The story of the Panama Canal is often framed as a morality tale juxtaposing French tragedy and American triumph (or imperialism). What gets lost in this depiction is a pair of adventurous entrepreneurs, Anthoine de Gogorza and Louis Lacharme, whose efforts led Ferdinand de Lesseps to his doomed canal project. This article shows how the roots of the Panama Canal emerged from the forests of Colombia’s Sinú River Valley, whose settlement, in turn, was fostered by the search for canal routes in the Darien. Yet despite the spatial proximity of these two regions, their overlooked connections were woven together through the ‘lifepaths’ of de Gogorza and Lacharme as they moved from France to Colombia and around the globalizing Atlantic of the nineteenth century. Following their movements, in turn, sheds light on the overlooked figure of the foreign speculator, the business of exploration, and marketing the tropics.

We experimentally analyze the role of speculators, who have no use value for the objects on sale, in auctions. The environment is a uniform-price sealed-bid auction for 2 identical objects, followed by a free-form bargaining resale market, with one positive-value bidder, and either one or two speculators who may choose simultaneously whether to enter the auction. We show that the bidder accommodates speculators by reducing demand in the auction and subsequently purchasing in the resale market, which encourages entry by speculators. The presence of multiple speculators induces each speculator to enter less often, but increases competition in the auction and the auction price. Speculators earn positive profits on average, except when multiple speculators enter the auction.