#53 — Sunday, 4th January 1902
The century is one year old. It has already killed a president, starved children behind barbed wire, punched a hole in the earth and pulled oil from it like blood from a vein. It has sent a signal across an ocean. It has watched a woman die and an empire change hands without anyone noticing the difference. It has done all of this in fifty-two Sundays, and now it begins again, and I begin again with it, because I have nowhere else to go.
Happy New Year.
Today — this exact day — a group of men in Paris finalise a number. Forty million dollars. That is what they are asking for the Panama Canal, or rather, for the right to finish what France started and France could not complete.
I want to be precise about what forty million dollars buys, because precision matters when the numbers are this large and the dead are this numerous. It buys a half-dug ditch across an isthmus. It buys rusted machinery standing in jungle that has already begun swallowing it back. It buys the memory of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal and believed he could do it again, and who died in 1894 in a fog of dementia and disgrace, not unlike the canal itself. It buys twenty thousand corpses — men who died of yellow fever and malaria in the years between 1881 and 1889, most of them Black labourers from the West Indies whose names were not recorded with the same diligence as the financial losses.
Twenty thousand dead. Forty million dollars. Two thousand dollars per body, if you are the sort of person who does that arithmetic. I am.
The Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama is offering this to the Walker Commission in Washington, and the Walker Commission will recommend it to Theodore Roosevelt, and Roosevelt will want it, because Roosevelt wants everything that makes America larger. The original asking price was a hundred and nine million dollars. The Americans balked. The commission preferred a route through Nicaragua — cheaper, less haunted. So the French dropped the price to forty million, which is to say they calculated exactly how much the Americans were willing to pay for someone else’s catastrophe and offered it for a dollar less.
I should mention that a man named Philippe Bunau-Varilla is involved. He is French, an engineer, a shareholder in the company, and a lobbyist of extraordinary persistence. He will spend the next year convincing the United States Senate that Panama is the correct route. He will do this partly with engineering arguments and partly by mailing Nicaraguan postage stamps to every senator — stamps that depict a volcano, which is Nicaragua’s national emblem and also, Bunau-Varilla will argue, Nicaragua’s promise to destroy anything built across it. When Mount Pelée erupts in Martinique in May, killing twenty-nine thousand people, the stamps will suddenly seem prophetic rather than opportunistic.
The Senate will approve the purchase in June. Colombia, which owns Panama, will refuse the terms. And then — but I am getting ahead of myself. I always am.
The canal will be finished in 1914, the same year everything else begins to fall apart. The Americans will complete it in ten years with better medicine, better machines, and the same indifference to the workers who die building it. Roughly five thousand more will die during the American construction. The canal will open on the fifteenth of August 1914, eleven days after Germany invades Belgium, and almost nobody will notice because by then the world will be busy digging a different kind of trench.
But that is later. Today is about the price. Forty million dollars. I keep returning to it because the century is going to be built on transactions exactly like this one — the sale of a failure from one empire to another, the transfer of ambition across an ocean, the dead included at no extra charge.
Three days ago, on New Year’s Day, in Pasadena, California, eight thousand people watched the University of Michigan destroy Stanford, forty-nine to nothing, in the first college football bowl game ever played. It was called the Tournament of Roses East-West Football Game. The sun was warm. The crowd overwhelmed the thousand available seats and stood in the dust along the sidelines. Stanford’s captain asked to stop the game with eight minutes remaining, because there was no point continuing. Michigan had outscored every opponent that season by a combined five hundred and fifty to zero.
The organisers, somewhat chastened by the spectacle of annihilation dressed as entertainment, will replace football next year with chariot races. They will not bring football back for fourteen years. The century, in its first sporting event of consequence, has already demonstrated its gift for producing entertainments so excessive they have to be abandoned.
I note this not because it matters in the way that Panama matters or the camps matter, but because the century is teaching itself something in Pasadena. It is learning that people will travel great distances and stand in dust and sun to watch one side obliterate another, and that they will call this a game, and that they will do it again.
In the Southern Ocean, the Discovery is pushing through pack ice. Robert Falcon Scott will reach Cape Adare in five days. He will find the remains of Borchgrevink’s camp, then continue south along the Victoria Land coast, into McMurdo Sound, to the edge of the known world. The continent below him is the last one. There is nowhere further to go after this.
Meanwhile, in England, on the first and second of January, a Japanese diplomat named Itō Hirobumi visited the private estate of the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, in Wiltshire. What they discussed will not be made public for a month: an alliance. Britain and Japan, agreeing to support each other in the Pacific against Russia. It will be the first formal military alliance between a Western power and an Asian one.
I have mentioned the Black Dragon Society before. They were founded in Tokyo the year Victoria died, and they are watching. Everyone is watching. The pieces are being positioned, and the game has not yet been named, but I know its name. It will be called the Russo-Japanese War, and it will begin in two years, and it will shock every European nation that believed the twentieth century was theirs alone.
The edges are being reached. Scott goes south. Japan reaches west. The Americans reach across an isthmus. Everywhere, the century is pressing outward, filling every space, buying what can be bought and taking what cannot.
In South Africa, the camp death rate is falling. I should be glad about this. In November, Milner’s civilian administration took control of the camps from Kitchener, and the dying has slowed. In the white camps, the annual death rate has dropped from three hundred and forty-four per thousand in October to something approaching survivable. Improvements are coming. Slowly. Too slowly for the ones already buried.
In the Black camps, the numbers are worse, the records worse still. Nobody is counting them with the same attention. I said that last year and it remains true, which is the particular cruelty of this kind of sentence — the kind you can repeat six months later and change nothing but the date.
I remain.
The century is fifty-three weeks old. It is already heavier than I expected. I carry none of it. I carry all of it.
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