Panama Fever, by Matthew Parker

The building of the Panama Canal was the greatest engineering feat in history. Although visionaries had dreamed of uniting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and thus shaving 7,000 miles off the New York-San Francisco route via Cape Horn, only in the 1880s did the hero of the Suez canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, try to covert the idea into reality.

Having proved the sceptics wrong over Suez, de Lesseps woefully underrated the obstacles that awaited his Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interoceanique when it tried to drive through the isthmus of Panama. As if torrential rain, snakes, insects, swamps, hellish heat, malaria and yellow fever were not formidable enough, de Lesseps had not factored in the Chagres river, which snaked across the proposed route 14 times.

He tried to dam and divert the river but in the rainy reason it proved an untameable flood. Despite raising capital by nine public subscriptions, in 1888 the Compagnie Universelle went bankrupt. The debacle was the greatest in the history of stockmarkets: $287m. had been spent, but only 11 miles of canal completed.

Matthew Parker is at his best in picking over the almost incredible details of the myriad fraudsters who leeched off the company. Some 12 million francs were also distributed to journalists to plug the canal, the level of payola to politicians was incredible, and the dimensions of embezzlement by bankers astronomical.

Once he became the youngest US president at 42, Theodore Roosevelt was determined to succeed where de Lesseps had failed. He bought the construction rights, then engineered a revolution whereby the territory of Panama broke away from Colombia. Having secured rights to the canal from the infant republic for a mere $10m, Roosevelt threw the resources of his powerful nation at the problem.

His engineers contrived a "lock and lake" canal. A series of locks would raise ships from the Atlantic side to a lake formed by the damming of the Chagres. Ships would then cross the lake and descend to the Pacific side by another series of locks.

The Americans succeeded where the French failed for a number of reasons: they had the full resources of the state; they had advanced technology unavailable 20 years earlier; and medical science had moved on, managing both to contain malaria and eliminate yellow fever. During the ten years of construction (1904-14), the Americans removed 233 million cubic yards of rock and soil.

Parker is excellent at the description of the notorious Culebra Cut, the concrete technology, and the successful damming of the Chagres. The canal opened to ocean-going traffic in August 1914, just as the guns began to speak in Europe. The symbolism was obvious: the Central Powers might be locked in conflict with the Triple Alliance in Europe, but the US was the rising superpower. The story is an epic one, and Parker has brilliantly done justice to every aspect of a complex episode.

Frank McLynn's books include 'Villa and Zapata' (Pimlico)

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