The Panama Canal is a man-made waterway, completed in 1914, linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans through the Isthmus of Panama. An eight-hour trip through the fifty-mile Panama Canal saves a ship 5,200 miles on a voyage from Los Angeles to New York. Without it, to get from one U.S. coast to the other, a ship would need to travel around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. In 1999, the United States handed control of the Canal to Panama.
