By John Ruch
Photo: U.S. Marines hold up a captured Sandino guerrilla flag during invasion of Nicaragua c. 1932. (U.S. Defense Visual Information Directorate public domain photo, via Wikipedia.org)
Reports of the recently announced plans for a Nicaragua Canal to rival that of Panama are incomplete to say the least. The concept of a Nicaragua Canal has a bloody history more than 500 years old. I happen to be an expert in it, having given myself a crash course for an essay I wrote in early 2010 and republish below for current public edification.
My essay was spawned by curiosity about the sharks of the Río San Juan, the river intended as the original canal course. The current canal proposal avoids that river for different watercourses, sparing the unusual Nicaraguan sharks from a likely ecological catastrophe.
However, my chronicling of the other, human “sharks”—conquistadors, pirates, tycoons—drawn to Nicaragua by fevered canal dreams certainly still holds true. So do my observations that canals are environmental disasters, economic boons and invasion magnets. (And that most canal plans, perhaps including this one, turn out to be grandiose nonsense.)
Today’s dry news reports don’t tell you that the Nicaragua Canal concept was born of Spanish soldiers of fortune addled by religious mania. Or that it attracted a crazed American dictator bent on creating a white supremacist slavery empire in the pre-Civil War era. Or that the U.S. once invaded Nicaragua to secure canal rights, leaving a legacy of dictators and death squads.
Canals are way more than shipping news. They’re history so gory, they would give George R.R. Martin pause to recount in full detail. Dig in.
Canals of Mars: The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua and the Río San Juan
“Do sharks ever swim up rivers?” my friend asked while driving along Lake Huron.
The answer I would give today: “Yeah, but most of them come by boat.”
The answer I gave then was simply, “Yes.” Relying on a childhood fascination with wildlife lore, I recalled that the bull shark is able to leave the oceans and survive in fresh water.
Checking in with Wikipedia, I discovered that’s a bit like saying Lewis and Clark were able to leave the house and camp in the back yard. Sharks have been spotted as far up the Mississippi as St. Louis and up the Amazon to Peru.
The colonization of Lake Nicaragua in Nicaragua by bull sharks is why my monsterphiliac child brain knew about them. It was there that scientists first proved that the common freshwater sharks seen in lakes and rivers around the globe are not separate species, but rather are oceanic bull sharks that headed upstream. In Nicaragua, the sharks enter the lake by swimming 120 miles up the Río San Juan from the Caribbean Sea.
The sharks of the Río San Juan “jump along the rapids…almost like salmon,” added Wikipedia in a spectacular—and, as it turns out, characteristically incorrect—claim. But at the time, I was entranced by this extravagant image of sharks bounding their way up a jungle river like some primitive video game come to life. To me, such things are chum in the water of strange seas, and I dived right in.
Lake Nicaragua is not only an aquarium for freshwater sharks, I learned. The largest lake in Central America, it is a tropical wonderland dotted with volcano-islands. From the highest cones, one may spy the Pacific a mere dozen miles away.
And though my raging piscine obsession was already churning out clever column titles in my mind (“Jumping, The Shark”), I learned that fish are hardly the most savage predators to travel up the San Juan into Lake Nicaragua.1 Conquistadors and pirates, mercenaries and tycoons—they all followed the shark in plying the San Juan and colonizing the lake, and outdid it in consuming the inhabitants.
All of this history is essentially forgotten in the U.S. and Europe; but, like a vine-shrouded pyramid, it remains monumentally significant. Here, on the shores of Lake Nicaragua and on the waters of the San Juan, is where one of the richest cities in North America once stood; where Lord Nelson first gained fame; where the term “robber baron” was coined; where Southerners fought a prototype of the U.S. Civil War in an attempt to build a new slave empire.
And linking it all together like a trail of blood is the most monumental fact of all: the Panama Canal was originally supposed to be the Nicaragua Canal.
The idea of plowing a shipping channel across the Central American isthmus is as old as the conquistadors. Nicaragua was long seen as the ideal location. Between the Atlantic and the Pacific, there was practically a canal already: a river, a lake and under 20 miles of digging to do.
In fact, the lake-river system, which forms most of today’s border with Costa Rica, was a major trade route even without a canal. A large portion of Spain’s rich Peruvian trade ran up and down the San Juan, which in turn attracted other empires and their officially sanctioned pirates. Three centuries later, the American industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt capitalized on the California Gold Rush by running a San Juan/Lake Nicaragua steamship and stagecoach line, a business that served as a placeholder for a canal-building plan. Cursory dredging work for the Nicaragua Canal was carried out in the 19th century. Eventually, Nicaragua became the chessboard for a U.S.-British Cold War over who would control the still-imaginary canal.
Thus, when Panama won the great Central American “cut me in half—please!” race in 1914, it had as much to do with geopolitics and commercial fraud as with practicalities. Nicaragua could consider itself lucky to have lost, considering what the British later did in Suez and the Americans in “Operation Just Cause”-era Panama. Canals are invasion magnets.
But in the end, Nicaragua got the worst of both worlds. The Panama Canal not only killed the Nicaragua Canal, but also Nicaragua’s entire transcontinental trade. Nicaragua is now the second-poorest country, per capita, in the Western Hemisphere.2
At the same time, it continues to suffer the legacy of dictators and death squads—going-away presents from the Yankees’ canal-territory wars. The president of Nicaragua today is a Sandinista, the revolutionary party/army named for the guerilla who successfully battled U.S. troops and demanded an end to American canal rights. Dark history still flows from this canal that never was: a US puppet dictator allowed the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion to be launched from Nicaragua; the malevolent Iran-Contra scheme came to light when a CIA plane was shot down in the area where the San Juan meets the lake.
The Yankees went home, more or less, after the 1980s. But their canal dream lives on in Nicaragua’s slumber. There are at least two modern proposals—one from the government, one from a private company—to build the Nicaragua Canal after all. One goes by the thoughtfully non-predatory modern name of Ecocanal. Both proposals are long-stalled.
The sharks—the non-metaphorical ones, with fins and fangs—are also still there. Barely. The human variety almost killed them off for money, too.
The Sharks
Illustrating the principle of “it takes one to know one,” the first known description of the Lake Nicaraguan sharks comes from a conquistador. Writing in the mid-1500s, the Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés also mentioned the other saltwater fish that live in the lake: the sawfish and the tarpon.
These oceanic fish are just one of the features that make Lake Nicaragua a kind of Pacific in freshwater miniature. At 100 miles long and up to 45 miles wide, the huge lake is roughly the size of Washington State’s Puget Sound. The jungle islands within it are all volcanic, including the twin-cone Ometepe, a lacustrine version of Hawaii complete with a frequently erupting peak.
It’s a special place, and so the sharks were long thought to be special, too. Today, we know that bull sharks (Carharhinus leucas) inhabit rivers and lakes around the world. In fact, you are far more likely to be attacked by a shark in a river than on a seashore.
Sharks are known in Indonesia’s Lake Jamoer and Guatemala’s Lake Izabal. Their 2,000-plus-mile treks up the Amazon and the Mississippi are extreme, but their jaunts in scores of other rivers are still impressive. Sharks have been found 50 miles up the Ganges and 400 miles up the Tigris (where their presence in Baghdad is not a concern, the U.S. Army tells me).3
The tropics are favored, but northern tidal rivers are not immune. Sharks have been seen 50 miles up the Hudson in New York. A seven-footer was caught in the Delaware River in 1960. The infamous New Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 included a boy and a man killed by a shark in a creek several miles from the sea.4
Such attacks point to the probable reason sharks go to all this travel trouble in the first place: fine dining. Bull sharks are opportunistic predators and scavengers. Freshwater rivers are typically rich in food and low in competition. Exploiting the unexploited—it’s a motivation the sharks share with their human counterparts.
Sharks do not see humans as normal prey. But they are bold and curious. Like dogs, they examine potential prey with their sensitive mouths. In a shallow river, bare-ankled humans and a shark in an exploratory mood can be a lethal combination.
Africa’s Zambezi River is home to the other well-known population of freshwater sharks, which were once thought, like those of Lake Nicaragua, to be a unique species. The Zambezi River sharks are notorious for attacks on humans and cattle.
In 1941-49, British military authorities recorded 27 shark attacks, several of them fatal, in the shallows of Iran’s Karun River. One example was the British military ambulance driver who was attacked 90 miles upriver by a shark in water “not as deep as a bathtub.”5
The literature on riparian shark attacks includes such small but ghoulish examples as the child whose hands were bitten off by a shark in an Australian river in 1934.6 But the real message to the data is that shark attacks in rivers are relatively common and probably vastly underreported, as many occur in non-industrialized countries.
Lake Nicaragua, however, is the yin to the Zambezi’s yang. The locals play up the “man-eater” legends for tourists, but reported shark attacks in the river and lake are few and unconfirmed. In researching 400 years of human adventure on the San Juan, I found only two mentions of the shark from the adventurers themselves, neither with any tone of concern.
Dr. C. Michael Cowan, who was on the team of scientists that proved the Lake Nicaragua shark is the bull shark, told me about the carefree style of living with sharks he saw during the team’s expedition to the lake and river circa 1963, a time when the shark population was still high.7
“One of the observations we made right away was that the ‘Lake Nicaragua shark’ couldn’t be as rapacious as described in the literature,” Cowan wrote in an e-mail. “The women would do their wash in waist-deep water right next to where we were fishing for sharks and the young boys would dive off the piers and swim without inhibition.”
Cowan made these observations at San Carlos, where the river begins, while the team was easily catching sharks out of the lake. It is probable that in the biologically rich lake, the sharks were far too busy with their normal prey to bother with examining the strange mammals in the water.
Similar observations had been made 70 years earlier by Robert Peary--the Robert Peary of later polar exploration fame. In the 1880s, Peary was a US Navy civil engineer in the warmer part of the world, doing surveying work for a Nicaragua canal company. He wrote that there were no authenticated reports of Nicaraguan sharks killing anyone, and that he had seen natives repeatedly “bathing in the river almost literally in the midst of several [sharks].”8
Cowan, who directly observed the sharks swimming up the San Juan’s strongest rapids, also was able to clear up that nonsense about the sharks jumping like salmon.
“In our observations there were no salmon-like jumps out of the water,” he wrote. “Maybe since then others have observed this activity but in all the years that we studied the sharks and sawfish in that drainage we never witnessed any jumping.”
No one else has, either. The only other authoritative description of the sharks’ mode of travel I could find was the late zoology professor Archie Carr’s second-hand account from a friend: “[The sharks] thrashed hard through fast patches, he said, then rested behind big rocks, then thrashed up to the next quiet place.”9
It is no surprise that the sharks do not jump like salmon, because they are not in a waterfall-laden river like salmon. The rapids of the San Juan are not cliffs, but rather are steep, rocky-bottomed shallows that low-draft boats can navigate.
But the spectacular claim of leaping salmon-sharks is taking on a small life of its own on the Web. In support of the claim, Wikipedia cites the Web site of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, which in turn cites the defunct Web site of amateur Australian scuba divers and a Web site that provides unsourced classroom materials for grade-school teachers.10 (Notably not cited are Cowan et al.’s journal articles about their discoveries, even as the museum site directly, and incorrectly, claims that the team made the original report of leaping sharks.) The only thing being jumped salmon-like here is basic academic standards of evidence.
How the sharks go up the San Juan was never really in question. Amazingly, the real controversy, lasting nearly a century, was whether the sharks go up the river at all.
Starting in the 1870s, the scientific consensus was that the Lake Nicaragua sharks were trapped there, and had been since volcanic disasters eons ago.
We all know that sharks are ocean creatures. We have all of this data about sharks swimming up rivers and living in lakes around the world. Sharks could be seen swimming in the San Juan. How could there be any doubt, any alternative theory, about how sharks got into Lake Nicaragua—let alone one that would stand as fact for 100 years?
As with most things predatory in Nicaragua, the answer ties into visions of transcontinental trade. Indeed, the proposal for a Nicaragua Canal is what made the Lake Nicaragua sharks famous.
Oviedo, the Spanish historian who first described the sharks, saw clearly where they came from. A well-traveled conquistador, he knew that sharks “often leave the sea and go up the rivers.” Other sea creatures do the same, he noted, speculating logically that the lake’s sawfish must have come up the San Juan as well.11
Oviedo had personally explored Lake Nicaragua thoroughly, and wrote at a time when Spain had a rich trade route on the river and lake (plus an overland/creek route to the Pacific). To him, the movement of sharks up the San Juan from the Atlantic would have been as evident as the Spanish merchant vessels doing the same.
But by the 1870s, political upheaval in Nicaragua had killed transcontinental traffic—even Vanderbilt moved his Gold Rush route to Panama—and the San Juan’s mouth was known to be silting up. At the same time, empires envisioned more strongly than ever a Nicaragua Canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. Inevitably, a new theory of the sharks arose that reflected—and reinforced—that vision.
The first scientific description of the Lake Nicaragua shark, published in 1877, was based on a single specimen captured by U.S. Navy surgeon John Bransford, who served on an official government Nicaragua Canal survey in 1872-73.12 In the scientific article, Bransford and the fortuitously named ichthyologist Theodore Gill obligingly gave the shark a new mythical origin in a prehistoric version of the Nicaragua Canal.
Once upon a time (the early Tertiary, to be exact), Gill and Bransford claimed, the Pacific and Atlantic were linked by an open channel in the vicinity of today’s San Juan. The Pacific coast featured a gigantic bay, in which swam sharks, sawfish and so forth. Volcanism eventually sealed off this bay, which transformed into Lakes Nicaragua and Managua, entrapping all the sea fish within. Some of the fish adapted, producing a unique freshwater shark species (Eulamia nicaraguensis).
What about the fact that a large river full of sharks flows between Lake Nicaragua and the Atlantic? No problem, said Gill and Bransford. They simply assumed that the river’s rapids cannot be passed by sharks going either direction, thus trapping the freshwater species forever in the lake/river system (and in their Pacific-origin mythos).
This concept of the Once and Future Canal so neatly matched American imperial dreams that it was taken for granted as geological fact. And the Lake Nicaragua sharks were the key. In a masterpiece of circular logic, the final report of the U.S. Nicaragua Canal Commission cited the Pacific-origin theory of the sharks as evidence of the prehistoric canal.13
Sloppy thinking plagued Gill and Bransford, too. It’s one thing to claim that river rapids might block fish from swimming upstream; but to say that a fish could not go down river rapids has to be one of the patently dumbest claims ever to be taken seriously by science.
Gill (the lead author) appears to have twisted and even altered evidence. In the 1877 article, he acknowledges that sharks and other sea fish are known to swim up freshwater rivers. Yet he presents this not as evidence for the Lake Nicaragua sharks coming from the San Juan, but rather for how they could have adapted to freshwater life in the mythical Pacific bay turned lake. Rather than sharpening his Occam’s razor, Gill patronizingly dismissed Oviedo’s clear-eyed observations about the lake sharks as quaint naivete.
Keep in mind, Gill was inferring all of this from a single, well-mutilated specimen.
Gill and Bransford did not address the glaring absence of sharks in Lake Managua, which is separated from Lake Nicaragua by only about 10 miles of land that arose in recent geologic time. If both lakes were created from an isolated bay, why don’t they both have sharks?
Strangest of all, Gill and Bransford said that the Lake Nicaragua shark is “closely related” to the sandbar shark—an Atlantic species. (Gill placed the lake shark in the now-obsolete genus Eulamia, also that of the sandbar shark.) A relationship with Atlantic sharks was not necessarily fatal to Gill and Bransford’s theory, resting as it did on a prehistoric canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific. But it is a curious thing, and one that might be expected to give the authors pause.
Gill reportedly later handled this awkward data by simply changing his story. In the U.S. Nicaragua Canal Commission report 20 years later, chief geologist Charles Hayes said that Gill had told him that “the sharks of Lake Nicaragua are specifically identical with those found in adjacent portions of the Pacific, but distinct from those found in the Caribbean.”14
Gill was one of the world’s top fish experts, resident at the Smithsonian, which may explain why his eccentric analysis of the Lake Nicaragua shark was so easily accepted. While he did little field work (clearly part of the problem here), Gill was no fool; his tortuous attempts to make facts fit his theory in this case may be a chronic case of American canal fever.
Certainly, they are part of canal history. Immortalized in U.S. Nicaragua Canal Commission reports, the concept of a unique, landlocked shark in an exotic lake entered the public consciousness and scientific dogma.
Despite its flawed logic and non-representative sample, Gill and Bransford’s 1877 report proved remarkably resilient. It would be 70 years before serious doubts began appearing in the scientific literature.
Even then, there was no real field work. But the few preserved specimens in museums showed morphological similarities with Atlantic sharks, several experts argued. There was an anecdotal report of a shark found upriver in the San Juan with remoras—symbiotic ocean fish—still attached to it. Someone pointed out that the lake’s tarpon are native to the Atlantic and do not exist in the Pacific.15
Meanwhile, geologists dealt the fatal blow—the whole concept of a prehistoric canal and volcanic enclosure of a bay was hogwash.
Forced to acknowledge that the Lake Nicaragua sharks indeed came up the San Juan from the Caribbean, some experts continued to claim they were nonetheless a unique and/or landlocked species. Among them was Archie Carr, who proposed that the river was navigable until the 1600s, when earthquakes uplifted the rapids.16
Like Gill in his Smithsonian tower, these experts were largely engaged in armchair science. It fell to the late Dr. Thomas Thorson, a zoologist at the University of Nebraska, to actually go and dip his toe in the water.
Thorson and his research team (including Cowan at times) went to Nicaragua in the 1960s. They caught sharks. They electronically tagged sharks. They boated down the San Juan.17
They definitively identified the Lake Nicaragua shark as the bull shark, which lives in all of the world’s warm oceans. They watched the bull sharks swimming upstream in the supposedly impassable San Juan rapids. (No surprise, as the river has always been navigable, though never easily; just 20 years before Gill and Bransford’s report, Vanderbilt powered a full-size steamship up the very rapids that supposedly blocked the sharks.)
The tagging showed that the sharks come from the Atlantic. The highest population density was at the river’s mouth, with only a small percentage of sharks venturing upriver. Those that did enter the system swam both up and down the river, as well as on its various tributaries. Some traversed the entire length of the river in as little as two days.
Illuminating as it was, this should not be taken as a pat story of Thorson’s good triumphing over Gill and Bransford’s evil. Like all good science, Thorson’s studies raised many new questions. But lake/river shark science has frozen at Thorson much the way it once did at Gill and Bransford.
Perhaps Thorson’s most intriguing discovery was that, while the sharks are not landlocked by nature, they may be by choice. The electronic tags showed that sharks that enter the river system tend to stay in it, with no signs of returning to the ocean. Thorson raised the question of whether the river/lake sharks are becoming an “accessory population” isolated from the main species. That’s a far cry from a unique species, but it’s an avenue worth exploring, especially considering that Thorson’s research happened before the DNA analysis era.18 (Other research has found that bull sharks breed only in salt water.) At the very least, new tagging projects could reveal much more about the sharks’ habits.
Thanks to Thorson, any shark that appears in a river worldwide is automatically identified as a bull shark—exactly the sort of kneejerk assumption his field work opposed. This is often done without any preserved specimens. For example, the shark found in the Peruvian Amazon is considered a bull shark, but its remains were never scientifically examined.
The bull shark is a pretty good bet in such cases. It is well-documented in rivers, and its ability to live in fresh water is unusual among sea fishes. (The downside for the shark is that, to prevent osmotic loss of body salts in fresh water, it has to urinate more than 20 times the normal amount.19 One of Lake Nicaragua’s many roles is as a shark toilet bowl.) But many sharks have at least some freshwater tolerance, and sharks in general are still poorly understood.
The ultimate example is the “true river sharks” of the genus Glyphis, a rare type that lives in rivers, sometimes alongside bull sharks (as in the Ganges). Glyphis sharks appear to be reclusive bottom-dwellers. (The Ganges species has eyes oriented to look upward.) But they can be as large as bull sharks, and are virtually unknown to science, with only a handful of specimens in existence. Their role, if any, in attacking humans is a mystery. Clearly, Glyphis is a new frontier of river/lake shark studies.20
Meanwhile, Thorson gave us some great information. We should at least get it right. Yet I found some blatant myths circulating already. One of the most common errors is a claim that Lake Nicaragua has the world’s only freshwater sharks.
“…I see a lot of myths out there about Lake Nicaragua and the sharks,” Cowan told me. “Some of these were even on the National Geographic Channel (they really should do more homework).”
I found a lot of myths about human history on the lake as well. Bald errors seemed unusually common in history books on Nicaragua. I think this tells us something about our view of a remote, exotic place where the sharks excite us more than the people do, and where the people are generally too poor to speak up for themselves. Getting things right seems to be less important than maintaining our fantasies.
Not that the locals are above spreading myths themselves. Nicaraguan Web sites are a main source of another legend: that Lake Nicaragua sharks are accompanied by Lake Nicaragua swordfish.
The phantom swordfish comes from our old friend Oviedo (or at least from an English translation of him) and a simple slip of the pen. He says somebody once found a swordfish on the lakeshore. But the description he gives is clearly of a sawfish: “a bone armed on both sides with sharp points, placed in the extremity of its jaw.”21
Sawfish and swordfish both have long rostra, or snouts. As the names imply, the sawfish’s rostrum is studded with tooth-like points, and the swordfish’s rostrum is smooth and pointed. There are no substantiated references to swordfish in the lake. Sawfish, as mentioned, are well-known residents of Lake Nicaragua (and have been known to battle the sharks).
Dr. Harry Fierstine, a professor emeritus at California Polytechnic State University and an expert in swordfish, agreed that the Lake Nicaragua swordfish is a case of mistaken identity.22
“There have been only one or two reports of swordfishes in fresh water and they were near river mouths,” Fierstine wrote in an e-mail to me. “A sawfish was probably mistaken for a swordfish.”
Notably, many of the Web sites that reference a Lake Nicaragua swordfish do not mention the sawfish.
But Oviedo’s typo was taken as gospel by the U.S. Nicaragua Canal Commission, whose report described the lake’s swordfish as “well known.”23 The report surely spread the myth.
Swordfish and the similarly long-beaked marlin are often fished on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast.24 With the lake only 12 miles from the Pacific, it is possible that ocean-caught swordfish being transported into lake towns perpetuate the legend.
The most egregious form of the swordfish myth is found in “Geography: The World and Its People,” a U.S. textbook published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill and branded with the National Geographic Society’s imprimatur.25 The book includes a tightly cropped photo of a boy carrying a dead swordfish along a beach. The caption identifies him as one Amadeo Robelo of Granada, Nicaragua, and claims he just caught the swordfish in Lake Nicaragua.
But the photo is uncredited, the beach looks like a seashore, and the caption also repeats the myth that Lake Nicaragua holds the world’s only freshwater sharks. Previous editions of the textbook were criticized by the watchdog group the Textbook League as full of myths and for having an unclear marketing relationship with the National Geographic Society.26 The Society did not respond to my requests for the source of their photo and caption, and Glencoe/McGraw-Hill said the textbook editor was not immediately available.
Good, bad or plain untrue, science about the Lake Nicaragua sharks may become truly academic. A boom in commercial fishing was already slashing the shark population in Thorson’s time. By 2006, overfishing was so dire that Nicaragua declared a ban on fishing for sharks and sawfish on the lake and the river.27 As usual, the “man-eater” was actually being eaten by man.
Thorson traveled thousands of miles to the jungles to see his predators. But, according to a bizarre court case that popped up in my own research, he also encountered sharks much closer to home.28
In 1981, a Thomas B. Thorson of Lincoln, Nebraska, was sucked into an elaborate scam by a trio of con artists. Asked to provide directions to a boarding house, Thorson soon found himself regaled with the claim that one of the scammers had $37,000 in cash in his pocket from an insurance settlement. Another scammer then showed Thorson how to play the classic con game three-card monte, and suggested that it be used to con the first scammer out of his money—“not to actually take his money, but to ‘teach’ him how foolish it was to carry so much cash.”
“Thorson apparently realized that he was the intended victim of a confidence game,” recounted a later court decision, “but decided to play along until he could contact police.”
The chance to contact police did not come until after Thorson had bet his wallet, watch and ring on three-card monte; traveled to a bank with the scammers to get $15,000 in certificates of deposit to back more bets; and gone back into the bank to borrow $12,000 in cash to put in the pot. Thorson finally was able to phone police, and bagged another species of shark.
Homegrown predation leads us to our next set of Nicaraguan sharks. From their European dreamworld of medieval violence, the conquistadors launched a ruthless Crusade in the New World—and invented the idea of the Nicaragua Canal.
The Conquistadors
The explorer Peary once noted that Nicaragua canal lust was so strong that after nearly 400 years, Europeans had charted little of the country beyond the San Juan’s banks. Meanwhile, he wrote, the river had been through “every vicissitude of despotism[,] intrigue and perverted judgment.”29 As with so many American troubles, it all began with Columbus.
Sailing from Spain in 1492 to find a shortcut to the Indies, Columbus found a New World instead. That included Nicaragua, whose Atlantic coast Columbus first spotted on his final voyage in 1502. Stopping at a river mouth somewhere on that shore, Columbus lost a boatload of men, leading him to dub the waterway the Río del Desastre.30 Some sources equate it with the Río San Juan, which, if true, makes Columbus’s name a commemoration for his men and a prophecy for everyone else. (A minority theory holds that the name “America” itself came from Nicaragua after Columbus or another explorer somehow heard of the country’s minor Amerrique [more commonly, Amerrisque] Mountains.31)
While the Spanish conquistadors who followed Columbus famously turned the New World into a cash cow, they continued to crave that shortcut to what now had to be called the East Indies. Their mania to find a Northwest Passage (which now exists, thanks to polar icemelt) is well-known thanks to self-centered U.S. history textbooks. But the conquistadors were even more interested in a kind of Southwest Passage across Mexico or Central America. As the conquistador Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, once ingratiatingly wrote to the Spanish king, such a transcontinental waterway would “render your majesty master of so many kingdoms that you will be considered as lord of the world.”32
Indeed, the conquistadors quested at least as much for this dream passage as for legendary cities of gold. And when those cities of gold were found in Peru, that only sharply increased the need for a rapid trade route across the Central American isthmus.
Nicaragua was “discovered” during just such a waterway quest. And it was there that the conquistadors, those masters of slicing and stabbing through things, apparently first conceived of a Central American canal.
The entire competitive history of the Panama and Nicaragua Canals is foreshadowed in these beginnings. In 1522, 20 years after Columbus’s last voyage, the colony of Panama had already sprung up around a rudimentary, overland/river transcontinental trade route. (Indeed, the route was the site of the the first European settlements on the New World’s Pacific coast.) That year, a new army of conquistadors set out northward in the hopes of finding a waterway to put Panama out of business.
The soldiers of Gil González Dávila (or de Ávila) were the first Europeans to lay eyes on what must have been the astonishing sight of Lake Nicaragua. The very name they gave the country shows the significance of water to the Spanish; it combines “Nicarao,” a local chieftain’s name, and agua, Spanish for “water.” (This makes the name “Lake Nicaragua” a redundancy.) Indeed, the country likely was named for the lake, not the other way around. Such a huge body of water so close to the Pacific naturally raised hopes that a transcontinental waterway could be found there.
Still, it took nearly 20 years for the conquistadors to find and fully explore the San Juan (or as they first simply called it, El Desaguedero—The Drain), due to local conflicts and the river’s tough rapids. Reversing the course of Nicaragua’s original sharks, the new Spanish species started in the lake and moved downriver.
The conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba founded the key lakeside city of Granada—which still stands today—in 1524. Sometime thereafter, he had a ship disassembled on the Pacific coast, hauled overland, and rebuilt in the lake so that his men could explore with it. They found the San Juan, but could not navigate it very far. Only in 1539 did the Spanish finally boat downriver all the way to the Atlantic. The coast remained an area of Nicaragua they would never dominate.
But as early as 1530, there was already talk of canal-building on the still unexplored river. The first proposal was for a series of short canals to bypass the rapids. After the conquest of Peru in 1532, a veritable canalomania gripped the New World. Every Central American colony vied for transcontinental trade rights, each pitching a wildly rosy description of their terrain and accoutrements to the crown.
The contenders were routes across Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and Mexico. Soon, full-blown canals were proposed for all of these routes—proposals that would survive essentially unchanged into the 20th century (and in the case of Nicaragua, well beyond).
In questing for the Southwest Passage, the conquistadors sometimes said that the benevolent Christian god must have created such a convenient channel somewhere. But with the backlog of Peruvian gold on the Pacific, the Spanish government sagely considered that perhaps humans should create what Providence failed to provide. Though almost certainly impossible with engineering technology of the time, the canal idea was taken very seriously by the crown.
The first survey for a Panama Canal was performed in 1536. The original Nicaragua Canal survey followed in 1561. As it would be for the next three centuries, Nicaragua was generally favored; it was the longest route, but almost entirely consisting of a fantastic lake and a large river. Canal-diggers are plastic surgeons on the face of a nation, and Nicaragua gave them a lot to work with.
“The” Nicaragua Canal actually was to be two canals—a dredging/canal project on the river, and a full canal between the lake and the Pacific. Or even three canals—some models, then and now, call for routing traffic from Lake Nicaragua into Lake Managua via yet another new channel before heading west.
Obviously, Spain never built a canal, for the same reason it let insane soldiers of fortune pillage entire continents in the first place: the country was broke. Impossible and infeasible, the conquistador canal was nonetheless popular. National pride and mercantile profit were at stake. Diplomatically announcing an end to canal-planning, Spain’s King Philip II took refuge in a newly fundamentalist theology: If there is no natural transcontinental waterway, it would be an affront to God to cut His continent in half.33
Philip’s actual pragmatic reasoning found the canal costs daunting not merely for construction, but also for defense. He presciently saw that such a canal, with its immeasurable commercial value, would draw instant invasions from other empires—particularly those he was already at war with in Europe. Spain could easily lose such a canal, and its entire cash flow.
In fact, this was already a major fear behind the quest for a Southwest Passage. Had the conquistadors ever found a natural transcontinental waterway, Spain intended to keep it secret. In a letter to Cortés, Emperor Charles V urged the conquistador to find “el secreto del estrecho”—“the secret of the strait.”34 The phrase held double meaning: a command to discover a waterway whose location was, like El Dorado, a “secret” presumably known to Indians, and a reminder to keep it a secret—a Spanish secret—once it was found.
Nicaragua gives us a vivid illustration of just how valuable such a secret was. The first Spanish explorers to boat all the way down the San Juan, finding themselves in the Caribbean, sailed for Nombre de Dios, the town with the impossible-to-live-up-to name that sat on the Atlantic end of the Panamanian trade route. There, the historian Oviedo tells us, the explorers were “held prisoner” by one Doctor (i.e., a lawyer) Robles. The doctor intended to squeeze them for the secreto location of the San Juan’s mouth, “because he himself wished to found a colony at the outlet of these lakes, and thus profit by the labor of another, as is the custom with these men of letters, for the use that they make of their wisdom is rather to rob than to render justice….” The explorers refused to spill the beans, Oviedo assures us, and Robles got a kidnapping rap.35
It was pretty ridiculous of the Spanish to imagine that a historic discovery of a transcontinental waterway could be kept as a trade secret. But building a Seven Wonders of the World-style canal would be no secret at all, and surely attract invaders (both foreign and domestic) before it was even finished.
Without canals, transcontinental trade remained rough but extremely profitable. Panama, closest to Peru and boasting the shortest route, became a mini-empire. But Nicaragua, with fewer pirates and epidemics, did very well as a heavily used alternate. Trade on the San Juan could be a brutal slog lasting as long as two months, especially when big loads on 120-ton ships had to be unladed and carried around the rapids. But there was more than enough business to go around. Nicaragua also profited handsomely (and much more easily) from homegrown exports to Peru, such as horses that were raised on the expansive conquistador ranches. (Later, the route may even have functioned as a true Southwest Passage to the East Indies, carrying smuggled Asian trade goods.36)
Granada quickly became one of the richest cities on the continent, a status it probably held for over a century, well into the era of Britain’s North American colonies. It erected cathedrals and minted its own coins.
All of this is a nice way of saying that Nicaragua was built, as one writer put it, as “an everlasting monument to atrocity.”37 The deeds reflected in the bloody waters of Lake Nicaragua are a microcosm of the conquistador lifestyle.
Dávila introduced himself to the natives with the customary greeting: a demand to turn Christian and bow to the king of Spain or die.38 One Indian chieftain, known as Diriangan, asked for three days to mull over this Christianity thing, then wisely used to the time to amass a conquistador-slaying army. Dávila’s men survived only thanks to the terror they were able to inspire with an unfamiliar European beast: the horse. (Another object of native fascination and terror was the Spaniards’ beards. That led Dávila to outfit his less hairy troops with fake beards made of their own hair clippings. This must be considered the most serious version of trick-or-treat in history.)
You will notice that the country is not named Dirianganagua. That is because Dávila found the chieftain Nicarao (the Spanish version of the lost actual name) more amenable to the offer he couldn’t refuse. Nicarao was a powerful leader in the area of modern Rivas, between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific in the vicinity of future trade routes and canal schemes.
Nicarao had many questions for the Spanish, which may have been shrewd but were more likely awestruck, and thus ring with poignancy. Cosmology was a big topic, as might be expected from a meeting with angels or devils; Nicarao asked why the stars move, and what causes the wind and day and night.
He also asked the biggest question of all: “[W]hy so few men coveted so much gold.”39
What answers Nicarao got, and what became of him, is unknown. Crystal clear, however, is the perpetual violence that defined the Spanish-indigenous relationship from start to finish. Dávila’s obnoxious invasion was driven out by hostile tribes, but the Spanish in general were not to be denied. In western Nicaragua, they killed all Indians who opposed them and enslaved the rest. Technically, slavery was illegal and this servitude was considered a benign form of medieval serfdom on conquistador haciendas. No one asked the Indians what they thought of such fine distinctions. (It is known that Dávila himself was a critic of the serfdom’s fatal outcomes, but the slavery ban was freely ignored by other conquistadors on multiple occasions.)
Hernando de Soto, later second-in-command in the conquest of Peru and the infamously brutal explorer of what is now the southern U.S., cut his teeth in Nicaragua at this time. He was on the crew that first sailed Lake Nicaragua and discovered the San Juan. Like Peary four centuries later, De Soto found Nicaragua a nightclub-act warm-up for his later explorations.
In eastern Nicaragua and the Mosquito Coast, the Indians remained unconquered enemies to the day Spain left the country. The conquistadors were never able to penetrate the area, except for the occasional slaving run and the trade literally on the San Juan. The Indians prevented exploration of the river for several years until new conquistador commanders agreed to halt the slave-catching.
It is no surprise that the conquistadors viewed the Indians as serfs. More illuminating to their character is how they viewed each other: much like rival Mafia bosses.
Immediately after Dávila “discovered”—and thus laid claim to—Nicaragua, the governor of Panama, Pedrarias Dávila (no relation), sent Córdoba to colonize it on behalf of his own mini-kingdom. Outraged, Gil González Dávila headed back to raid the new Spanish towns. The conquistador city of Granada was fortified with a wall to protect it from conquistadors.
Meanwhile, one Cristóbal de Olid, who conquered Honduras on behalf of Cortés, decided it was the perfect time for a rebellion. He declared himself ruler of a newer New World empire that was seceding from Spain and intent on spreading all the way to Peru.
All of these oddballs, and more, converged and battled in Honduras and northern Nicaragua. Thus, before there really was a Nicaragua, there was a conquistador civil war over it. Olid ended up assassinated; Córdoba was beheaded; Gil González Dávila went home empty-handed; and Pedrarias, a notorious murderer and slavemaster, got a golden-parachute demotion to the governorship of Nicaragua. Cortés, who had arrived belatedly in Honduras to sort out the mess personally, began plotting an invasion of Nicaragua in search of that estrecho secreto. Only new troubles in Mexico prevented him from kick-starting the mess all over again.
Destruction and construction are the units by which conquistadors are measured. Nicaragua is a solid yardstick for each of these characters’ varying amounts of morality, brutality and creativity. But on a deeper, nearly intangible level, Nicaragua also symbolizes the peculiar dark psychosis shared by all conquistadors.
“Conquistador” (“conqueror”) is a word that became (in)famous in the New World, but it is not a New World term. The original conquistadors were domestic soldiers fighting in Spain’s Reconquista—a literal, official Crusade to drive the Muslim Moors out of Iberia.40 By no coincidence at all, that 800-year war was finally won in 1492—the very year of Columbus’s first voyage.
Winning a Crusade put Spain into a spiritual euphoria of a darkly medieval character. The government’s idea of celebrating was the expulsion of all Jews from Spain and the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition. The Reconquista instantly became the stuff of sword-and-sorcery adventure tales (just as the Inquisition later would become the stuff of Gothic horror tales).
War left Spain spiritually high, but financially low—which is why the crown chose to gamble on Columbus’s shortcut-to-the-Indies venture after years of dismissing it on account of inherent wackiness. Meanwhile, an entire caste of warriors was left jobless. The first conquistadors—including the first conquistador, Juan Ponce de León—were Reconquista veterans. They were the models for all of the New World soldiers of fortune to come. (All conquistadors were private mercenaries serving commercial corporations; there was no such thing as a professional national army at the time, and the impoverished crown merely authorized expeditions rather than funding them.41)
This culturally toxic mix of nationalist/religious triumphalism, unemployed mercenaries and gold-hunger made it the best possible time for the Spanish to discover a New World—and the worst possible time for those already there.
Whether they actually fought in the Reconquista or were only regaled with its tales, the conquistadors viewed the New World and their role in it through Reconquista legends. Its influence is obvious everywhere from the mania for forced Christian conversion to the imposition of medieval serfdom on the Indians. Cortés described the Aztec civilization he conquered in terms of the vanquished Spanish Muslims, calling the pyramid-temples “mosques” and likening the local’s clothing to that of the Moors.42
The conquistadors’ self-image combined two common motifs: the holy Crusader and the Arthurian questing knight. They were living out, and enlarging upon, the adventure fiction of the era. The proximity of reality and fantasy was sometimes striking. Oviedo, the pro-conquistador historian and expert on the Lake Nicaragua sharks, also wrote the New World’s first novel: an adventure tale about a knight-errant. “Don Claribalte,” published in 1519, actually preceded his New World non-fiction; the legend came first. Oviedo “was at once an eyewitness to the exploration and conquest of a new world and the author of a romance of heroic chivalric wanderings.”43 He also had witnessed the final battle of the Reconquista.
That final battle was a siege of the last Muslim stronghold in Spain: Granada. In giving that name to his city on Lake Nicaragua, Córdoba was not merely self-diagnosing some homesickness. The conquest of Nicaragua was another chapter of the Reconquista, the battle of good versus evil, the triumphant expansion of a nation favored by God. (The name loomed even larger in South America, where an empire based in modern Colombia was named New Granada; Panama was officially part of it.44) The conquistadors would give way to bureaucrats and aristocrats, but this legend of manifest destiny would live on in every empire that drooled over a Nicaragua Canal, as durable as the lake city’s name.
The founder of Granada is now an eponym himself. In symbolism he surely would appreciate, the Nicaraguan unit of money is called the córdoba.
The Pirates
Like the trail of waves behind a surface-breaking dorsal fin, pirates followed the conquistador treasure fleets everywhere—including right up the San Juan and into the lake, where buccaneers sacked Granada at least three times. Their increasingly bold depredations throughout the 1600s drew imperial attention to transcontinental trade routes and eventually revived the very idea of a Central American canal.
The conquistadors had been right to worry about other countries coveting their semi-secret trade routes. The English, French and Dutch pirates of the Caribbean were at least tolerated, and often directly commissioned, by their homelands as a form of economic warfare against imperial Spain. The various English terms—“pirates,” “privateers,” “buccaneers,” “freebooters” and so on—reflect some of the official distinctions; but, like the proverbial Eskimo words for “snow,” the real message of the synonym glut is the culture’s intense involvement with piracy. The seamy pirate towns of the anarchic Mosquito Coast would become the basis for Britain’s territorial claims 200 years later in a dispute over Nicaragua Canal rights.
Sir Francis Drake, the pet pirate of Queen Elizabeth I, pioneered these transcontinental assaults, as he did so many other anti-Spanish tactics. An explorer and gold-snatcher who got his start by selling slaves illicitly to residents of the Spanish Main, Drake was pretty conquistador-like himself.45 Sharks swim with sharks—in this case, to Panama, where in 1572-73, Drake spectacularly seized control of Nombre de Dios and raided the Spanish trade route.
Drake stole so much gold and silver on this raid that he literally couldn’t carry it all, reputedly hiding a huge cache of silver on a beach, thus inventing the trope of pirates’ buried treasure.46 At the invitation of Indians, Drake and his men climbed a tall tree outfitted with steps and became the first Englishmen to view the Pacific.47 Indeed, they see could both oceans at the same time across the isthmus—a portentous vision we might call “canal gaze.” Its preservation in Drake’s legend indicates how strongly it spoke to an England awakened to the value of transcontinental traffic.
Drake never raided the Nicaragua route, but not for lack of plotting; in fact, he may have been heading to the Río San Juan when he died. In 1596, his fleet limping from a failed assault on Puerto Rico, Drake tried to get back to his glory days by again raiding Panama. Repelled there as well, Drake apparently fell into depression. Thomas Baskerville, his second-in-command, at some point thrust out a map depicting Lake Nicaragua and Granada, as well as a Honduran bay, and demanded that Drake pick one as a location for the pirate army’s next raid. Drake apathetically indicated both.48
The fleet got under way in that general direction. A later Spanish report based on information from English prisoners said that Drake’s men were headed about 140 miles away to a river “from where they thought there was a channel to the South Sea.”49 The San Juan fits that bill.
But Drake fell nastily ill with dysentery, leaving him with a fatally not-so-golden hind. The fleet returned to Panama, where Drake died and was buried at sea very near the transcontinental route he craved.
Emulating Drake’s terrestrial pillaging, other pirates were raiding inland Nicaragua by 1643. The details of these raids are lost to history, but apparently they were not enough to convince the Spanish to fortify the San Juan. Granada was ripe for the taking when, in 1665, its first recorded sacking was carried out by Henry Morgan.
Morgan, a Welshman, was such a good marauder that he eventually turned pro, getting knighted and made lieutenant governor of the pirate island of Jamaica. (Like Córdoba, he also has an apt modern namesake: Captain Morgan rum.50) Morgan’s innovative attack on Granada was the prototype for his better-known 1671 sacking of Panama, the Drake-ian adventure that made him famous.
The Nicaragua raid came at the end of a two-year expedition that started in Mexico, where Morgan hit upon a valuable lesson in piracy: If it was good enough for the conquistadors, it’s good enough for the pirates. He found success in Mexico by at least partly following Cortés’ original path of pillage.51 Finding himself at the mouth of the San Juan, Morgan decided to do the same there. He would go right up the Spaniards’ own trade route and seize Granada.
Morgan quickly gained nine Indian guides for his assault. Pirates had long found it easy to ally with the Spanish-loathing locals throughout the New World; indeed, Morgan may have learned of Lake Nicaragua and Granada from the Indians. Morgan went further and adopted their tactics as well. Rather than attempt to sail a pirate fleet up the rapids-filled river, he would sneak up it by canoe and take Granada in a guerilla assault.
Morgan’s 100-man pirate crew paddled by night, slept in the jungle overgrowth by day, and carried their canoes around the San Juan rapids. Finally gaining the lake, they were astonished at the paradisiacal scene of fish-filled waters and shores rich with livestock and orchards. The Indian guides then led the pirates on a five-day journey across the lake, once again paddling by night and sleeping by day hidden among the many islands.
Granada’s population was perhaps 3,500, with a military garrison that outnumbered the pirates probably by more than 5 to 1. No problem for Morgan’s army, which simply walked into the unsuspecting city in the middle of the night and seized the arsenal. And the numbers were soon on Morgan’s side: a thousand indigenous serfs immediately rebelled and joined the pirates in sacking the city. (Perhaps the Indians did get a chance to tell us what they thought of Spain’s New World neo-feudalism after all.) It is said that this slave rebellion would have led to a massacre had Morgan not politely reminded the serfs that he was there to plunder, not to colonize, and that the Spanish forces could return with vengeance in mind. He and his men left, apparently the way they came, carrying a huge amount of gold, silver and trade goods. Morgan arrived in Jamaica smug and wealthy, wearing a fine jerkin, breeches and stockings he had stolen in Granada.52
A pirate-canoe night attack on a tropical lake was electrifying stuff. The Spanish soon built forts at San Carlos and on the river’s worst rapids, still known as El Castillo after the now-ruined fortress. There are legends that the Spanish also blasted the rapids, or dumped rocks into them, to make them worse.53 That can’t be true, as it would only hinder their own trading vessels, not pirate canoes; but the fiction tells us something about the reality of their concern. Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, the governor of what is today Costa Rica ordered the forced migration of Indians from the coast in 1666 to prevent their allying with pirates.54
Morgan’s genius for commando tactics and his targeting of Nicaragua were also an inspiration to fellow pirates. Unfortunately for them, they had his tactics, but not his genius. Morgan was not the first pirate to raid by canoe, but he was likely the wiliest and luckiest.
In 1670, three English pirate captains duplicated Morgan’s raid up the San Juan, almost certainly also by canoe. They were able to invade Granada, but found there was little left to sack. Perhaps the city was still recovering from Morgan’s binge.
In 1686, a 350-man coalition of English and French pirates took the original conquistador route into Nicaragua, hiking from the Pacific to Granada. Unlike Morgan, they were spotted on the way in, and their raid collapsed into a chaos of arson and bloodshed. The Spanish were waiting for them with blazing cannon. Worse yet, the Spanish hauled the city’s best treasures out to an island on the lake.
Catching on to the timing of cannon blasts, the pirates were able to duck from the worst of the fire (though the Spanish began using blanks to fool them).55 In a desperate battle, the pirates managed to seize the city. The French pirates initially sang a thankful “Te Deum” in the cathedral; but, when it was clear that ransoming the city for the treasure would not work, the pirates robbed a bishop’s tomb and burned the cathedral, along with many other important buildings. Fleeing inland, the pirates were able to find shelter for a time with cautiously sympathetic Indians, but ultimately left the country under further Spanish assaults.
Most importantly, Morgan’s tactics were an inspiration to himself. Similarities to Granada abound in his 1669 assault on Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. But it was his 1671 Panama invasion that restaged the Nicaraguan raid on a grand scale. With an army of 1,200, he headed up the Chagres River by canoe and seized the city of Panama, perhaps the richest on the continent at the time. It took 200 pack mules to carry the gold, silver and goods he looted from the city, which burned in the process, adding to the spectacle of his achievement. (Whether to blame the pirates or the Spanish for the fire remains a historical issue.) Foreshadowing U.S. President George H.W. Bush 300 years later, Morgan concocted a political pretext for his invasion of Panama, claiming that the Spanish were assembling a force there with which to attack Jamaica. (Plausible enough, as English pirates had only recently stolen the island from the Spanish.)
On paper, Morgan’s Panamanian victory was deeply flawed: the Spanish hid the majority of treasure before he arrived; he faced massive mutinies; and he was arrested for violating a recent England-Spain peace treaty. But in practice, he became a national hero and got rewarded rather than convicted. His haul of gold may only have been so-so, but the treasure notably included a tome of Spanish sea charts. Transcontinental trade aspirations were the true legacy of Morgan’s raid.
The Pacific coast city of Panama had long been considered untouchable by the Spanish, and probably by its enemies. Morgan showed that it was not, that anyone could march across the isthmus with an army and attain the Pacific. In England, the interior of Panama started to become a reality rather than an imagined vision.
William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England and a resident of Jamaica or the similarly piratical Bahamas during Morgan’s days, was clearly struck by the fall of Panama.56 Fifteen years after Morgan’s raid, Paterson began seeking support from various governments for an incredible plan to establish colonies on either side of the Panamanian isthmus, and between them create an overland trade route—a route that, unlike the Spanish version, would be solidly built, scrupulously maintained and open to all nations. These colonies, he said, would “hold the keys of the commerce of the world.”57
Paterson’s West Indies intelligence informed him that, contrary to popular wisdom, Panama’s Pacific coast was not totally full of mountains that would block such an ambitious trade route. He finally got his native government of Scotland to sponsor the colonization plan, known as Caledonia. The fact that it had to be cut down to a single colony before getting started in 1698, and then promptly failed miserably, does not reduce the prescience of Paterson’s vision.
An anonymous 1699 pamphlet calling for the rescue of Paterson’s colony contained this intriguing statement about Panama: “If it were possible to cut a Channel from Sea to Sea, capable of shipping, it would facilitate the Navigation of the World two parts in three; but it’s next to an impossibility, for it’s almost a continued Chain of Mountains, of which some are as high as any of the Alps….”58
In speaking of impossibility, the pamphlet shows us that Paterson—and surely others—had considered the possibility of just such a channel. Albeit in a negative form, Paterson had revived the idea of a transcontinental canal.
Britain in particular would sail into the 18th century with transcontinental trade in its sights and canals on its mind.
Lord Nelson
As the 1700s wore on, the pirates of the Caribbean essentially vanished, history books will tell you; by which they mean that piracy was now performed by navies. The future Admiral Lord Nelson, Britain’s greatest naval hero, got his now-forgotten first command in a Morgan-style raid on the San Juan. The fortress at El Castillo appears in the background of his first official portrait.59
With the European powers frequently at war, there was less need to hide behind the flimsy proxies of privateers. The buccaneer-era wildness of the Mosquito Coast—with its mix of indigenous, maroon and pirate cultures—became appropriated into an official British “protectorate.” British “agents”—typically, semi-reformed pirates—manipulated Indian chieftains who were granted such ludicrously grandiose English titles as King George and Julius Caesar.60 Following orders issued from Jamaica, these agents carried out forays that, in style and substance, are indistinguishable from those of the classic pirates.
At war with Spain in 1748, the British ordered their agents in today’s Honduras and Belize to go up the San Juan and seize Lake Nicaragua. In true Morganic style, the plan called for raising an indigenous army from the Mosquito Coast. An armistice killed this plan, but the same agents went rogue and attempted it on their own in 1769. The Spanish repulsed them at El Castillo (full name, with typical conquistador verve: El Castillo de la Immaculada Concepción). A local legend was born when Rafaela Herrera, the young daughter of the fortress’s fallen commander, reputedly rallied the troops into holding down the fort.61
These official pirates were not merely going after Spanish trade; they were targeting canal territory. Charles Marie de La Condamine, a French scientist, revived the Nicaragua Canal idea in the 1740s after traveling throughout Central and South America.62 He declared a Nicaragua Canal feasible and said such commercial waterways were worth exploring. Europe’s kings and merchants didn’t have to be asked twice. A boom in canal proposals began that would last until 1914.
In the 1770s, the Spanish again surveyed the possible canal route in southern Mexico, whose geography was long forgotten from the conquistador years. Finding it unsuitable, they soon followed La Condamine’s advice and focused their attention on Nicaragua. The same agents who helmed the 1769 attack on the San Juan managed to spy on a Spanish canal survey of the area, transmitting the information back to the British.
In 1779, Spain joined the American Revolutionary War on the side of the Colonies. (America was just one front of a much larger struggle between Europe’s empires, which is the only reason the tiny Colonies won.) The Caribbean was once again a theater of war between Spain and Britain. John Dalling, the governor of Jamaica, dusted off the old 1748 plans for invading Lake Nicaragua.
The plan called for going upriver in larger vessels while carrying a disassembled shallow-draft boat that could be put together past any rapids and used on the lake. The British would then seize Granada and build more boats to defend their conquest. They would also march overland and seize the main towns on the Pacific. Dalling even envisioned turning the region into a new home for displaced American Tories—the first in a series of strange colonization schemes that potential canal routes would inspire in the likes of Abraham Lincoln.
“Give me but the direction of a force, and that of no great extent, and I’ll be answerable to give you the domination of Spain in this part of the world,” Dalling wrote to the British colonial secretary, displaying at least as much confidence in the significance of the Nicaragua route as in himself.63
Nelson, a 21-year-old newbie who was supposed to helm an escort and supply part of the mission, wasn’t so sure. “How it will turn out, God knows!” he wrote to an official.
It turned out to be one of the great what-ifs of history. A bit more luck and planning, and Nelson’s Column might have been about Nicaragua rather than Trafalgar.
As usual, the plan involved raising an instant army from the Mosquito Coast’s Spanish-haters. But when Nelson arrived, the British agent had failed to muster the promised troops. Nelson eventually settled for a much smaller force than expected.
The raiders converged at San Juan del Norte (later known as Greytown, and now San Juan de Nicaragua), a nominally Spanish-controlled shanty town at the mouth of the Río San Juan. Nelson’s work was done. But, apparently taking pity on the understaffed force, he made a fateful decision, offering to continue escorting the party all the way up the river.
Saying yes might be the last thing the raiding party did right. Inexplicably, they assembled the boat intended for the lake and began towing it upriver, doubling their workload. And the commander of the raid set out immediately rather than waiting for reinforcements in a pirate-style quest for finders-keepers glory.
Leading the strange fleet of boats, dories and canoes, the greenhorn Nelson proved to be a natural leader and effectively took command of the entire raid within days. Their tale reads like something out of Kipling or H. Rider Haggard. Nelson and the Indian guides reportedly developed mutual respect and friendship, boosted enormously when Nelson survived an encounter with a venomous snake, which was taken as a sign of divine favor. One soldier was attacked by a jaguar; another, lacking Nelson’s luck, died when he was bitten on the face by a snake hanging from a tree, causing his eye to dissolve.
The appearance of a fortified island in the river was the first big surprise of the raid and Nelson’s first taste of hand-to-hand combat. He earned respect by leaping from the boat without hesitation and sword-fighting the Spaniards, reputedly in his stocking feet after his boots got stuck in the mud.
Arriving under the walls of El Castillo, the British began a siege for which neither side was well-prepared. Then Nelson ran into a far deadlier enemy: disease. A fever and dysentery began killing the men and left Nelson seriously ill. (He reputedly later said he was not sick, but rather had swallowed water from a spring poisoned by the machineel tree, a toxic plant used by Indians to make poisoned arrows. This bizarre self-diagnosis is surely untrue.)
The reinforcements finally arrived, along with surprising news: Nelson had been promoted. He was shipped back to San Juan del Norte while the British succeeded in taking El Castillo. But the fever exploded into an epidemic at both El Castillo and San Juan del Norte. More than 2,500 men may have died in total. The horrifying disease stopped the raid cold and forced the British to leave the river altogether.
A mouthful of bad water or a swarm of the wrong kind of mosquito is likely all that stood between the British and at least temporary control of the Nicaraguan trade route.
The British public was appalled by this massive loss of soldiers and sailors. But it also thrilled to the exploits of a new hero, this young Horatio Nelson. They, and the Spanish, would hear more from him later.
But the United States won that war—something Britain and Spain would both come to regret. Inspired by the U.S., the Central American territories declared their independence from Spain in 1821.
The first U.S. Nicaragua Canal company formed in 1826.
Vanderbilt
That company didn’t last, but there were plenty more where it came from. A Nicaragua Canal was considered so inevitable by the 1820s that American newspapers were giving voice to eccentric fears that a canal would cause massive sea-level drops or disruption of the Gulf Stream.64
It was not merely a matter of industry, but of empire. At that time, the famed naturalist Alexander von Humboldt stumped for a canal after a tour of the Americas, highlighting Nicaragua as a great possibility, an idea that fired the imagination of Goethe as well as Spain.65 Napoleon III spent his time in exile plotting a new American empire, and formed a Nicaragua canal company in 1846.66 (Naturally, he wanted to name the canal after himself.)
But all of that was fantasy compared to the two big players with real footholds in the region. By 1825, an American-controlled Nicaragua canal was the stated policy of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the British continued to control the Mosquito Coast, and in 1847 assaulted San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, as they now called it after the governor of the old pirate island of Jamaica. In January 1848, the British finally succeeded in seizing Granada.
At the very same time, gold was discovered in California. The Cold War between the U.S. and Britain in Nicaragua suddenly got warm indeed. Transcontinental trade was no longer something that simply looked good on paper. Would-be prospectors wanted to get from the East Coast to California; huge amounts of gold would return from California to the East Coast. Fortunes would be made in providing the quickest possible route in this time before the U.S. transcontinental railways.
The effect of the Gold Rush on transcontinental canal planning was electric. At least eight potential canal sites were instantly proposed as companies and governments dusted off old conquistador plans. The general idea was to quickly establish a stagecoach overland route as a placeholder for a canal. Railroad companies got in on the act, too, establishing the first transcontinental line in Panama by 1855.
Just like in conquistador days, legends and spurious treasure maps abounded. The most mystique-heavy potential canal site was the Río Atrato in Colombia. The conquistadors considered it a possible location of el secreto del estrecho, but found it too difficult to explore. The Spanish government banned further exploration in 1542 to preserve any potential secret, pending a better-equipped survey that never happened. The Atrato remained unexplored for the next 300 years, accumulating legends; one claimed that a Spanish monk somehow managed to actually build a canal there in 1788. Drawn by the mystery, an American businessman named Frederick Kelly bankrupted himself exploring the river starting in 1851, only to find the Andes Mountains in his way. Kelly proposed a 3.5-mile canal tunnel through the mountains—a kind of grand Tunnel of Love for merchant ships—but failed to convince anyone that was anything more than a cool idea.67
Back in the realm of places worth fighting over, the U.S.-Britain showdown in Nicaragua blossomed into the first major test of the U.S.’s Monroe Doctrine. Britain could not simply seize Nicaragua and build a canal, said the U.S. And never mind that the U.S. was being pretty hegemonic itself with its plans for a U.S.-controlled canal (more or less with the support of the Nicaraguans). After much saber-rattling, the countries signed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, which guaranteed that even a U.S.-built canal would be officially neutral turf open to all. Britain also agreed to give up its control of the Mosquito Coast—a term it quickly altered with a last-minute addendum that relit the fuse on the whole dispute.
Into this mess boldly stepped “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, the first great American industrialist, already fabulously rich from canals and ferries in the U.S., later to be richer still from railroad lines, and in the meantime the only man to create anything like a Nicaragua Canal.
A cigar-chomping hick who pronounced the country’s name as “Nicaraguey,” Vanderbilt was the very picture of rapacious American capitalism.68 Phrenology, the flattery-spewing pseudoscience of the day, could not avoid being somewhat honest about him: “His head is very high in the crown—Firmness, Self-Esteem, Approbativeness, Hope, and Conscientiousness being among his largest phrenological organs….[A] single glance reveals to him, as to an Indian, the motives and capacities of men….His Destructiveness and Combativeness are fully developed….”69
Vanderbilt showed up in Nicaragua in 1849 and established the American Atlantic & Pacific Ship Canal Company.70 He cut a deal with the Nicaraguan government that gave him a monopoly on building a Nicaragua canal, and 12 years to do so. In return, Nicaragua would get a handsome slice of the income and total ownership of the canal after 85 years.
Meanwhile, Vanderbilt wanted some income now. He set up a subsidiary, the Accessory Transit Company, to run a steamship line on the San Juan and Lake Nicaragua and a stagecoach line on the overland bit to the Pacific. The overland route was necessary for supplying the canal project, Vanderbilt assured the Nicaraguans.
In fact, Vanderbilt never did any work on the canal project, instead funneling all of his profitable business through Accessory Transit, leaving the Nicaraguans without their taste of the pie. Thus Vanderbilt entered the San Juan as yet another shark, initiating what the U.S. government’s lead canal negotiator would later call “an infamous career of deception and fraud.”71
Not to say that Vanderbilt was lazy. Of the many things he can be accused of, that would not be on the list. Arriving in Greytown in 1850 for an inaugural run up the San Juan, he immediately learned how difficult things were going to be when he ran a steamship into a sandbar. And when the 120-ton ship started protesting at the first rapids, Vanderbilt took the helm himself and practically willed the vessel upriver, forcing it to crawl up the rocks with its paddlewheels. So much for sharks not being able to pass the San Juan rapids.
Vanderbilt conquered the El Castillo rapids as well, warping the ship up the steep grade after ordering everyone else off, and then steaming triumphantly to Granada. He navigated the international cold war around him with equal determination. Apolitical by nature, he nonetheless gained the approval of the U.S. government. He named two of his San Juan route ships “Clayton” and “Bulwer” after the treaty.
Within a few years, Vanderbilt had established a route of such solidity that as picky a passenger as Mark Twain would find reason to complain only about the sandwiches and the boring nature of fellow passengers.
Vanderbilt was a robber baron. Indeed, he was the first American industrialist to be called a robber baron, specifically because of his jaunts on the San Juan. Henry Raymond, the co-founder of the New York Times and Vanderbilt’s archenemy, invoked the image rather than the exact term in a scathing 1859 editorial that likened the businessman to “those old German barons who, from their eyries along the Rhine, swooped down upon the commerce of the noble river and wrung tribute from every passenger that floated by….”72
The Lake Nicaragua system thus gives us one of our enduring terms for modern predators who feast on our pockets rather than our bones. In the case of Accessory Transit, it was a lousy analogy—Vanderbilt was running the boats, not the fortresses. Raymond was well aware of Vanderbilt’s post-industrial methods, calling him out for attempting to crush a start-up competitor in Nicaragua to preserve his own monopoly.
But the fact is, Vanderbilt ran a darn good transit line (sandwiches notwithstanding) at a low price and was more victim than predator in the end. He sure wasn’t the robber baron when his company was the one forced to pay a fee at Greytown after a British warship fired warning shots over the bow of an Accessory Transit steamer.
Vanderbilt would come to learn that common lesson of the San Juan system: sharks follow sharks. In fact, Vanderbilt sent some of them there himself—his own employees, who rebelled and attempted to defraud the company with false claims of getting canal-building financing. Vanderbilt’s famously curt letter to them is another lasting legacy of Lake Nicaragua predation: “Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.”73 And ruin them he did, sabotaging and devaluing his own company and then buying back its exploded pieces in one of his pioneering insider-trading schemes.
That was only a warm-up for the real clash of the titans in Lake Nicaragua, an alien-vs.-predator battle where Vanderbilt would be cast against type as an antihero, like Godzilla come to destroy a far worse monstrosity. Lake Nicaragua was about to glow from the fires of William Walker.
Walker
William Walker may not have been the worst man ever to invade Lake Nicaragua, but he made sure that he’ll be remembered that way. With Granada in ashes and thousands of people in coffins, the viciously racist mercenary penned a “Mein Kampf”-style memoir of his attempt to turn Nicaragua into the capital of a new slave empire and spark a U.S. civil war.74 Conquistador, pirate, imperialist, man-eater—Walker was all the Nicaraguan sharks rolled into one cracker box. He should have been born with horns on his head and a fin on his back.
A Bizarro World version of John Brown, Walker was as incompetent as he was evil and seemed to crave martyrdom more than success. Some tiger-hunter would have taken him down eventually; the honor went to Vanderbilt after Walker targeted the canal company and Accessory Transit as the keys to his dominion.
Walker was a “filibuster” (all the moreso for his protest-too-much insistence that he was not), a term for the many American soldiers of fortune who invaded such places as Cuba with private armies and slave-state, business-friendly expansion on their addled minds, sometimes with U.S. government backing, sometimes without. “Filibuster” is a Romance language version of “freebooter,” both from an old Dutch term for pirates of the Caribbean.75 The freeboot fit, to a certain extent, but the filibusters were more like Protestant conquistadors, megalomaniacal ideologues on a mission from their genocidal god. Walker was not the only filibuster in Nicaragua; indeed, he tangled with a couple of rivals in a low-rent version of the conquistador civil war of yore.
A doctor, lawyer, journalist and, most significantly, a redneck son of the enduringly racist state of Tennessee, Walker got his filibustering start in Mexico. In 1853, the self-styled “Colonel” Walker attacked the state of Sonora with a private army, briefly seizing it and grandiosely declaring a new Republic of Lower Mexico. His first order of business was to legalize slavery. Unafflicted with Walker’s mental problems, the Mexicans quickly routed him, sending his army on a death march across the desert and into the waiting hands of the U.S. Army. Put on trial in the U.S. for illegally invading a sovereign nation, Walker was promptly acquitted, as Americans’ approval for killing foreigners in the name of a horrid philosophy, not to mention general lack of personal and intellectual integrity, were just as high then as now.
Like the classic pirates, Walker now had an M.O. It was just a matter of where to repeat his crime. Now based in San Francisco, he would have known the importance of the Nicaraguan transit route. Indeed, the mayor of San Francisco was Cornelius Garrison—one of the cheating Accessory Transit partners to whom Vanderbilt would send the infamous “I’ll ruin you” letter. Garrison colluded with Walker, offering to help take over Nicaragua in exchange for help in taking over Accessory Transit. The invasion was soon set, once Walker heard that Nicaragua was in the midst of a civil war between aristocrats and populists. He saw chaos to exploit, and knew exactly what kind of order he would bring.
Histories typically say only that the Nicaraguan leftists hired Walker to come help them, suggesting he ran some semi-respectable Blackwater sort of army, and that the Nicaraguans essentially got what they asked for. In fact, Walker sent a business partner to Nicaragua to actively solicit a mercenary contract with one side or the other. The Nicaraguans probably had never heard of him before, and surely were sold on the deal with outrageous lies.
Having promoted himself to “General” Walker, the filibuster set out in 1855 with a crew almost literally piratical in character; in his memoir, he describes one man who “had lately been to the Cocos Islands in search of a buried treasure.”76 His adventures are dotted with references to other sharks of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan. One of his battles took place near a stream called the Gil González; another at a promontory near El Castillo called Nelson’s Hill. Walker himself notes that he saw stones reputed to be ballast from one of Morgan’s ships, and explains how the Pacific coastal city of Realejo was relocated inland to avoid pirate attacks. With the eye of a connoisseur, Walker briefly recounts the history of British policy in the region—its support of piracy and smuggling, its establishment of trading posts and protectorates rather than more expensive colonies, all as successful economic warfare.
Walker had intended to arrive with reinforcements on the way via Accessory Transit. Vanderbilt, who already found civil war inconvenient enough without filibusters, refused to ship troops. The two men, who were never to meet face-to-face, were set on a collision course. In the meantime, Walker’s mode of travel presented him with the first of many comedically pathetic screw-ups: the ship that would take him to Nicaragua was the subject of a last-minute debt dispute, with the sheriff stopping it from sailing. Walker’s memoirs recount innumerable petty crises such as this, apparently thinking, much like modern neocon hawks, that self-created difficulties somehow only further ennoble the cause rather than betray a rank incompetence.
Walker finally arrived in Nicaragua the old-fashioned conquistador way, from the Pacific. He immediately set out to attack Rivas, the town that controlled the overland part of the Accessory Transit line, consisting of a wood-plank road. Like all sharks in Nicaragua, Walker was immediately drawn to these waters. The Accessory Transit route was his top priority, not only for supplies, but for fresh troops—a necessity for a “general” whose main tactic was having his men charge into every battle, leading to appalling casualty rates. Vanderbilt was not playing along, so Walker would simply seize the company and transfer it to the Commodore’s corrupt partners, including that estimable mayor of San Francisco.
“The control of the Transit is, to Americans, the control of Nicaragua,” Walker later wrote. His enemies would come to call it the “highway of filibusterism.”
Among these successful early campaigns, Walker and the local Democrats took Virgin Bay, the Accessory Transit harbor on Lake Nicaragua. There, Walker seized a Transit steamship and used it to attack Granada, the capital of the enemy Conservatives. Like Morgan before him, Walker took the city in a silent night attack after sending his troops ashore in boats.
Parker French, a con man and something of a filibuster rival to Walker, though he was technically part of Walker’s forces, was less successful in a similar assault. French hijacked a Transit steamer on the lake—with passengers still aboard—and attempted to take San Carlos. The Conservatives reputedly fired on at least one Transit ship in another engagement, killing civilians.
This sort of thing infuriated Vanderbilt, who was also facing the depredations of another filibuster, H.L. Kinney, on the Mosquito Coast. But Garrison had no such scruples. As the war ended in the Democrats’ favor, Walker got himself named the nation’s commander-in-chief and effective ruler. A local Accessory Transit agent named C.J. Macdonald, acting on the authority of Garrison rather than Vanderbilt, offered Walker a “loan” of $20,000 in California gold bars, fresh off the transit route.
In return, Walker dissolved the Nicaragua-chartered Accessory Transit and transferred its rights to Garrison et al. Reinforcements immediately began shipping in. He later made Macdonald “quartermaster-general” of the army. À la Oliver North in another Nicaragua scheme a century later, Walker made sure the president had plausible deniability about these machinations: “neither the President nor the cabinet knew of the means whereby their objects were accomplished….”
That turned out to be OK, because the puppet president, Patricio Rivas, was formerly a toll collector on the San Juan and hated Vanderbilt’s arrogant company. It also turned out to be moot, as Walker quickly set up a rigged election and had himself named president.
This 1856 coup outraged some, drew the support of others—including the U.S. government. But the best was yet to come. Walker issued a three-point decree written in the malignantly subtle language of a contract with the devil. It declared English the official language, and set up a complex new real estate registration system, both to put power only in Anglo hands. Worst of all, the decree legalized slavery, which the Central American states had outlawed decades before when they booted out the Spanish.
The mask was gone; Walker now could announce that he saw the seizure of Nicaragua as just the first shots in a literal race war. “By this act [establishing slavery] must the Walker administration be judged; for it is the key to its whole policy,” he later wrote. “In fact the wisdom or folly of this decree involves the wisdom or folly of the American movement in Nicaragua; for on the re-establishment of African slavery there depended the permanent presence of the white race in that region….”
And not just African slavery. Walker noted how well-suited the Indians were for slavery as well, and vowed to “destroy” the local “mixed-race” populace.
Exactly like modern social conservatives condemning those who support gay rights or oppose wars, Walker condemned opponents of slavery as bleeding-heart irrationalists who ignore the laws of nature and economics. Abolitionism is a “kind of hydrophobia,” he sneered, while praising the “conservatism of slavery.”
It’s good American business, he tells us in his memoir; slavery is the very model of the “relations of capital to labor.” Slavery has its “abuses,” he acknowledges, but that only means it should be regulated, not banned. More important is that Africans are a “satire of man” whom whites rescued and employed under divine direction.
At this time, less than a decade before the U.S. erupted into a civil war over slavery, Walker intended his decree less for Nicaraguans than for Southerners. “…[T]he slavery decree was calculated to bind the Southern states to Nicaragua, as if she were one of themselves,” Walker wrote, adding that his many, many fallen filibusters should be memorialized as “martyrs and confessors in the cause of Southern civilization.” Slavery had to be extended “beyond the limits of the Union” to preserve it in the American South. Nicaragua was where it could gain “an empire.”
Walker essentially attempted to begin the American Civil War on Lake Nicaragua. Much of America loved him for it. He was the subject of patriotic songs and lecture tours; the Democratic Party platform was changed to “sympathize” with Walker’s efforts.77 Pockets of the country still love him. The Tennessee State Library and Archives Web site on Walker gives him his folk-hero title of “Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny”; it calls him an “idealist” and “expansionist,” not a racist and a traitor.78
The Nicaraguans who actually had to live under Walker immediately saw him for what he was: a rabid animal to be shot. Finally free after 300 years, they were not about to bend under yet another conquistador. As Walker set up what he intended to be a permanent military dictatorship, rebellion began fomenting and other Central American states began arming. Anti-American riots burst out along the railway line in Panama. But the situation remained foggy as everyone waited to see the responses of the two real powers in the region: the equivocating U.S. and the lurking Britain.
Vanderbilt did not have time to wait. His transit line was being hijacked from the inside and the outside. Rebuffed by the U.S. government, Vanderbilt turned to Britain for help. He infuriated the American public by calling a British warship to stop one of his own company’s steamships at Greytown and search it for filibuster troops.
But that was hardly enough to stop Walker. Like many of today’s corporate chieftains, Vanderbilt’s main allegiance was to money, and he had enough of it to conduct his own foreign policy. Ignoring the diplomatic positions of his own country, Vanderbilt directly negotiated with Costa Rica, encouraging it to invade Nicaragua, and giving it funds to do so. (Britain was aiding Costa Rica as well.) Vanderbilt also hired his own mercenary army to assault Walker’s troops.
Coalition troops from other Central American countries invaded as well, and Walker was soon in trouble. In his most infamous act, Walker petulantly ordered the burning of Granada. His henchmen put the city to the torch and blew up a tower of its main church with gunpowder. Then, on a lance amid the ruins, they hung a sign snidely saying, “Aquí fue Granada”—“Here Was Granada.”
This grand vandalism was the height of Walker’s achievement. He could never really explain why he did it, citing a mixture of vain political gesture and petty revenge. The Nicaraguans still sorely remember it today. Often forgotten is why Walker was willing to sacrifice the city: He was retreating to Rivas, once again to retain control of the transit line; of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan, that route so crucial to all the pirates and slavemasters before him.
Walker got some assistance from fellow filibusters. One was Stephen Tucker, a Vermonter who had joined Walker’s Sonora campaign and inexplicably found it wise to fight alongside him again; Tucker would later die in the Civil War as a Confederate colonel.79 More colorful was Henry Titus, a pro-slavery filibuster in Cuba and a recent participant in the infamous sacking of Lawrence, Kansas—one of the sparks that lit the fuse on the Civil War.80 The odious Titus, whom even Walker thought had “the air of the bully,” would go on to be a Confederate colonel and founder of Titusville, Florida. Like the pirates and British naval heroes, Titus led his own army up the San Juan in an attack on El Castillo. He proved as incompetent as his master and was easily repulsed.
Titus was attacking on the San Juan because the Costa Ricans had taken it, dashing Walker’s hopes of maintaining his lifeline. Vanderbilt was behind it all. The Costa Ricans had provided his agents with an American mercenary, one Sylvanus Spencer.81 Spencer floated his army down a Costa Rican tributary of the San Juan on homemade rafts and attacked a key filibuster fort on the river in a surprise raid. From there, they seized transit steamers at Greytown and used them as naval war vessels. Vanderbilt had out-filibustered the filibuster.
Meanwhile, Walker found it impossible to retake El Castillo. When many men in that expedition mutinied, Walker’s commander ordered them down the river the hard way—unarmed and clinging to logs. It is surely the strangest way a shark ever went down the San Juan.
Besieged and outnumbered, Walker was forced into ignominious surrender and house arrest on a ship he formerly controlled, one called the “Granada.” As a final insult, the Costa Rican captain who took over the “Granada” was a “Jamaica negro.” To Walker, this was not a hilarious refutation of his theories of racial superiority, but rather a simple perversion.
Walker would make two more attempts to invade Nicaragua, with navies stopping him on the way. The British navy in 1860 finally got the bright idea of handing him over to the Hondurans, who promptly shot him.
Walker was gone, but his legacy lived on in Nicaragua Canal schemes: in the Manifest Destiny Christian racism that pervaded later canal proposals, and in the violent political instability that is a major reason the canal was never built.
The Canal
Vanderbilt was soon gone as well. The Greytown harbor was showing signs of silting up by 1860, which is when U.S. and British arguments over a Nicaragua canal erupted once more (openly, rather than through proxy warfare). Vanderbilt sold out to an Italian company in 1869, but had already relocated much of his business to Panama.
The rest of the world was looking to other routes as well. Unlike Nicaragua, Panama was the site of some U.S.-British cooperation, with the railroad line at least technically operating under equal access and joint capital. In an inversion of Walker’s efforts, President Abraham Lincoln once proposed establishing a colony of freed American slaves in Panama to help secure U.S. canal route rights.82 Lincoln even met with some kind of African-American delegation about the proposal, which never materialized.
The most bizarre scheme was a proposed “ship railway” at Tehuantepec, the narrowest part of Mexico, where Cortés had once sought the secret strait and others had proposed a canal.83 In this plan, ships would be floated out of the water on giant pontoon platforms and then placed on giant railway cars, to be hauled overland on a heavy-duty railroad. The design called for arrow-straight rail lines, and giant turntables to get the ships around hairpin turns in the mountains. The vision of still-dripping freight ships being hauled over mountains on railroad cars may seem insane, but the U.S. government seriously considered buying rights to it, and a U.S. businessman in 1883 got a 99-year concession to build and operate a ship railway. That it never happened is one of the least surprising, if more disappointing, items in transcontinental travel history. (A regular railway was put across the isthmus instead.)
By the 1870s, it was clear that a canal would be built somewhere and that it was now a footrace with Nicaragua and Panama neck-and-neck, and Honduras and Mexico well behind. Panama, with its successful railway, was already gaining ground on Nicaragua, where transcontinental traffic was essentially dead. But Nicaragua was hardly forgotten. Lincoln reestablished diplomatic ties with Nicaragua, specifically citing the importance of the canal proposal. President Ulysses Grant, declaring a future canal to be “virtually a part of the coast-line of the United States,” formed an Interoceanic Canal Commission to study the various routes.84 It recommended Nicaragua as the best (and made the Lake Nicaragua shark famous).
Panama, however, was good enough, and a French company started digging there in 1881. This company turned out to be an incompetent fraud on a massive scale, spiraling into bankruptcy and sending French ministers to prison for bribery. The Panama Canal was still just a small open wound.
U.S. patriots stumped for a Nicaragua Canal. There were even pro-canal conventions around the country in the 1890s to build Congressional support. Canal books proliferated, many of them speaking of Anglo-Saxon destiny and American imperialism. The U.S.-British war went hot, too. The U.S. Navy shelled Greytown; U.S. troops joined Nicaraguans in invading the Mosquito Coast protectorate. Britain seized a coastal island that would be near the Pacific end of a canal, but was finally driven out once and for all.
In 1893, a U.S. company finally began work on a Nicaragua Canal. That meant extensive forest-clearing around Greytown and a cursory dredging of 2 miles of the river—deliberately token, speculative work intended to show enough progress to draw investors. It failed.
The French quickly got their act together and offered the Panama Canal project to the U.S. government in exchange for a financial bailout. Legend has it that the French hired a lobbyist to scare congressmen off of the Nicaragua Canal idea by showing them a Nicaragua postage stamp depicting a smoking volcano—not the type of terrain you want along your pricey trade route. Considering that there actually is an active volcano in the lake, it doesn’t seem as sneaky as it’s portrayed. In any case, it is likely that Nicaragua’s political instability (much of it caused by the canal tug-of-war itself) and border dispute with Costa Rica had more to do with scaring off congressmen, particularly when they could choose a starter-kit canal project in Panama. The U.S. bought into Panama.
There were still twists and turns; another U.S. commission in 1901 recommended a Nicaragua Canal after all, and Panama’s declaration of independence from Colombia in 1903 gave some pause. But technical work resumed in 1904, and the Panama Canal was open for business in 1914.
The U.S. continued its wrangling over Nicaragua Canal rights, but now it was all merely to forestall competition with Panama. In 1909, the U.S. invaded Nicaragua in a dispute that began when Nicaragua began negotiating with Germany and Japan to build a Nicaragua Canal. Finally, in 1914, the U.S. and Nicaragua agreed to the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, which gave the U.S. permanent, exclusive rights to build any Nicaragua canal.
Panama’s monopoly was ensured, as was 70 more years of U.S. military involvement in propping up puppet dictators and fighting rebels. Most famous among the latter was Augusto César Sandino, a guerrilla who successfully battled U.S. troops for years while waving a battle flag depicting the beheading of a U.S. Marine. Among his demands was the end to the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, under which the U.S. military was occasionally and fruitlessly proposing a Nicaragua Canal as a security-based alternative to Panama in case of attack.
Sandino didn’t live to see it, but the treaty is indeed obsolete now—and a Sandinista is Nicaragua’s president. Nicaragua is now free to consider its own canal fate, and has been almost constantly since the treaty was dissolved in the 1970s. One of the first incredibly proposed “nuclear blasting” as a possibly economical excavation method.85 Japanese investors in the 1980s proposed an enormous canal that could handle superfreighters far larger than the “Panamax”—the largest size of ship the Panama Canal can handle.86 The Japanese are gone, but the Nicaraguan government revived this $20 billion idea in 2006 as the Grand Inter-Oceanic Nicaragua Canal.87 It, too, went nowhere, and its official Web site is dead.
In the late 1990s, a private venture called Ecocanal (originally EcoCanal) arrived with a proposal for a partial canal. It would dredge the river and build locks around the worst rapids, creating passage for large, low-draft barges, but would not cut through to the Pacific. This Ecocanal would allow Nicaraguan goods to head more directly to Europe and the U.S. East Coast, rather than passing through Honduras or Costa Rica as they do now. Despite multiple announcements and a much less ambitious scale, Ecocanal also has never happened.
Ecocanal was the brainchild of Tim Coone, a British economist and journalist who now heads a Managua-based alternative energy company called ENCO Centroamérica. Coone told me that Ecocanal is now being “reframed” as part of a larger proposal for an alternative energy windmill farm in Lake Nicaragua.88 The canal would be needed to haul wind turbines to the construction site.
“The Ecocanal project is still at a pre-feasibility study stage,” Coone told me, “and although there is a lot of interest locally—especially compared to the larger, more ambitious interocean projects—there is little willingness to risk capital, even though the amounts involved are relatively small.”
He added that he believes the full canal proposals, as well as similar railway plans, are “totally uncompetitive” with the Panama Canal, which is undergoing an expansion to boost that pesky Panamax.
These days, Nicaragua is getting an economic boost from ecotourism, not an Ecocanal. The San Juan is now lined with nature preserves protecting its pristine jungles. Tour boats run where pirate canoes and Vanderbilt’s steamships of Forty-Niners once ran. Every time a canal proposal is floated these days, there are cries that it will be an environmental disaster. The Nicaragua Canal is an old wound that always hurts to reopen.
In 1987, filmmaker Alex Cox went to Lake Nicaragua in the midst of the U.S.-backed civil war and made “Walker,” a surreal biography of the filibuster.89 Staging the burning of Granada in Granada is pretty surreal all by itself. But Cox went further: as the tale unfolds, 1980s objects begin appearing without comment in the 1850s world—Zippos, cars, helicopters and finally Max Headroom-style video of Ronald Reagan. Of course, these anachronisms are anything but; Cox is telling us that history in Nicaragua repeats itself, exists in one vast landscape where past and future are coeval.
Sly as this is as technique, Cox’s film also unconsciously embodies its own truth. Cox, who is known as a demanding madman, explained in an on-location interview during filming (appearing on the “Walker” DVD) how he came to “like” and “admire” the “heroic” filibuster (who is portrayed by the intensely charismatic Ed Harris), albeit ambivalently. Behind-the-scenes articles describe the cast and crew enjoying frenzied all-night parties, and accidentally killing a local boy when a film truck scared his horse.
Perhaps a director must always sympathize with a dictator; just as a canal-builder must always be a bit of a conquistador. Four hundred years of Nicaragua Canal history flows into one stream of thought: If you can go where a shark goes, you’re probably a shark, too.
1 My metaphorical device of linking piscine and human sharks is my original, independent insight. But Randy Wayne White, author of the 2000 book “The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua: True Tales of Adventure, Travel, And Fishing,” independently arrived at the same connection: “No sharks? I disagreed. Nicaragua has a long history of attracting and enduring predators.” White did not make my further connection between these sharks and the canal proposals.
2 “CIA World Factbook” at www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook.
3 U.S. Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Lee M. Packnett, phone interview, Dec. 23, 2009. “I was in Iraq. I never heard of anything like that,” said Packnett, who served in Iraq in 2007. He also consulted three other Army personnel in the office who had served in Iraq and also had not heard of the Tigris sharks.
I encountered a bizarre Tigris River shark item in my research: an undated postcard (its typeface suggests the 1900-30 era) with a photograph of an apparently stuffed shark, about three to four feet long, lying on its belly across chairs on a street. The caption cryptically reads, “The largest Shark Kosage in the river Tigris, Baghdad.” I have been unable to locate a meaning for “kosage,” or any logical variants, in the Oxford English Dictionary and other sources. This postcard is item number “iraq256353” on the postcard-selling site www.postcardman.net. The site’s owner did not respond to my e-mail inquiries about the postcard.
4 Most river shark data is from “Shadows in the Sea: The Sharks, Skates, And Rays” (revised ed.) by Thomas B. Allen; “Shark Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance” by Thomas B. Allen; and the ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research (Vancouver, Canada) Web site at www.elasmo-research.org/index.html. The insights on shark predatory behavior that follow in the text are also largely from ReefQuest.
5 Allen, op. cit.
6 Allen, “Shark Attacks,” op. cit.
7 Personal e-mail, Dec. 7, 2009. In his response to my inquiries about Lake Nicaragua sharks, Dr. Cowan went beyond the call of duty, graciously providing me with a detailed essay about his adventures with Dr. Thomas B. Thorson, who will appear later in my narrative. I take the liberty of presenting here the salient section of Dr. Cowan’s essay:
Our first trip into Central America (1963, I think) lasted about a month. We began in Guatemala City and organized, through an expatriate American plantation owner, a trip to Lake Izabal in eastern Guatemala. Dr. Thorson had read reports that sharks had been taken in the Lake and river (Rio Dulce). We spent about two weeks at San Felipe, the site of an old Spanish fort, but as I recall, didn't have much luck catching sharks. (At that time Lake Izabal and the Rio Dulce were well off the beaten path for tourists and sightseers. I understand they are very popular today.) Afterward, we took a supply boat down the Rio Dulce to Livingston on the coast, then a ferry to Puerto Barrios and a bus (yes, the kind with all kinds of produce and livestock on-board) back to Guatemala City.
Next, we flew down to Managua, Nicaragua and caught a bus to Granada at the north end of Lake Nicaragua. There was boat service to the village of San Carlos at the south end of the Lake. The boat service, as it was called, consisted of a dilapidated supply barge that stopped at all the villages along the Lake. It was a long and arduous trip. Lake Nicaragua, as you know, is about 100 miles long. There was no seating so we just made beds with some of the supplies on the roof of the cabin. After arriving at San Carlos we proceeded to hire a guide that would help us with the fishing and also take us downriver to San Juan del Norte or Greytown, as it was called then. We hired a man named Ramon and began fishing. To our pleasant surprise the fishing went well. We caught several specimens of the “Lake Nicaragua shark” (as it was known then) and some huge sawfish as well. One of the observations we made right away was that the “Lake Nicaragua shark” couldn't be as rapacious as described in the literature. The women would do their wash in waist deep water right next to where we were fishing for sharks and the young boys would dive off the piers and swim without inhibition. We took samples for several days and then left to go downriver to San Juan Del Norte. Again, as you know, it is a long trip—over 100 miles if I remember correctly.
Now we come to the part of the trip that you asked about. We spent a full day going downstream and stopped at El Castillo for the night. El Castillo was the site of an old fort where, as the story goes, native Nicaraguans turned back the English navy (reference [Rafaela] Herrera). It was also the location where river rapids, resulting from uplift created by earthquakes, had supposedly blocked any migrations of sharks between Lake Nicaragua and the Caribbean Sea. We didn’t stay long in El Castillo but while we were there we noticed that we could see the iconic shark fins above the water and headed upstream. In our observations there were no salmon like jumps out of the water. Maybe since then others have observed this activity but in all the years that we studied the sharks and sawfish in that drainage we never witnessed any jumping.
We continued in our dugout for San Juan del Norte on the Caribbean coast. When we arrived we discovered right away why it was called Greytown—the sky was always gray and it rained incessantly. It was really a miserable existence and the fishing did not go well. As an aside, I will tell you that the most interesting thing I came across in San Juan Del Norte were the 19th century graves of at least two and possibly three American sailors that had died there. I took their names and the information on how they died off of the primitively fashion[ed] gravestones so that I might give the information to our State Department. Unfortunately, I lost the 3 x 5 cards and wasn't able to pass along the information. I remember that at least one of the sailors had died after falling from the mizzen mast of his ship.
Dr. Cowan uses the Lake Nicaragua shark as an example of how consensus science is often incorrect in explaining why he finds the evidence for global warming unconvincing in another essay, “Settled Science and Global Warming,” on his own Web site at http://cmcowan.net/webcam/blogs/settled_science_blog_110208.html.
8 “The Rio San Juan de Nicaragua” by R.E. Peary, “Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York,” Vol. 21, 1889.
9 “A Naturalist in Florida: A Celebration of Eden” by Archie Carr (Marjorie Harris Carr, ed.).
10 University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Animal Diversity Web page for Carcharhinus leucas at http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Carcharhinus_leucas.html.
11 In “The Status of the Freshwater Shark of Lake Nicaragua,” by Thomas B. Thorson, Donald E. Watson and C. Michael Cowan, in “Papers in the Biological Sciences: Investigations of the Icthyofauna of Nicaraguan Lakes,” University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1976 (reprinted from “Copeia,” 1966, No. 3, Sept. 7, pp. 385-402), at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ichthynicar/38.
12 Gill and Bransford’s observations and theories as summarized in Ibid.
13 “Report of the Nicaragua Canal Commission,” 1897-1899, Vol. 2 (“Appendix II—Geologic Report” by Charles Hayes). Thorson et al. noted the feedback loop involving the shark theory and the geological theory; the influence of the canal planning itself on the paradigm of both is my own insight.
14 Ibid.
15 Examples from Thorson et al., op. cit.
16 Ibid.
17 Summarized findings from Ibid; “Movement of Bull Sharks, Carcharhinus Leucas, Between Carribean [sic] Sea and Lake Nicaragua Demonstrated by Tagging,” by Thomas B. Thorson (same source as Ibid; reprinted from “Copeia,” 1971, No. 2, June 1, pp. 336-338); and “The Status of the Lake Nicaragua Shark: An Updated Appraisal,” by Thomas B. Thorson (same source as Ibid).
18 Thorson’s pre-DNA comparative anatomy IDs of shark species look positively insane by today’s standards—charts comparing measurements of eye positions, gill slit lengths and dorsal fin dimensions.
19 ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research, op. cit.
20 Ibid.
21 In “Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments, And the Proposed Interoceanic Canal,” Vol. 1, by Ephraim George Squier. Oviedo actually indicates that the “swordfish” was found along Lake Managua near Lake Nicaragua, and that the two lakes were interconnected at that time. A weak, shallow, seasonal river has been known to connect the two lakes at times, though it has recently been completely dry. The river likely was not much bigger in Oviedo’s time, but his report suggests that sawfish and perhaps sharks could pass into Lake Managua in the conquistador era. Modern local myths claim the lakes are connected by an underground river, or that the Lake Nicaragua sharks travel from the Pacific through a submarine tunnel.
Squier’s description of viewing multiple shark fins breaking the water of Lake Nicaragua became a key image in popularizing the sharks; but Thorson was of the opinion that what Squier actually saw were fins of the tarpons.
22 Personal e-mail, Dec. 23, 2009.
23 “Report of the Nicaragua Canal Commission,” op. cit.
24 For example, see www.sanjuanfishingcharter.com, Web site of the Aquaholic fishing boat charter company in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.
25 The relevant Chapter 7 posted online at http://mrwelch.pbworks.com/f/Chapter7_CentralAmerica.pdf, the Web site of social studies teacher Joe Welch, North Hills Junior High School, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
26 “Keeping an Eye on the Scams, Shams and Swindles,” by William J. Bennetta, “The Textbook Letter,” Jan.-Feb. 1999, at www.textbookleague.org/96scams.htm.
27 “Nicaragua bans freshwater shark fishing amid dwindling population numbers,” Underwatertimes.com News Service, Jan. 18, 2006, via www.UnderwaterTimes.com/news.php?article_id=05437210968.
28 Redding v. Benson (739F2d 1360), 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, via http://openjurist.org/739/f2d/1360/redding-v-benson.
29 Peary, op. cit.
30 E.g., Peary, op. cit.
31 E.g., “The Naming of America: Fragments We’ve Shored Against Ourselves,” by Jonathan Cohen, at www.fammed.sunysb.edu/surgery/america.html.
32 My own combination of various English translations; see “Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain,” Vol. 2, by Alexander von Humboldt (John Black, trans.), and “The Nicaragua Canal and the Monroe Doctrine: A Political History of Isthmus Transit, With Special Reference to the Nicaragua Canal Project and the Attitude of the United States Government Thereto,” by Lindley Miller Keasbey.
33 Keasbey, op. cit.
34 “The Inter-Oceanic Canal Across Nicaragua and Attitude Toward It of the Government of the United States,” by Thomas B. Atkins.
35 Squier, op. cit. Oviedo noted that the expedition’s captain wouldn’t tell him the secret, either.
36 “Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720” (revised ed.), by Murdo J. MacLeod.
37 “The Nicaragua Canal,” by William E. Simmons.
38 The various Indian encounters described here are from Squier, op. cit.
39 Squier, op. cit.
40 “Geometrical Landscapes: The Voyages of Discovery and the Transformation of Mathematical Practice,” in “Writing Science,” Vol. 1, by Amir R. Alexander.
41 “The Wages of Conquest: The Mexican Aristocracy in the Context of Western Aristocracies,” by Hugo G. Nutini.
42 “Five Letters, 1519-1526,” by Hernán Cortés (John Bayard Morris, trans.).
43 Alexander, op. cit.
44 In a story so insane it must be true, the conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada reportedly established the New Kingdom of Granada by bizarre Christian magical rituals: declaring his dominion on behalf of the crown by pulling up some grass, then drawing his sword and daring anyone to challenge his claim, even though he was among friends. He then established the city of Bogatá (originally Santa Fe de Bogatá) by erecting 12 huts to represent the Christian Apostles. (“Following the Conquistadores: Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdelena,” by John Augustine Zahm [a.k.a. H.J. Mozans].)
45 “American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” by Edmund Sears Morgan.
46 “Francis Drake: Lives of a Hero,” by John Cummins.
47 “Francis Drake: Privateer: Contemporary Narratives and Documents,” by John Hampden.
48 Cummins, op. cit.
49 Ibid.
50 See www.captainmorgan.com.
51 “Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, The Epic Battle for the Americas, And the Catastrophe that Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign,” by Stephan Talty.
52 Raid details from Ibid.
53 Peary, op. cit.
54 “Living in the Land of Our Ancestors: Rama Indian and Creole Territory in Caribbean Nicaragua,” by Gerald Riverstone.
55 Squier, op. cit.
56 “A History of William Paterson and the Darien Company,” by James Samuel Barbour.
57 “History of the Panama Canal: Its Construction and Builders,” by Ira Elbert Bennett.
58 Barbour, op. cit.
59 “The Nelson Touch: The Life and Legend of Horatio Nelson,” by Terry Coleman.
60 “Nelson: A Dream of Glory, 1758-1797,” by John Sugden.
61 “El Castillo Journal; A Crumbling Fort Sleeps On, Haunted by History,” by Stephen Kinzer, New York Times, May 23, 1988, via www.nytimes.com/1988/05/23/world/el-castillo-journal-a-crumbling-fort-sleeps-on-haunted-by-history.html.
62 Keasbey, op. cit.
63 Remaining quotes and narrative on Nelson’s raid from Cummins, op. cit.
64 “Ship Canal Through Central America,” Niles Weekly Register, No. 10, Vol. IV, May 7, 1825.
65 For Von Humboldt, see Keasbey, op. cit. For Geothe, see “The Key of the Pacific: The Nicaragua Canal,” by Archibald Ross Colquhoun.
66 Keasbey, op. cit.
67 Ibid.
68 “Tycoon’s War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America’s Most Famous Military Adventurer,” by Stephen Dando-Collins.
69 “Cornelius Vanderbilt: Portrait, Character and Biography” in “The Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated,” Vols. 43-44, March 1866, S.R. Wells, ed.
70 The bulk of the following information about Vanderbilt’s enterprise is from: “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” by T.J. Stiles; and Dando-Collins, op. cit.
71 Dando-Collins, op. cit.
72 “Your Money or Your Line,” New York Times, March 9, 1859, via http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D02E1DB1E31EE34BC4153DFB4668382649FDE. The “robber baron” origin first noted by Stiles, op. cit.
73 Stiles, op. cit. One way Vanderbilt sabotaged the company was by making ships from New York stop in Panama before heading back to Greytown, adding days to the trip.
74 “The War in Nicaragua,” by William Walker. It is the primary source for most of the details in this section. It is also a masterpiece of psychopathological literature, starting out sinister and ending up berserk.
75 “The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.”
76 The Cocos Islands are in Australia. Walker probably actually meant Cocos Island off Costa Rica, which is famed for its several legends of buried treasure.
77 Keasbey, op. cit.
78 At www.tennessee.gov/tsla/exhibits/walker/index.htm.
79 See “Vermont in the Civil War” Web site at http://vermontcivilwar.org/csa/tucker.php.
80 See Kansas State Historical Society Web site at www.kshs.org/cool3/titussword.htm.
81 Stiles, op. cit.
82 Keasbey, op. cit.
83 “The Atlantic & Pacific Ship-Railway Across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, In Mexico, Considered Commercially, Politically & Constructively,” by Elmer L. Corthell.
84 Keasbey, op. cit.
85 Thorson, “The Status of the Lake Nicaragua Shark: An Updated Appraisal,” op. cit.
86 “Canal Dreams Past and Present,” by Tim Coone, in “Moon Nicaragua,” by Joshua Berman and Randall Wood. The book identifies Coone as a journalist but does not mention that he is founder of one of Nicaragua’s top canal companies.
87 “Rival to Panama Canal Planned,” by Hector Tobar and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2006, via http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/30/business/fi-canal30. The Nicaraguan government did not respond to my request for an update on this canal plan.
88 Personal e-mail, Dec. 23, 2009.
89 “Walker” (1987), DVD, Criterion Collection, via Netflix.
Significant sources not cited in the text or footnotes include: “$20bn and 10 years to build—a giant rival for Panama Canal,” by John Vidal, Guardian (UK), Oct. 4, 2006, at www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/oct/04/water.conservationandendangeredspecies; “Admiral Sir Henry Morgan: King of the Buccaneers,” by Terry Breverton; “American Is Captured After Plane Is Downed in Nicaragua Territory,” by Richard Halloran, New York Times, Oct. 8, 1986; “A Brief Commercial Geography of Nicaragua,” by Edward Neville Vose, “Dun’s Review,” Vo. 23, No. 1, March 1914; “Bull Sharks Upriver,” National Geographic video short on Bay of Bengal sharks, posted May 18, 2007 on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_x8oRSVfCQ&feature=fvw; “Columbia Encyclopedia” (fifth ed.), Barbara A. Chernow and George A. Vallasi, eds.; “Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, And the Fall of Old Mexico,” by Hugh Thomas; “An ‘Eco-Canal’ across Nicaragua,” by Néfer Muñoz (undated; apparently 2001), Tierramérica Web site at www.tierramerica.net/2001/0506/iacentos.shtml; “EcoCanal and the San Juan River in Nicaragua,” presentation by Gabriel Pasos, World Water Forum, Japan, March 16-23, 2003, at Web site of Foundation for Riverfront Improvement and Restoration (Tokyo, Japan), www.rfc.or.jp/IWT/iwtrkp/www/htdocs/knowledge_data/session5/Gabriel_Pasos.pdf; ENCO Centroamérica energy company Web site at www.encocentam.com; “Explaining the Reagan Years in Central America: A World System Perspective,” by Jeremy B. Brown; “Filibustering,” (anonymous), “Putnam’s Monthly,” Vol. 9, March 1857; Global Security Web site article on Panama Canal references including citation of Ecocanal, www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/panama-canal-refs.htm; “Henry L. Stimson’s American Policy in Nicaragua,” by Henry Lewis Stimson (1991 ed. Including U.S. State Department report “The United States and Nicaragua: A Survey of Relations from 1909 to 1932); “Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas,” by David Ewing Duncan; “The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, And ‘Discovery’ in the Southeast,” by Patricia Kay Galloway; “Hollywood Invades Nicaragua,” by Louis Mathews, “Mother Jones,” Dec. 1987; “Integrating a Research Station into Community Development and Area Protection in Nicaragua,” by Hans G. Schabel, in “Sustainable Forests: Global Challenges and Local Solutions,” by O. Thomas Bouman and David George Brand, eds.; “The Isthmian Canal from the Beginning,” by Charles Morris, “Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine,” Vol. 69, Jan.-June. 1902; “Living and Investing in the New Nicaragua,” by Christopher Howard and Tim Rogers; “Message to the Senate Transmitting the Convention Terminating the Nicaragua Canal Treaty of 1914,” President Richard Nixon document, Sept. 23, 1970, at American Presidency Project of University of California Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2667; “The Nicaragua Canal,” by Lindley M. Keasbey, in “Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,” Vol. VII, Jan.-June 1896; “Nicaragua Canal and Economic Development,” by Emory R. Johnson, in “Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,” Vol. VII, Jan.-June 1896; “Nicaragua: Shot Out of the Sky,” by Michael S. Serrill, “Time,” Oct. 20, 1986, via www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1075209-4,00.html; “Old Panama and Castillo del Oro,” by Charles Loftus Grant Anderson; “Panama and the Canal,” by Alfred Bates Hall and Clarence Lyon Chester; “Pesces de las aguas continentals de Costa Rica,” by William A. Bussing; “Pirates of the Pacific, 1575-1742,” by Peter Gerhard; “The Pirates’ Who’s Who: Giving Particulars of the Lives & Deaths of the Pirates and Buccaneers,” by Philip Gosse; “Plane Supplying Contras Crashes,” by Bernard E. Trainor, New York Times, Jan. 25, 1988, at www.nytimes.com/1988/01/25/world/plane-supplying-contras-crashes-11-believed-killed-nicaragua-plane-struck.html; Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History Web page about Theodore Gill at http://vertebrates.si.edu/fishes/ichthyology_history/ichs_colls/gill_theodore.html;“The Tower Commission Report,” by John Tower, Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft; Mark Twain’s March 16, 1867 letter to the San Francisco “Alta California” about his Nicaragua travels on TwainQuotes.com at www.twainquotes.com/18670316.html; “Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987,” by Bob Woodward; “Where Is Nicaragua?” by Peter Davies; Wikipedia article on Lake Nicaragua at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_nicaragua. All books (except for Thomas B. Allen’s shark works; Woodward, “Veil”; and “Tower Commission Report”), journals, magazines and newspapers viewed via Google Books unless otherwise noted. Many thanks to Dr. Cowan for extraordinary assistance.
Photo: U.S. Marines hold up a captured Sandino guerrilla flag during invasion of Nicaragua c. 1932. (U.S. Defense Visual Information Directorate public domain photo, via Wikipedia.org)
Reports of the recently announced plans for a Nicaragua Canal to rival that of Panama are incomplete to say the least. The concept of a Nicaragua Canal has a bloody history more than 500 years old. I happen to be an expert in it, having given myself a crash course for an essay I wrote in early 2010 and republish below for current public edification.
My essay was spawned by curiosity about the sharks of the Río San Juan, the river intended as the original canal course. The current canal proposal avoids that river for different watercourses, sparing the unusual Nicaraguan sharks from a likely ecological catastrophe.
However, my chronicling of the other, human “sharks”—conquistadors, pirates, tycoons—drawn to Nicaragua by fevered canal dreams certainly still holds true. So do my observations that canals are environmental disasters, economic boons and invasion magnets. (And that most canal plans, perhaps including this one, turn out to be grandiose nonsense.)
Today’s dry news reports don’t tell you that the Nicaragua Canal concept was born of Spanish soldiers of fortune addled by religious mania. Or that it attracted a crazed American dictator bent on creating a white supremacist slavery empire in the pre-Civil War era. Or that the U.S. once invaded Nicaragua to secure canal rights, leaving a legacy of dictators and death squads.
Canals are way more than shipping news. They’re history so gory, they would give George R.R. Martin pause to recount in full detail. Dig in.
Canals of Mars: The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua and the Río San Juan
“Do sharks ever swim up rivers?” my friend asked while driving along Lake Huron.
The answer I would give today: “Yeah, but most of them come by boat.”
The answer I gave then was simply, “Yes.” Relying on a childhood fascination with wildlife lore, I recalled that the bull shark is able to leave the oceans and survive in fresh water.
Checking in with Wikipedia, I discovered that’s a bit like saying Lewis and Clark were able to leave the house and camp in the back yard. Sharks have been spotted as far up the Mississippi as St. Louis and up the Amazon to Peru.
The colonization of Lake Nicaragua in Nicaragua by bull sharks is why my monsterphiliac child brain knew about them. It was there that scientists first proved that the common freshwater sharks seen in lakes and rivers around the globe are not separate species, but rather are oceanic bull sharks that headed upstream. In Nicaragua, the sharks enter the lake by swimming 120 miles up the Río San Juan from the Caribbean Sea.
The sharks of the Río San Juan “jump along the rapids…almost like salmon,” added Wikipedia in a spectacular—and, as it turns out, characteristically incorrect—claim. But at the time, I was entranced by this extravagant image of sharks bounding their way up a jungle river like some primitive video game come to life. To me, such things are chum in the water of strange seas, and I dived right in.
Lake Nicaragua is not only an aquarium for freshwater sharks, I learned. The largest lake in Central America, it is a tropical wonderland dotted with volcano-islands. From the highest cones, one may spy the Pacific a mere dozen miles away.
And though my raging piscine obsession was already churning out clever column titles in my mind (“Jumping, The Shark”), I learned that fish are hardly the most savage predators to travel up the San Juan into Lake Nicaragua.1 Conquistadors and pirates, mercenaries and tycoons—they all followed the shark in plying the San Juan and colonizing the lake, and outdid it in consuming the inhabitants.
All of this history is essentially forgotten in the U.S. and Europe; but, like a vine-shrouded pyramid, it remains monumentally significant. Here, on the shores of Lake Nicaragua and on the waters of the San Juan, is where one of the richest cities in North America once stood; where Lord Nelson first gained fame; where the term “robber baron” was coined; where Southerners fought a prototype of the U.S. Civil War in an attempt to build a new slave empire.
And linking it all together like a trail of blood is the most monumental fact of all: the Panama Canal was originally supposed to be the Nicaragua Canal.
The idea of plowing a shipping channel across the Central American isthmus is as old as the conquistadors. Nicaragua was long seen as the ideal location. Between the Atlantic and the Pacific, there was practically a canal already: a river, a lake and under 20 miles of digging to do.
In fact, the lake-river system, which forms most of today’s border with Costa Rica, was a major trade route even without a canal. A large portion of Spain’s rich Peruvian trade ran up and down the San Juan, which in turn attracted other empires and their officially sanctioned pirates. Three centuries later, the American industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt capitalized on the California Gold Rush by running a San Juan/Lake Nicaragua steamship and stagecoach line, a business that served as a placeholder for a canal-building plan. Cursory dredging work for the Nicaragua Canal was carried out in the 19th century. Eventually, Nicaragua became the chessboard for a U.S.-British Cold War over who would control the still-imaginary canal.
Thus, when Panama won the great Central American “cut me in half—please!” race in 1914, it had as much to do with geopolitics and commercial fraud as with practicalities. Nicaragua could consider itself lucky to have lost, considering what the British later did in Suez and the Americans in “Operation Just Cause”-era Panama. Canals are invasion magnets.
But in the end, Nicaragua got the worst of both worlds. The Panama Canal not only killed the Nicaragua Canal, but also Nicaragua’s entire transcontinental trade. Nicaragua is now the second-poorest country, per capita, in the Western Hemisphere.2
At the same time, it continues to suffer the legacy of dictators and death squads—going-away presents from the Yankees’ canal-territory wars. The president of Nicaragua today is a Sandinista, the revolutionary party/army named for the guerilla who successfully battled U.S. troops and demanded an end to American canal rights. Dark history still flows from this canal that never was: a US puppet dictator allowed the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion to be launched from Nicaragua; the malevolent Iran-Contra scheme came to light when a CIA plane was shot down in the area where the San Juan meets the lake.
The Yankees went home, more or less, after the 1980s. But their canal dream lives on in Nicaragua’s slumber. There are at least two modern proposals—one from the government, one from a private company—to build the Nicaragua Canal after all. One goes by the thoughtfully non-predatory modern name of Ecocanal. Both proposals are long-stalled.
The sharks—the non-metaphorical ones, with fins and fangs—are also still there. Barely. The human variety almost killed them off for money, too.
The Sharks
Illustrating the principle of “it takes one to know one,” the first known description of the Lake Nicaraguan sharks comes from a conquistador. Writing in the mid-1500s, the Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés also mentioned the other saltwater fish that live in the lake: the sawfish and the tarpon.
These oceanic fish are just one of the features that make Lake Nicaragua a kind of Pacific in freshwater miniature. At 100 miles long and up to 45 miles wide, the huge lake is roughly the size of Washington State’s Puget Sound. The jungle islands within it are all volcanic, including the twin-cone Ometepe, a lacustrine version of Hawaii complete with a frequently erupting peak.
It’s a special place, and so the sharks were long thought to be special, too. Today, we know that bull sharks (Carharhinus leucas) inhabit rivers and lakes around the world. In fact, you are far more likely to be attacked by a shark in a river than on a seashore.
Sharks are known in Indonesia’s Lake Jamoer and Guatemala’s Lake Izabal. Their 2,000-plus-mile treks up the Amazon and the Mississippi are extreme, but their jaunts in scores of other rivers are still impressive. Sharks have been found 50 miles up the Ganges and 400 miles up the Tigris (where their presence in Baghdad is not a concern, the U.S. Army tells me).3
The tropics are favored, but northern tidal rivers are not immune. Sharks have been seen 50 miles up the Hudson in New York. A seven-footer was caught in the Delaware River in 1960. The infamous New Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916 included a boy and a man killed by a shark in a creek several miles from the sea.4
Such attacks point to the probable reason sharks go to all this travel trouble in the first place: fine dining. Bull sharks are opportunistic predators and scavengers. Freshwater rivers are typically rich in food and low in competition. Exploiting the unexploited—it’s a motivation the sharks share with their human counterparts.
Sharks do not see humans as normal prey. But they are bold and curious. Like dogs, they examine potential prey with their sensitive mouths. In a shallow river, bare-ankled humans and a shark in an exploratory mood can be a lethal combination.
Africa’s Zambezi River is home to the other well-known population of freshwater sharks, which were once thought, like those of Lake Nicaragua, to be a unique species. The Zambezi River sharks are notorious for attacks on humans and cattle.
In 1941-49, British military authorities recorded 27 shark attacks, several of them fatal, in the shallows of Iran’s Karun River. One example was the British military ambulance driver who was attacked 90 miles upriver by a shark in water “not as deep as a bathtub.”5
The literature on riparian shark attacks includes such small but ghoulish examples as the child whose hands were bitten off by a shark in an Australian river in 1934.6 But the real message to the data is that shark attacks in rivers are relatively common and probably vastly underreported, as many occur in non-industrialized countries.
Lake Nicaragua, however, is the yin to the Zambezi’s yang. The locals play up the “man-eater” legends for tourists, but reported shark attacks in the river and lake are few and unconfirmed. In researching 400 years of human adventure on the San Juan, I found only two mentions of the shark from the adventurers themselves, neither with any tone of concern.
Dr. C. Michael Cowan, who was on the team of scientists that proved the Lake Nicaragua shark is the bull shark, told me about the carefree style of living with sharks he saw during the team’s expedition to the lake and river circa 1963, a time when the shark population was still high.7
“One of the observations we made right away was that the ‘Lake Nicaragua shark’ couldn’t be as rapacious as described in the literature,” Cowan wrote in an e-mail. “The women would do their wash in waist-deep water right next to where we were fishing for sharks and the young boys would dive off the piers and swim without inhibition.”
Cowan made these observations at San Carlos, where the river begins, while the team was easily catching sharks out of the lake. It is probable that in the biologically rich lake, the sharks were far too busy with their normal prey to bother with examining the strange mammals in the water.
Similar observations had been made 70 years earlier by Robert Peary--the Robert Peary of later polar exploration fame. In the 1880s, Peary was a US Navy civil engineer in the warmer part of the world, doing surveying work for a Nicaragua canal company. He wrote that there were no authenticated reports of Nicaraguan sharks killing anyone, and that he had seen natives repeatedly “bathing in the river almost literally in the midst of several [sharks].”8
Cowan, who directly observed the sharks swimming up the San Juan’s strongest rapids, also was able to clear up that nonsense about the sharks jumping like salmon.
“In our observations there were no salmon-like jumps out of the water,” he wrote. “Maybe since then others have observed this activity but in all the years that we studied the sharks and sawfish in that drainage we never witnessed any jumping.”
No one else has, either. The only other authoritative description of the sharks’ mode of travel I could find was the late zoology professor Archie Carr’s second-hand account from a friend: “[The sharks] thrashed hard through fast patches, he said, then rested behind big rocks, then thrashed up to the next quiet place.”9
It is no surprise that the sharks do not jump like salmon, because they are not in a waterfall-laden river like salmon. The rapids of the San Juan are not cliffs, but rather are steep, rocky-bottomed shallows that low-draft boats can navigate.
But the spectacular claim of leaping salmon-sharks is taking on a small life of its own on the Web. In support of the claim, Wikipedia cites the Web site of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, which in turn cites the defunct Web site of amateur Australian scuba divers and a Web site that provides unsourced classroom materials for grade-school teachers.10 (Notably not cited are Cowan et al.’s journal articles about their discoveries, even as the museum site directly, and incorrectly, claims that the team made the original report of leaping sharks.) The only thing being jumped salmon-like here is basic academic standards of evidence.
How the sharks go up the San Juan was never really in question. Amazingly, the real controversy, lasting nearly a century, was whether the sharks go up the river at all.
Starting in the 1870s, the scientific consensus was that the Lake Nicaragua sharks were trapped there, and had been since volcanic disasters eons ago.
We all know that sharks are ocean creatures. We have all of this data about sharks swimming up rivers and living in lakes around the world. Sharks could be seen swimming in the San Juan. How could there be any doubt, any alternative theory, about how sharks got into Lake Nicaragua—let alone one that would stand as fact for 100 years?
As with most things predatory in Nicaragua, the answer ties into visions of transcontinental trade. Indeed, the proposal for a Nicaragua Canal is what made the Lake Nicaragua sharks famous.
Oviedo, the Spanish historian who first described the sharks, saw clearly where they came from. A well-traveled conquistador, he knew that sharks “often leave the sea and go up the rivers.” Other sea creatures do the same, he noted, speculating logically that the lake’s sawfish must have come up the San Juan as well.11
Oviedo had personally explored Lake Nicaragua thoroughly, and wrote at a time when Spain had a rich trade route on the river and lake (plus an overland/creek route to the Pacific). To him, the movement of sharks up the San Juan from the Atlantic would have been as evident as the Spanish merchant vessels doing the same.
But by the 1870s, political upheaval in Nicaragua had killed transcontinental traffic—even Vanderbilt moved his Gold Rush route to Panama—and the San Juan’s mouth was known to be silting up. At the same time, empires envisioned more strongly than ever a Nicaragua Canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. Inevitably, a new theory of the sharks arose that reflected—and reinforced—that vision.
The first scientific description of the Lake Nicaragua shark, published in 1877, was based on a single specimen captured by U.S. Navy surgeon John Bransford, who served on an official government Nicaragua Canal survey in 1872-73.12 In the scientific article, Bransford and the fortuitously named ichthyologist Theodore Gill obligingly gave the shark a new mythical origin in a prehistoric version of the Nicaragua Canal.
Once upon a time (the early Tertiary, to be exact), Gill and Bransford claimed, the Pacific and Atlantic were linked by an open channel in the vicinity of today’s San Juan. The Pacific coast featured a gigantic bay, in which swam sharks, sawfish and so forth. Volcanism eventually sealed off this bay, which transformed into Lakes Nicaragua and Managua, entrapping all the sea fish within. Some of the fish adapted, producing a unique freshwater shark species (Eulamia nicaraguensis).
What about the fact that a large river full of sharks flows between Lake Nicaragua and the Atlantic? No problem, said Gill and Bransford. They simply assumed that the river’s rapids cannot be passed by sharks going either direction, thus trapping the freshwater species forever in the lake/river system (and in their Pacific-origin mythos).
This concept of the Once and Future Canal so neatly matched American imperial dreams that it was taken for granted as geological fact. And the Lake Nicaragua sharks were the key. In a masterpiece of circular logic, the final report of the U.S. Nicaragua Canal Commission cited the Pacific-origin theory of the sharks as evidence of the prehistoric canal.13
Sloppy thinking plagued Gill and Bransford, too. It’s one thing to claim that river rapids might block fish from swimming upstream; but to say that a fish could not go down river rapids has to be one of the patently dumbest claims ever to be taken seriously by science.
Gill (the lead author) appears to have twisted and even altered evidence. In the 1877 article, he acknowledges that sharks and other sea fish are known to swim up freshwater rivers. Yet he presents this not as evidence for the Lake Nicaragua sharks coming from the San Juan, but rather for how they could have adapted to freshwater life in the mythical Pacific bay turned lake. Rather than sharpening his Occam’s razor, Gill patronizingly dismissed Oviedo’s clear-eyed observations about the lake sharks as quaint naivete.
Keep in mind, Gill was inferring all of this from a single, well-mutilated specimen.
Gill and Bransford did not address the glaring absence of sharks in Lake Managua, which is separated from Lake Nicaragua by only about 10 miles of land that arose in recent geologic time. If both lakes were created from an isolated bay, why don’t they both have sharks?
Strangest of all, Gill and Bransford said that the Lake Nicaragua shark is “closely related” to the sandbar shark—an Atlantic species. (Gill placed the lake shark in the now-obsolete genus Eulamia, also that of the sandbar shark.) A relationship with Atlantic sharks was not necessarily fatal to Gill and Bransford’s theory, resting as it did on a prehistoric canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific. But it is a curious thing, and one that might be expected to give the authors pause.
Gill reportedly later handled this awkward data by simply changing his story. In the U.S. Nicaragua Canal Commission report 20 years later, chief geologist Charles Hayes said that Gill had told him that “the sharks of Lake Nicaragua are specifically identical with those found in adjacent portions of the Pacific, but distinct from those found in the Caribbean.”14
Gill was one of the world’s top fish experts, resident at the Smithsonian, which may explain why his eccentric analysis of the Lake Nicaragua shark was so easily accepted. While he did little field work (clearly part of the problem here), Gill was no fool; his tortuous attempts to make facts fit his theory in this case may be a chronic case of American canal fever.
Certainly, they are part of canal history. Immortalized in U.S. Nicaragua Canal Commission reports, the concept of a unique, landlocked shark in an exotic lake entered the public consciousness and scientific dogma.
Despite its flawed logic and non-representative sample, Gill and Bransford’s 1877 report proved remarkably resilient. It would be 70 years before serious doubts began appearing in the scientific literature.
Even then, there was no real field work. But the few preserved specimens in museums showed morphological similarities with Atlantic sharks, several experts argued. There was an anecdotal report of a shark found upriver in the San Juan with remoras—symbiotic ocean fish—still attached to it. Someone pointed out that the lake’s tarpon are native to the Atlantic and do not exist in the Pacific.15
Meanwhile, geologists dealt the fatal blow—the whole concept of a prehistoric canal and volcanic enclosure of a bay was hogwash.
Forced to acknowledge that the Lake Nicaragua sharks indeed came up the San Juan from the Caribbean, some experts continued to claim they were nonetheless a unique and/or landlocked species. Among them was Archie Carr, who proposed that the river was navigable until the 1600s, when earthquakes uplifted the rapids.16
Like Gill in his Smithsonian tower, these experts were largely engaged in armchair science. It fell to the late Dr. Thomas Thorson, a zoologist at the University of Nebraska, to actually go and dip his toe in the water.
Thorson and his research team (including Cowan at times) went to Nicaragua in the 1960s. They caught sharks. They electronically tagged sharks. They boated down the San Juan.17
They definitively identified the Lake Nicaragua shark as the bull shark, which lives in all of the world’s warm oceans. They watched the bull sharks swimming upstream in the supposedly impassable San Juan rapids. (No surprise, as the river has always been navigable, though never easily; just 20 years before Gill and Bransford’s report, Vanderbilt powered a full-size steamship up the very rapids that supposedly blocked the sharks.)
The tagging showed that the sharks come from the Atlantic. The highest population density was at the river’s mouth, with only a small percentage of sharks venturing upriver. Those that did enter the system swam both up and down the river, as well as on its various tributaries. Some traversed the entire length of the river in as little as two days.
Illuminating as it was, this should not be taken as a pat story of Thorson’s good triumphing over Gill and Bransford’s evil. Like all good science, Thorson’s studies raised many new questions. But lake/river shark science has frozen at Thorson much the way it once did at Gill and Bransford.
Perhaps Thorson’s most intriguing discovery was that, while the sharks are not landlocked by nature, they may be by choice. The electronic tags showed that sharks that enter the river system tend to stay in it, with no signs of returning to the ocean. Thorson raised the question of whether the river/lake sharks are becoming an “accessory population” isolated from the main species. That’s a far cry from a unique species, but it’s an avenue worth exploring, especially considering that Thorson’s research happened before the DNA analysis era.18 (Other research has found that bull sharks breed only in salt water.) At the very least, new tagging projects could reveal much more about the sharks’ habits.
Thanks to Thorson, any shark that appears in a river worldwide is automatically identified as a bull shark—exactly the sort of kneejerk assumption his field work opposed. This is often done without any preserved specimens. For example, the shark found in the Peruvian Amazon is considered a bull shark, but its remains were never scientifically examined.
The bull shark is a pretty good bet in such cases. It is well-documented in rivers, and its ability to live in fresh water is unusual among sea fishes. (The downside for the shark is that, to prevent osmotic loss of body salts in fresh water, it has to urinate more than 20 times the normal amount.19 One of Lake Nicaragua’s many roles is as a shark toilet bowl.) But many sharks have at least some freshwater tolerance, and sharks in general are still poorly understood.
The ultimate example is the “true river sharks” of the genus Glyphis, a rare type that lives in rivers, sometimes alongside bull sharks (as in the Ganges). Glyphis sharks appear to be reclusive bottom-dwellers. (The Ganges species has eyes oriented to look upward.) But they can be as large as bull sharks, and are virtually unknown to science, with only a handful of specimens in existence. Their role, if any, in attacking humans is a mystery. Clearly, Glyphis is a new frontier of river/lake shark studies.20
Meanwhile, Thorson gave us some great information. We should at least get it right. Yet I found some blatant myths circulating already. One of the most common errors is a claim that Lake Nicaragua has the world’s only freshwater sharks.
“…I see a lot of myths out there about Lake Nicaragua and the sharks,” Cowan told me. “Some of these were even on the National Geographic Channel (they really should do more homework).”
I found a lot of myths about human history on the lake as well. Bald errors seemed unusually common in history books on Nicaragua. I think this tells us something about our view of a remote, exotic place where the sharks excite us more than the people do, and where the people are generally too poor to speak up for themselves. Getting things right seems to be less important than maintaining our fantasies.
Not that the locals are above spreading myths themselves. Nicaraguan Web sites are a main source of another legend: that Lake Nicaragua sharks are accompanied by Lake Nicaragua swordfish.
The phantom swordfish comes from our old friend Oviedo (or at least from an English translation of him) and a simple slip of the pen. He says somebody once found a swordfish on the lakeshore. But the description he gives is clearly of a sawfish: “a bone armed on both sides with sharp points, placed in the extremity of its jaw.”21
Sawfish and swordfish both have long rostra, or snouts. As the names imply, the sawfish’s rostrum is studded with tooth-like points, and the swordfish’s rostrum is smooth and pointed. There are no substantiated references to swordfish in the lake. Sawfish, as mentioned, are well-known residents of Lake Nicaragua (and have been known to battle the sharks).
Dr. Harry Fierstine, a professor emeritus at California Polytechnic State University and an expert in swordfish, agreed that the Lake Nicaragua swordfish is a case of mistaken identity.22
“There have been only one or two reports of swordfishes in fresh water and they were near river mouths,” Fierstine wrote in an e-mail to me. “A sawfish was probably mistaken for a swordfish.”
Notably, many of the Web sites that reference a Lake Nicaragua swordfish do not mention the sawfish.
But Oviedo’s typo was taken as gospel by the U.S. Nicaragua Canal Commission, whose report described the lake’s swordfish as “well known.”23 The report surely spread the myth.
Swordfish and the similarly long-beaked marlin are often fished on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast.24 With the lake only 12 miles from the Pacific, it is possible that ocean-caught swordfish being transported into lake towns perpetuate the legend.
The most egregious form of the swordfish myth is found in “Geography: The World and Its People,” a U.S. textbook published by Glencoe/McGraw-Hill and branded with the National Geographic Society’s imprimatur.25 The book includes a tightly cropped photo of a boy carrying a dead swordfish along a beach. The caption identifies him as one Amadeo Robelo of Granada, Nicaragua, and claims he just caught the swordfish in Lake Nicaragua.
But the photo is uncredited, the beach looks like a seashore, and the caption also repeats the myth that Lake Nicaragua holds the world’s only freshwater sharks. Previous editions of the textbook were criticized by the watchdog group the Textbook League as full of myths and for having an unclear marketing relationship with the National Geographic Society.26 The Society did not respond to my requests for the source of their photo and caption, and Glencoe/McGraw-Hill said the textbook editor was not immediately available.
Good, bad or plain untrue, science about the Lake Nicaragua sharks may become truly academic. A boom in commercial fishing was already slashing the shark population in Thorson’s time. By 2006, overfishing was so dire that Nicaragua declared a ban on fishing for sharks and sawfish on the lake and the river.27 As usual, the “man-eater” was actually being eaten by man.
Thorson traveled thousands of miles to the jungles to see his predators. But, according to a bizarre court case that popped up in my own research, he also encountered sharks much closer to home.28
In 1981, a Thomas B. Thorson of Lincoln, Nebraska, was sucked into an elaborate scam by a trio of con artists. Asked to provide directions to a boarding house, Thorson soon found himself regaled with the claim that one of the scammers had $37,000 in cash in his pocket from an insurance settlement. Another scammer then showed Thorson how to play the classic con game three-card monte, and suggested that it be used to con the first scammer out of his money—“not to actually take his money, but to ‘teach’ him how foolish it was to carry so much cash.”
“Thorson apparently realized that he was the intended victim of a confidence game,” recounted a later court decision, “but decided to play along until he could contact police.”
The chance to contact police did not come until after Thorson had bet his wallet, watch and ring on three-card monte; traveled to a bank with the scammers to get $15,000 in certificates of deposit to back more bets; and gone back into the bank to borrow $12,000 in cash to put in the pot. Thorson finally was able to phone police, and bagged another species of shark.
Homegrown predation leads us to our next set of Nicaraguan sharks. From their European dreamworld of medieval violence, the conquistadors launched a ruthless Crusade in the New World—and invented the idea of the Nicaragua Canal.
The Conquistadors
The explorer Peary once noted that Nicaragua canal lust was so strong that after nearly 400 years, Europeans had charted little of the country beyond the San Juan’s banks. Meanwhile, he wrote, the river had been through “every vicissitude of despotism[,] intrigue and perverted judgment.”29 As with so many American troubles, it all began with Columbus.
Sailing from Spain in 1492 to find a shortcut to the Indies, Columbus found a New World instead. That included Nicaragua, whose Atlantic coast Columbus first spotted on his final voyage in 1502. Stopping at a river mouth somewhere on that shore, Columbus lost a boatload of men, leading him to dub the waterway the Río del Desastre.30 Some sources equate it with the Río San Juan, which, if true, makes Columbus’s name a commemoration for his men and a prophecy for everyone else. (A minority theory holds that the name “America” itself came from Nicaragua after Columbus or another explorer somehow heard of the country’s minor Amerrique [more commonly, Amerrisque] Mountains.31)
While the Spanish conquistadors who followed Columbus famously turned the New World into a cash cow, they continued to crave that shortcut to what now had to be called the East Indies. Their mania to find a Northwest Passage (which now exists, thanks to polar icemelt) is well-known thanks to self-centered U.S. history textbooks. But the conquistadors were even more interested in a kind of Southwest Passage across Mexico or Central America. As the conquistador Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, once ingratiatingly wrote to the Spanish king, such a transcontinental waterway would “render your majesty master of so many kingdoms that you will be considered as lord of the world.”32
Indeed, the conquistadors quested at least as much for this dream passage as for legendary cities of gold. And when those cities of gold were found in Peru, that only sharply increased the need for a rapid trade route across the Central American isthmus.
Nicaragua was “discovered” during just such a waterway quest. And it was there that the conquistadors, those masters of slicing and stabbing through things, apparently first conceived of a Central American canal.
The entire competitive history of the Panama and Nicaragua Canals is foreshadowed in these beginnings. In 1522, 20 years after Columbus’s last voyage, the colony of Panama had already sprung up around a rudimentary, overland/river transcontinental trade route. (Indeed, the route was the site of the the first European settlements on the New World’s Pacific coast.) That year, a new army of conquistadors set out northward in the hopes of finding a waterway to put Panama out of business.
The soldiers of Gil González Dávila (or de Ávila) were the first Europeans to lay eyes on what must have been the astonishing sight of Lake Nicaragua. The very name they gave the country shows the significance of water to the Spanish; it combines “Nicarao,” a local chieftain’s name, and agua, Spanish for “water.” (This makes the name “Lake Nicaragua” a redundancy.) Indeed, the country likely was named for the lake, not the other way around. Such a huge body of water so close to the Pacific naturally raised hopes that a transcontinental waterway could be found there.
Still, it took nearly 20 years for the conquistadors to find and fully explore the San Juan (or as they first simply called it, El Desaguedero—The Drain), due to local conflicts and the river’s tough rapids. Reversing the course of Nicaragua’s original sharks, the new Spanish species started in the lake and moved downriver.
The conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba founded the key lakeside city of Granada—which still stands today—in 1524. Sometime thereafter, he had a ship disassembled on the Pacific coast, hauled overland, and rebuilt in the lake so that his men could explore with it. They found the San Juan, but could not navigate it very far. Only in 1539 did the Spanish finally boat downriver all the way to the Atlantic. The coast remained an area of Nicaragua they would never dominate.
But as early as 1530, there was already talk of canal-building on the still unexplored river. The first proposal was for a series of short canals to bypass the rapids. After the conquest of Peru in 1532, a veritable canalomania gripped the New World. Every Central American colony vied for transcontinental trade rights, each pitching a wildly rosy description of their terrain and accoutrements to the crown.
The contenders were routes across Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and Mexico. Soon, full-blown canals were proposed for all of these routes—proposals that would survive essentially unchanged into the 20th century (and in the case of Nicaragua, well beyond).
In questing for the Southwest Passage, the conquistadors sometimes said that the benevolent Christian god must have created such a convenient channel somewhere. But with the backlog of Peruvian gold on the Pacific, the Spanish government sagely considered that perhaps humans should create what Providence failed to provide. Though almost certainly impossible with engineering technology of the time, the canal idea was taken very seriously by the crown.
The first survey for a Panama Canal was performed in 1536. The original Nicaragua Canal survey followed in 1561. As it would be for the next three centuries, Nicaragua was generally favored; it was the longest route, but almost entirely consisting of a fantastic lake and a large river. Canal-diggers are plastic surgeons on the face of a nation, and Nicaragua gave them a lot to work with.
“The” Nicaragua Canal actually was to be two canals—a dredging/canal project on the river, and a full canal between the lake and the Pacific. Or even three canals—some models, then and now, call for routing traffic from Lake Nicaragua into Lake Managua via yet another new channel before heading west.
Obviously, Spain never built a canal, for the same reason it let insane soldiers of fortune pillage entire continents in the first place: the country was broke. Impossible and infeasible, the conquistador canal was nonetheless popular. National pride and mercantile profit were at stake. Diplomatically announcing an end to canal-planning, Spain’s King Philip II took refuge in a newly fundamentalist theology: If there is no natural transcontinental waterway, it would be an affront to God to cut His continent in half.33
Philip’s actual pragmatic reasoning found the canal costs daunting not merely for construction, but also for defense. He presciently saw that such a canal, with its immeasurable commercial value, would draw instant invasions from other empires—particularly those he was already at war with in Europe. Spain could easily lose such a canal, and its entire cash flow.
In fact, this was already a major fear behind the quest for a Southwest Passage. Had the conquistadors ever found a natural transcontinental waterway, Spain intended to keep it secret. In a letter to Cortés, Emperor Charles V urged the conquistador to find “el secreto del estrecho”—“the secret of the strait.”34 The phrase held double meaning: a command to discover a waterway whose location was, like El Dorado, a “secret” presumably known to Indians, and a reminder to keep it a secret—a Spanish secret—once it was found.
Nicaragua gives us a vivid illustration of just how valuable such a secret was. The first Spanish explorers to boat all the way down the San Juan, finding themselves in the Caribbean, sailed for Nombre de Dios, the town with the impossible-to-live-up-to name that sat on the Atlantic end of the Panamanian trade route. There, the historian Oviedo tells us, the explorers were “held prisoner” by one Doctor (i.e., a lawyer) Robles. The doctor intended to squeeze them for the secreto location of the San Juan’s mouth, “because he himself wished to found a colony at the outlet of these lakes, and thus profit by the labor of another, as is the custom with these men of letters, for the use that they make of their wisdom is rather to rob than to render justice….” The explorers refused to spill the beans, Oviedo assures us, and Robles got a kidnapping rap.35
It was pretty ridiculous of the Spanish to imagine that a historic discovery of a transcontinental waterway could be kept as a trade secret. But building a Seven Wonders of the World-style canal would be no secret at all, and surely attract invaders (both foreign and domestic) before it was even finished.
Without canals, transcontinental trade remained rough but extremely profitable. Panama, closest to Peru and boasting the shortest route, became a mini-empire. But Nicaragua, with fewer pirates and epidemics, did very well as a heavily used alternate. Trade on the San Juan could be a brutal slog lasting as long as two months, especially when big loads on 120-ton ships had to be unladed and carried around the rapids. But there was more than enough business to go around. Nicaragua also profited handsomely (and much more easily) from homegrown exports to Peru, such as horses that were raised on the expansive conquistador ranches. (Later, the route may even have functioned as a true Southwest Passage to the East Indies, carrying smuggled Asian trade goods.36)
Granada quickly became one of the richest cities on the continent, a status it probably held for over a century, well into the era of Britain’s North American colonies. It erected cathedrals and minted its own coins.
All of this is a nice way of saying that Nicaragua was built, as one writer put it, as “an everlasting monument to atrocity.”37 The deeds reflected in the bloody waters of Lake Nicaragua are a microcosm of the conquistador lifestyle.
Dávila introduced himself to the natives with the customary greeting: a demand to turn Christian and bow to the king of Spain or die.38 One Indian chieftain, known as Diriangan, asked for three days to mull over this Christianity thing, then wisely used to the time to amass a conquistador-slaying army. Dávila’s men survived only thanks to the terror they were able to inspire with an unfamiliar European beast: the horse. (Another object of native fascination and terror was the Spaniards’ beards. That led Dávila to outfit his less hairy troops with fake beards made of their own hair clippings. This must be considered the most serious version of trick-or-treat in history.)
You will notice that the country is not named Dirianganagua. That is because Dávila found the chieftain Nicarao (the Spanish version of the lost actual name) more amenable to the offer he couldn’t refuse. Nicarao was a powerful leader in the area of modern Rivas, between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific in the vicinity of future trade routes and canal schemes.
Nicarao had many questions for the Spanish, which may have been shrewd but were more likely awestruck, and thus ring with poignancy. Cosmology was a big topic, as might be expected from a meeting with angels or devils; Nicarao asked why the stars move, and what causes the wind and day and night.
He also asked the biggest question of all: “[W]hy so few men coveted so much gold.”39
What answers Nicarao got, and what became of him, is unknown. Crystal clear, however, is the perpetual violence that defined the Spanish-indigenous relationship from start to finish. Dávila’s obnoxious invasion was driven out by hostile tribes, but the Spanish in general were not to be denied. In western Nicaragua, they killed all Indians who opposed them and enslaved the rest. Technically, slavery was illegal and this servitude was considered a benign form of medieval serfdom on conquistador haciendas. No one asked the Indians what they thought of such fine distinctions. (It is known that Dávila himself was a critic of the serfdom’s fatal outcomes, but the slavery ban was freely ignored by other conquistadors on multiple occasions.)
Hernando de Soto, later second-in-command in the conquest of Peru and the infamously brutal explorer of what is now the southern U.S., cut his teeth in Nicaragua at this time. He was on the crew that first sailed Lake Nicaragua and discovered the San Juan. Like Peary four centuries later, De Soto found Nicaragua a nightclub-act warm-up for his later explorations.
In eastern Nicaragua and the Mosquito Coast, the Indians remained unconquered enemies to the day Spain left the country. The conquistadors were never able to penetrate the area, except for the occasional slaving run and the trade literally on the San Juan. The Indians prevented exploration of the river for several years until new conquistador commanders agreed to halt the slave-catching.
It is no surprise that the conquistadors viewed the Indians as serfs. More illuminating to their character is how they viewed each other: much like rival Mafia bosses.
Immediately after Dávila “discovered”—and thus laid claim to—Nicaragua, the governor of Panama, Pedrarias Dávila (no relation), sent Córdoba to colonize it on behalf of his own mini-kingdom. Outraged, Gil González Dávila headed back to raid the new Spanish towns. The conquistador city of Granada was fortified with a wall to protect it from conquistadors.
Meanwhile, one Cristóbal de Olid, who conquered Honduras on behalf of Cortés, decided it was the perfect time for a rebellion. He declared himself ruler of a newer New World empire that was seceding from Spain and intent on spreading all the way to Peru.
All of these oddballs, and more, converged and battled in Honduras and northern Nicaragua. Thus, before there really was a Nicaragua, there was a conquistador civil war over it. Olid ended up assassinated; Córdoba was beheaded; Gil González Dávila went home empty-handed; and Pedrarias, a notorious murderer and slavemaster, got a golden-parachute demotion to the governorship of Nicaragua. Cortés, who had arrived belatedly in Honduras to sort out the mess personally, began plotting an invasion of Nicaragua in search of that estrecho secreto. Only new troubles in Mexico prevented him from kick-starting the mess all over again.
Destruction and construction are the units by which conquistadors are measured. Nicaragua is a solid yardstick for each of these characters’ varying amounts of morality, brutality and creativity. But on a deeper, nearly intangible level, Nicaragua also symbolizes the peculiar dark psychosis shared by all conquistadors.
“Conquistador” (“conqueror”) is a word that became (in)famous in the New World, but it is not a New World term. The original conquistadors were domestic soldiers fighting in Spain’s Reconquista—a literal, official Crusade to drive the Muslim Moors out of Iberia.40 By no coincidence at all, that 800-year war was finally won in 1492—the very year of Columbus’s first voyage.
Winning a Crusade put Spain into a spiritual euphoria of a darkly medieval character. The government’s idea of celebrating was the expulsion of all Jews from Spain and the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition. The Reconquista instantly became the stuff of sword-and-sorcery adventure tales (just as the Inquisition later would become the stuff of Gothic horror tales).
War left Spain spiritually high, but financially low—which is why the crown chose to gamble on Columbus’s shortcut-to-the-Indies venture after years of dismissing it on account of inherent wackiness. Meanwhile, an entire caste of warriors was left jobless. The first conquistadors—including the first conquistador, Juan Ponce de León—were Reconquista veterans. They were the models for all of the New World soldiers of fortune to come. (All conquistadors were private mercenaries serving commercial corporations; there was no such thing as a professional national army at the time, and the impoverished crown merely authorized expeditions rather than funding them.41)
This culturally toxic mix of nationalist/religious triumphalism, unemployed mercenaries and gold-hunger made it the best possible time for the Spanish to discover a New World—and the worst possible time for those already there.
Whether they actually fought in the Reconquista or were only regaled with its tales, the conquistadors viewed the New World and their role in it through Reconquista legends. Its influence is obvious everywhere from the mania for forced Christian conversion to the imposition of medieval serfdom on the Indians. Cortés described the Aztec civilization he conquered in terms of the vanquished Spanish Muslims, calling the pyramid-temples “mosques” and likening the local’s clothing to that of the Moors.42
The conquistadors’ self-image combined two common motifs: the holy Crusader and the Arthurian questing knight. They were living out, and enlarging upon, the adventure fiction of the era. The proximity of reality and fantasy was sometimes striking. Oviedo, the pro-conquistador historian and expert on the Lake Nicaragua sharks, also wrote the New World’s first novel: an adventure tale about a knight-errant. “Don Claribalte,” published in 1519, actually preceded his New World non-fiction; the legend came first. Oviedo “was at once an eyewitness to the exploration and conquest of a new world and the author of a romance of heroic chivalric wanderings.”43 He also had witnessed the final battle of the Reconquista.
That final battle was a siege of the last Muslim stronghold in Spain: Granada. In giving that name to his city on Lake Nicaragua, Córdoba was not merely self-diagnosing some homesickness. The conquest of Nicaragua was another chapter of the Reconquista, the battle of good versus evil, the triumphant expansion of a nation favored by God. (The name loomed even larger in South America, where an empire based in modern Colombia was named New Granada; Panama was officially part of it.44) The conquistadors would give way to bureaucrats and aristocrats, but this legend of manifest destiny would live on in every empire that drooled over a Nicaragua Canal, as durable as the lake city’s name.
The founder of Granada is now an eponym himself. In symbolism he surely would appreciate, the Nicaraguan unit of money is called the córdoba.
The Pirates
Like the trail of waves behind a surface-breaking dorsal fin, pirates followed the conquistador treasure fleets everywhere—including right up the San Juan and into the lake, where buccaneers sacked Granada at least three times. Their increasingly bold depredations throughout the 1600s drew imperial attention to transcontinental trade routes and eventually revived the very idea of a Central American canal.
The conquistadors had been right to worry about other countries coveting their semi-secret trade routes. The English, French and Dutch pirates of the Caribbean were at least tolerated, and often directly commissioned, by their homelands as a form of economic warfare against imperial Spain. The various English terms—“pirates,” “privateers,” “buccaneers,” “freebooters” and so on—reflect some of the official distinctions; but, like the proverbial Eskimo words for “snow,” the real message of the synonym glut is the culture’s intense involvement with piracy. The seamy pirate towns of the anarchic Mosquito Coast would become the basis for Britain’s territorial claims 200 years later in a dispute over Nicaragua Canal rights.
Sir Francis Drake, the pet pirate of Queen Elizabeth I, pioneered these transcontinental assaults, as he did so many other anti-Spanish tactics. An explorer and gold-snatcher who got his start by selling slaves illicitly to residents of the Spanish Main, Drake was pretty conquistador-like himself.45 Sharks swim with sharks—in this case, to Panama, where in 1572-73, Drake spectacularly seized control of Nombre de Dios and raided the Spanish trade route.
Drake stole so much gold and silver on this raid that he literally couldn’t carry it all, reputedly hiding a huge cache of silver on a beach, thus inventing the trope of pirates’ buried treasure.46 At the invitation of Indians, Drake and his men climbed a tall tree outfitted with steps and became the first Englishmen to view the Pacific.47 Indeed, they see could both oceans at the same time across the isthmus—a portentous vision we might call “canal gaze.” Its preservation in Drake’s legend indicates how strongly it spoke to an England awakened to the value of transcontinental traffic.
Drake never raided the Nicaragua route, but not for lack of plotting; in fact, he may have been heading to the Río San Juan when he died. In 1596, his fleet limping from a failed assault on Puerto Rico, Drake tried to get back to his glory days by again raiding Panama. Repelled there as well, Drake apparently fell into depression. Thomas Baskerville, his second-in-command, at some point thrust out a map depicting Lake Nicaragua and Granada, as well as a Honduran bay, and demanded that Drake pick one as a location for the pirate army’s next raid. Drake apathetically indicated both.48
The fleet got under way in that general direction. A later Spanish report based on information from English prisoners said that Drake’s men were headed about 140 miles away to a river “from where they thought there was a channel to the South Sea.”49 The San Juan fits that bill.
But Drake fell nastily ill with dysentery, leaving him with a fatally not-so-golden hind. The fleet returned to Panama, where Drake died and was buried at sea very near the transcontinental route he craved.
Emulating Drake’s terrestrial pillaging, other pirates were raiding inland Nicaragua by 1643. The details of these raids are lost to history, but apparently they were not enough to convince the Spanish to fortify the San Juan. Granada was ripe for the taking when, in 1665, its first recorded sacking was carried out by Henry Morgan.
Morgan, a Welshman, was such a good marauder that he eventually turned pro, getting knighted and made lieutenant governor of the pirate island of Jamaica. (Like Córdoba, he also has an apt modern namesake: Captain Morgan rum.50) Morgan’s innovative attack on Granada was the prototype for his better-known 1671 sacking of Panama, the Drake-ian adventure that made him famous.
The Nicaragua raid came at the end of a two-year expedition that started in Mexico, where Morgan hit upon a valuable lesson in piracy: If it was good enough for the conquistadors, it’s good enough for the pirates. He found success in Mexico by at least partly following Cortés’ original path of pillage.51 Finding himself at the mouth of the San Juan, Morgan decided to do the same there. He would go right up the Spaniards’ own trade route and seize Granada.
Morgan quickly gained nine Indian guides for his assault. Pirates had long found it easy to ally with the Spanish-loathing locals throughout the New World; indeed, Morgan may have learned of Lake Nicaragua and Granada from the Indians. Morgan went further and adopted their tactics as well. Rather than attempt to sail a pirate fleet up the rapids-filled river, he would sneak up it by canoe and take Granada in a guerilla assault.
Morgan’s 100-man pirate crew paddled by night, slept in the jungle overgrowth by day, and carried their canoes around the San Juan rapids. Finally gaining the lake, they were astonished at the paradisiacal scene of fish-filled waters and shores rich with livestock and orchards. The Indian guides then led the pirates on a five-day journey across the lake, once again paddling by night and sleeping by day hidden among the many islands.
Granada’s population was perhaps 3,500, with a military garrison that outnumbered the pirates probably by more than 5 to 1. No problem for Morgan’s army, which simply walked into the unsuspecting city in the middle of the night and seized the arsenal. And the numbers were soon on Morgan’s side: a thousand indigenous serfs immediately rebelled and joined the pirates in sacking the city. (Perhaps the Indians did get a chance to tell us what they thought of Spain’s New World neo-feudalism after all.) It is said that this slave rebellion would have led to a massacre had Morgan not politely reminded the serfs that he was there to plunder, not to colonize, and that the Spanish forces could return with vengeance in mind. He and his men left, apparently the way they came, carrying a huge amount of gold, silver and trade goods. Morgan arrived in Jamaica smug and wealthy, wearing a fine jerkin, breeches and stockings he had stolen in Granada.52
A pirate-canoe night attack on a tropical lake was electrifying stuff. The Spanish soon built forts at San Carlos and on the river’s worst rapids, still known as El Castillo after the now-ruined fortress. There are legends that the Spanish also blasted the rapids, or dumped rocks into them, to make them worse.53 That can’t be true, as it would only hinder their own trading vessels, not pirate canoes; but the fiction tells us something about the reality of their concern. Meanwhile, on the other side of the river, the governor of what is today Costa Rica ordered the forced migration of Indians from the coast in 1666 to prevent their allying with pirates.54
Morgan’s genius for commando tactics and his targeting of Nicaragua were also an inspiration to fellow pirates. Unfortunately for them, they had his tactics, but not his genius. Morgan was not the first pirate to raid by canoe, but he was likely the wiliest and luckiest.
In 1670, three English pirate captains duplicated Morgan’s raid up the San Juan, almost certainly also by canoe. They were able to invade Granada, but found there was little left to sack. Perhaps the city was still recovering from Morgan’s binge.
In 1686, a 350-man coalition of English and French pirates took the original conquistador route into Nicaragua, hiking from the Pacific to Granada. Unlike Morgan, they were spotted on the way in, and their raid collapsed into a chaos of arson and bloodshed. The Spanish were waiting for them with blazing cannon. Worse yet, the Spanish hauled the city’s best treasures out to an island on the lake.
Catching on to the timing of cannon blasts, the pirates were able to duck from the worst of the fire (though the Spanish began using blanks to fool them).55 In a desperate battle, the pirates managed to seize the city. The French pirates initially sang a thankful “Te Deum” in the cathedral; but, when it was clear that ransoming the city for the treasure would not work, the pirates robbed a bishop’s tomb and burned the cathedral, along with many other important buildings. Fleeing inland, the pirates were able to find shelter for a time with cautiously sympathetic Indians, but ultimately left the country under further Spanish assaults.
Most importantly, Morgan’s tactics were an inspiration to himself. Similarities to Granada abound in his 1669 assault on Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. But it was his 1671 Panama invasion that restaged the Nicaraguan raid on a grand scale. With an army of 1,200, he headed up the Chagres River by canoe and seized the city of Panama, perhaps the richest on the continent at the time. It took 200 pack mules to carry the gold, silver and goods he looted from the city, which burned in the process, adding to the spectacle of his achievement. (Whether to blame the pirates or the Spanish for the fire remains a historical issue.) Foreshadowing U.S. President George H.W. Bush 300 years later, Morgan concocted a political pretext for his invasion of Panama, claiming that the Spanish were assembling a force there with which to attack Jamaica. (Plausible enough, as English pirates had only recently stolen the island from the Spanish.)
On paper, Morgan’s Panamanian victory was deeply flawed: the Spanish hid the majority of treasure before he arrived; he faced massive mutinies; and he was arrested for violating a recent England-Spain peace treaty. But in practice, he became a national hero and got rewarded rather than convicted. His haul of gold may only have been so-so, but the treasure notably included a tome of Spanish sea charts. Transcontinental trade aspirations were the true legacy of Morgan’s raid.
The Pacific coast city of Panama had long been considered untouchable by the Spanish, and probably by its enemies. Morgan showed that it was not, that anyone could march across the isthmus with an army and attain the Pacific. In England, the interior of Panama started to become a reality rather than an imagined vision.
William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England and a resident of Jamaica or the similarly piratical Bahamas during Morgan’s days, was clearly struck by the fall of Panama.56 Fifteen years after Morgan’s raid, Paterson began seeking support from various governments for an incredible plan to establish colonies on either side of the Panamanian isthmus, and between them create an overland trade route—a route that, unlike the Spanish version, would be solidly built, scrupulously maintained and open to all nations. These colonies, he said, would “hold the keys of the commerce of the world.”57
Paterson’s West Indies intelligence informed him that, contrary to popular wisdom, Panama’s Pacific coast was not totally full of mountains that would block such an ambitious trade route. He finally got his native government of Scotland to sponsor the colonization plan, known as Caledonia. The fact that it had to be cut down to a single colony before getting started in 1698, and then promptly failed miserably, does not reduce the prescience of Paterson’s vision.
An anonymous 1699 pamphlet calling for the rescue of Paterson’s colony contained this intriguing statement about Panama: “If it were possible to cut a Channel from Sea to Sea, capable of shipping, it would facilitate the Navigation of the World two parts in three; but it’s next to an impossibility, for it’s almost a continued Chain of Mountains, of which some are as high as any of the Alps….”58
In speaking of impossibility, the pamphlet shows us that Paterson—and surely others—had considered the possibility of just such a channel. Albeit in a negative form, Paterson had revived the idea of a transcontinental canal.
Britain in particular would sail into the 18th century with transcontinental trade in its sights and canals on its mind.
Lord Nelson
As the 1700s wore on, the pirates of the Caribbean essentially vanished, history books will tell you; by which they mean that piracy was now performed by navies. The future Admiral Lord Nelson, Britain’s greatest naval hero, got his now-forgotten first command in a Morgan-style raid on the San Juan. The fortress at El Castillo appears in the background of his first official portrait.59
With the European powers frequently at war, there was less need to hide behind the flimsy proxies of privateers. The buccaneer-era wildness of the Mosquito Coast—with its mix of indigenous, maroon and pirate cultures—became appropriated into an official British “protectorate.” British “agents”—typically, semi-reformed pirates—manipulated Indian chieftains who were granted such ludicrously grandiose English titles as King George and Julius Caesar.60 Following orders issued from Jamaica, these agents carried out forays that, in style and substance, are indistinguishable from those of the classic pirates.
At war with Spain in 1748, the British ordered their agents in today’s Honduras and Belize to go up the San Juan and seize Lake Nicaragua. In true Morganic style, the plan called for raising an indigenous army from the Mosquito Coast. An armistice killed this plan, but the same agents went rogue and attempted it on their own in 1769. The Spanish repulsed them at El Castillo (full name, with typical conquistador verve: El Castillo de la Immaculada Concepción). A local legend was born when Rafaela Herrera, the young daughter of the fortress’s fallen commander, reputedly rallied the troops into holding down the fort.61
These official pirates were not merely going after Spanish trade; they were targeting canal territory. Charles Marie de La Condamine, a French scientist, revived the Nicaragua Canal idea in the 1740s after traveling throughout Central and South America.62 He declared a Nicaragua Canal feasible and said such commercial waterways were worth exploring. Europe’s kings and merchants didn’t have to be asked twice. A boom in canal proposals began that would last until 1914.
In the 1770s, the Spanish again surveyed the possible canal route in southern Mexico, whose geography was long forgotten from the conquistador years. Finding it unsuitable, they soon followed La Condamine’s advice and focused their attention on Nicaragua. The same agents who helmed the 1769 attack on the San Juan managed to spy on a Spanish canal survey of the area, transmitting the information back to the British.
In 1779, Spain joined the American Revolutionary War on the side of the Colonies. (America was just one front of a much larger struggle between Europe’s empires, which is the only reason the tiny Colonies won.) The Caribbean was once again a theater of war between Spain and Britain. John Dalling, the governor of Jamaica, dusted off the old 1748 plans for invading Lake Nicaragua.
The plan called for going upriver in larger vessels while carrying a disassembled shallow-draft boat that could be put together past any rapids and used on the lake. The British would then seize Granada and build more boats to defend their conquest. They would also march overland and seize the main towns on the Pacific. Dalling even envisioned turning the region into a new home for displaced American Tories—the first in a series of strange colonization schemes that potential canal routes would inspire in the likes of Abraham Lincoln.
“Give me but the direction of a force, and that of no great extent, and I’ll be answerable to give you the domination of Spain in this part of the world,” Dalling wrote to the British colonial secretary, displaying at least as much confidence in the significance of the Nicaragua route as in himself.63
Nelson, a 21-year-old newbie who was supposed to helm an escort and supply part of the mission, wasn’t so sure. “How it will turn out, God knows!” he wrote to an official.
It turned out to be one of the great what-ifs of history. A bit more luck and planning, and Nelson’s Column might have been about Nicaragua rather than Trafalgar.
As usual, the plan involved raising an instant army from the Mosquito Coast’s Spanish-haters. But when Nelson arrived, the British agent had failed to muster the promised troops. Nelson eventually settled for a much smaller force than expected.
The raiders converged at San Juan del Norte (later known as Greytown, and now San Juan de Nicaragua), a nominally Spanish-controlled shanty town at the mouth of the Río San Juan. Nelson’s work was done. But, apparently taking pity on the understaffed force, he made a fateful decision, offering to continue escorting the party all the way up the river.
Saying yes might be the last thing the raiding party did right. Inexplicably, they assembled the boat intended for the lake and began towing it upriver, doubling their workload. And the commander of the raid set out immediately rather than waiting for reinforcements in a pirate-style quest for finders-keepers glory.
Leading the strange fleet of boats, dories and canoes, the greenhorn Nelson proved to be a natural leader and effectively took command of the entire raid within days. Their tale reads like something out of Kipling or H. Rider Haggard. Nelson and the Indian guides reportedly developed mutual respect and friendship, boosted enormously when Nelson survived an encounter with a venomous snake, which was taken as a sign of divine favor. One soldier was attacked by a jaguar; another, lacking Nelson’s luck, died when he was bitten on the face by a snake hanging from a tree, causing his eye to dissolve.
The appearance of a fortified island in the river was the first big surprise of the raid and Nelson’s first taste of hand-to-hand combat. He earned respect by leaping from the boat without hesitation and sword-fighting the Spaniards, reputedly in his stocking feet after his boots got stuck in the mud.
Arriving under the walls of El Castillo, the British began a siege for which neither side was well-prepared. Then Nelson ran into a far deadlier enemy: disease. A fever and dysentery began killing the men and left Nelson seriously ill. (He reputedly later said he was not sick, but rather had swallowed water from a spring poisoned by the machineel tree, a toxic plant used by Indians to make poisoned arrows. This bizarre self-diagnosis is surely untrue.)
The reinforcements finally arrived, along with surprising news: Nelson had been promoted. He was shipped back to San Juan del Norte while the British succeeded in taking El Castillo. But the fever exploded into an epidemic at both El Castillo and San Juan del Norte. More than 2,500 men may have died in total. The horrifying disease stopped the raid cold and forced the British to leave the river altogether.
A mouthful of bad water or a swarm of the wrong kind of mosquito is likely all that stood between the British and at least temporary control of the Nicaraguan trade route.
The British public was appalled by this massive loss of soldiers and sailors. But it also thrilled to the exploits of a new hero, this young Horatio Nelson. They, and the Spanish, would hear more from him later.
But the United States won that war—something Britain and Spain would both come to regret. Inspired by the U.S., the Central American territories declared their independence from Spain in 1821.
The first U.S. Nicaragua Canal company formed in 1826.
Vanderbilt
That company didn’t last, but there were plenty more where it came from. A Nicaragua Canal was considered so inevitable by the 1820s that American newspapers were giving voice to eccentric fears that a canal would cause massive sea-level drops or disruption of the Gulf Stream.64
It was not merely a matter of industry, but of empire. At that time, the famed naturalist Alexander von Humboldt stumped for a canal after a tour of the Americas, highlighting Nicaragua as a great possibility, an idea that fired the imagination of Goethe as well as Spain.65 Napoleon III spent his time in exile plotting a new American empire, and formed a Nicaragua canal company in 1846.66 (Naturally, he wanted to name the canal after himself.)
But all of that was fantasy compared to the two big players with real footholds in the region. By 1825, an American-controlled Nicaragua canal was the stated policy of the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the British continued to control the Mosquito Coast, and in 1847 assaulted San Juan del Norte, or Greytown, as they now called it after the governor of the old pirate island of Jamaica. In January 1848, the British finally succeeded in seizing Granada.
At the very same time, gold was discovered in California. The Cold War between the U.S. and Britain in Nicaragua suddenly got warm indeed. Transcontinental trade was no longer something that simply looked good on paper. Would-be prospectors wanted to get from the East Coast to California; huge amounts of gold would return from California to the East Coast. Fortunes would be made in providing the quickest possible route in this time before the U.S. transcontinental railways.
The effect of the Gold Rush on transcontinental canal planning was electric. At least eight potential canal sites were instantly proposed as companies and governments dusted off old conquistador plans. The general idea was to quickly establish a stagecoach overland route as a placeholder for a canal. Railroad companies got in on the act, too, establishing the first transcontinental line in Panama by 1855.
Just like in conquistador days, legends and spurious treasure maps abounded. The most mystique-heavy potential canal site was the Río Atrato in Colombia. The conquistadors considered it a possible location of el secreto del estrecho, but found it too difficult to explore. The Spanish government banned further exploration in 1542 to preserve any potential secret, pending a better-equipped survey that never happened. The Atrato remained unexplored for the next 300 years, accumulating legends; one claimed that a Spanish monk somehow managed to actually build a canal there in 1788. Drawn by the mystery, an American businessman named Frederick Kelly bankrupted himself exploring the river starting in 1851, only to find the Andes Mountains in his way. Kelly proposed a 3.5-mile canal tunnel through the mountains—a kind of grand Tunnel of Love for merchant ships—but failed to convince anyone that was anything more than a cool idea.67
Back in the realm of places worth fighting over, the U.S.-Britain showdown in Nicaragua blossomed into the first major test of the U.S.’s Monroe Doctrine. Britain could not simply seize Nicaragua and build a canal, said the U.S. And never mind that the U.S. was being pretty hegemonic itself with its plans for a U.S.-controlled canal (more or less with the support of the Nicaraguans). After much saber-rattling, the countries signed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, which guaranteed that even a U.S.-built canal would be officially neutral turf open to all. Britain also agreed to give up its control of the Mosquito Coast—a term it quickly altered with a last-minute addendum that relit the fuse on the whole dispute.
Into this mess boldly stepped “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, the first great American industrialist, already fabulously rich from canals and ferries in the U.S., later to be richer still from railroad lines, and in the meantime the only man to create anything like a Nicaragua Canal.
A cigar-chomping hick who pronounced the country’s name as “Nicaraguey,” Vanderbilt was the very picture of rapacious American capitalism.68 Phrenology, the flattery-spewing pseudoscience of the day, could not avoid being somewhat honest about him: “His head is very high in the crown—Firmness, Self-Esteem, Approbativeness, Hope, and Conscientiousness being among his largest phrenological organs….[A] single glance reveals to him, as to an Indian, the motives and capacities of men….His Destructiveness and Combativeness are fully developed….”69
Vanderbilt showed up in Nicaragua in 1849 and established the American Atlantic & Pacific Ship Canal Company.70 He cut a deal with the Nicaraguan government that gave him a monopoly on building a Nicaragua canal, and 12 years to do so. In return, Nicaragua would get a handsome slice of the income and total ownership of the canal after 85 years.
Meanwhile, Vanderbilt wanted some income now. He set up a subsidiary, the Accessory Transit Company, to run a steamship line on the San Juan and Lake Nicaragua and a stagecoach line on the overland bit to the Pacific. The overland route was necessary for supplying the canal project, Vanderbilt assured the Nicaraguans.
In fact, Vanderbilt never did any work on the canal project, instead funneling all of his profitable business through Accessory Transit, leaving the Nicaraguans without their taste of the pie. Thus Vanderbilt entered the San Juan as yet another shark, initiating what the U.S. government’s lead canal negotiator would later call “an infamous career of deception and fraud.”71
Not to say that Vanderbilt was lazy. Of the many things he can be accused of, that would not be on the list. Arriving in Greytown in 1850 for an inaugural run up the San Juan, he immediately learned how difficult things were going to be when he ran a steamship into a sandbar. And when the 120-ton ship started protesting at the first rapids, Vanderbilt took the helm himself and practically willed the vessel upriver, forcing it to crawl up the rocks with its paddlewheels. So much for sharks not being able to pass the San Juan rapids.
Vanderbilt conquered the El Castillo rapids as well, warping the ship up the steep grade after ordering everyone else off, and then steaming triumphantly to Granada. He navigated the international cold war around him with equal determination. Apolitical by nature, he nonetheless gained the approval of the U.S. government. He named two of his San Juan route ships “Clayton” and “Bulwer” after the treaty.
Within a few years, Vanderbilt had established a route of such solidity that as picky a passenger as Mark Twain would find reason to complain only about the sandwiches and the boring nature of fellow passengers.
Vanderbilt was a robber baron. Indeed, he was the first American industrialist to be called a robber baron, specifically because of his jaunts on the San Juan. Henry Raymond, the co-founder of the New York Times and Vanderbilt’s archenemy, invoked the image rather than the exact term in a scathing 1859 editorial that likened the businessman to “those old German barons who, from their eyries along the Rhine, swooped down upon the commerce of the noble river and wrung tribute from every passenger that floated by….”72
The Lake Nicaragua system thus gives us one of our enduring terms for modern predators who feast on our pockets rather than our bones. In the case of Accessory Transit, it was a lousy analogy—Vanderbilt was running the boats, not the fortresses. Raymond was well aware of Vanderbilt’s post-industrial methods, calling him out for attempting to crush a start-up competitor in Nicaragua to preserve his own monopoly.
But the fact is, Vanderbilt ran a darn good transit line (sandwiches notwithstanding) at a low price and was more victim than predator in the end. He sure wasn’t the robber baron when his company was the one forced to pay a fee at Greytown after a British warship fired warning shots over the bow of an Accessory Transit steamer.
Vanderbilt would come to learn that common lesson of the San Juan system: sharks follow sharks. In fact, Vanderbilt sent some of them there himself—his own employees, who rebelled and attempted to defraud the company with false claims of getting canal-building financing. Vanderbilt’s famously curt letter to them is another lasting legacy of Lake Nicaragua predation: “Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.”73 And ruin them he did, sabotaging and devaluing his own company and then buying back its exploded pieces in one of his pioneering insider-trading schemes.
That was only a warm-up for the real clash of the titans in Lake Nicaragua, an alien-vs.-predator battle where Vanderbilt would be cast against type as an antihero, like Godzilla come to destroy a far worse monstrosity. Lake Nicaragua was about to glow from the fires of William Walker.
Walker
William Walker may not have been the worst man ever to invade Lake Nicaragua, but he made sure that he’ll be remembered that way. With Granada in ashes and thousands of people in coffins, the viciously racist mercenary penned a “Mein Kampf”-style memoir of his attempt to turn Nicaragua into the capital of a new slave empire and spark a U.S. civil war.74 Conquistador, pirate, imperialist, man-eater—Walker was all the Nicaraguan sharks rolled into one cracker box. He should have been born with horns on his head and a fin on his back.
A Bizarro World version of John Brown, Walker was as incompetent as he was evil and seemed to crave martyrdom more than success. Some tiger-hunter would have taken him down eventually; the honor went to Vanderbilt after Walker targeted the canal company and Accessory Transit as the keys to his dominion.
Walker was a “filibuster” (all the moreso for his protest-too-much insistence that he was not), a term for the many American soldiers of fortune who invaded such places as Cuba with private armies and slave-state, business-friendly expansion on their addled minds, sometimes with U.S. government backing, sometimes without. “Filibuster” is a Romance language version of “freebooter,” both from an old Dutch term for pirates of the Caribbean.75 The freeboot fit, to a certain extent, but the filibusters were more like Protestant conquistadors, megalomaniacal ideologues on a mission from their genocidal god. Walker was not the only filibuster in Nicaragua; indeed, he tangled with a couple of rivals in a low-rent version of the conquistador civil war of yore.
A doctor, lawyer, journalist and, most significantly, a redneck son of the enduringly racist state of Tennessee, Walker got his filibustering start in Mexico. In 1853, the self-styled “Colonel” Walker attacked the state of Sonora with a private army, briefly seizing it and grandiosely declaring a new Republic of Lower Mexico. His first order of business was to legalize slavery. Unafflicted with Walker’s mental problems, the Mexicans quickly routed him, sending his army on a death march across the desert and into the waiting hands of the U.S. Army. Put on trial in the U.S. for illegally invading a sovereign nation, Walker was promptly acquitted, as Americans’ approval for killing foreigners in the name of a horrid philosophy, not to mention general lack of personal and intellectual integrity, were just as high then as now.
Like the classic pirates, Walker now had an M.O. It was just a matter of where to repeat his crime. Now based in San Francisco, he would have known the importance of the Nicaraguan transit route. Indeed, the mayor of San Francisco was Cornelius Garrison—one of the cheating Accessory Transit partners to whom Vanderbilt would send the infamous “I’ll ruin you” letter. Garrison colluded with Walker, offering to help take over Nicaragua in exchange for help in taking over Accessory Transit. The invasion was soon set, once Walker heard that Nicaragua was in the midst of a civil war between aristocrats and populists. He saw chaos to exploit, and knew exactly what kind of order he would bring.
Histories typically say only that the Nicaraguan leftists hired Walker to come help them, suggesting he ran some semi-respectable Blackwater sort of army, and that the Nicaraguans essentially got what they asked for. In fact, Walker sent a business partner to Nicaragua to actively solicit a mercenary contract with one side or the other. The Nicaraguans probably had never heard of him before, and surely were sold on the deal with outrageous lies.
Having promoted himself to “General” Walker, the filibuster set out in 1855 with a crew almost literally piratical in character; in his memoir, he describes one man who “had lately been to the Cocos Islands in search of a buried treasure.”76 His adventures are dotted with references to other sharks of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan. One of his battles took place near a stream called the Gil González; another at a promontory near El Castillo called Nelson’s Hill. Walker himself notes that he saw stones reputed to be ballast from one of Morgan’s ships, and explains how the Pacific coastal city of Realejo was relocated inland to avoid pirate attacks. With the eye of a connoisseur, Walker briefly recounts the history of British policy in the region—its support of piracy and smuggling, its establishment of trading posts and protectorates rather than more expensive colonies, all as successful economic warfare.
Walker had intended to arrive with reinforcements on the way via Accessory Transit. Vanderbilt, who already found civil war inconvenient enough without filibusters, refused to ship troops. The two men, who were never to meet face-to-face, were set on a collision course. In the meantime, Walker’s mode of travel presented him with the first of many comedically pathetic screw-ups: the ship that would take him to Nicaragua was the subject of a last-minute debt dispute, with the sheriff stopping it from sailing. Walker’s memoirs recount innumerable petty crises such as this, apparently thinking, much like modern neocon hawks, that self-created difficulties somehow only further ennoble the cause rather than betray a rank incompetence.
Walker finally arrived in Nicaragua the old-fashioned conquistador way, from the Pacific. He immediately set out to attack Rivas, the town that controlled the overland part of the Accessory Transit line, consisting of a wood-plank road. Like all sharks in Nicaragua, Walker was immediately drawn to these waters. The Accessory Transit route was his top priority, not only for supplies, but for fresh troops—a necessity for a “general” whose main tactic was having his men charge into every battle, leading to appalling casualty rates. Vanderbilt was not playing along, so Walker would simply seize the company and transfer it to the Commodore’s corrupt partners, including that estimable mayor of San Francisco.
“The control of the Transit is, to Americans, the control of Nicaragua,” Walker later wrote. His enemies would come to call it the “highway of filibusterism.”
Among these successful early campaigns, Walker and the local Democrats took Virgin Bay, the Accessory Transit harbor on Lake Nicaragua. There, Walker seized a Transit steamship and used it to attack Granada, the capital of the enemy Conservatives. Like Morgan before him, Walker took the city in a silent night attack after sending his troops ashore in boats.
Parker French, a con man and something of a filibuster rival to Walker, though he was technically part of Walker’s forces, was less successful in a similar assault. French hijacked a Transit steamer on the lake—with passengers still aboard—and attempted to take San Carlos. The Conservatives reputedly fired on at least one Transit ship in another engagement, killing civilians.
This sort of thing infuriated Vanderbilt, who was also facing the depredations of another filibuster, H.L. Kinney, on the Mosquito Coast. But Garrison had no such scruples. As the war ended in the Democrats’ favor, Walker got himself named the nation’s commander-in-chief and effective ruler. A local Accessory Transit agent named C.J. Macdonald, acting on the authority of Garrison rather than Vanderbilt, offered Walker a “loan” of $20,000 in California gold bars, fresh off the transit route.
In return, Walker dissolved the Nicaragua-chartered Accessory Transit and transferred its rights to Garrison et al. Reinforcements immediately began shipping in. He later made Macdonald “quartermaster-general” of the army. À la Oliver North in another Nicaragua scheme a century later, Walker made sure the president had plausible deniability about these machinations: “neither the President nor the cabinet knew of the means whereby their objects were accomplished….”
That turned out to be OK, because the puppet president, Patricio Rivas, was formerly a toll collector on the San Juan and hated Vanderbilt’s arrogant company. It also turned out to be moot, as Walker quickly set up a rigged election and had himself named president.
This 1856 coup outraged some, drew the support of others—including the U.S. government. But the best was yet to come. Walker issued a three-point decree written in the malignantly subtle language of a contract with the devil. It declared English the official language, and set up a complex new real estate registration system, both to put power only in Anglo hands. Worst of all, the decree legalized slavery, which the Central American states had outlawed decades before when they booted out the Spanish.
The mask was gone; Walker now could announce that he saw the seizure of Nicaragua as just the first shots in a literal race war. “By this act [establishing slavery] must the Walker administration be judged; for it is the key to its whole policy,” he later wrote. “In fact the wisdom or folly of this decree involves the wisdom or folly of the American movement in Nicaragua; for on the re-establishment of African slavery there depended the permanent presence of the white race in that region….”
And not just African slavery. Walker noted how well-suited the Indians were for slavery as well, and vowed to “destroy” the local “mixed-race” populace.
Exactly like modern social conservatives condemning those who support gay rights or oppose wars, Walker condemned opponents of slavery as bleeding-heart irrationalists who ignore the laws of nature and economics. Abolitionism is a “kind of hydrophobia,” he sneered, while praising the “conservatism of slavery.”
It’s good American business, he tells us in his memoir; slavery is the very model of the “relations of capital to labor.” Slavery has its “abuses,” he acknowledges, but that only means it should be regulated, not banned. More important is that Africans are a “satire of man” whom whites rescued and employed under divine direction.
At this time, less than a decade before the U.S. erupted into a civil war over slavery, Walker intended his decree less for Nicaraguans than for Southerners. “…[T]he slavery decree was calculated to bind the Southern states to Nicaragua, as if she were one of themselves,” Walker wrote, adding that his many, many fallen filibusters should be memorialized as “martyrs and confessors in the cause of Southern civilization.” Slavery had to be extended “beyond the limits of the Union” to preserve it in the American South. Nicaragua was where it could gain “an empire.”
Walker essentially attempted to begin the American Civil War on Lake Nicaragua. Much of America loved him for it. He was the subject of patriotic songs and lecture tours; the Democratic Party platform was changed to “sympathize” with Walker’s efforts.77 Pockets of the country still love him. The Tennessee State Library and Archives Web site on Walker gives him his folk-hero title of “Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny”; it calls him an “idealist” and “expansionist,” not a racist and a traitor.78
The Nicaraguans who actually had to live under Walker immediately saw him for what he was: a rabid animal to be shot. Finally free after 300 years, they were not about to bend under yet another conquistador. As Walker set up what he intended to be a permanent military dictatorship, rebellion began fomenting and other Central American states began arming. Anti-American riots burst out along the railway line in Panama. But the situation remained foggy as everyone waited to see the responses of the two real powers in the region: the equivocating U.S. and the lurking Britain.
Vanderbilt did not have time to wait. His transit line was being hijacked from the inside and the outside. Rebuffed by the U.S. government, Vanderbilt turned to Britain for help. He infuriated the American public by calling a British warship to stop one of his own company’s steamships at Greytown and search it for filibuster troops.
But that was hardly enough to stop Walker. Like many of today’s corporate chieftains, Vanderbilt’s main allegiance was to money, and he had enough of it to conduct his own foreign policy. Ignoring the diplomatic positions of his own country, Vanderbilt directly negotiated with Costa Rica, encouraging it to invade Nicaragua, and giving it funds to do so. (Britain was aiding Costa Rica as well.) Vanderbilt also hired his own mercenary army to assault Walker’s troops.
Coalition troops from other Central American countries invaded as well, and Walker was soon in trouble. In his most infamous act, Walker petulantly ordered the burning of Granada. His henchmen put the city to the torch and blew up a tower of its main church with gunpowder. Then, on a lance amid the ruins, they hung a sign snidely saying, “Aquí fue Granada”—“Here Was Granada.”
This grand vandalism was the height of Walker’s achievement. He could never really explain why he did it, citing a mixture of vain political gesture and petty revenge. The Nicaraguans still sorely remember it today. Often forgotten is why Walker was willing to sacrifice the city: He was retreating to Rivas, once again to retain control of the transit line; of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan, that route so crucial to all the pirates and slavemasters before him.
Walker got some assistance from fellow filibusters. One was Stephen Tucker, a Vermonter who had joined Walker’s Sonora campaign and inexplicably found it wise to fight alongside him again; Tucker would later die in the Civil War as a Confederate colonel.79 More colorful was Henry Titus, a pro-slavery filibuster in Cuba and a recent participant in the infamous sacking of Lawrence, Kansas—one of the sparks that lit the fuse on the Civil War.80 The odious Titus, whom even Walker thought had “the air of the bully,” would go on to be a Confederate colonel and founder of Titusville, Florida. Like the pirates and British naval heroes, Titus led his own army up the San Juan in an attack on El Castillo. He proved as incompetent as his master and was easily repulsed.
Titus was attacking on the San Juan because the Costa Ricans had taken it, dashing Walker’s hopes of maintaining his lifeline. Vanderbilt was behind it all. The Costa Ricans had provided his agents with an American mercenary, one Sylvanus Spencer.81 Spencer floated his army down a Costa Rican tributary of the San Juan on homemade rafts and attacked a key filibuster fort on the river in a surprise raid. From there, they seized transit steamers at Greytown and used them as naval war vessels. Vanderbilt had out-filibustered the filibuster.
Meanwhile, Walker found it impossible to retake El Castillo. When many men in that expedition mutinied, Walker’s commander ordered them down the river the hard way—unarmed and clinging to logs. It is surely the strangest way a shark ever went down the San Juan.
Besieged and outnumbered, Walker was forced into ignominious surrender and house arrest on a ship he formerly controlled, one called the “Granada.” As a final insult, the Costa Rican captain who took over the “Granada” was a “Jamaica negro.” To Walker, this was not a hilarious refutation of his theories of racial superiority, but rather a simple perversion.
Walker would make two more attempts to invade Nicaragua, with navies stopping him on the way. The British navy in 1860 finally got the bright idea of handing him over to the Hondurans, who promptly shot him.
Walker was gone, but his legacy lived on in Nicaragua Canal schemes: in the Manifest Destiny Christian racism that pervaded later canal proposals, and in the violent political instability that is a major reason the canal was never built.
The Canal
Vanderbilt was soon gone as well. The Greytown harbor was showing signs of silting up by 1860, which is when U.S. and British arguments over a Nicaragua canal erupted once more (openly, rather than through proxy warfare). Vanderbilt sold out to an Italian company in 1869, but had already relocated much of his business to Panama.
The rest of the world was looking to other routes as well. Unlike Nicaragua, Panama was the site of some U.S.-British cooperation, with the railroad line at least technically operating under equal access and joint capital. In an inversion of Walker’s efforts, President Abraham Lincoln once proposed establishing a colony of freed American slaves in Panama to help secure U.S. canal route rights.82 Lincoln even met with some kind of African-American delegation about the proposal, which never materialized.
The most bizarre scheme was a proposed “ship railway” at Tehuantepec, the narrowest part of Mexico, where Cortés had once sought the secret strait and others had proposed a canal.83 In this plan, ships would be floated out of the water on giant pontoon platforms and then placed on giant railway cars, to be hauled overland on a heavy-duty railroad. The design called for arrow-straight rail lines, and giant turntables to get the ships around hairpin turns in the mountains. The vision of still-dripping freight ships being hauled over mountains on railroad cars may seem insane, but the U.S. government seriously considered buying rights to it, and a U.S. businessman in 1883 got a 99-year concession to build and operate a ship railway. That it never happened is one of the least surprising, if more disappointing, items in transcontinental travel history. (A regular railway was put across the isthmus instead.)
By the 1870s, it was clear that a canal would be built somewhere and that it was now a footrace with Nicaragua and Panama neck-and-neck, and Honduras and Mexico well behind. Panama, with its successful railway, was already gaining ground on Nicaragua, where transcontinental traffic was essentially dead. But Nicaragua was hardly forgotten. Lincoln reestablished diplomatic ties with Nicaragua, specifically citing the importance of the canal proposal. President Ulysses Grant, declaring a future canal to be “virtually a part of the coast-line of the United States,” formed an Interoceanic Canal Commission to study the various routes.84 It recommended Nicaragua as the best (and made the Lake Nicaragua shark famous).
Panama, however, was good enough, and a French company started digging there in 1881. This company turned out to be an incompetent fraud on a massive scale, spiraling into bankruptcy and sending French ministers to prison for bribery. The Panama Canal was still just a small open wound.
U.S. patriots stumped for a Nicaragua Canal. There were even pro-canal conventions around the country in the 1890s to build Congressional support. Canal books proliferated, many of them speaking of Anglo-Saxon destiny and American imperialism. The U.S.-British war went hot, too. The U.S. Navy shelled Greytown; U.S. troops joined Nicaraguans in invading the Mosquito Coast protectorate. Britain seized a coastal island that would be near the Pacific end of a canal, but was finally driven out once and for all.
In 1893, a U.S. company finally began work on a Nicaragua Canal. That meant extensive forest-clearing around Greytown and a cursory dredging of 2 miles of the river—deliberately token, speculative work intended to show enough progress to draw investors. It failed.
The French quickly got their act together and offered the Panama Canal project to the U.S. government in exchange for a financial bailout. Legend has it that the French hired a lobbyist to scare congressmen off of the Nicaragua Canal idea by showing them a Nicaragua postage stamp depicting a smoking volcano—not the type of terrain you want along your pricey trade route. Considering that there actually is an active volcano in the lake, it doesn’t seem as sneaky as it’s portrayed. In any case, it is likely that Nicaragua’s political instability (much of it caused by the canal tug-of-war itself) and border dispute with Costa Rica had more to do with scaring off congressmen, particularly when they could choose a starter-kit canal project in Panama. The U.S. bought into Panama.
There were still twists and turns; another U.S. commission in 1901 recommended a Nicaragua Canal after all, and Panama’s declaration of independence from Colombia in 1903 gave some pause. But technical work resumed in 1904, and the Panama Canal was open for business in 1914.
The U.S. continued its wrangling over Nicaragua Canal rights, but now it was all merely to forestall competition with Panama. In 1909, the U.S. invaded Nicaragua in a dispute that began when Nicaragua began negotiating with Germany and Japan to build a Nicaragua Canal. Finally, in 1914, the U.S. and Nicaragua agreed to the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, which gave the U.S. permanent, exclusive rights to build any Nicaragua canal.
Panama’s monopoly was ensured, as was 70 more years of U.S. military involvement in propping up puppet dictators and fighting rebels. Most famous among the latter was Augusto César Sandino, a guerrilla who successfully battled U.S. troops for years while waving a battle flag depicting the beheading of a U.S. Marine. Among his demands was the end to the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, under which the U.S. military was occasionally and fruitlessly proposing a Nicaragua Canal as a security-based alternative to Panama in case of attack.
Sandino didn’t live to see it, but the treaty is indeed obsolete now—and a Sandinista is Nicaragua’s president. Nicaragua is now free to consider its own canal fate, and has been almost constantly since the treaty was dissolved in the 1970s. One of the first incredibly proposed “nuclear blasting” as a possibly economical excavation method.85 Japanese investors in the 1980s proposed an enormous canal that could handle superfreighters far larger than the “Panamax”—the largest size of ship the Panama Canal can handle.86 The Japanese are gone, but the Nicaraguan government revived this $20 billion idea in 2006 as the Grand Inter-Oceanic Nicaragua Canal.87 It, too, went nowhere, and its official Web site is dead.
In the late 1990s, a private venture called Ecocanal (originally EcoCanal) arrived with a proposal for a partial canal. It would dredge the river and build locks around the worst rapids, creating passage for large, low-draft barges, but would not cut through to the Pacific. This Ecocanal would allow Nicaraguan goods to head more directly to Europe and the U.S. East Coast, rather than passing through Honduras or Costa Rica as they do now. Despite multiple announcements and a much less ambitious scale, Ecocanal also has never happened.
Ecocanal was the brainchild of Tim Coone, a British economist and journalist who now heads a Managua-based alternative energy company called ENCO Centroamérica. Coone told me that Ecocanal is now being “reframed” as part of a larger proposal for an alternative energy windmill farm in Lake Nicaragua.88 The canal would be needed to haul wind turbines to the construction site.
“The Ecocanal project is still at a pre-feasibility study stage,” Coone told me, “and although there is a lot of interest locally—especially compared to the larger, more ambitious interocean projects—there is little willingness to risk capital, even though the amounts involved are relatively small.”
He added that he believes the full canal proposals, as well as similar railway plans, are “totally uncompetitive” with the Panama Canal, which is undergoing an expansion to boost that pesky Panamax.
These days, Nicaragua is getting an economic boost from ecotourism, not an Ecocanal. The San Juan is now lined with nature preserves protecting its pristine jungles. Tour boats run where pirate canoes and Vanderbilt’s steamships of Forty-Niners once ran. Every time a canal proposal is floated these days, there are cries that it will be an environmental disaster. The Nicaragua Canal is an old wound that always hurts to reopen.
In 1987, filmmaker Alex Cox went to Lake Nicaragua in the midst of the U.S.-backed civil war and made “Walker,” a surreal biography of the filibuster.89 Staging the burning of Granada in Granada is pretty surreal all by itself. But Cox went further: as the tale unfolds, 1980s objects begin appearing without comment in the 1850s world—Zippos, cars, helicopters and finally Max Headroom-style video of Ronald Reagan. Of course, these anachronisms are anything but; Cox is telling us that history in Nicaragua repeats itself, exists in one vast landscape where past and future are coeval.
Sly as this is as technique, Cox’s film also unconsciously embodies its own truth. Cox, who is known as a demanding madman, explained in an on-location interview during filming (appearing on the “Walker” DVD) how he came to “like” and “admire” the “heroic” filibuster (who is portrayed by the intensely charismatic Ed Harris), albeit ambivalently. Behind-the-scenes articles describe the cast and crew enjoying frenzied all-night parties, and accidentally killing a local boy when a film truck scared his horse.
Perhaps a director must always sympathize with a dictator; just as a canal-builder must always be a bit of a conquistador. Four hundred years of Nicaragua Canal history flows into one stream of thought: If you can go where a shark goes, you’re probably a shark, too.
1 My metaphorical device of linking piscine and human sharks is my original, independent insight. But Randy Wayne White, author of the 2000 book “The Sharks of Lake Nicaragua: True Tales of Adventure, Travel, And Fishing,” independently arrived at the same connection: “No sharks? I disagreed. Nicaragua has a long history of attracting and enduring predators.” White did not make my further connection between these sharks and the canal proposals.
2 “CIA World Factbook” at www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook.
3 U.S. Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Lee M. Packnett, phone interview, Dec. 23, 2009. “I was in Iraq. I never heard of anything like that,” said Packnett, who served in Iraq in 2007. He also consulted three other Army personnel in the office who had served in Iraq and also had not heard of the Tigris sharks.
I encountered a bizarre Tigris River shark item in my research: an undated postcard (its typeface suggests the 1900-30 era) with a photograph of an apparently stuffed shark, about three to four feet long, lying on its belly across chairs on a street. The caption cryptically reads, “The largest Shark Kosage in the river Tigris, Baghdad.” I have been unable to locate a meaning for “kosage,” or any logical variants, in the Oxford English Dictionary and other sources. This postcard is item number “iraq256353” on the postcard-selling site www.postcardman.net. The site’s owner did not respond to my e-mail inquiries about the postcard.
4 Most river shark data is from “Shadows in the Sea: The Sharks, Skates, And Rays” (revised ed.) by Thomas B. Allen; “Shark Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance” by Thomas B. Allen; and the ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research (Vancouver, Canada) Web site at www.elasmo-research.org/index.html. The insights on shark predatory behavior that follow in the text are also largely from ReefQuest.
5 Allen, op. cit.
6 Allen, “Shark Attacks,” op. cit.
7 Personal e-mail, Dec. 7, 2009. In his response to my inquiries about Lake Nicaragua sharks, Dr. Cowan went beyond the call of duty, graciously providing me with a detailed essay about his adventures with Dr. Thomas B. Thorson, who will appear later in my narrative. I take the liberty of presenting here the salient section of Dr. Cowan’s essay:
Our first trip into Central America (1963, I think) lasted about a month. We began in Guatemala City and organized, through an expatriate American plantation owner, a trip to Lake Izabal in eastern Guatemala. Dr. Thorson had read reports that sharks had been taken in the Lake and river (Rio Dulce). We spent about two weeks at San Felipe, the site of an old Spanish fort, but as I recall, didn't have much luck catching sharks. (At that time Lake Izabal and the Rio Dulce were well off the beaten path for tourists and sightseers. I understand they are very popular today.) Afterward, we took a supply boat down the Rio Dulce to Livingston on the coast, then a ferry to Puerto Barrios and a bus (yes, the kind with all kinds of produce and livestock on-board) back to Guatemala City.
Next, we flew down to Managua, Nicaragua and caught a bus to Granada at the north end of Lake Nicaragua. There was boat service to the village of San Carlos at the south end of the Lake. The boat service, as it was called, consisted of a dilapidated supply barge that stopped at all the villages along the Lake. It was a long and arduous trip. Lake Nicaragua, as you know, is about 100 miles long. There was no seating so we just made beds with some of the supplies on the roof of the cabin. After arriving at San Carlos we proceeded to hire a guide that would help us with the fishing and also take us downriver to San Juan del Norte or Greytown, as it was called then. We hired a man named Ramon and began fishing. To our pleasant surprise the fishing went well. We caught several specimens of the “Lake Nicaragua shark” (as it was known then) and some huge sawfish as well. One of the observations we made right away was that the “Lake Nicaragua shark” couldn't be as rapacious as described in the literature. The women would do their wash in waist deep water right next to where we were fishing for sharks and the young boys would dive off the piers and swim without inhibition. We took samples for several days and then left to go downriver to San Juan Del Norte. Again, as you know, it is a long trip—over 100 miles if I remember correctly.
Now we come to the part of the trip that you asked about. We spent a full day going downstream and stopped at El Castillo for the night. El Castillo was the site of an old fort where, as the story goes, native Nicaraguans turned back the English navy (reference [Rafaela] Herrera). It was also the location where river rapids, resulting from uplift created by earthquakes, had supposedly blocked any migrations of sharks between Lake Nicaragua and the Caribbean Sea. We didn’t stay long in El Castillo but while we were there we noticed that we could see the iconic shark fins above the water and headed upstream. In our observations there were no salmon like jumps out of the water. Maybe since then others have observed this activity but in all the years that we studied the sharks and sawfish in that drainage we never witnessed any jumping.
We continued in our dugout for San Juan del Norte on the Caribbean coast. When we arrived we discovered right away why it was called Greytown—the sky was always gray and it rained incessantly. It was really a miserable existence and the fishing did not go well. As an aside, I will tell you that the most interesting thing I came across in San Juan Del Norte were the 19th century graves of at least two and possibly three American sailors that had died there. I took their names and the information on how they died off of the primitively fashion[ed] gravestones so that I might give the information to our State Department. Unfortunately, I lost the 3 x 5 cards and wasn't able to pass along the information. I remember that at least one of the sailors had died after falling from the mizzen mast of his ship.
Dr. Cowan uses the Lake Nicaragua shark as an example of how consensus science is often incorrect in explaining why he finds the evidence for global warming unconvincing in another essay, “Settled Science and Global Warming,” on his own Web site at http://cmcowan.net/webcam/blogs/settled_science_blog_110208.html.
8 “The Rio San Juan de Nicaragua” by R.E. Peary, “Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York,” Vol. 21, 1889.
9 “A Naturalist in Florida: A Celebration of Eden” by Archie Carr (Marjorie Harris Carr, ed.).
10 University of Michigan Museum of Zoology Animal Diversity Web page for Carcharhinus leucas at http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Carcharhinus_leucas.html.
11 In “The Status of the Freshwater Shark of Lake Nicaragua,” by Thomas B. Thorson, Donald E. Watson and C. Michael Cowan, in “Papers in the Biological Sciences: Investigations of the Icthyofauna of Nicaraguan Lakes,” University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1976 (reprinted from “Copeia,” 1966, No. 3, Sept. 7, pp. 385-402), at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/ichthynicar/38.
12 Gill and Bransford’s observations and theories as summarized in Ibid.
13 “Report of the Nicaragua Canal Commission,” 1897-1899, Vol. 2 (“Appendix II—Geologic Report” by Charles Hayes). Thorson et al. noted the feedback loop involving the shark theory and the geological theory; the influence of the canal planning itself on the paradigm of both is my own insight.
14 Ibid.
15 Examples from Thorson et al., op. cit.
16 Ibid.
17 Summarized findings from Ibid; “Movement of Bull Sharks, Carcharhinus Leucas, Between Carribean [sic] Sea and Lake Nicaragua Demonstrated by Tagging,” by Thomas B. Thorson (same source as Ibid; reprinted from “Copeia,” 1971, No. 2, June 1, pp. 336-338); and “The Status of the Lake Nicaragua Shark: An Updated Appraisal,” by Thomas B. Thorson (same source as Ibid).
18 Thorson’s pre-DNA comparative anatomy IDs of shark species look positively insane by today’s standards—charts comparing measurements of eye positions, gill slit lengths and dorsal fin dimensions.
19 ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research, op. cit.
20 Ibid.
21 In “Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments, And the Proposed Interoceanic Canal,” Vol. 1, by Ephraim George Squier. Oviedo actually indicates that the “swordfish” was found along Lake Managua near Lake Nicaragua, and that the two lakes were interconnected at that time. A weak, shallow, seasonal river has been known to connect the two lakes at times, though it has recently been completely dry. The river likely was not much bigger in Oviedo’s time, but his report suggests that sawfish and perhaps sharks could pass into Lake Managua in the conquistador era. Modern local myths claim the lakes are connected by an underground river, or that the Lake Nicaragua sharks travel from the Pacific through a submarine tunnel.
Squier’s description of viewing multiple shark fins breaking the water of Lake Nicaragua became a key image in popularizing the sharks; but Thorson was of the opinion that what Squier actually saw were fins of the tarpons.
22 Personal e-mail, Dec. 23, 2009.
23 “Report of the Nicaragua Canal Commission,” op. cit.
24 For example, see www.sanjuanfishingcharter.com, Web site of the Aquaholic fishing boat charter company in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.
25 The relevant Chapter 7 posted online at http://mrwelch.pbworks.com/f/Chapter7_CentralAmerica.pdf, the Web site of social studies teacher Joe Welch, North Hills Junior High School, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
26 “Keeping an Eye on the Scams, Shams and Swindles,” by William J. Bennetta, “The Textbook Letter,” Jan.-Feb. 1999, at www.textbookleague.org/96scams.htm.
27 “Nicaragua bans freshwater shark fishing amid dwindling population numbers,” Underwatertimes.com News Service, Jan. 18, 2006, via www.UnderwaterTimes.com/news.php?article_id=05437210968.
28 Redding v. Benson (739F2d 1360), 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, via http://openjurist.org/739/f2d/1360/redding-v-benson.
29 Peary, op. cit.
30 E.g., Peary, op. cit.
31 E.g., “The Naming of America: Fragments We’ve Shored Against Ourselves,” by Jonathan Cohen, at www.fammed.sunysb.edu/surgery/america.html.
32 My own combination of various English translations; see “Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain,” Vol. 2, by Alexander von Humboldt (John Black, trans.), and “The Nicaragua Canal and the Monroe Doctrine: A Political History of Isthmus Transit, With Special Reference to the Nicaragua Canal Project and the Attitude of the United States Government Thereto,” by Lindley Miller Keasbey.
33 Keasbey, op. cit.
34 “The Inter-Oceanic Canal Across Nicaragua and Attitude Toward It of the Government of the United States,” by Thomas B. Atkins.
35 Squier, op. cit. Oviedo noted that the expedition’s captain wouldn’t tell him the secret, either.
36 “Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720” (revised ed.), by Murdo J. MacLeod.
37 “The Nicaragua Canal,” by William E. Simmons.
38 The various Indian encounters described here are from Squier, op. cit.
39 Squier, op. cit.
40 “Geometrical Landscapes: The Voyages of Discovery and the Transformation of Mathematical Practice,” in “Writing Science,” Vol. 1, by Amir R. Alexander.
41 “The Wages of Conquest: The Mexican Aristocracy in the Context of Western Aristocracies,” by Hugo G. Nutini.
42 “Five Letters, 1519-1526,” by Hernán Cortés (John Bayard Morris, trans.).
43 Alexander, op. cit.
44 In a story so insane it must be true, the conquistador Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada reportedly established the New Kingdom of Granada by bizarre Christian magical rituals: declaring his dominion on behalf of the crown by pulling up some grass, then drawing his sword and daring anyone to challenge his claim, even though he was among friends. He then established the city of Bogatá (originally Santa Fe de Bogatá) by erecting 12 huts to represent the Christian Apostles. (“Following the Conquistadores: Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdelena,” by John Augustine Zahm [a.k.a. H.J. Mozans].)
45 “American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” by Edmund Sears Morgan.
46 “Francis Drake: Lives of a Hero,” by John Cummins.
47 “Francis Drake: Privateer: Contemporary Narratives and Documents,” by John Hampden.
48 Cummins, op. cit.
49 Ibid.
50 See www.captainmorgan.com.
51 “Empire of Blue Water: Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army, The Epic Battle for the Americas, And the Catastrophe that Ended the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign,” by Stephan Talty.
52 Raid details from Ibid.
53 Peary, op. cit.
54 “Living in the Land of Our Ancestors: Rama Indian and Creole Territory in Caribbean Nicaragua,” by Gerald Riverstone.
55 Squier, op. cit.
56 “A History of William Paterson and the Darien Company,” by James Samuel Barbour.
57 “History of the Panama Canal: Its Construction and Builders,” by Ira Elbert Bennett.
58 Barbour, op. cit.
59 “The Nelson Touch: The Life and Legend of Horatio Nelson,” by Terry Coleman.
60 “Nelson: A Dream of Glory, 1758-1797,” by John Sugden.
61 “El Castillo Journal; A Crumbling Fort Sleeps On, Haunted by History,” by Stephen Kinzer, New York Times, May 23, 1988, via www.nytimes.com/1988/05/23/world/el-castillo-journal-a-crumbling-fort-sleeps-on-haunted-by-history.html.
62 Keasbey, op. cit.
63 Remaining quotes and narrative on Nelson’s raid from Cummins, op. cit.
64 “Ship Canal Through Central America,” Niles Weekly Register, No. 10, Vol. IV, May 7, 1825.
65 For Von Humboldt, see Keasbey, op. cit. For Geothe, see “The Key of the Pacific: The Nicaragua Canal,” by Archibald Ross Colquhoun.
66 Keasbey, op. cit.
67 Ibid.
68 “Tycoon’s War: How Cornelius Vanderbilt Invaded a Country to Overthrow America’s Most Famous Military Adventurer,” by Stephen Dando-Collins.
69 “Cornelius Vanderbilt: Portrait, Character and Biography” in “The Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated,” Vols. 43-44, March 1866, S.R. Wells, ed.
70 The bulk of the following information about Vanderbilt’s enterprise is from: “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” by T.J. Stiles; and Dando-Collins, op. cit.
71 Dando-Collins, op. cit.
72 “Your Money or Your Line,” New York Times, March 9, 1859, via http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D02E1DB1E31EE34BC4153DFB4668382649FDE. The “robber baron” origin first noted by Stiles, op. cit.
73 Stiles, op. cit. One way Vanderbilt sabotaged the company was by making ships from New York stop in Panama before heading back to Greytown, adding days to the trip.
74 “The War in Nicaragua,” by William Walker. It is the primary source for most of the details in this section. It is also a masterpiece of psychopathological literature, starting out sinister and ending up berserk.
75 “The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.”
76 The Cocos Islands are in Australia. Walker probably actually meant Cocos Island off Costa Rica, which is famed for its several legends of buried treasure.
77 Keasbey, op. cit.
78 At www.tennessee.gov/tsla/exhibits/walker/index.htm.
79 See “Vermont in the Civil War” Web site at http://vermontcivilwar.org/csa/tucker.php.
80 See Kansas State Historical Society Web site at www.kshs.org/cool3/titussword.htm.
81 Stiles, op. cit.
82 Keasbey, op. cit.
83 “The Atlantic & Pacific Ship-Railway Across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, In Mexico, Considered Commercially, Politically & Constructively,” by Elmer L. Corthell.
84 Keasbey, op. cit.
85 Thorson, “The Status of the Lake Nicaragua Shark: An Updated Appraisal,” op. cit.
86 “Canal Dreams Past and Present,” by Tim Coone, in “Moon Nicaragua,” by Joshua Berman and Randall Wood. The book identifies Coone as a journalist but does not mention that he is founder of one of Nicaragua’s top canal companies.
87 “Rival to Panama Canal Planned,” by Hector Tobar and Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2006, via http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/30/business/fi-canal30. The Nicaraguan government did not respond to my request for an update on this canal plan.
88 Personal e-mail, Dec. 23, 2009.
89 “Walker” (1987), DVD, Criterion Collection, via Netflix.
Significant sources not cited in the text or footnotes include: “$20bn and 10 years to build—a giant rival for Panama Canal,” by John Vidal, Guardian (UK), Oct. 4, 2006, at www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/oct/04/water.conservationandendangeredspecies; “Admiral Sir Henry Morgan: King of the Buccaneers,” by Terry Breverton; “American Is Captured After Plane Is Downed in Nicaragua Territory,” by Richard Halloran, New York Times, Oct. 8, 1986; “A Brief Commercial Geography of Nicaragua,” by Edward Neville Vose, “Dun’s Review,” Vo. 23, No. 1, March 1914; “Bull Sharks Upriver,” National Geographic video short on Bay of Bengal sharks, posted May 18, 2007 on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_x8oRSVfCQ&feature=fvw; “Columbia Encyclopedia” (fifth ed.), Barbara A. Chernow and George A. Vallasi, eds.; “Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, And the Fall of Old Mexico,” by Hugh Thomas; “An ‘Eco-Canal’ across Nicaragua,” by Néfer Muñoz (undated; apparently 2001), Tierramérica Web site at www.tierramerica.net/2001/0506/iacentos.shtml; “EcoCanal and the San Juan River in Nicaragua,” presentation by Gabriel Pasos, World Water Forum, Japan, March 16-23, 2003, at Web site of Foundation for Riverfront Improvement and Restoration (Tokyo, Japan), www.rfc.or.jp/IWT/iwtrkp/www/htdocs/knowledge_data/session5/Gabriel_Pasos.pdf; ENCO Centroamérica energy company Web site at www.encocentam.com; “Explaining the Reagan Years in Central America: A World System Perspective,” by Jeremy B. Brown; “Filibustering,” (anonymous), “Putnam’s Monthly,” Vol. 9, March 1857; Global Security Web site article on Panama Canal references including citation of Ecocanal, www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/panama-canal-refs.htm; “Henry L. Stimson’s American Policy in Nicaragua,” by Henry Lewis Stimson (1991 ed. Including U.S. State Department report “The United States and Nicaragua: A Survey of Relations from 1909 to 1932); “Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas,” by David Ewing Duncan; “The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, And ‘Discovery’ in the Southeast,” by Patricia Kay Galloway; “Hollywood Invades Nicaragua,” by Louis Mathews, “Mother Jones,” Dec. 1987; “Integrating a Research Station into Community Development and Area Protection in Nicaragua,” by Hans G. Schabel, in “Sustainable Forests: Global Challenges and Local Solutions,” by O. Thomas Bouman and David George Brand, eds.; “The Isthmian Canal from the Beginning,” by Charles Morris, “Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine,” Vol. 69, Jan.-June. 1902; “Living and Investing in the New Nicaragua,” by Christopher Howard and Tim Rogers; “Message to the Senate Transmitting the Convention Terminating the Nicaragua Canal Treaty of 1914,” President Richard Nixon document, Sept. 23, 1970, at American Presidency Project of University of California Santa Barbara, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2667; “The Nicaragua Canal,” by Lindley M. Keasbey, in “Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,” Vol. VII, Jan.-June 1896; “Nicaragua Canal and Economic Development,” by Emory R. Johnson, in “Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,” Vol. VII, Jan.-June 1896; “Nicaragua: Shot Out of the Sky,” by Michael S. Serrill, “Time,” Oct. 20, 1986, via www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1075209-4,00.html; “Old Panama and Castillo del Oro,” by Charles Loftus Grant Anderson; “Panama and the Canal,” by Alfred Bates Hall and Clarence Lyon Chester; “Pesces de las aguas continentals de Costa Rica,” by William A. Bussing; “Pirates of the Pacific, 1575-1742,” by Peter Gerhard; “The Pirates’ Who’s Who: Giving Particulars of the Lives & Deaths of the Pirates and Buccaneers,” by Philip Gosse; “Plane Supplying Contras Crashes,” by Bernard E. Trainor, New York Times, Jan. 25, 1988, at www.nytimes.com/1988/01/25/world/plane-supplying-contras-crashes-11-believed-killed-nicaragua-plane-struck.html; Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History Web page about Theodore Gill at http://vertebrates.si.edu/fishes/ichthyology_history/ichs_colls/gill_theodore.html;“The Tower Commission Report,” by John Tower, Edmund Muskie and Brent Scowcroft; Mark Twain’s March 16, 1867 letter to the San Francisco “Alta California” about his Nicaragua travels on TwainQuotes.com at www.twainquotes.com/18670316.html; “Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987,” by Bob Woodward; “Where Is Nicaragua?” by Peter Davies; Wikipedia article on Lake Nicaragua at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_nicaragua. All books (except for Thomas B. Allen’s shark works; Woodward, “Veil”; and “Tower Commission Report”), journals, magazines and newspapers viewed via Google Books unless otherwise noted. Many thanks to Dr. Cowan for extraordinary assistance.