South America Observations and Impressions

We are now more than halfway to the Pacific and may pause to survey the landscape. Though there is moisture everywhere, one sees no water, for neither ocean is visible, the Chagres is hidden among the folds of the hills, and the brooks at the valley bottoms are insignificant. But otherwise it is cheerful and pleasant in its bright green and its varied lines, – a country in which a man might be content to live, faintly reminding one of the Trossachs in Scotland by the number of steep little peaks crowded together and by the profusion of wood. The luxuriance of nature is, however, far greater than in any temperate clime, and the trees have that feathery lightness which belongs to the tropics, their tops springing like green bubbles into the soft blue air.

Here, at a place called Culebra, is the highest part of the crossing from ocean to ocean, 110 feet above sea-level; and as it was here that the deepest cutting had to be made for the canal it is here that the headquarters of the engineering staff has been fixed. Of the cutting more anon. The railway follows a devious course among the hills, rattling here and there through cuttings in hard igneous rock, and in a few miles, descending gently, it passes out into a wide valley, the farther end of which, to the south, is open, with a bold hill guarding it on the east side and several more distant rocky eminences visible far away against the horizon. The hill is Ancon, overlooking Panama city on the one side, and, on the other, the bay which the canal enters. The eminences are islands lying out in the Pacific. Being now quite down on the level of the ocean, we do not see its waters till the railway, passing along the edge of a brackish tidal swamp, reaches the city of Panama, forty-six miles from Colon.

As the Pacific side of the Isthmus is much the most picturesque part of the whole, and impresses itself most on the imagination, the visitor who desires to enjoy the scenery and grasp the configuration of land and sea, ought to climb, if he is an active walker, to the top of the hill of Ancon, on the lower slopes of which, rising just above Panama city, are the United States government offices and the villas of its officials. Steep everywhere, and in parts slippery also, is the foot-path that leads over pastures and through thickets to the top of the hill, some six hundred feet high. But it is worth while to make the ascent, for from the summit one obtains an ample prospect worthy of the historic greatness of the spot.

From this breezy height let the traveller turn his eyes first to the north, and look back over that maze of low forest-covered mountains through which he has passed from Colon and which form the watershed between the two seas. No more from this side of the Isthmus than from the other does one discern any depression in the watershed, any break in the range sufficient to indicate that at this point there is an easy passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The hollows through which both railroad and canal pass are hidden deep in the folds of the hills, which stand so thick together that it is hard to believe any waterway could ever be carved out between them and impossible to tell the spot where the cutting is being made.

Very different is the view when the gaze is turned eastward along the far-winding bays and promontories of the Gulf of Panama. There the coast is for a long space flat, and a plain runs back toward distant hills. Beyond this plain other ranges rise to the southeast, bordering the Pacific till they sink below the horizon opposite the Pearl Islands. Somewhere among those ranges is the height to which Balboa climbed and whence he made the great discovery; somewhere along those shores the place where, clad in armour, he strode into the waves, and with sword drawn, took possession of the sea on behalf of the king of Spain. It is rather across that plain that any one looking from this side might fancy the lowest passage from sea to sea would be found. Yet not there, but much farther to the southeast, far behind the hills, in the Gulf of Darien, there is a point still lower, where between the Atrato River which falls into the Caribbean and the River San Juan running to the Pacific a few miles of cut would enable a ship to pass from sea to sea. Now let the traveller turn round and face to the west. His eyes will follow a long mountain chain which rises high and bold from the opposite shore of the Gulf of Panama and runs out southwest until it too is lost to sight beneath the far horizon. In front, a group of rocky isles lies basking in the sunny sea. Just beneath the Ancon hill, at its eastern foot, the little city of Panama stands on its promontory, a mass of grey, red-roofed houses with a half-demolished Spanish fort of the eighteenth century guarding the shallow roadstead, while on the opposite side of the hill, at the base of its steep slopes, is the mouth of the Canal.

The landscape spread out under this hill of Ancon is the finest in all the Isthmian region. The northern side at Colon, although pretty with its abundant verdure, is commonplace; but here there is a view which appeals at once to the eye and to the imagination, ranging over vast stretches of land and sea, rich with varied colour, bringing together the past and the future. Over these smooth ocean plains, which the Spaniards, accustomed to their own stormy Atlantic, called the Peaceful Sea, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa looked eagerly out as he planned that expedition to Peru which the jealous cruelty of Pedrarias, the Spanish viceroy, cut short. Over them the less worthy but more fortunate Pizarro sailed to those far southern lands, where he won, in two years, an empire vaster than that which in the Old World obeyed his sovereign, Charles the Fifth. Backward and forward across these waters came the fleets that bore to the south swarms of fierce adventurers to plunder the native peoples, and that brought back the treasures which supported the European wars of Spain and helped to work her ruin. Three miles off there can be just discerned amid the trees the ancient cathedral tower of the now ruined city of old Panama, where those fleets used to anchor till the English buccaneer Morgan sacked and destroyed the place in 1679. And just beneath, on the opposite side of the hill from these traces of the vanished colonial empire of Spain, the long mole that is to shield the mouth of the Canal is rising, and the steamships lying along the wharves, and cars standing beside them on the railway tracks, presage a commerce vaster than ever was seen in the great days of Spain, for they speak of the passage of men from all the nations along the new waterway through these forests and out over this sea to the ends of the earth. Here, as at the Straits of Gibraltar and on the Bosphorus, nature and history have joined to give delight for the eyes, and to the mind musings on the past and dim forecasting visions of the future.

Save for these few points where human dwellings are seen, – the little Spanish city below and the offices and warehouses that mark the beginnings of the new commercial port and some houses on the islets in the bay, where the inhabitants of Panama seek in summer a cooler air, – it is a lonely landscape, with scarcely a sign of life on land, and as yet few ships flecking the water. The region has always been thinly peopled and its tribes never reached the semi-civilization of the Maya peoples of Yucatan, Honduras, and Guatemala to the north of them, nor of the Chibchas of Bogota to the south. There are, anyhow, no traces of prehistoric progress here, though some have been found in Costa Rica. The aborigines were not numerous in this region, and, after the Spaniards came, were quickly reduced by the attacks which gold-seeking adventurers made upon them. Thus one hears of but few now, except at one place, called San Blas, on the shore of the Caribbean Sea, some forty miles east of Colon. There an Indian tribe has kept itself quite apart from the white intruders, having maintained a practical independence both of Spanish viceroys and republican presidents of Colombia. These Indians are short, strong men, good sailors and fine fighters, men of the same stock that repulsed the first settlers whom Columbus planted near by on his second voyage, and so jealous of their freedom and their own ways that they will not suffer a white stranger to spend the night in one of their villages. They are reported to be still heathens, having their own medicine men, the efficiency of whom is secured by a rule which terminates the professional career together with the life of a practitioner who has lost to death seven patients in succession. These Indians come to Colon in their canoes to trade, and show themselves passably friendly to the Americans there, though less effusively so than their ancestors were to the English in those far-away days when they guided English buccaneers across the Isthmus to pounce upon their Spanish enemies at Panama. When in 1698 the Scottish colonists arrived on their ill-starred expedition to found a colony at Darien, the San Bias men welcomed them with open arms and shewed their good feeling by frequently coming on board and drinking a great deal of liquor. These kindly dispositions lasted down till our own time, for a tale goes that in one of their struggles against the Colombians they declared themselves subjects of Queen Victoria. The Republic of Panama, having plenty of troubles of its own, wisely leaves them alone.

As there are few Indians now in the narrowest part of the Isthmus, so also there are few white people. The Spaniards never tried to settle the country, though they built towns here and there on the coast for trade. There was neither gold nor silver to attract adventurers. The land was covered with jungle, and there was a lack of native labourers to be enslaved and set to clear and till it. The jealous policy of the home government excluded the subjects of all other powers, so most of this region remained a wilderness, unimproved, and parts of it unexplored. A paved road was constructed across the Isthmus from old Panama, the town built by Pedrarias when he crossed to the Pacific side in 1520, to Nombre de Dios, which became the chief port on the Atlantic side; and along this road pack mule trains carried the silver that had come up from Peru to be shipped for Cadiz or Vigo in those great galleons for which the English seamen used to lie in wait. On the Atlantic coast there was held once a year a great fair which lasted six weeks, and to which trading folk came by sea from far and wide. Nearly all the manufactured goods which were consumed in Peru and all down the west coast were sold and bought here. Little else broke the monotonous annals of these remote provinces except the exploits of the English sea-rovers who carried on the war of Protestantism against Spain for the benefit of their own pockets. Sir Francis Drake, the least sordid and most gallant among them, began his exploits by establishing himself in a creek on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, and thence took Nombre de Dios with a ridiculously small force, and laid ambushes for the silver-carrying mule trains that crossed from Panama, raiding at intervals such Spanish ports as his small force enabled him to capture. In one early expedition, he climbed a tree on a hilltop, and seeing the Pacific from it, fell on his knees and prayed God to give him life till he could sail upon that sea in an English ship – a prayer which was amply fulfilled when he issued from the Straits of Magellan and ravaged the coasts of Peru in 1578. In the last of all his cruises it was in his ship off Puerto Bello that he died in 1596. Eighty years later, Morgan, the famous English buccaneer, gathered a large force of adventurers and seafaring ruffians, crossed the Isthmus by sailing in small boats up the Chagres and thence after a short land journey falling upon Panama, which he took and pillaged, bringing back his booty to the Caribbean Sea. The city was burned, whether by him or by the Spaniards remains in doubt, and thereafter it lay deserted.

Thirty years after Morgan's raid the commercial possibilities of the Isthmus fascinated a Scotsman who had more than the usual fervour and less than the usual caution of his nation. William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England, led a colony, chiefly composed of Scottish people, and well supplied with Scottish ministers, to a place near Acla in the Gulf of Darien, on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, one hundred miles southeast of Colon, meaning to make it a great centre of trade over both oceans. They went out, however, imperfectly equipped and ignorant of climatic conditions. Many perished from disease; King William III gave them no support; the Spaniards at last attacked and compelled the surrender of the few who remained. Thereafter nobody disturbed the subjects of the Catholic king. New Panama, planted in a better site where the roadstead is a little deeper, although too shallow for the ocean liners of our own day, continued to enjoy a certain prosperity as the gateway to all western South America, for there was and could be no land transit through the trackless forests and rugged mountains that lie along the coast between the Isthmus and the Equator. But the decline and decay of the colonial empire of Spain under the most ill-conceived and ill-administered scheme of government that selfishness and stupidity ever combined to devise, steadily reduced the importance of the city. Nothing was done to develop the country, which remained, outside Panama and a few other ports, an unprofitable solitude. Neither did the extinction of the rule of Spain, which came quietly here because the local governor did not resist it, make any difference. Occupied with domestic broils, the new republic, first called New Granada and now Colombia, had not the capital nor the intelligence nor the energy to improve the country or develop the commercial possibilities of the Isthmus. This was a task reserved for children of the race which had produced Drake and Morgan.

Thus we come down to the events which have given Panama its present importance. In 1846 Mexico was forced to cede to the United States, as the price of peace, the territories which now constitute the States of California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Soon afterwards gold was discovered in California, and a great inrush of settlers followed. There was urgent need for some shorter and safer route to San Francisco than the voyage round Cape Horn or the waggon trail over plains and mountains from the Missouri. Three enterprising Americans obtained in 1848 a concession of the right to build a railway across the Isthmus. The line was opened in 1855, and had, till taken over by the United States government, paid higher dividends continuously (an average down to 1895 of about 15 per cent per annum) than any other line in the world. Being exposed to no competition, it could charge what fares it pleased. A better service of passenger steamers began to run from Panama southward as well as northward; and thenceforward, despite its deadly climate, the Isthmus became a world highway. Though the subsequent opening of railroads across the North American continent reduced the passenger traffic from the eastern United States to California via Panama, the goods or freight traffic continued; and as trade to western South America increased, so the old idea of constructing an interoceanic canal took more definite shape and led to the propounding of scheme after scheme. Finally, in 1878, the success which Ferdinand de Lesseps had achieved at Suez encouraged him to form a company in France to make a sea-level waterway through the Isthmus. This company, formed without sufficient preliminary investigation of the conditions and the cost, collapsed in 1889, having exhausted its funds. A second one, formed in 1894 to resume and complete the enterprise, failed in its turn, after spending many millions, and in 1904 transferred all its rights and interests, together with its plans and its machinery, to the United States government, who, after about two years usefully spent in examining the problem they had to face, began in 1907 that effective work of digging and lock-building which they expect to complete in 1913. They had for some time been trying to obtain a grant from the republic of Colombia of the strip of land required for the excavation of the Canal, but could not secure terms which they thought reasonable. Then, in 1903, a revolt took place at Panama against the authority of Colombia, and the new republic of Panama, which forthwith emerged, gave to the United States a perpetual lease of a strip of ten miles wide, being the space through which the purposed canal was to run. This strip – now called the Canal Zone – is forty-five miles long, with an area of about 448 square miles. The United States Government is practically supreme in it, – though it has been held not to be a part of the United States for the purposes of the Constitution, – and rules it by a Commission under the War Department, being also owner of more than two-thirds of its surface. In return for the lease it has paid a large sum to the little republic and guaranteed its independence. With the strip it has also acquired four small islands, deemed valuable strategically, which lie a little way off the shore opposite the Pacific end of the Canal. They are now to be fortified to protect the approach. The colonial city, with its picturesque fort looking out over the sea, its pretty little plazas planted with trees, its winding old-fashioned streets and big dark churches, stands within the Canal Zone, but is administered by its own government, being the capital of this smallest of all the South American republics. The poorer classes occupy themselves with fishing and sitting in the shade, the upper classes with politics. There is hardly any cultivated land near, but it is hoped that on the high undulating ground some miles to the west the cultivation of vegetables and fruits and whatever else passing vessels may need will presently be established.

Of the Canal itself a few words must now be said, just enough to convey some preliminary general notion of it to those who two years hence, when the time for its formal opening arrives, will be deluged with details.

It will be fifty miles in length, from deep water to deep water, though only forty from tide-end to tide-end. The minimum bottom width will be three hundred feet, the minimum depth forty-one feet, the breadth and depth being, however, for the larger part of its length, greater than these figures. Its highest point above sea-level will be eighty-five feet at the surface of the water and forty feet at the bottom, the depth at this point being forty-five feet; i. e. it will be cut down through the dividing ridge of the Continent to a point forty feet above the two oceans.

The simplest way to realize its character is to consider it as consisting of four sections which I will call (a) the Atlantic Level, (b) the Lake, (c) the Cutting, and (d) the Pacific section (in two levels separated by a lock). The Atlantic Level is a straight channel, unbroken by locks, of eight miles, from deep water at the mouth of the shallow Bay of Limon, a little west of Colon, to Gatun, where it reaches the valley of the Chagres River. Now the Chagres River had always been reckoned as one of the chief difficulties in the way of making a canal. It occupied the bottom of that natural depression along which all surveyors had long ago perceived that any canal must run. But the difficulty of widening and deepening the river channel till it should become a useable canal, was a formidable one, because in the wet season the river swells to an unmanageable size under the tropical rains, sometimes rising over forty feet in twenty-four hours. This difficulty was at last met and the stream ingeniously utilized by erecting right across the course of the Chagres a stupendous dam at Gatun, which by impounding the water of the river turns its valley into a lake. This lake will have along the central channel a depth of from eighty-five to forty-five feet of water, sufficient for the largest ship. At the Gatun dam there are three locks, built of concrete, with a total rise of eighty-five feet, by which vessels will be lifted up into the lake. The lake will fill not only the valley of the Chagres itself, but the bottom of its tributary valleys to the east and west, so that it will cover 164 square miles in all, and will be dotted by many islands. The central and deepest line of this artificial piece of water, nearly twenty-four miles long, is the second of our four canal sections, and will be the prettiest, for the banks are richly wooded. At the point called Bas Obispo, where the Chagres valley, which has been running south-southeast towards the Pacific turns away to the northeast among the hills, the line of the canal leaves the Gatun river-lake, and we enter the third section, which I have called the Cutting. Here hills are encountered, so it became necessary, in order to avoid the making of more locks, to cut deep into the central line of the continent, with its ridge of rock which connects the Cordilleras of the southern continent with the Sierras of the northern. After five miles of comparatively shallow cutting southward from the Lake, a tall and steep eminence, Gold Hill, the continental watershed, its top 665 feet high, bars the way. Through it there has been carved out a mighty gash, the "Culebra Cut," of which more anon. A little further south, eight miles from the Lake, the ground begins to fall rapidly towards the other sea, and we reach the fourth or Pacific section at a point called Pedro Miguel. Here is a lock by which the Canal is lowered thirty feet to another but much smaller artificial lake, formed by a long dam built across the valley at a spot called Miraflores, where we find two more locks, by which vessels will be lowered fifty-five feet to the level of the Pacific. Thence the Canal runs straight out into the ocean, here so shallow that a deep-water channel has been dredged out for some miles, and a great dyke or mole erected along its eastern side to keep the southerly current from silting up the harbour. From Pedro Miguel to Miraflores it is nearly two miles, and from the locks at the latter to the Pacific eight miles, so the length of this fourth Pacific section, which, unlike the Atlantic section, is on two different levels divided by the Miraflores dam and locks, is ten miles. In it there has been comparatively little land excavation, because the ground is flat, though a great deal of dredging, both to carry a sea channel out through the shallow bay into the open Pacific, and also to provide space for vessels to lie and load or discharge without blocking the traffic.

Thus the voyager of the future, in the ten or twelve hours of his passage from ocean to ocean, will have much variety. The level light of the fiery tropic dawn will fall on the houses of Colon as he approaches it in the morning, when vessels usually arrive. When his ship has mounted the majestic staircase of the three Gatun locks from the Atlantic level, he will glide slowly and softly along the waters of a broad lake which gradually narrows toward its head, a lake enclosed by rich forests of that velvety softness one sees in the tropics, with vistas of forest-girt islets stretching far off to right and left among the hills, a welcome change from the restless Caribbean Sea which he has left. Then the mountains will close in upon him, steep slopes of grass or brushwood rising two hundred feet above him as he passes through the great Cut. From the level of the Miguel lock he will look southward down the broad vale that opens on the ocean flooded with the light of the declining sun, and see the rocky islets rising, between which in the twilight his course will lie out into the vast Pacific. At Suez the passage from sea to sea is through a dreary and monotonous waste of shifting sand and barren clay. Here one is for a few hours in the centre of a verdant continent, floating on smooth waters, shut off from sight of the ocean behind and the ocean before, a short sweet present of tranquillity between a stormy past and a stormy future.

In these forty miles of canal (or fifty if we reckon from deep water to deep water) the two most remarkable pieces of engineering work are the gigantic dam (with its locks) at Gatun and the gigantic cutting at Culebra, each the hugest of its kind that the world has to shew. The dam is nearly a mile and a half long; its base nearly half a mile thick, and it is 400 feet wide at the water line of the lake which it will support. Each of the three locks is double, so that one of the pair can be used by vessels passing from north to south, the other by those passing from south to north. Each has a useable length of 1000 feet, a useable width of 110 feet. They are big enough in length, width, and depth for the largest vessels that were afloat in 1911. He who stands inside one of them seems, when he looks up, to be at the bottom of a rocky glen, "a canyon of cement." Nothing less than an earthquake will affect them, and though earthquakes have been destructive in Costa Rica, two hundred miles away, there is no record of any serious one here. The locks will be worked, and vessels will be towed through them, by electric power, which is to be generated by the fall of the Chagres River over the spillway which carries its water from the lake to the Atlantic.