The original Panama Canal still operates a century later. Kajmeister photo.
A grand vision. Incredible hubris. Stupidity and poor planning. Thousands of lives lost. A miracle of modern science and engineering. A doorway between oceans. The Panama Canal was–and is–all of these things.
Yesterday, I wrote my A to Z post about the country of Panama. But I mentioned the serendipity of being in Panama while it was time to write about Panama. And the first thing anyone usually thinks about Panama is The Canal.
Knowing I was planning this trip through the canal, Nan, one of my chickleball friends, recommended an excellent history of the canal: David McCullough’s The Pathway through the Seas. It earned a Pulitzer Prize 50 years ago, and for good reason. I had to speed-read the last of the 600 pages, just finishing it it in time–phew! otherwise, we would have been stuck in the locks. Spoiler: they did it. It was cray-cray. Herein, I will give you the speed version, 2000 words instead of 600 pages, the How, Why, and What the Canal was all about.
Before the Canal, there was a 50-mi (roughly) stretch of mountains and jungles. There was a railroad, but railroads can’t carry ships, and the Chagres River limited what ships could traverse it. Photo from mapsland.Continue reading “The Panama Canal: 500 Lives per Mile”
Malta, the two tiny islands south of Sicily and west of Tunis. Graphic by Nuclear Vacuum.
What is it? The stuff that dreams are made of…
Sam Spade, describing the Maltese falcon in “The Maltese Falcon”
Fast Facts
Named for: Greek meli (μέλη) for honeyed. There are native bees.
Capital: Valletta
Long/Lat: 35.5 N/14.3 E , 6700 mi East/11 hours East of CV. Nearly directly south of Liechtenstein.
Population: 520,000, or 9x Castro Valleys
Size: 122 sq mi, 8x CV. The population density and size of about 10 CVs.
Avg temp in April: 62 F/16 C (CV-like)
Median household income: $60,000, also high on a world standard
Ethnicity: 78% Maltese, meaning a mix of Italian, Spanish, Arab, French etc.
Main industries: Tourism, banking. In theory, limestone, but not too much.
Unlike Liechtenstein from yesterday, Malta is a tiny dot of great strategic importance. It’s in the Mediterranean, just south of Sicily and Italy but just East of Tunis and North Africa. Tunis was the springboard for the Phoenicians, who advanced sailing and the alphabet, but they were more traders than conquerors. The Romans took over in their turn, as did Hannibal and the Carthaginians. The Goths and Visigoths came through, followed by Islam sweeping across southern Europe and northern Africa. And that’s just the first half of their story of civilization.
Aleccio, Matteo Perez d’; The Siege of Malta: Attack on the Post of the Castilian Knights, 21 August 1565; National Maritime Museum.
It was a place of launching dreams of conquest or re-conquest. When the Crusaders made their move to “take back” land, they pushed from Europe south, establishing footholds in the Mediterranean from Venice and the Riviera to islands like Malta and Cyprus going down to Jerusalem. There were multiple waves of Crusades in the Middle Ages, and, at some point, a group of Benedictine monks built a hospital to minister to the wounded and sick Christian Crusaders. This was the Order of the Knights Hospitallers, affiliated with St. John. Their surcoat with the white cross against the red background is the inverse to the Knight’s Templar, but both captured the idea of a monastic order, beginning from ministering to the sick and needy, yet grounded in a military base.
We move from islands to mountains: Central Europe, on the other side of the world from Kiribati, literally and metaphorically. Liechtenstein is one of only two double land-locked countries, which is a thing because humans now must have special statistics for everything. Double land-locked means that it’s land-locked between two other land-locked countries, in this case between Switzerland and Austria. If they could carve out a country within Liechtenstein’s borders, that would be land-locked cubed.
Liechtenstein’s nickname is “The Principality,” which isn’t much shorter, so I’ll just have to learn to spell it. Liechtenstein means “light stone,” and it was what Hugo von Petronell called the castle he built after receiving a fief from the Babenburg margraves. Translating that medieval-speak, it means he did something good for the honchos who ran Austria in the 13th century. But here’s the rub: Liechtenstein Castle is in Austria. Was then, still is now.
