The Americans, who had been considering building a canal across Nicaragua, eventually stepped in, wrested Panamanian independence from Colombia, and began to complete the canal in 1904. It took 10 years, almost US$400 million and 75,000 labourers to build it. The Americans used a mixture of smart engineering and brute strength to complete the task. To prevent the need for a series of locks (there are only three), they dug a very deep channel, and then saved some hard yakka by damming a river and creating a long, navigable lake.
Most visitors envisage the Panama Canal to be straight and narrow, but it actually consists of the expansive Lake Gatún and the sinuous Culebra Cut. The Canal measures just over 80 km in length and it takes around nine hours for a ship to navigate it. Between 30 and 40 ships pass through the Canal each day, most paying around US$30,000 for their passage. In 1988, the QEII paid the highest fee ever to use the Canal - a cool US$117,285.51.
Panama effectively takes over responsibility for the Canal in 1999, and there is already talk of enlarging the waterway to accommodate the 5% of ships now too big to navigate it. As far as canals go, the Panama Canal is a dwarf compared to the 1069-km-long Karakumsky Kanal in Turkmenistan, but its commercial and strategic importance cannot be measured.