The Line Through Hell

The Line Through Hell - Americas Forgotten Catastrophe in the Isthmus of Panama

In January 1854, Lieutenant Isaac Strain of the United States Navy led twenty-seven men into the Darién jungle of Panama on what the Navy Department considered a manageable survey mission: cross the forty miles of the isthmus, map the continental divide, and return with the data that might finally answer the three-hundred-year-old question of where to cut a canal between the oceans.

The maps were wrong. The provisions were a third of what was needed. The jungle did not yield to naval authority. What followed was forty-nine days of starvation, malaria, drowning, and the slow, systematic destruction of men who had been sent in with instruments but without food, with courage but without the one thing that might have saved them: the knowledge held by the indigenous people who had always known how to survive there, and whom no one had thought to properly ask.

Eight men died in the Darién. Nineteen came out. Their commanding officer survived by will alone and was dead within three years. And then the whole catastrophe, its names, its weight, its lessons, was quietly filed away and forgotten. The Line Through Hell is the book that restores it.