The team got lost within days and was forced to divide seven men ultimately died. Four years later, a twenty-seven-man team, led by Lieutenant Isaac Strain, of the United States Navy, set off to find Cullen’s mythical east-west passage. In 1850, an Irish physician named Edward Cullen claimed to have walked such a passage without trouble, and his fraudulent assertion-supported by detailed phony maps-sparked a series of expeditions. The Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt speculated that the Darién isthmus harbored a river passage that need only be expanded to be navigable. In English, it’s called the Darién Gap, the legacy of a nineteenth-century scramble to cut a seafaring channel from the Caribbean to the Pacific. The region in between, which spans two coasts with jungles and mountains and a confounding web of rivers, is known locally as the Tapón del Darién-the Darién Plug-for its seeming impassability. The road ends abruptly on the Panama side, just north of a national park, and picks up again as a dirt path, sixty miles southeast, in Colombia, in the floodplain of the enormous Atrato River. The Pan-American Highway runs sixteen thousand miles, from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego, with one significant interruption: an expanse of rain forest along the border of Colombia and Panama.
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