Panama Canal Museum

This guide to the Panama Canal Museum in Panama City starts inside a building that began life as the Grand Hotel in eighteen seventy-four, then became headquarters for Ferdinand de Lesseps's Universal Interoceanic Canal Company in eighteen eighty-one. It follows de Lesseps, already famous for Suez, promising backers a sea-level canal in eight years, and the landslides, malaria and yellow fever that tore through the work camps as the isthmus refused to cooperate. The company's finances collapsed into bankruptcy by eighteen eighty-eight, and the same rooms later housed an American canal commission before Panama's own government moved in.