monday, January 30, 1984.  The ship rested easily at anchor in very calm water, no wind, and stifling heat overnight.  Soon after breakfast on Tuesday the 31^st, a pilot came aboard, and the Comet weighed anchor and proceeded into the canal.  This transit was in the opposite direction of the Mercury’s, but was otherwise quite similar.

The pilot on this transit was an exceptionally friendly fellow.  I remember when the Comet passed from Gatun Lake into Culebra Cut he remarked to us, “Well, this is the part that God did not intend to be a canal.”  And he chatted with us about the difficulties of dynamiting a waterway out of a mountain range.  He also gave us tourist brochures complete with photographs and text that described the canal and its history and operations.  I still have this bit of memorabilia, which I found very informative.

At 5:00pm that day, after completing her transit of the canal, the Comet moored in Balboa for cargo operations.  I went ashore briefly and walked around the waterfront.  At the entrance to the docks, a taxi driver spoke to me in badly broken and heavily accented English.  He offered to bring me into downtown Balboa for “only $30.00.”  When I politely declined, he exploded angrily and cursed me out in very loud, completely fluent, unbroken, and unaccented English.  I found this performance rather amusing.

That evening, actually at 12:30am on Wednesday, February 1, the Comet sailed from Balboa.  Another pilot took her under the Bridge of the Americas and out to sea.  After he departed, the ship set a course for the coastwise run to Honduras, and I left the Panama Canal behind for the last time.

In the forty years since, many changes have come to the Panama Canal.  Foremost among these is the transfer to Panamanian ownership.  The erstwhile American colony called the Canal Zone has passed into history.  Equally important are the new and bigger locks, built to accommodate today’s gargantuan container ships and oil tankers.  The original locks, 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide, were by the standards of their time enormous.  They are still used, of course, but supplemented by the newer and larger ones.  Additionally, two more bridges now cross the canal; the cargo ports of Cristobal, Colon, and Balboa have expanded; and webcams now monitor all traffic passing through the locks.  So I can watch all the action on a computer screen at home!

For many years I was the only member of my family that had gone to Panama.  This changed on Friday, January 8, 2010, when my son James entered the canal from the north aboard the cruise ship Zuiderdam of the Holland America Line.  This vessel transited the Gatun Locks and entered Gatun Lake, where James disembarked and then completed his transit from Gamboa aboard the ferry Tuira II.  From Balboa, he recrossed the isthmus by bus and rejoined the Zuiderdam at the Colon Cruise Terminal.

Next, my son Michael, while on a hitchhiking odyssey through Latin America, visited the Miraflores Locks, witnessed the passage of a ship through them, and then toured the adjacent Miraflores Visitor’s Center on Wednesday, December 7, 2016.

Then, Miss Patty saw the Panama Canal from an airplane on Tuesday, May 21, 2019.  She was traveling on Avianca Airlines to Brazil to assist with our newborn grandson David, and she changed aircraft in Panama City.  When she returned on Saturday, July 6, the view of the canal was unfortunately obscured by clouds and rain.

Little did I think in the 1980s that the Panama Canal would later become such a family affair!  I never imagined then that one son would sail on cruise ships, that another son would hitchhike from Pennsylvania to Panama, or that I would have family in Brazil.  Life is indeed full of surprises.  Through these surprises, though, the Panama Canal has served four of us well as a common interest and as a waypoint in our travels.  Time will tell if the rest of the family will also go to Panama.

In the preface to his great book, David McCullough pays tribute to the Panama Canal, describing its construction as

a profoundly important historic event and a sweeping human drama not unlike that of war.  Apart from wars, it represented the largest, most costly single effort ever mounted anywhere on earth…. It affected the lives of tens of thousands of people at every level of society and of virtually every race and nationality.[2]

Since its construction, the Panama Canal has affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including my own, as one of the world’s most vital transportation links.  More freight passes through Panama than most folks can imagine, and there is no end of it in sight.  Without Panama, the global supply chains and the world’s economies would be largely crippled. 

Finally, there remains in the annals of Panama Canal literature an additional, if tenuous, family connection.  My grandparents never travelled to Panama, but they owned an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which contains an article[3] on the Panama Canal co-authored by Colonel George W. Goethals, one of the chief engineers of its construction.  This prose, now in my possession, symbolically links the family, the sea, and the Panama Canal, and prompts me to recall many golden opportunities and happy memories!

Now, we have some photographs to consider: 

 

 

 

Two views of the anchorage taken from the Comet in Limon Bay off Cristobal near the north end of the Panama Canal on Monday, January 30, 1984.  I took more pictures than these, but my camera was malfunctioning, which I did not realize until later, and so only these two survived. 

The following photographs come from the tourist brochure which the friendly pilot aboard the Comet gave me.  I don't remember his name, but I remain very grateful to him for this gift.

 

In this first picture, we have an aerial view, looking north, of the Miraflores Locks and Lake Miraflores.  In the upper left corner, we can see part of the Pedro Miguel Locks.  

 

Next, we look the other way and see the canal's southern terminus, and beyond that, the Pacific Ocean.  In the center stands the Bridge of the Americas, a structure that dates from 1962.  On the left lies part of the port of Balboa.

 

Here, near the northern terminus of the canal, we see Limon Bay with its extensive anchorage and the finger piers of Cristobal.  The city proper of Colon lies to the right, just out of the picture.

 

This rudimentary map shows the basic layout of the canal, most notably its northwest to southeast layout, something that surprises many people.

 

Finally, this schematic profile, while not drawn to scale, illustrates the canal's elevated course through the mountainous terrain of the Panamanian isthmus.  A short but unlikely route for a ship!

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[1] David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914, New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1977.  A truly outstanding book by one of my favorite authors.

[2] Op. cit., p. 11.

[3] George W. Goethals and Clarence S. Ridley, “Panama Canal,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, London: The Encyclopaedia   Britannica Company, Ltd., 1941, v. 17, p. 171-177.   In 1941 Mr. Ridley was the governor of the Panama Canal Zone.