The Panama Canal. Frederic J. Haskin
assessed upon merchant vessels passing through it.
The question of the probable traffic the canal will be called upon to handle was studied as perhaps no other world-wide problem of transportation ever was. Prof. Emory R. Johnson was the student of this phase of the question from the beginning to the end. He estimates that the canal in the first few years of its operation will have a traffic of 10,000,000 tons of shipping each year, and that by 1975 this will have increased to 80,000,000 tons, the full capacity of the canal in its present form. Provision has been made against this contingency by the engineers who have so constructed the canal that a third set of locks at each end may be constructed at a cost of about $25,000,000, and these will be sufficient almost to double the present ultimate capacity, and to take care of a larger volume of traffic than now can be foreseen.
Americans are interested, first of all, in what the canal will do for their own domestic trade. It brings Seattle 7,800 miles nearer to New York; San Francisco, 8,800 miles nearer to New Orleans; Honolulu 6,600 miles nearer to New York than by the Strait of Magellan. Such saving in distance for water-borne freight works a great economy, and inevitably must have a tremendous effect upon transcontinental American commerce.
In foreign commerce, also, some of the distances saved are tremendous. For instance, Guayaquil, in Ecuador, is 7,400 miles nearer to New York by the canal than by the Strait of Magellan; Yokohama is nearly 4,000 miles nearer to New York by Panama than by Suez; and Melbourne is 1,300 miles closer to Liverpool by Panama than by either Suez or the Cape of Good Hope. Curiously enough, the distance from Manila to New York, by way of Suez and Panama, is almost the same, the difference in favor of Panama being only 41 miles out of a total of 11,548 miles. The difference in distance from Hongkong to New York by the two canals is even less, being only 18 miles, this slight advantage favoring Suez.
But it is not by measure of distances that the effect of the canal on international commerce may be measured. It spells the development of the all but untouched western coast of South America and Mexico. It means a tremendous up-building of foreign commerce in our own Mississippi Valley and Gulf States. It means an unprecedented commercial and industrial awakening in the States of our Pacific coast and the Provinces of Western Canada.
While it was not projected as a money-making proposition, it will pay for its maintenance and a slight return upon the money invested from the beginning, and in a score of years will be not only self-supporting, but will yield a sufficient income to provide for the amortization of its capital in a hundred years.
The story of how this titanic work was undertaken, of how it progressed, and of how it was crowned with success, is a story without a parallel in the annals of man. The canal itself, as Ambassador Bryce has said, is the greatest liberty man has ever taken with nature.
Its digging was a steady and progressive victory over sullen and resistant nature. The ditch through Culebra Mountain was eaten out by huge steam shovels of such mechanical perfection that they seemed almost to be alive, almost to know what they were doing. The rocks and earth they bit out of the mountain side were carried away by trains operating in a system of such skill that it is the admiration of all the transportation world, for the problem of disposing of the excavated material was even greater than that of taking it out.
The control of the torrential Chagres River by the Gatun Dam, changing the river from the chief menace of the canal to its essential and salient feature, was no less an undertaking. And, long after Gatun Dam and Culebra Cut cease to be marvels, long after the Panama Canal becomes as much a matter of course as the Suez Canal, men still will be thrilled and impressed by the wonderful machinery of the locks—those great water stairways, operated by machinery as ingenious as gigantic, and holding in check with their mighty gates such floods as never elsewhere have been impounded.
It is a wonderful story that this book is undertaking to tell. There will be much in it of engineering feats and accomplishments, because its subject is the greatest of all engineering accomplishments. There will be much in it of the things that were done at Panama during the period of construction, for never were such things done before. There will be much in it of the history of how and why the American Government came to undertake the work, for nothing is of greater importance. There will be something in it of the future, looking with conservatism and care as far ahead as may be, to outline what the completion of this canal will mean not only for the people of the United States, but for the people of all the world.
Much that might be written of the romantic history of the Isthmian territory—tales of discoverers and conquistadores, wild tales of pirates and buccaneers, serio-comic narratives of intrigue and revolution—is left out of this book, because, while it is interesting, it now belongs to that antiquity which boasts of many, many books; and this volume is to tell not of Panama, but of the Panama Canal—on the threshold of its story, fitted by a noble birth for a noble destiny.
CHAPTER II
GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT
The Panama Canal is the greatest engineering project of all history. There is more than the patriotic prejudice of a people proud of their own achievements behind this assertion. Men of all nations concede it without question, and felicitate the United States upon the remarkable success with which it has been carried out. So distinguished an authority as the Rt. Hon. James Bryce, late British ambassador to Washington, and a man not less famous in the world of letters than successful in the field of diplomacy, declared before the National Geographic Society that not only is the Panama Canal the greatest undertaking of the past or the present but that even the future seems destined never to offer any land-dividing, world-uniting project comparable to it in magnitude or consequence.
We are told that the excavations total 232,000,000 cubic yards; that the Gatun Dam contains 21,000,000 cubic yards of material; and that the locks and spillways required the laying of some 4,500,000 cubic yards of concrete. But if one is to realize the meaning of this he must get out of the realm of cubic yards and into the region of concrete comparisons. Every one is familiar with the size and shape of the Washington Monument. With its base of 55 feet square and its height of 555 feet, it is one of the most imposing of all the hand reared structures of the earth. Yet the material excavated from the big waterway at Panama represents 5,840 such solid-built shafts. Placed in a row with base touching base they would traverse the entire Isthmus and reach 10 miles beyond deep water in the two oceans at Panama. Placed in a square with base touching base they would cover an area of 475 acres. If all the material were placed in one solid shaft with a base as large as the average city block, it would tower nearly 100,000 feet in the air.
Another illustration of the magnitude of the quantity of material excavated at Panama may be had from a comparison with the pyramid of Cheops, of which noble pile some one has said that "All things fear Time, but Time fears only Cheops." We are told that it required a hundred thousand men 10 years to make ready for the building of that great structure, and 20 years more to build it. There were times at Panama when, in 26 working days, more material was removed from the canal than was required to build Cheops, and from first to last the Americans removed material enough to build sixty-odd pyramids such as Cheops. Were it all placed in one such structure, with a base as large as that of Cheops, the apex would tower higher into the sky than the loftiest mountain on the face of the earth.
Still