The Panama Canal

It was either very careless or very astute of Nature to leave the entire length of the American continent without a central passage from ocean to ocean, or, having provided such a passage at Nicaragua, to allow it to be obstructed again by volcanic action. This imperviousness of the long American barrier had, as we shall see, important economic and political results, and the eventual opening of a waterway will have results scarcely less important.

The Panama Canal will achieve, after more than four centuries, the object with which Columbus spread his sails westwards from the port of Palos-the provision of a sea-route westwards to China and the Indies. The capture of Constantinople in 1453 by the Turks interrupted the ancient trade routes between East and West. Brigands held up the caravans which plodded across the desert sands from the Euphrates and the Indus, and pirates swarmed in the Mediterranean and Red Sea, intercepting the precious cargoes of silks and jewels and spices consigned to the merchants of Italy. The eyes of all Europe were turned to the Atlantic, and an ocean route westwards to India and the Orient, the existence of which had been fabled from the days of Aristotle, became an economic necessity.

Columbus, as every one knows, died in the belief that he had discovered this route, and that the lands he had visited were fringes and islands of the Eastern Asiatic continent. The geographers of those days greatly exaggerated the eastern extension of Asia, with the result that the distance from Europe to China and India was underestimated by at least one-half. This was a fortunate mistake, for it is improbable that if Columbus had known that Cathay and Cipangu (Japan) were a good 12,000 miles westwards from the coast of Spain he would have ventured upon a continuous voyage of that length in the vessels of his time.

It was in his fourth voyage (1502) that Columbus first reached and explored the coastline of the isthmus and Central America. He was apparently not the first to land on the isthmus. That distinction belongs either to Alfonso Ojeda, who is said to have reached "Terra Firma" earlier in 1502, or to Rodrigo de Bastidas, who, we are told, set sail from Cadiz with La Cosa in 1500, and, reached the isthmus somewhere near Porto Bello. About the doings of Columbus on the mainland we get some detailed information from the Portuguese historian and explorer of the sixteenth century, Galvano. It is interesting to read that the great navigator visited the exact spot where the newly-constructed canal starts from the Caribbean coast. From the Rio Grande, we read, Columbus "went to the River of Crocodiles which is now called Rio de Chagres, which hath its springs near the South Sea, within four leagues of Panama, and runneth into the North Sea." It was this same river, as we shall see, that became the feeder of the canal when the high-level scheme was adopted. So far out of his reckoning was Columbus that at Panama he imagined himself to be ten days' journey from the mouth of the Ganges! One of his objects, as we know from his own journal, was to convert the Great Khan of Tartary to the Christian faith, and this entanglement in what he called "the islands of the Indian Sea" was a sore hindrance to that and all his other purposes. He began that search for the strait which engaged the attention and tried the temper of Spanish, Portuguese, and English navigators for the next thirty years. He had heard from the natives of the coast of "a narrow place between two seas." They probably meant a narrow strip of land as at Panama. But Columbus understood them to mean a narrow waterway, and rumours of such a passage no doubt existed then, as they still do among the isthmian tribes. He must also have heard accounts of the great ocean only thirty miles away, and it is rather surprising he should not have made a dash across and anticipated Balboa and Drake. In May 1503, however, he quitted the "Terra Firma" without solving the great secret, and he never returned to the mainland. He died in 1506, still in complete ignorance of the nature of his discovery. He knew nothing of the continent of America or of that seventy million square miles of ocean beyond, to which Magellan gave the name of "Pacific."

The Holy Grail itself was not pursued with more persistence and devotion than this mythical, elusive strait by the navigators of the early years of the sixteenth century. The isthmian governor sent out from Spain went with urgent instructions to solve the "secret of the strait." In 1513 Balboa set himself to the great enterprise. If he could not discover a waterway he would at least see what lay beyond the narrow land barrier. From Coibo on the Gulf of Darien he struck inland on September 6 with a hundred Indian guides and bearers. It is eloquent of the difficulties of the country which he had to traverse that it was not until September 26 that he won, first of European men, his distant view of the nameless and mysterious ocean.[1] It was he, and not Cortéz, who "with eagle eyes, stared at the Pacific."

"And all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise,

Silent upon a peak in Darien."

Cortéz was himself a persistent searcher for the mythical strait. He wrote home to the King of Spain saying, "If the strait is found, I shall hold it to be the greatest service I have yet rendered. It would make the King of Spain master of so many lands that he might call himself the lord of the whole world."

These vain attempts had very important results. They led incidentally to the exploration of the whole coastline of the American continent. For example, Jacques Cartier, who was sent out by the King of France about this time to find "the shorter route to Cathay," searched the coast northwards as far as Labrador and thus prepared the way for the planting of a French colony in Canada. At last, in 1520, a sea-passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was actually discovered by the first great circumnavigator, Magellan, but it was far away from the narrow lands between North and South America. Through the perilous straits that have ever since borne his name at the southern extremity of the continent, Magellan pushed his venturous way into the great ocean beyond. But even Magellan had no idea that a few miles south of his strait the land ended and Atlantic and Pacific mingled their waters in one great flood. That truth was accidentally discovered by the English Drake more than fifty years afterwards (1579). Drake had been driven southward by stormy weather when he made the discovery which almost eclipsed in its importance even Magellan's exploit. In his exultation, we are told, he landed on the farthest island, and walking alone with his instruments to its extremity threw himself down, and with his arms embraced the southernmost point of the known world. From that point Drake sailed up the western coast of South America, engaged mainly in his favourite pursuit of "singeing the King of Spain's beard"-capturing, that is, the treasure-ships bound to Panama. But he did not forget the more scientific duty of searching for the strait. Far northward he held his course, past the future California, till he must have been off the coastline of what is now British Columbia, ever hoping to find the Pacific outlet of the famous North-West Passage. But always the coast trended to the north-west, and Drake, giving up the quest, turned his prow westward and continued his voyage of circumnavigation.

But we are over-running our dates and must return to events at the isthmus. It was about the year 1530 that the non-existence of a natural waterway became recognized. And no sooner was this fact accepted than projects for an artificial canal began to be put forward. It was clear to the geographers and traders of those days that an isthmian route westward offered great advantages to the routes via the Cape of Good Hope, Magellan Straits, or the problematical North-West Passage.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] The eminence known as "Balboa Hill" in the American canal zone is certainly not that from which Balboa first sighted the Pacific, though very likely a tradition to that effect will now gradually be established.

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