South America Observations and Impressions. Viscount James Bryce
he has in recent years brought under irrigation. Panama had for centuries a climate so deadly that even passing travellers feared to halt more than a few hours on either side of the Isthmus. Yellow fever, intermittent and remittent fevers, and all sorts of other tropical maladies made it their favourite home.
A still more remarkable contrast, however, between these two necks of land lies in the part they have respectively played in human affairs. The Isthmus of Panama must, in far-off prehistoric days, have been the highway along which those wandering tribes whose forefathers had passed in their canoes from northeastern Asia along the Aleutian Isles into Alaska found their way, after many centuries, into the vast spaces of South America. But its place in the annals of mankind during the four centuries that have elapsed since Balboa gazed from a mountain top rising out of the forest upon the far-off waters of the South Sea has been small, indeed, compared to that which the Isthmus of Suez has held from the beginning of history. It echoed to the tread of the armies of Thothmes and Rameses marching forth on their invasions of western Asia. Along the edge of it Israel fled forth before the hosts of Pharaoh. First the Assyrian and afterwards the Persian hosts poured across it to conquer Egypt; and over its sands Bonaparte led his regiments to Palestine in that bold adventure which was stopped at St. Jean d'Acre. It has been one of the great highways for armies for forty centuries, as the canal cut through it is now one of the great highways of commerce.
The turn of the Isthmus of Panama has now come, and curiously enough it is the Isthmus of Suez that brought that turn, for it was the digging of a ship canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and the vast expansion of Eastern trade which followed, that led to the revival of the old designs, mooted as far back as the days of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, of piercing the American Isthmus. Thus the comparison of the two isthmuses becomes now more interesting than ever, for our generation will watch to see whether the commerce and politics of the western world will be affected by this new route which is now being opened, as those of the Old World have been affected by the achievement of Ferdinand de Lesseps.
So many books have been written, and so many more will be written, about the engineering of the Panama Canal and about its commercial possibilities, that of these very little need be said in such a sketch as this. But as everybody is already curious, and will, two years hence, be still more curious regarding the region it traverses, I shall try to convey some sort of notion of the physical aspects of the Isthmus and of the impressions its past and its present make on the traveller's mind. In taking the reader with me across the neck of land, I shall in the first instance say nothing of the works of the canal which I saw in course of execution, but will ask him to remember that it runs, as does the Trans-Isthmian railway, from north to south, the coast-line both on the Atlantic and on the Pacific side trending in this region east and west.4
Approaching in the steamer from Europe or New York across the Caribbean Sea one sees low hills rising gently from the shore, fringed with palms and dotted with small white houses half hidden among the trees. In front, on an islet now joined to the mainland, is the town of Colon, a new town, with a statue of Christopher Columbus "protecting" a female Indian figure of America, but no buildings of interest and little history, for it is only sixty years old, built as the terminal point of the railway. The old fortified ports where the Spanish galleons used to lie at anchor in former days, Nombre de Dios and Puerto Bello, stand farther to the east. Behind the town, higher hills, covered with those thick, light green woods that characterize the tropics, cut off the view to the south. No depression in the land is visible. There is nothing to suggest that another ocean lies beyond, only fifty miles away, and that here the great backbone which traverses two continents for many thousands of miles sinks to a point a few hundreds of feet above sea level.
The traveller on landing steps into the railroad car, and after running for three miles along the shore of the shallow bay of Limon into which the Canal is to issue, strikes in four miles more the valley of the Chagres River. Here is the point (to be described later) at which the huge Gatun Dam is being built across that valley to flood it and turn it into a navigable lake. Thence the line keeps in the same general south-southeast direction on the east side of the Chagres River, parallel to its course. The Chagres, a muddy and rather languid stream, has in the dry season about as much water as the Scottish Tweed and in the wet season rather more than the Potomac and much more than the Shannon. There are few stations on the way, and at first no dwellings, for the country was uninhabited till the work of canal construction began. Morasses are crossed, and everywhere there is on each side a dense, dark forest. So deep and spongy are the swamps that in places it has been found impossible to fill them up or to lay more than one set of rails upon the surface. So dense is the forest, the spaces between the tree trunks filled by shrubs and the boughs bound together by climbing plants into a wall of living green, that one cannot see more than a few yards into the thicket, and can force a way through it only by the help of the machete, – that long, cutlass-like knife which people carry in Spanish America. Hardly a trail running into the woods is seen, and a mile or two back the wild cats and monkeys, and their terrible enemies, the anacondas or boa constrictors, have the place all to themselves.
After some twenty-three miles of this sort of country, beautiful when the outer boughs of the trees are gay with brilliant blossoms, and pendulous orchids sway in the breeze between their stems, but in September rather monotonous in color, the railway crosses and leaves the Chagres River, whose valley turns northeast far in among higher hills. The line continues to run southward, rising gently between slopes from which the wood has been lately cut away so that one can see the surrounding landscape. All around there is a sort of tossing sea of miniature mountains – I call them mountains because of their steep slopes and pointed crests, though few of them exceed a thousand feet in height. These are set so close together that hardly a dozen yards of level ground can be found between the bases of their declivities, and are disposed so irregularly that they seem as if the product of scattered outbreaks and uplifts of igneous rock. Their sides are clothed and their tops plumed with so thick a growth of wood that the eye cannot discover crags or cliffs, if any there be, and the tops of all are practically unapproachable, because no trails have yet been cut, except to one conspicuous summit. This one rises boldly to a height of about 1200 feet, and has received the name of Balboa Hill, because from it alone in this region – so one is told – can both oceans in a season of fair weather be descried. The gallant Vasco Nuñez deserves the honour of being thus commemorated; but it is to be feared that before long the legend will have struck root among those who dwell here, and will be repeated to those who pass along the canal, that it was from this height, and not from a peak in Darien, seventy or eighty miles farther to the east, that the bold adventurer first looked out over the shining expanse of the South Sea.
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
The reader will find at the end of the volume a small map which may help him to understand the topography of the region.