Hey Thoughty2 here. On an unreasonably humid  morning in 1854, the chief engineer of the  

Panama railroad was woken by a man, outside his  hut, screaming at the top of his lungs. What he  

saw when he opened the door, he later wrote, was  something he would never forget if he lived to  

be a thousand years old. It was genuinely one of  the most shocking sights I’ve ever spoken about  

on this channel, more on that in a minute, but  first how did we get here in the first place?

The Panama railroad stretches just 47 miles, from  the Atlantic to the Pacific. By railway standards,  

that's nothing. But these aren't  your average 47 miles of track,  

because they go through one of the  most inhospitable places on the planet,  

and no it’s not Luton. This stretch of railway  unlocked the world and supercharged global trade,  

but it came at the cost of 12,000 lives.  That's 255 deaths for every mile of track laid.

But to the money moguls and market movers, it  didn't matter one bit. The Panama Railroad became  

one of the most profitable enterprises in American  history. For a while, it was the highest-priced  

stock on the New York Stock Exchange, and  investors on Wall Street became filthy rich whilst  

Chinese, Irish, and Caribbean workers died in  their thousands in disease-ridden jungle swamps.

Panama is a peculiar place: a narrow, tropical  isthmus of rainforest and mangrove-fringed  

coasts that acts as the connective  tissue between two great land masses.

Spanish conquistadors identified Panama as  a crucial economic pinch point way back in  

the 1500s. They knew that whoever  could find a way to move people and  

goods quickly across this tiny gap would  control global trade and two previously  

unconnected worlds. Yet, for another 300  years, nobody managed to pull it off.

In the early 1800s, getting from the  East Coast of America to California  

was an absolute nightmare. You had  two options, and both were rubbish:

You could sail all the way around South  America via Cape Horn (a journey of roughly  

14,000 miles that would take about 4–6 months  back then). Assuming your ship wasn't consumed  

by the notoriously treacherous currents  along Drake's Passage (which many were).

Or you could trudge overland across North  America itself, which involved months of  

gruelling wagon trails through deserts,  mountains and badlands beset with bandits.

Along the way, you could enjoy  amenities such as dysentery,  

starvation, dehydration and the occasional arrow  to the knee. Ending your days as an adventurer.

But there was a third option: a nifty, shortcut.  You could simply sail down to Panama, then hack,  

trudge, and trek your way across 50 miles of dense  jungle. After which, you’d catch another ship on  

the Pacific side heading north up to California.  It sounds pretty easy and a lot more attractive  

than the first two options. Except for the fact  that this 50 mile jaunt across land meant canoeing  

up the Chagres River, which was infested  with alligators and prone to flash floods.

Then you would need to switch to a mule and trudge  across crumbling Spanish trails that hadn't been  

maintained in half a century. All of which would  take about 8 days in total, assuming you survived  

the onslaught of malaria, yellow fever, cholera,  the blistering heat and murderous bandits.

Few people ever chose this third option for  obvious reasons. That was until January 1848,  

when gold was discovered at  Sutter's Mill in California,  

and within a few months, everything had changed.

Suddenly, tens of thousands of Americans, induced  with gold fever, were desperate to get over to the  

West Coast by any means possible. They were  known as the California 49ers. A surprising  

number of them chose the Panama route as it  was much quicker than the first two options.  

It was incredibly dangerous and plenty of people  died, but for them, it was worth the risk to get  

their hands on the juiciest gold claims. These  were essentially the 'Bitcoin bros' of the day.

Almost overnight, the Panama route became  clogged with traffic as thousands crammed  

onto ships bound for the isthmus. Local  boatmen and mule drivers made small fortunes,  

charging extortionate prices to help  people cross. Entire tent cities  

sprang up on both coasts of Panama,  full of impatient, transient 49ers.

There’s an old adage that the people who  made the most in the Gold Rush were those  

selling the shovels and just like those  shovel-sellers, three men in New York saw  

the pandemonium ensuing down in Panama and  they instantly knew there was opportunity  

extracting wealth from people's desire to get to  California as quickly as humanly possible. So,  

they decided to build a railroad across Panama  (the first transcontinental railroad in the  

Americas) assuming that, once it was complete,  it would print money. Boy, were they correct.

The first of these three ambitious men was William  Henry Aspinwall, a shipping magnate who already  

owned the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. He was  one of the wealthiest men in New York. A city on  

the Atlantic coast of Panama would actually be  named after him – but Aspinwall, Panama was later  

renamed to Colón by the hispanic community, in  honour of Christopher Columbus’ digestive tract.

The second opportunistic man was Henry Chauncey,  

a Wall Street banker with deep  pockets and deep connections.

The third man was probably the most interesting of  the lot. John Lloyd Stephens wasn't some wealthy  

magnate like the others; he was a celebrity  explorer, a diplomat, and a best-selling author.

A decade earlier, he'd ventured deep into the  jungles of Central America and rediscovered  

the lost cities of the ancient Maya. He once  bought an entire ruined Mayan city for just £50.

He'd written a book on Central America (several,  in fact), so unlike Aspinwall and Chauncey,  

he knew the environment and the jungle  better than almost any man in America.

PART 2

In December 1848, the three men secured a  contract with the government of New Granada  

(present-day Colombia) to build a railroad  across Panama. By April of the following year,  

the Panama Railroad Company was  officially incorporated in New York,  

backed by $1,000,000 of startup  capital – about $40 million today.

Construction began in May 1850. But from  day one, the entire project was cursed.  

The starting point for the Panama Railroad was  Manzanillo island, which doesn't really exist  

anymore because it's been consumed by the city  of Colón. But to call Manzanillo an island in  

the first place is pretty generous. It was  a festering, waterlogged swamp covered in  

mangroves and poisonous manchineel plants. And at  high tide, most of it was completely underwater.

As I said, not a great start, but it gets worse.

Before a single piece of track could be laid,  

the workers (who were mostly Irish  or Chinese immigrants) had to hack  

through thick and poisonous vegetation and then  drive wooden piles deep into the muck. Finally,  

they needed to build a causeway connecting  the island to the Panamanian mainland.

Buildings to accommodate the workers had  to be constructed on stilts to keep them  

above the waterline. However, this  was so difficult and time-consuming,  

they simply towed abandoned ships from the  California Gold Rush, which people had used  

to travel from the East Coast of America  to Panama, into the Manzanillo Bay and used  

them as makeshift dormitories. These old boats  were rotting, and full of mosquitoes and rats.

After the initial groundworks  on Manzanillo Island were done,  

they started to build out the route itself.  The first eight miles passed through what one  

engineer described as “a jungle of gelatinous  swamps infested with alligators”. Workers had  

to labour long hours in water up to four feet  deep. The ground was so soft that countless  

tonnes of gravel and rock had to be dumped just  to create a solid foundation for the rails.

And just when they thought the ground couldn't  get any softer, the rain arrived. Panama receives  

up to 3.5 metres of rainfall every year,  most of it during the rainy season between  

May and December. I say season, but at seven  months, that's basically most of the year.

The workers themselves were drenched to their  bones, they worked in wet clothes and slept in wet  

clothes. Their clothes rotted, as did their food,  the wood, and most importantly, their morale.

But the real killer was the mosquitoes. In  the 1850s, germ theory was still years away,  

and the idea that tiny insects could  transmit deadly illnesses was little  

more than a Chinese whisper passed around  camp. Workers simply slept in the open,  

whilst the mosquitoes covered them from head  to toe in bites. The surrounding swamps churned  

out billions of mosquitoes, and before long,  cholera and yellow fever swept through the camps.

Then there was the malaria,  which caused fever, chills,  

and delirium. All three of these had  the unfortunate side effect of death;  

men who seemed healthy at breakfast  could have been dead by dinner time.

The railroad company brought in  doctors, but there was almost  

nothing they could do. They didn't even  fully understand what they were fighting.

It is for this reason, and probably a few  others, that the original chief engineer,  

George Totten (who surveyed the  route before construction began),  

almost backed out of the project after  he had taken one look at the jungle and  

swamps. But the company was obviously  paying him enough for him to stay.

The story was very different for the regular  workers, however. The company recruited  

them from wherever they could. Americans  were lured by the promise of good wages,  

Irish immigrants arrved, fleeing the  aftermath of the Great Famine. And so to  

came various workers from the Caribbean,  Colombia, China, and across Europe.

During the first year of construction, the  railroad was forging its way across low-lying  

swampland and had not reached higher ground yet.  This presented a significant problem: there was  

nowhere they could build a proper cemetery for the  deceased. You can’t really bury people in swamps.

With multiple people dying each day, corpses  began piling up. It was becoming a huge  

logistical problem that slowed the project  down, but the Panama Railroad Company,  

who weren’t going to let a few inconvenient  corpses stand in the way of progress, came  

up with a solution that was kind of ingenious  – and would actually turn a profit to boot!

You see, it came to the attention of the  higher-ups that most of the workers who died  

were anonymous. They were known only by their  first name, with no address and no next of kin.

It also happened that in the 1850s, medical  schools around the world were absolutely  

desperate for cadavers to train their students.  The demand for fresh bodies far exceeded supply,  

which led to a 19th-century side hustle:  so-called 'resurrection men' made a small fortune  

digging up graves to sell the corpses to medical  schools. So the Panama Railroad Company thought:  

why not turn what is a side hustle for  others into a full-on revenue stream?

After all, they had ready access to  plenty of raw goods (cadavers) and  

a constant supply that didn't seem to be  slowing down any time soon. Sure enough,  

the company began pickling the unclaimed  bodies of dead workers in large wooden  

barrels and shipping them off to medical  schools and hospitals around the world.

For years, the Panama Railroad Company became  one of the world's biggest suppliers of human  

cadavers. It wasn't just a small  footnote in their company ledger;  

it was one of the largest revenue  streams in the business. The proceeds  

from selling corpses were enough  to pay for the company's hospital.

But it gets even weirder. The man behind the  wholesale corpse operation was Dr J.A. Totten,  

the company's chief physician and the  brother of chief engineer George Totten.

So, whilst one brother was overseeing  the construction that killed the workers,  

the other was busy profiting from their deaths.  I’d love to know what their childhood was like.

Despite the relentless death bell tolling  along the steel of the tracks each morning  

as the corpses piled higher and higher,  the company had investors to please,  

deadlines to meet, and a fortune  awaiting them on the other side.  

Rather than doing the moral thing, such as  improving health and safety standards or  

calling off the project altogether, they  only amped up their recruitment efforts.

They focused on places that hadn't  yet heard how deadly Panama truly was,  

in particular, the Irish fleeing the Great Famine.

However, that avenue of workers and  bodies dried up after an Irish-American  

newspaper published an article in 1853  entitled 'Irish Graves in Panama',  

warning readers of the 'fearful sacrifice of life'  that awaited them. Cork newspapers also printed  

testimonies from workers who had returned  from the railroad, detailing their horrors.

So the company shifted its focus towards  China. In March 1854, the clipper ship Sea  

Witch arrived in Panama Harbour. It was famous for  setting speed records on the high seas. On board  

the Sea Witch that day were over 700 Chinese  labourers. Most of them from southern China.

They had been promised decent wages in  a far-off tropical land. And crucially,  

their contracts also guaranteed a  daily ration of opium, which seems odd,  

but it was not unusual for Chinese labourers of  the era to inbibe as a part of their daily lives.

But upon their arrival in this tropical land,  the realisation hit that they’d been sent  

to their death sentences. The Chinese workers  were used for the worst sections of the route.  

They were made to hack through  dense jungle, drain swamps,  

and haul ungodly amounts of earth in the most  horrific conditions. Unlike the Irish workers,  

many of the Chinese labourers had never  encountered tropical diseases and had  

zero immunity. Malaria and yellow fever cut  through them like a scythe through wet grass.

Within weeks of their arrival, the  Chinese were dying so quickly that  

even the railroad company's management  were beginning to worry. That says a lot,  

because until now, they had given the grand  total of zero shits over their workers' deaths.

And if you thought things couldn't get  any worse or the management any crueler,  

well, you obviously haven't been  following this story very well.

Because when the directors back in New York learnt  how much those daily opium rations were costing  

them, they abruptly cut off the supply in direct  violation of the workers' contracts. It turns out  

opium withdrawal is a force to be reckoned  with, and these men (who were already sick,  

exhausted, and thousands of miles from home) were  now suffering with yet another horrendous ailment.

And in the end, it just proved  too much for them to take.

One morning, as Chief Engineer George Totten lay  on a cot in his hut near the town of Matachín,  

recovering from yet another bout of malaria,  he was roused by someone screaming in horror  

outside. He staggered out of bed and  unbolted the door to find James Baldwin,  

his assistant chief engineer, translucent  with fear and drenched in sweat.  

He implored Totten to come immediately,  because the Chinese workers had begun  

strapping themselves to trees and doing  something YouTube won’t allow me to talk about.

Totten would later write that if he should live  to be as old as Methuselah, he would never forget  

what he saw that morning. When he and Baldwin  arrived at the site, there were more than a  

hundred Chinese workers dangling from trees.  Most had used their own hair to loop their  

long braids around their necks and tied the ends  to tree limbs. Others had thrown themselves onto  

their own machetes, and a few had tied stones to  their clothing and simply jumped into the river.

Totten also reported some of the Chinese  workers had paid Malay labourers to shoot  

them and cut off their heads. From  the surrounding brush, witnesses  

described hearing high-pitched laughter  followed by the blasts of blunderbusses.

I genuinely don't know what to say  about that… so we’ll just move on.

So what did the company do in response to the mass  “deciding not to wake up again” event? Obviously  

their minds didn't turn to guilt or, God forbid,  reforms to improve the situation for the remaining  

workers – the company just saw a logistics  problem. Management's primary concern was  

replacing the dead Chinese workers – and ensuring  the survivors didn’t go down the same path.

So, the surviving Chinese labourers  were gradually phased out. But this  

“phasing out” was almost as cruel as the  horrors that had preceeded it. 197 of the  

surviving Chinese workers were literally traded  – like livestock – for Black Jamaican workers.  

The going rate was $17.77 per Chinese  man, paid to secure his relocation to  

the sugar plantations of Jamaica. They  had simply moved from one hell to another.

Oh, and remember the town of Matachín, where  the mass no-more-lifing took place? A popular  

tale soon spread that the name was a deliberate  contraction of mata – Spanish for "kill" – and  

chino – "Chinese." But it’s highly doubtful  those in charge would have actually named a  

town “Kill Chinese” – so it’s widely accepted to  have been a Chinese whisper, rather than fact.

But the railroad wasn't done with  its workers yet. Not even close.  

By mid-1852, they had slogged through about  23 miles of swamp and burnt through roughly a  

million dollars of the company's original  capital. And now they had arrived at the  

most seemingly insurmountable obstacle  of the entire route: the Chagres River.

Now, crossing a river might not sound like  a big deal. Railways cross rivers all the  

time. But this wasn't some cutesy bridge over  the River Thames. The Chagres was an absolute  

beast of a waterway that could rise 40 feet in a  single day during heavy rain. So in the morning  

it could be all sunshine and rainbows, but by  the late afternoon, the river has swallowed  

the footings you just laid, washed away your  tools, and drowned several of your co-workers.

The engineers initially built a wooden bridge at  a place called Barbacoas. But in very little time,  

the river rose dramatically and washed the entire  bridge away in one fell swoop. The result of  

months of work, back-breaking labour, and quite  a few more dead workers was gone in a flash.

So, in its place, they built a  300-foot-long iron bridge that  

was tall enough to survive the tantrums of  the Chagres. It cost over a year to build,  

a small fortune of the company’s  cash, and a few more deaths of course.

And that was just one of almost 300 bridges  and culverts the workers were required to  

build along the route. Bearing in mind  this railway was only 47 miles - long,  

which meant there was a frankly absurd six  bridges or culverts for every mile of track.

The construction of the track itself  was also causing the company and the  

workers a headache. Specifically  the railroad sleepers (sometimes  

called ties). They were originally  made of pine, but humidity in Panama  

sits at about 90% so the freshly placed  pine sleepers rotted in under a year.

The solution was to use lignum vitae instead,  one of the densest, hardest and heaviest timbers  

in the world, found in trees native to the  Caribbean and South America. It did the trick,  

but necessitated the arduous new step  of having to drill all the way through  

the sleepers before the workers could  drive spikes into them. Which doesn't  

sound like much until you learn that they  were doing all of this using a hand drill.

But if the swamps, the river, and the  rotting infrastructure weren't enough,  

the railroad still had one final boss  to face: the Continental Divide itself.

At a place called Culebra the railroad had to  cross the the Continental Divide. And the only  

way to cross it with a railroad was to cut through  it. Its summit was only 287 feet above sea level,  

which is a mere speed bump as far as mountains  go, but an obstacle nonetheless. Workers dug a  

trench over 40 feet deep and roughly 2,500  feet long, carving through solid earth and  

rock at the highest point of the isthmus.  They used explosives to break the rock,  

then loaded the debris by hand onto rail cars.  it was backbreaking work, but their efforts later  

served as the template for the significantly  larger Culebra Cut that would be needed for  

the Panama Canal fifty years later – subscribe to  the channel if you don’t want to miss that one.

It wasn't just the workers that the  railroad was claiming. Do you remember  

John Lloyd Stephens? The celebrity explorer  and Panama Railroad Company co-founder. Well,  

in the spring of 1852, whilst  visiting the construction site,  

Stephens was struck down by malaria. he died  that October, aged only 46. Just about one  

year for every mile of the railroad he'd  helped conceive. He never saw it completed.

Of the three co-founders, Stephens was the only  one who had regularly visited Panama. Aspinwall  

and Chauncey were quite content to manage things  from the comfort of their New York offices,  

far away from the malaria and the  daily horrors of the project itself.

By late 1854, progress had been slow and  the death count numerous. So the company  

adopted a two-pronged attack from here on  out. They split into two teams. One from  

the Atlantic side pushed westward. They had  it worse, as there were more swamps, jungle,  

mosquitoes and general shittery on that side.

The second team, the Pacific team,  pushed eastward from Panama City. They  

were able to make quicker progress due  to the slighly less murderous terrain.

And then, on a wet evening on January  27th, 1855 the two teams met at the summit.

George Totten, the long-suffering chief  engineer who by this point had survived  

multiple bouts of malaria, drove the final spike  into a crosstie by the light of sputtering whale  

oil lamps in the pouring rain. The Atlantic  and Pacific Oceans were now connected by rail.

The following day, a locomotive with freight and  passenger cars made the first complete journey  

across Panama from ocean to ocean. It may have  only been a journey of fort-seven miles. But to  

get to this point had taken four and a half years.  An estimated 12,000 deaths. And a final price tag  

of around $8 million (about $280 million today).  Eight times the original budget of $1 million.

But the directors of the Panama Railroad Company  didn't care one iota, because almost overnight,  

it started printing money, exactly as the three  founders had predicted. A one-way ticket was  

$25 worth of gold - roughly $930 today. And do  you know what? People paid it. Of course they did,  

because the alternative was a six-month voyage  around Cape Horn with a strong likelihood of  

death, or a relentless and exhausting expedition  across the American interior with a strong  

liklihood of death – or of course they could  attempt to chop and trudge their way through  

the Panama jungle on foot, as many had done  before, with the a strong liklihood of death.

Within a decade, the Panama Railroad was  generating $11 million a year in revenue  

and briefly became the highest-priced stock  on the New York Stock Exchange. A single  

share changed hands for a whopping  $295. To put that in perspective:  

a typical railroad stock on the NYSE at the time  traded for somewhere between $50 and $100 a share.

But the problem with the Panama Railroad is  that it was only so valuable because it held the  

monopoly on quickly traversing the continent, and  it didn't take long before that monopoly crumbled.  

On the 10th of May 1869, just 14 years after the  first train had trundled across the bloody tracks  

of the isthmus, a golden spike was driven  into the ground at Promontory Summit, Utah,  

completing the first transcontinental  railroad across the United States.  

All of a sudden, you could travel from New  York to California without having to take a  

boat down to Panama, a vastly overpriced train  ride, and then pay for yet another boat ride  

up the western coast. For the vast majority of  travellers, the Panama Railroad Company became  

obsolete overnight, and the company's  share price collapsed from $295 to $60.

The railroad lived on, barely. The  French briefly revived its fortunes  

in the 1880s when they attempted  to build a canal across Panama,  

and suddenly the railroad was vital for  hauling equipment and men through the jungle.

But in 1904, the French surrendered and the  Americans took over the canal project. Once  

again, the railroad found a second life as the  logistical backbone of their construction efforts:  

every day, it hauled enormous quantities  of excavated earth out of the Culebra Cut.

By the way, if you think the 12,000 deaths  building the Panama Railroad was bad,  

the French effort to construct a canal  cost in the region of 22,000 deaths and  

$287 million. And it was all for nothing  really – as I’d previously mentioned but  

feel strangely oblidged, as an Englishman, to  say once more – in the end, they surrendered.

Anyway, that’s a story for a future video.

When the Americans finally finished the  Panama Canal in 1914, without surrendering,  

it was essentially the death knell for the  railroad. Ships no longer needed to stop at all:  

there was no unloading in the  harbour, no rail crossing,  

and no reloading on the other side.  They simply sailed straight through.

By the time Panama took control of the  railroad in 1979 as part of the Canal Treaties,  

it was already a shadow of its glory days.  By the 1990s, trains were crawling along at  

10 miles per hour on crumbling infrastructure,  losing millions of dollars a month. The jungle  

was slowly reclaiming the route that 12,000  people had died to painstakingly carve out.

It was eventually privatised and modernised  in the early 2000s, and today it still runs.  

Carrying shipping containers mostly. You  won't find any gold-fevered prospectors  

aboard its carriages today. They do a weekly  tourist run between Panama City and Colón,  

with a glass-domed observation car and views  of the canal. Catering mostly to cruise ship  

passengers. A one-way ticket will set  you back $25. Which funnily enough,  

is the same price in gold, that the 49ers once  paid to cross the isthmus almost two centuries  

ago. If there's one lesson we can take away from  the Panama Railroad and the canal that followed,  

it's that lives really matter; just not as  much as gold, apparently. Thanks for watching.