Speaker 1: Pushkin eighteen eighty six. A train near Paris, two men
Speaker 1: are sitting in silence. One decides to strike up a conversation.
Speaker 1: What's your line of work? He asks his fellow passenger.
Speaker 1: It's a mundane, everyday question. Almost everyone in France would
Speaker 1: have been astonished to hear it. How has this man
Speaker 1: failed to recognize who he's talking to? The twinkling black
Speaker 1: eyes and walrus mustache under a shock of thick white hair.
Speaker 1: This is one of the most famous faces in the country,
Speaker 1: the Grand Francis. They call him the great Frenchman, Ferdinand
Speaker 1: the Lesser. He looks younger than he is. He'd never
Speaker 1: guess he's eighty. Here's how the New York Herald had
Speaker 1: once described La grand Francais. He bears his years with
Speaker 1: ease and grace, showing no signs of age in his movements.
Speaker 1: His face is tanned and ruddy, with the evidence of
Speaker 1: perfect health. His bearing is erect, his manner suave, courteous,
Speaker 1: and polished. Ferdinando les Seppe might be surprised that the
Speaker 1: other passenger hasn't recognized him, but he's not offended. He's
Speaker 1: amused his line of work. He flashes a smile and
Speaker 1: says isthmuses. Ferdinand Lessppe built the Suez Canal. Everyone told
Speaker 1: him it couldn't be done, the waterway slicing one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty miles through the Egyptian Isthmus. It was too ambitious,
Speaker 1: but Ferdinand Lessseppe did it. The new canal was an
Speaker 1: instant hit, slashed journey times between Asia and Europe. Instead
Speaker 1: of going thousands of miles around the southern tip of Africa,
Speaker 1: ships could pay to take the shortcut from the Red
Speaker 1: Sea to the Mediterranean. Today, twelve percent of global trade
Speaker 1: goes through Suez. De Leasseeppe made a lot of French
Speaker 1: investors very, very rich, and now he's trying to do
Speaker 1: it all over again in Panama. But for Ferdinand de
Speaker 1: les Seppe, Panama will not be a happy isthmus. I'm
Speaker 1: Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. Ferdinando Lesseppe
Speaker 1: was born in eighteen oh five in Versailles into a
Speaker 1: distinguished family. His cousin would later become Empress Eugenie, the
Speaker 1: wife of Napoleon the Third. Like his father, De la
Speaker 1: Seppe became a diplomat. He served in Portugal, Spain, and Tunisia.
Speaker 1: He spent five years in Egypt as France's vice consul.
Speaker 1: De Leeseppe was charming and charismatic. He made friends wherever
Speaker 1: he went. It is wonderful, said his first wife, to
Speaker 1: have a husband so liked by everyone. Fernando Lesseppe was
Speaker 1: a fine horseman, a crack shot and accomplished fencer. He
Speaker 1: was not an engineer, or a financier or an administrator,
Speaker 1: all skills you might expect someone to need if they
Speaker 1: were going to embark on a groundbreaking one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty mile canal. So how did de Lesseppe get put
Speaker 1: in Chos of Suez? In his five years in Egypt,
Speaker 1: he had become firm friends with the ruler's son. By
Speaker 1: the time the ruler's son took over, De Lesseppe had
Speaker 1: left the diplomatic service and recently been widowed. He went
Speaker 1: to visit his old friend. They talked about canals. The
Speaker 1: idea had been around for years, but nobody had ever
Speaker 1: got very far with it. I'll put up some money,
Speaker 1: the ruler told De Lesseepe if you can raise the rest.
Speaker 1: As the historian David McCulloch puts it, de Lesseppe had
Speaker 1: no experience faintly related to such an undertaking. He had
Speaker 1: no backing from France's government or from banks, but why
Speaker 1: should that stop him. De Lesseppe convened a committee of
Speaker 1: experts to come up with a plan. He formed a company,
Speaker 1: and he barn stormed around France selling his scheme to
Speaker 1: small investors. He was magnetic, a compelling speaker. Thousan of
Speaker 1: French families entrusted him with their savings. The British Prime
Speaker 1: Minister called the Lesseppe a swindler and a fool, but
Speaker 1: then he would say that if the canal were actually
Speaker 1: to happen, the British didn't want it controlled by a
Speaker 1: French company. But could you really cut a canal right
Speaker 1: across the Egyptian desert? It can't be easy to dig
Speaker 1: in sand. De Lesseppe had no time for the doomsters
Speaker 1: and gloomsters. They never achieve anything, who do not believe
Speaker 1: in success, He liked to say. By eighteen sixty seven
Speaker 1: they'd been digging for eight years and gone way over budget.
Speaker 1: De Lesseppe was running out of cash. He went back
Speaker 1: to the French public with another scheme to raise more money.
Speaker 1: Lottery bonds, invest in finishing the Suez Canal. With a
Speaker 1: chance of winning big cash prizes, public snapped up the bonds,
Speaker 1: and two years later the very first ship steamed through
Speaker 1: the newly opened canal, the state yacht of Empress Eugenie.
Speaker 1: Somehow de Lasseppe had pulled it off. The two sides
Speaker 1: of the world approached to greet one another, said one commentator.
Speaker 1: Another gave de Lesseppe his new nickname, La Grange Franseille.
Speaker 1: The triumph made him a symbol of France's self image
Speaker 1: and the age of globalism and technological progress. In the
Speaker 1: words of Matthew Parker, the author of Hell's Gorge, he
Speaker 1: represented a new patriotism based around not war, but achievement
Speaker 1: for all mankind. De Lesseppe married again. He was sixty four,
Speaker 1: his glamorous new wife just twenty. Soon they had a child,
Speaker 1: then another, and another. The photogenic family was never out
Speaker 1: of the newspapers. The Grand Francais set his heart on
Speaker 1: conquering another isthmus. As with Egypt, the idea of a
Speaker 1: canal across Panama had been discussed for years. As with Suez,
Speaker 1: such a canal would save ships. A detail of thousands
Speaker 1: upon thousands of miles instead of sailing all around South America,
Speaker 1: they'd be able to shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic.
Speaker 1: Surveyors had scoped out the lie of the land in Panama.
Speaker 1: Various routes were proposed for locks that might convey a
Speaker 1: ship over the hills between the oceans, like a set
Speaker 1: of steps. To Lesseppe had strong views about locks. He
Speaker 1: hated them more the ship close one set of gates,
Speaker 1: open another wait for the water to gush in or out.
Speaker 1: Locks make a canal journey slow and cumbersome, And as
Speaker 1: far as de Lesseppe was concerned, there was only one
Speaker 1: right way to build a canal at sea level. That's
Speaker 1: what had done at Suez. You sail in at one
Speaker 1: end and out the other. Simple and the Suez Canal
Speaker 1: was one hundred and twenty miles. It's only forty odd
Speaker 1: miles across the Panama isthmus. How hard could it be?
Speaker 1: In eighteen seventy nine, De Lesseppe had the Saciete de
Speaker 1: Geography convene a congress in Paris to study all the
Speaker 1: possible routes. He invited delegates from twenty two countries, explorers, economists, engineers,
Speaker 1: an expert. After expert explained very clearly why the sea
Speaker 1: level canal that had worked in Egypt was never going
Speaker 1: to work in Panama. For a start, Egypt was pretty flat,
Speaker 1: Panama was hilly. How much earth would you have to dig,
Speaker 1: how much would it cost? How long would it take?
Speaker 1: And Egypt was dry. Panama's river Chagres cut across any
Speaker 1: route the canal might take. Have you ever seen the chuglis,
Speaker 1: asked one delegate to de Lesseppe's conference. I have. I've
Speaker 1: watched it after a storm rise ten feet in an hour.
Speaker 1: I've seen it gushing like a torrent fifteen hundred feet across.
Speaker 1: What's going to happen to the ships in your sea
Speaker 1: level canal when all that floodwater hits them? Problems, problems, problems,
Speaker 1: said de Lesseppe. Of course there are problems. There were
Speaker 1: problems at Suez too. People had said you could never
Speaker 1: dig through sand, but men of genius came forward to
Speaker 1: solve every problem by inventing machines, massive steam powered dredges.
Speaker 1: Men of genius will invent whatever is needed for Panama too.
Speaker 1: The Congress ended with a vote on which plan to support.
Speaker 1: A surprising number of delegates were nowhere to be found.
Speaker 1: One later explained that it was obvious which way de
Speaker 1: le Seppe wanted the vote to go, and he didn't
Speaker 1: agree with it. But he'd also dined very well in Paris,
Speaker 1: and he'd hate to upset his hosts. Others were braver
Speaker 1: in order not to burden my conscience, said one with
Speaker 1: unnecessary deaths and useless expenditure, I say no. De le
Speaker 1: Seppe got up to cast his vote and make an announcement.
Speaker 1: I vote yes, and I have accepted command of the enterprise.
Speaker 1: The room erupted. Lesseeppe was seventy four years old. It
Speaker 1: has been suggested he said that after Suez I ought
Speaker 1: to take a rest. But I ask you, when a
Speaker 1: general has just won one battle and is invited to
Speaker 1: win another, why should he refuse. By the end of
Speaker 1: the vote, Yes had a resounding majority. Look more closely,
Speaker 1: and the result seems less reassuring. Most of the Yes
Speaker 1: delegates were French, not many were engineers, and of the
Speaker 1: engineers only one had ever actually been to Panama, and
Speaker 1: he had a financial interest in del Sepe's plan. Still,
Speaker 1: now de la Seppe could go to the French public
Speaker 1: to seek investment and claim the packing of experts, just
Speaker 1: as it done with Suez. De la Sepe's son from
Speaker 1: his first marriage, his loyal right hand man, Charles, wasn't
Speaker 1: sure this was wise. You succeeded at Suez by a miracle,
Speaker 1: he said to his father. Should not one be satisfied
Speaker 1: with completing one miracle in a lifetime. Cautionary tales will
Speaker 1: be back in a moment. If Ferdinand de Lesseppe was
Speaker 1: going to persuade ordinary French families to invest in his
Speaker 1: Panama Canal company as they had in Suez, it would
Speaker 1: probably help if he'd actually been to Panama. On December thirtieth,
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy nine, his ship docked in the small town
Speaker 1: of Cologne. Down the ramp walked de Lesseppe with his
Speaker 1: beautiful young wife and three of their little children. In
Speaker 1: a white linen suit. De Lesseppe gave a rousing speech.
Speaker 1: The canal will be made, he said, again and again.
Speaker 1: The canal will be made. On was a railway town,
Speaker 1: and not somewhere travelers like to linger. Unpaved streets strewn
Speaker 1: with garbage, a couple of seedy hotels, and that was
Speaker 1: about it. You landed in Colon only to get the
Speaker 1: train to Panama City. The railway across Panama had been
Speaker 1: built by American investors in the mid nineteenth century, when
Speaker 1: the easiest way to get from the east coast of
Speaker 1: America to the west was not to go through America
Speaker 1: at all. Instead, you'd take a ship down to Panama,
Speaker 1: make your way by land across the forty mile Isthmus,
Speaker 1: and take another ship back north. De Lasseppe had arrived
Speaker 1: at the start of the dry season. The skies were blue,
Speaker 1: the breeze was pleasant. It was the perfect time of
Speaker 1: year to visit Panama if you wanted to enjoy a vacation,
Speaker 1: the most uninformative time if you wanted to understand how
Speaker 1: hard it might be to build a canal. De la
Speaker 1: Seppe and his entourage bordered the train for Panama City.
Speaker 1: It took them across a swamp, through a jungle, and
Speaker 1: up into the hills. The scenery was stunning, and on
Speaker 1: board the train, the Champagne flowed freely. De la Seppe
Speaker 1: was captivated La plu Bergen dumand he declared the most
Speaker 1: beautiful place in the world. Then the train ground to
Speaker 1: a halt. Everybody out. It was time to cross the
Speaker 1: Chaghlis River, which flowed gently down a valley forty feet below.
Speaker 1: There was, however, a problem. A few months earlier, after
Speaker 1: a storm in the rainy season, the river had swelled
Speaker 1: forty six feet. The railway bridge, huge and sturdy and
Speaker 1: made from iron, had been battered and mangled out of shape.
Speaker 1: It wasn't safe to take a CA train across it,
Speaker 1: but another train was waiting on the other side to
Speaker 1: take them on to Panama City if they'd cared to
Speaker 1: cross the bridge on foot. Some of the passengers looked
Speaker 1: down at the drop and across the twisted bridge and
Speaker 1: decided and had had too much champagne to risk it.
Speaker 1: De Leasseeppe gathered up his small children and led them
Speaker 1: happily across. It was all a big adventure. If the
Speaker 1: destructive power of the floods had impressed him, he kept
Speaker 1: it to himself. Writing back to France, he mentioned only
Speaker 1: that there'd been a small delay on the railway in
Speaker 1: Panama City. On New Year's Day, they'd arranged a boat
Speaker 1: for the three mile trip to the bay where the
Speaker 1: canal would meet the ocean. De Leeseppe had brought a
Speaker 1: shiny new pickaxe from France to strike the symbolic first blow,
Speaker 1: but her heads were saw from the night before, and
Speaker 1: the boat was late to leave. After more Champagne, they
Speaker 1: neared the bay and realized they'd missed the tide. They
Speaker 1: couldn't land. No matter, said de la Seppe. If the
Speaker 1: first blow is only symbolic, we can do it right
Speaker 1: here on the boat. He handed the pickaxe to his
Speaker 1: seven year old daughter and lined up an old Champagne
Speaker 1: crate emptied of bottles. The Bishop of Panama blessed the work,
Speaker 1: and the little girl brought the pickaxe swinging down onto
Speaker 1: the wooden box. Construction of the Panama Canal had big gun,
Speaker 1: sort of, and after his trip across the Isthmus, Ferdinand
Speaker 1: Lesseeppe was in a confident mood. Our work, he declared,
Speaker 1: will be easier at Panama than at Suez. The Congress
Speaker 1: in Paris had made a rough guess at what might
Speaker 1: be involved, how much earth they'd have to shift, how
Speaker 1: long it would take, and how much it would cost.
Speaker 1: De Lesseppe had brought with him to Panama a technical
Speaker 1: committee to give those numbers a sense check. They decided
Speaker 1: their need to do even more excavation, half as much again.
Speaker 1: But they also decided oddly that this would be quicker,
Speaker 1: not twelve years, but eight and cheaper two de Lesseppe
Speaker 1: once again barnstormed around France, drumming up interest in shares
Speaker 1: in his Panama company. Everywhere he went he flew the
Speaker 1: flags of France and America, though the French government had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with his scheme, and the Americans were
Speaker 1: just as wary of this Panama project as the Brits
Speaker 1: had been of Suez. A single share in the company
Speaker 1: would cost something like a year's wages for a typical
Speaker 1: worker in the Suez company had cost the same, and
Speaker 1: now they were trading at four times as much and
Speaker 1: paying dividends of seventeen percent a year. The French public
Speaker 1: had a question to resolve. Why had Suez succeeded. Was
Speaker 1: it because of la craent Francis the sheer force of
Speaker 1: personality of Ferdinand Lesseppe. If so, it might be worth
Speaker 1: betting that it'd put it off again. But there was
Speaker 1: an alternative explanation. Perhaps everyone had initially overestimated how challenging
Speaker 1: Suez would be. Maybe with hindsight, it wasn't that hard.
Speaker 1: If that were the case, we shouldn't be quite so
Speaker 1: impressed that de Lesseppe had managed it. Psychologists now have
Speaker 1: some jargon for thinking about questions like this. We have
Speaker 1: to weigh up two types of explanation, dispositional and situational.
Speaker 1: We might attribute an event to someone's disposition, what type
Speaker 1: of person they are, or to their situation, chance and circumstance.
Speaker 1: For example, suppose someone's late to a meeting, sorry, they say,
Speaker 1: stuck in traffic. That's a situational explanation. Do you believe it? What?
Speaker 1: Do you suspect that they're probably just the type of
Speaker 1: person who's late to everything. Researchers have found that humans
Speaker 1: are innately biased. We're too quick to jump to the
Speaker 1: dispositional explanations, too slow to believe the situational. Even if
Speaker 1: we know the traffic was bad on some level, we
Speaker 1: tend to think that it must have been their fault.
Speaker 1: In one famous experiment in nineteen sixty seven, subjects read
Speaker 1: articles that are either praised or damn Fidel Castro. The
Speaker 1: experimenters told them how the articles had come about. It
Speaker 1: was an exercise, they explained. We flipped a coin heads
Speaker 1: and we told the writer they had to make the
Speaker 1: case for Castro tales, and we told them to argue against.
Speaker 1: Then they asked, what do you think the writer's attitude
Speaker 1: is towards Fidel Castro? The answer is obvious, right, You
Speaker 1: simply can't tell. But even though the experiments subjects knew
Speaker 1: the article came from a coin toss, they couldn't quite
Speaker 1: bring themselves to believe it. They were more likely to
Speaker 1: say that the writer of the pro Castro article probably
Speaker 1: liked Castro and the writer of the anti Castro article
Speaker 1: probably didn't. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error. We're
Speaker 1: inclined to attribute things to people, not chars, and that
Speaker 1: leads us astray because it makes us too likely to
Speaker 1: expect the same outcome when the person's the same but
Speaker 1: the situation is different. The sale of shares in the
Speaker 1: Panama Company was a huge success. Tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: ordinary French people applied to buy more than twice as
Speaker 1: many shares as were available. The world of finance had
Speaker 1: never seen anything like it. In January eighteen eighty one,
Speaker 1: the first group of French engineers went out to Panama.
Speaker 1: Their task higher local laborers and clearer path along the
Speaker 1: route the canal was to take. It soon became clear
Speaker 1: that Panama was nothing like Suez. The jungle was so dense,
Speaker 1: said one worker, you could only see a few yards
Speaker 1: in any direction. Hacking away with machetes and axes, you
Speaker 1: had to watch out for the snakes, some of the
Speaker 1: world's deadliest species, and you couldn't avoid the mosquitoes, the spiders,
Speaker 1: the ants, the ticks, and the jiggers that laid eggs
Speaker 1: under the skin. The workers would spend their evenings trying
Speaker 1: to pick them out. De Leasseeppe had enjoyed Panama in
Speaker 1: the dry season. When the rains came, said one engineer,
Speaker 1: it was like working in a steambark. The tools rusted,
Speaker 1: colorful mold sprouted up on belts and bags and boots.
Speaker 1: Nothing dried. Did sleep, then put back on the sweat soaked,
Speaker 1: rain drenched clothes you'd taken off the night before. After
Speaker 1: just six months, only one in ten workers was still
Speaker 1: on the job. And the worst of it wasn't the
Speaker 1: climate or the bites. It was the illness. Typhoid, cholera, dysentery, pneumonia,
Speaker 1: the biggest cause of death, malaria, chills and shivering, then fever,
Speaker 1: thirst and sweat, and often those who lived never really recovered,
Speaker 1: and yellow fever too, which we heard all about in
Speaker 1: another cautionary tale. Less common than malaria but much deadlier.
Speaker 1: The cause of all these tropical diseases at the time
Speaker 1: nobody really knew. There were vague ideas about bad air,
Speaker 1: hence mal area, but many people had no doubt the
Speaker 1: cause was moral turpitude. Workers in Panama didn't have much
Speaker 1: to do for entertainment. There were no theaters or concert
Speaker 1: halls or galleries. There were, however, plenty of brothels. You
Speaker 1: could gamble, and you could drink. In fact, you probably
Speaker 1: should drink, because wine was a lot less likely to
Speaker 1: make you ill than the local water. Was all this
Speaker 1: debauchery being punished by the fates through disease and death.
Speaker 1: It's the fundamental attribution error, again, that innate human tendency
Speaker 1: to look for explanations in people's characters, not their circumstances.
Speaker 1: One man was especially convinced, Jule Donglais. He was France's
Speaker 1: top civil engineer, and in eighteen eighty three, with costs
Speaker 1: mounting and workers dying and nowhere near enough earth being
Speaker 1: dug de Lesseppe offered him a huge salary to go
Speaker 1: out to Panama and sort everything out. Was Joule Donglais
Speaker 1: afraid of disease, not at all. I intend to show
Speaker 1: the world. He announced that only the drunk and the
Speaker 1: dissipated will die of yellow fever. Cautionary tales will be
Speaker 1: back after the break. When Jule Donglais arrived in Panama,
Speaker 1: he found a mess of waste, mismanagement and corruption. Some
Speaker 1: workers were collecting wages for five different jobs because nobody
Speaker 1: was tracking who was spending time on what. Somehow, more
Speaker 1: than one hundred thoroughbred race horses had been shipped over
Speaker 1: from Europe, and the canal company was paying the stabling costs.
Speaker 1: Although this particular extravagance seems not to have offended Donglais
Speaker 1: too much, as he promptly arranged for his own horses
Speaker 1: to be shipped over as well. Along with his wife,
Speaker 1: his twenty year old son, his eighteen year old daughter,
Speaker 1: and his daughter's fiancee, they rode in the hills, exploring
Speaker 1: the countryside. The work, meanwhile, was being done with a
Speaker 1: mishmash of badly planned tools. The company had built railroads
Speaker 1: to reach parts of the planned canal route, but they'd
Speaker 1: managed to build them in six different gages. Trucks from
Speaker 1: one couldn't run on the others. Donglais surveyed the route
Speaker 1: and found seventeen types of rock formation, an engineering nightmare.
Speaker 1: The hard volcanic rock was bad enough. Even worse was
Speaker 1: the clay. Utterly impossible, said one engineer. For a man
Speaker 1: to throw off his shovel, he has to have a
Speaker 1: little scraper to shove it off. And then when the
Speaker 1: rains came the sides of the ditch, your doug would
Speaker 1: come slipping right back in again, great avalanches of sodden
Speaker 1: clay that swept away train tracks. The only thing to do,
Speaker 1: Donglais realized, was make the sides less steep by digging
Speaker 1: them wider. Donglais did some sum In total, he reckoned
Speaker 1: that have to shift one hundred and twenty million cubic
Speaker 1: meters of earth. That'd be like digging two meters down
Speaker 1: across the whole of Manhattan. More to the point, it
Speaker 1: was also two and a half times the amount that
Speaker 1: Paris Congress had initially estimated. Back in Paris, de Lesseppe
Speaker 1: took the news calmly. He decided there was no need
Speaker 1: to revise his estimates of the cost or the timescale,
Speaker 1: Everything he said, is proceeding as planned. Donglais too was optimistic.
Speaker 1: It only requires that we quadruple our efforts, he said,
Speaker 1: which is absolutely possible. And for a while it seemed
Speaker 1: it might be. New machines arrived, custom built for the challenge,
Speaker 1: monstrous contraptions on wooden legs, with a tall tower and
Speaker 1: a wheel hauling huge buckets on a chair, and great
Speaker 1: pipes spewing jets of water to fire the earth in
Speaker 1: the buckets far away from the ditch. It looked just
Speaker 1: like the sort of fantastic invention that de Lesseppe had
Speaker 1: promised men of genius would come up with. Maybe, just maybe,
Speaker 1: Jule Donglais could turn the project around. But then donglais
Speaker 1: eighteen year old daughter fell ill and died yellow fever.
Speaker 1: My poor husband is in a despair, which is painful
Speaker 1: to see, wrote Madame Donglais. My first desire was to
Speaker 1: flee as fast as possible and carry far from this
Speaker 1: murderous country those who were left to me. But my
Speaker 1: husband is a man of duty. A month later, the
Speaker 1: sun fell ill and died yellow fever. Madame Donglais controls
Speaker 1: her health with courage wrote Monsieur Donglais, but she is
Speaker 1: deeply shaken. Then the daughter's fiance died yellow fever, and
Speaker 1: then yellow fever came for Madame Donglais too. After his
Speaker 1: beloved wife died, Jule Donglais ordered that the family's horses
Speaker 1: be shot. It was too painful to think of someone
Speaker 1: else riding them into the Panamanian hills. He quit his
Speaker 1: job and returned to France a broken man. The United
Speaker 1: States had never been keen on the idea of a
Speaker 1: French owned canal through Panama. It would, as President Rutherford B.
Speaker 1: Hayes put it, be virtually a part of our coastline.
Speaker 1: American newspapers sent reporters to see how things were going.
Speaker 1: The news they sent back was dumbfounding hospitals with a
Speaker 1: seventy five percent death rate, a ship that arrived with
Speaker 1: thirty three workers and twenty seven died in the first
Speaker 1: three weeks. Corpses left on streets for buzzards to pick at,
Speaker 1: laborers dropping dead on the job, and being unceremoniously rolled
Speaker 1: down the embankment to be covered up with excavated spoil.
Speaker 1: None of this made the newspapers in France The French
Speaker 1: media had been on side ever since they pushed that
Speaker 1: successful share issue. Oh Ye of little faith, wrote La Libertee.
Speaker 1: Hear the words of Monsieur de le Sep and believe
Speaker 1: they didn't ask many questions. When an earthquake struck Panama,
Speaker 1: journalists allowed de le Sepe to get away with blithely
Speaker 1: promising there will be no more earthquakes. By the time
Speaker 1: he entered his eightieth year, de Lesseppe was still as
Speaker 1: vigorous as ever. His wife was expecting child number twelve,
Speaker 1: but he was being forced to divert his energies to
Speaker 1: maintaining the project's reputation. This wasn't easy, As a writer
Speaker 1: in the New York Tribune explained, every difficulty by which
Speaker 1: the company is beset requires two distinct efforts. It must
Speaker 1: be overcome, and it must also be kept secret from
Speaker 1: the supporters of the project, who would otherwise be discouraged.
Speaker 1: How long could the awful secret of the true situation
Speaker 1: in Panama be kept from France? Too? Many French families
Speaker 1: were starting to discuss how sons and husbands went out
Speaker 1: to Panama and didn't come back. The price of shares
Speaker 1: in the Panama Canal company started to wobble. De le
Speaker 1: Seppe tried to shore up the situation with an upbeat
Speaker 1: speech at the annual shareholders meeting. The efforts actually put forth,
Speaker 1: he announced, may be considered as more than half the
Speaker 1: total efforts necessary, more than halfway there. It was a
Speaker 1: strange thing to claim. In fact, they dug only about
Speaker 1: ten percent of the canal. Then de Lesseppe casually proclaimed
Speaker 1: that they had changed the course of the Chagles River.
Speaker 1: He meant they'd come up with a new plan for
Speaker 1: a dam that would change the course of the river,
Speaker 1: but the newspaper reports made it sound like it had
Speaker 1: happened already. For all the Lesseeppe tried, the company's finances
Speaker 1: were becoming stretched. Every new bond issue got fewer and
Speaker 1: fewer takers, Borrowing money became more and more expensive. De
Speaker 1: Leeseppe reached for another tactic from his Suez playbook, a
Speaker 1: lottery bond. France's laws said the government had to approve
Speaker 1: every lottery. Debate was fierce. The amount de les Seppe
Speaker 1: wanted to raise was more than he had said the
Speaker 1: whole thing would cost, But the vote went in his favor,
Speaker 1: and the Leasseeppe barn stormed round the country for one
Speaker 1: last time. His message was simple, you can't stop now.
Speaker 1: Hundreds of thousands of French men and women had money
Speaker 1: on the line in Panama. They'd mortgaged their houses, they
Speaker 1: had sold off their jewelry. If the lottery bond failed,
Speaker 1: they'd be ruined. But if each one bought a bond,
Speaker 1: it would raise the cash to finish the canal. I
Speaker 1: appealed to all Frenchmen, he said. I appealed to all
Speaker 1: my colleagues whose fortunes are threatened. Your fates are in
Speaker 1: your own hands. Decide. In December eighteen eighty eight, it
Speaker 1: fell to de le Sppe's son and right hand man,
Speaker 1: the loyal Charles, to announce the results of the investment drive.
Speaker 1: They had sold fewer than half the bonds they needed
Speaker 1: to The company was bankrupt. It was over A reporter
Speaker 1: tracked down Ferdinand de Lesseppe. The blood had drained from
Speaker 1: his face. Sitting possible, he said, set indign It's impossible,
Speaker 1: and indignity all at once. Ferdinand de Lessepe's age caught
Speaker 1: up with him as the liquidators picked over his company's books.
Speaker 1: The Grand Francais hold up in his country house, His
Speaker 1: prodigious energies finally spent, the liquidators found a scandal. The
Speaker 1: company had bribed politicians to approve the lottery. For years,
Speaker 1: they'd been paying newspapers not to print negative news. Over
Speaker 1: two thousand, five hundred editors had been secretly on the
Speaker 1: company's pay roll, including not just the big dailies, but
Speaker 1: such unlikely outlets as Marriage Journal, the bee Keeper's Journal,
Speaker 1: and the Choral Society's Echo. Some people had set up
Speaker 1: publications just to be able to take the company's money.
Speaker 1: The losses were astronomical. The Lessep's company had burned to
Speaker 1: the kind of money only usually spent on a war.
Speaker 1: It's hard to be sure about the cost in workers' lives.
Speaker 1: A reasonable estimate is that twenty five thousand people died
Speaker 1: in the failure to build the canal. Of course, the
Speaker 1: canal does now exist, and will pick up the story
Speaker 1: of how that happened. In the next episode of this
Speaker 1: two part Panama special, Ferdinand and Charles de l'eseppe went
Speaker 1: on trial for fraud. Both were sentenced to prison. Charles
Speaker 1: served his time, but nobody had the heart to lock
Speaker 1: up his father. Now a doddering, bewildered old man who
Speaker 1: spent his days at home staring blankly at the fire
Speaker 1: or out through the window. There was sympathy because amid
Speaker 1: all the corruption, Ferdinand Leseseppe had never tried to enrich himself.
Speaker 1: It was never about the money for La Grand Francis. Instead,
Speaker 1: he'd been guilty of one big error, the fundamental attribution error.
Speaker 1: Having led one triumph, he assumed, like many others, that
Speaker 1: the essential ingredient for a second triumph was Legrand Francis himself.
Speaker 1: You succeeded at Suez by a miracle, Charles had once
Speaker 1: told his father de Lesseppe had wrongly concluded that he
Speaker 1: could work a second miracle whenever he wanted. For a
Speaker 1: full list of our sources, see the show notes at
Speaker 1: Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
Speaker 1: Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with
Speaker 1: support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
Speaker 1: is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
Speaker 1: It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melany Guttridge,
Speaker 1: Stella Harford, Jama Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show also
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric Handler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.
Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
Speaker 1: at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
Speaker 1: like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
Speaker 1: tell your friends and if you want to hear the
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Speaker 1: show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
Speaker 1: slash plus