In all, nine routes have been surveyed or considered by some nation or
some company. The first route to the north is known as the Tehuantepec
route, which extends across Mexico from the Gulf of Mexico to the
Pacific Ocean, a distance of nearly 200 miles, and over which route an
English syndicate, headed by the Pearsons, is now operating a splendid
railroad system. Captain Eads, one of the most prominent of American
engineers of his time, advocated the building of a ship railway over
this route, a railway so constructed that cars could be let down into
the water under the bottoms of ships, drawing them out of the water and
across the land to the ocean on the other side.
Of course, this project might have been feasible with the smaller
sized merchant ships of forty years ago, but it would hardly be so for
transporting the gigantic freighters and passenger vessels that now
traverse the seas.
The second route, towards the south, was called the Honduras Bay route,
a route across the Republic of Honduras from Honduras Bay on the east
to the Pacific.
The third route came to be known as the Nicaraguan route. For a long
time this was the most popular of all the routes with the American
Congress and the American people. The Nicaraguan route contemplated the
utilization of the San Juan River on the east, between the Atlantic
Coast and the Nicaraguan lakes, the Nicaraguan lakes as far as they
extended westward, and thence through a canal across the dividing land
from the upper lake to Nicaragua to the Pacific Ocean at Brita. The
Nicaraguan route would be 377 miles shorter between San Francisco and
New York than is the Panama route, along which the United States is now
constructing a canal.
A fourth route was surveyed between the Chirique Lagoon on the eastern
side to the Pacific Ocean.