Theodore Roosevelt asked John Stevens as the two men shook hands. Amador, Shonts, and the rest of the welcoming party had already been greeted and dismissed by the President, left to wonder what had become of Roosevelt’s trademark grandiosity. Fatigue from his journey, they later surmised. They were wrong. The twenty-sixth President of the United States was far from tired. Since Stevens’s wire a month previous, Roosevelt had been electrified with worry. The Canal Project had been a tricky one from the onset—the whole Nicaraguan episode, the Panamanian revolution, the constant bickering in Congress—but nothing in his political or personal past had prepared him for this development. After five days of travel aboard the Battleship Louisiana, his wife Edith sick and miserable, Roosevelt’s nerves had become so tightly stretched they could be plucked and played like a mandolin. “You want to see it now?” Stevens asked, wiping the rain from a walrus mustache that rivaled the President’s.
