Panama Canal tomorrow

Saturday 2nd May continued.



Tomorrow morning we start our nine hour journey through the Panama Canal. We transfer through a series of locks from the Pacific to the Carribean Sea. We attended a talk tonight by Joyce Salisbury, one of the Profs on board, and she made the Canal's history memorable. She told us of all the wrong decisions made in the early years so that there were three unsuccessful attempts to build such a waterway. Malaria and Yellow Fever were huge problems and workers died of both because no one was sure what caused these two diseases. Finally it was proved that the mosquito caused both: Malaria during the night and Yellow Fever during the day. With this knowledge and a huge amount of preparation the Americans eventually succeeded where the French had failed.



It had been thought that it could be built in the same way as the Suez Canal (which John and I went through on our way from Kenya to the UK in 1960) which was simply dug through at sea level from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. However this was not going to work as the builder of the Suez Canal (De Lesseps) himself discovered. It took the Americans, under President Theodore Roosevelt, to design a series of locks on a higher-than-sea-level 'river' of water and make a huge success of building the Panama Canal as we know it today. It opened in 1914.



Ships were initially pulled along by mules as they had to turn their engines off to make the transit. This name is now given to the huge machines which beetle-like pull the huge liners and freighters through...as we shall be pulled tomorrow. The water which is continually flowing through the canal to the sea comes from the surrounding rain forest's never ending supply...unless trees are pulled down and the forest destroyed of course.



We have also had interesting programmes about the Canal on our TV. It looks beautiful in parts and this will be a fascinating and exciting experience for us all.



If anyone is interested you can apparently watch us going through 'live' on Webcam, which has cameras on the beginning, middle and end of the Canal. I think the lock names are Miraflores, Pedro Miguel and Gatun. We shall be on our balcony. I don't know how much will be visible but we are the third balcony from the front of the ship, 5th deck, on the Port side! We'll wave!