Hello and welcome to More or Less. We are weekly guide to the numbers in the news and

in life, and I'm Tim Halford. This week we're looking into a claim made by a former and

possibly future American President Donald Trump. You may be surprised to learn that this

is not the first time we have fact-checked one of his claims, but this fact-check is

of a different kind, it involves going back 150 years and looking at the development of

the Panama Canal. Now you might think this is a strange thing for a presidential candidate

to start talking about during an election campaign, but to Trump, the current closeness

of the Chinese government to the Panama government which runs the canal is an important issue.

That is why he brought it up during an interview with the right-wing Chachau host, Tucker Carlson.

So we built a thing called the Panama Canal. We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito, you

know, malaria. We lost 35,000 people building. We lost 35,000 people because of the mosquito,

vicious. The Panama Canal is about 80 kilometres long and links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Its construction is considered one of the greatest engineering feats of all time, but there

was enormous human suffering. Many thousands of people did indeed lose their lives, but

is Donald Trump's claim that 35,000 Americans lost their lives? True.

Hello, I'm Matthew Parker. I'm the author of a book called Hell's Gorge, The Battle to

Build the Panama Canal. So when was the first serious attempt to build this thing?

The Americans were really well over there. They wanted an Ismium Canal and they'd actually

sent a lot of explorers and surveyors all through Central America looking for the best

ones. But before they could actually action anything, in-stepped Ferdinand de Lesseps,

the builder of the Suez Canal, Le Grand François, described as the presiding genius of the

19th century. And when was this? This is in 1880. He sets up a company, raises money from

...