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Morgan appreciated the military significance of the Isthmus, understanding how it could be used for rapid delivery of a strike force from the Caribbean to attack Panama City—the richest port on the Pacific— from its landward side. Steinbeck’s freighter would have made the forty-nine mile transit of the canal and its locks in about ten hours, time enough for him to search for glimpses of the jungled and mountainous terrain Morgan’s men traversed in 1671.
    In 1925, when Steinbeck first saw it, the Panama Canal was a fresh marvel of modern engineering and a symbol of America’s buccaneering spirit. In a sense he had grown up with its story. The United States acquired rights to and began construction on the canal in 1904, when Steinbeck was two years old. The brainchild of President Theodore Roosevelt, built with the labor of 50,000 workers from many nations, the Panama Canal cost $352 million dollars to build. Thousands of workers gave their lives; during the American effort as many as 5,000 died due to landslides, construction accidents, and endemic diseases such as yellow fever and malaria. Finished in 1914, the year Steinbeck turned twelve, it was a source of national pride. The United States now dominated the trade of two oceans, exacting tolls from every passing ship, and had become a global naval power, controlling the path between the seas. In Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold , Balboa dresses in his “scoured armor,” wades into the Pacific, and “firmly addresse[s] the sea and claim[s] all the lands it broke on.” Teddy Roosevelt, the “New Imperialist, ” might have done the same.
    There was, however, a darker side—a piratical side—to the Panama Canal story—one that Steinbeck probably knew well. In 1903, the United States spent $40 million to purchase the rights to the canal project, ostensibly from a bankrupt French company that had been trying for years to build a canal without success. The money, however, went to a Wall Street syndicate formed by financier J. P. Morgan. Like Steinbeck’s Henry Morgan, J. P. Morgan was a man who understood that “honesty—public honesty—may be a ladder to a higher, more valuable crime.” Acting on inside knowledge of the Roosevelt administration’s interest in Panama, Morgan’s syndicate had secretly purchased the French company for a song. When Congress approved construction of a canal through Nicaragua instead, Morgan’s group used campaign contributions to help Roosevelt “persuade” legislators to reverse the vote. Thousands of French stockholders lost their investments (in French, the word “Paname” is synonymous with “swindle”) as Morgan’s syndicate raked in millions of taxpayer dollars. When newspapers broke the story, President Roosevelt himself sued for libel and veteran newsman Joseph Pulitzer was frightened enough to flee the country. When Congress mounted investigations, they lasted long but went nowhere. The analogies between J. P. Morgan and Steinbeck’s Sir Henry Morgan, who cheats his own men out of the booty of Panama and uses his riches to bribe the king, would not have been lost on readers in 1929.
    “I took the Isthmus,” Teddy Roosevelt declared unrepentantly, and a buccaneer named J. P. Morgan, a robber-baron with a famous yacht not coincidentally named Corsair , had helped him to do it. Panama at this time was an annex of Colombia, and when Colombia refused to ratify a treaty leasing the Canal Zone to the United States, Morgan’s syndicate, with the connivance of the Roosevelt administration, arranged and underwrote a convenient “revolution” in Panama. Colombian troops were bribed to abandon their posts, while Roosevelt, in an example of his famous “gunboat diplomacy,” sent the warship USS Nashville to sit off the Panama coast and discourage interference. Not surprisingly, the newly installed government of Panama was eager to make a treaty ceding the Canal Zone to the United States on very favorable terms.
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