Why a swimmer’s toll could be pennies
The famous case was travel writer Richard Halliburton, who swam through the Panama Canal in 1928 and paid a toll of 36 cents. The canal had to assign a charge to an unusual “vessel” with no hull or cargo. It used Halliburton’s weight as a practical stand-in for the amount of water his body displaced—the volume of water pushed aside by an object in it.
That calculation made the toll tiny, but it was a quirky exception, not a standard price for swimming the canal. The charge reflected the swimmer’s physical size, not the distance he covered or the effort required to navigate the route.
Ships pay for the space and capacity they use
For commercial traffic, tolls are designed around a ship’s size and carrying capacity, with the applicable method depending on the vessel. A large cargo ship occupies far more of the canal’s limited passage capacity and can carry valuable loads through a route that avoids a much longer voyage around South America. Its bill can therefore reach hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The contrast is an odd illustration of how toll systems translate unlike users into something chargeable: a swimmer could be priced by the water his body displaced, while a cargo ship is assessed as a vast working vessel. Halliburton’s under-a-dollar passage remains memorable because, in the canal’s accounting, one man barely registered beside the ships the route was built to serve.
