The Panama Canal

"I have read the chapters in 'The Panama Canal' dealing with the engineering features of the Canal and have found them an accurate and dependable account of the undertaking."

GEO. W. GOETHALS.

THE PANAMA CANAL

CHAPTER I

THE LAND DIVIDED

T

THE WORLD UNITED

HE Panama Canal is a waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, cut through the narrow neck of land connecting the continents of North and South America. It is the solution of the problem of international commerce that became acute in 1452 when the Eastern Roman Empire fell before the assaults of the Turks, and the land routes to India were closed to Western and Christian Europe.

Forty years after the Crescent supplanted the Cross on the dome of St. Sophia in Constantinople, Columbus set sail to seek a western route to the Indies. He did not find it, but it was his fortune to set foot on the Isthmus of Panama, where, more than four centuries later, the goal of his ambition was to be achieved; not by discovery, but by virtue of the strength and wealth of a new nation of which he did not dream, although its existence is due to his own intrepid courage.

Columbus died not knowing that he had multiplied the world by two, and many voyagers after him also vainly sought the longed-for western pas

sage. Magellan sought it thousands of leagues to the southward in the cold and stormy seas that encircle the Antarctic Continent. Scores of mariners sought it to the northward, but only one, Amundsen, in the twentieth century, was able to take a ship through the frozen passages of the American north seas.

Down the western coast of the new continent from the eternal ice of Alaska through the Tropics to the southern snows of Tierra del Fuego, the mighty Cordilleras stretch a mountain barrier thousands and thousands and thousands of miles.

Where that mountain chain is narrowest, and where its peaks are lowest, ships may now go through the Panama Canal. The canal is cut through the narrowest part of the Isthmus but one, and through the Culebra Mountain, the lowest pass but one, in all that longest, mightiest range of mountains. There is a lower place in Nicaragua, and a narrower place on the Isthmus east of the canal, but the engineers agreed that the route from Colon on the Atlantic to Panama on the Pacific through Culebra Mountain was the most practicable.

The canal is 50 miles long. Fifteen miles of it is level with the oceans, the rest is higher. Ships are lifted up in giant locks, three steps, to sail for more than 30 miles across the continental divide, 85 feet above the surface of the ocean, then let down by three other locks to sea level again. The channel is 300 feet wide at its narrowest place, and the locks which form the two gigantic water stairways are capable of lifting and lowering the largest ships now afloat. A great part of the

higher level of the canal is the largest artificial lake in the world, made by impounding the waters of the Chagres River, thus filling with water the lower levels of the section. Another part of the higher level is Culebra Cut, the channel cut through the backbone of the continent.

Almost before Columbus died plans were made for cutting such a channel. With the beginning of the nineteenth century and the introduction of steam navigation, the demand for the canal began to be insistent.

Many plans were made, but it remained for the French, on New Year's Day of 1880, actually to begin the work. They failed, but not before they had accomplished much toward the reduction of Culebra Cut. They expended between 1880 and 1904 no less than $300,000,000 in their ill-fated efforts.

In 1904 the United States of America undertook the task. In a decade it was completed and the Americans had spent, all told, $375,000,000 in the project.

Because the Atlantic lies east and the Pacific west of the United States, one is likely to imagine the canal as a huge ditch cut straight across a neck of land from east to west. But it must be remembered that South America lies eastward from North America, and that the Isthmus connecting the two has its axis east and west. The canal, therefore, is cut from the Atlantic southeastward to the Pacific. It lies directly south of Pittsburgh, Pa., and it brings Peru and Chile closer to New York than California and Oregon. The first 7 miles of the canal, beginning at the