To a person who wishes to sail to California an inspection of the map of
the world reveals a provoking peculiarity. The Atlantic Ocean—the
highway of the globe—being separated from the Pacific by the great
western continent, it is impossible to sail to the opposite coasts
without going thousands of miles out of his way; for he must double Cape
Horn. Yet a closer inspection of the map will discover that but for one
little barrier of land, which is in size but as a grain of sand to the
bed of an ocean, the passage would be direct. Were it not for that small
neck of land, the Isthmus of Panama (which narrows in one place to
twenty-eight miles) he might save a voyage of from six to eight thousand
miles, and pass at once into the Pacific Ocean. Again, if his desires
tend towards the East, he perceives that but for the Isthmus of Suez, he
would not be obliged to double the Cape of Good Hope. The Eastern
difficulty has been partially obviated by the overland route opened up
by the ill-rewarded Waghorn. The western barrier has yet to be broken
through.
Now that we can shake hands with Brother Jonathan in twelve days by
means of weekly steamers; travel from one end of Great Britain to
another, or from the Hudson to the Ohio, as fast as the wind, and make
our words dance to distant friends upon the magic tight wire a great
deal faster—now that the European and Columbian Saxon is spreading his
children more or less over all the known habitable world: it seems
extraordinary that the simple expedient of opening a twenty-eight mile
passage between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, to save a dangerous
voyage of some eight thousand miles, has not been already achieved. In
this age of enterprise that so simple a remedy for so great an evil
should not have been applied appears astonishing. Nay, we ought to feel
some shame when we reflect that evidences in the neighbourhood of both
Isthmuses exist of such junctions having existed, in what we are pleased
to designate ‘barbarous’ ages.
Does nature present insurmountable engineering difficulties to the
Panama scheme? By no means: for after the Croton aqueduct, our own
railway tunnelling and the Britannia tubular bridge, engineering
difficulties have become obsolete. Are the levels of the Pacific and the
Gulph of Mexico, which should be joined, so different, that if one were
admitted the fall would inundate the surrounding country? Not at all.
Hear Humboldt on these points.
Forty years ago he declared it to be his firm opinion that ‘the Isthmus
of Panama is suited to the formation of an oceanic canal—one with fewer
sluices than the Caledonian Canal—capable of affording an unimpeded
passage, at all seasons of the year, to vessels of that class which sail
between New York and Liverpool, and between Chili and California.’ In
the recent edition of his ‘Views of Nature,’ he ‘sees no reason to alter
the views he has always entertained on this subject.’ Engineers, both
British and American, have confirmed this opinion by actual survey. As,
then, combination of British skill, capital, and energy, with that of
the most ‘go-ahead’ people upon earth, have been dormant, whence the
secret of the delay? The answer at once allays astonishment:—Till the
present time, the speculation would not have ‘paid.’
Large works of this nature, while they create an inconceivable
development of commerce, must have a certain amount of a trading
population to begin upon. A goldbeater can cover the effigy of a man on
horseback with a sovereign; but he must have the sovereign first. It was
not merely because the full power of the iron rail to facilitate the
transition of heavy burdens had not been estimated, and because no
Stephenson had constructed a ‘Rocket engine,’ that a railway with steam
locomotives was not made from London to Liverpool before 1836. Until the
intermediate traffic between these termini had swelled to a sufficient
amount in quantity and value to bear reimbursement for establishing such
a mode of conveyance, its execution would have been impossible, even
though men had known how to set about it.
What has been the condition of the countries under consideration? In
1839, the entire population of the tropical American isthmus, in the
states of central America and New Grenada did not exceed three millions.
The number of the inhabitants of pure European descent did not exceed
one hundred thousand. It was only among this inconsiderable fraction
that anything like wealth, intelligence, and enterprise, akin to that of
Europe, was to be found; the rest were poor and ignorant aboriginals and
mixed races, in a state of scarcely demi-civilisation. Throughout this
thinly-peopled and poverty-stricken region, there was neither law nor
government. In Stephens’s ‘Central America,’ may be found an amusing
account of a hunt after a government, by a luckless American
diplomatist, who had been sent to seek for one in central America. A
night wanderer running through bog and brake after a will-o’-the-wisp
could not have encountered more perils, or in search of a more
impalpable phantom. In short, there was nobody to trade with. To the
south of the Isthmus, along the Pacific coast of America, there was only
one station to which merchants could resort with any fair prospect of
gain—Valparaiso. Except Chili, all the Pacific states of South America
were retrograding from a very imperfect civilisation, under a succession
of petty and aimless revolutions. To the north of the Isthmus matters
were little, if anything, better. Mexico had gone backwards from the
time of its revolution; and, at the best, its commerce in the Pacific
had been confined to a yearly ship between Acapulco and the Philippines.
Throughout California and Oregon, with the exception of a few European
and half-breed members, there were none but savage aboriginal tribes.
The Russian settlements in the far north had nothing but a paltry trade
in furs with Kamschatka, that barely defrayed its own expenses. Neither
was there any encouragement to make a short cut to the innumerable
islands of the Pacific. The whole of Polynesia lay outside of the pale
of civilisation. In Tahiti, the Sandwich group, and the northern
peninsula of New Zealand, missionaries had barely sowed the first seeds
of morals and enlightenment. The limited commerce of China and the
Eastern Archipelago was engrossed by Europe, and took the route of the
Cape of Good Hope, with the exception of a few annual vessels that
traded from the sea-board States of the North American Union to
Valparaiso and Canton. The wool of New South Wales was but coming into
notice, and found its way to England alone round the Cape of Good Hope.
An American fleet of whalers scoured the Pacific, and adventurers of the
same nation carried on a desultory and inconsiderable traffic in hides
with California, in tortoise-shell and mother of pearl with the
Polynesian Islands.
What then would have been the use of cutting a canal, through which
there would not have passed five ships in a twelvemonth? But twenty
years have worked a wondrous revolution in the state and prospects of
these regions.
The traffic of Chili has received a large development, and the stability
of its institutions has been fairly tried. The resources of Costa Rica,
the population of which is mainly of European race, is steadily
advancing. American citizens have founded a state in Oregon. The
Sandwich Islands have become for all practical purposes an American
colony. The trade with China—to which the proposed canal would open a
convenient avenue by a western instead of the present eastern route—is
no longer restricted to the Canton river, but is open to all nations as
far north as the Yangtse-Kiang. The navigation of the Amur has been
opened to the Russians by a treaty, and cannot long remain closed
against the English and American settlers between Mexico and the Russian
settlements in America. Tahiti has become a kind of commercial emporium.
The English settlements in Australia and New Zealand have opened a
direct trade with the Indian Archipelago and China. The permanent
settlements of intelligent and enterprising Anglo-Americans and English
in Polynesia, and on the eastern and western shores of the Pacific, have
proved so many _depôts_ for the adventurous traders with its innumerable
islands, and for the spermaceti whalers. Then the last, but greatest
addition of all, is California: a name in the world of commerce and
enterprise to conjure with. There gold is to be had for fetching. Gold,
the main-spring of commercial activity, the reward of toil—for which men
are ready to risk life, to endure every sort of privation; sometimes,
alas! to sacrifice every virtue; one most especially, and that is
Patience. They will away with her now.
Till the discovery of the new Gold country how contentedly they dawdled
round Cape Horn; creeping down one coast and up another; but now such
delay is not to be thought of. Already, indeed, Panama has become the
seat of a great increasing and perennial transit trade. This cannot fail
to augment the settled population of the region, its wealth and
intelligence. Upon these facts we rest the conviction that the time has
arrived for realising the project of a ship canal there or in the near
neighbourhood.
That a ship canal, and not a railway, is what is first wanted (for very
soon there will be both), must be obvious to all acquainted with the
practical details of commerce. The delay and expense to which merchants
are subjected, when obliged to ‘break bulk’ repeatedly between the port
whence they sail and that of their destination, is extreme. The waste
and spoiling of goods, the cost of the operation, are also heavy
drawbacks, and to these they are subject by the stormy passage round
Cape Horn.
Two points present themselves offering great facilities for the
execution of a ship canal. The one is in the immediate vicinity of
Panama; where the many imperfect observations which have hitherto been
made, are yet sufficient to leave no doubt that, as the distance is
comparatively short, the summit levels are inconsiderable, and the
supply of water ample. The other is some distance to the northward. The
isthmus is there broader, but is in part occupied by the large and deep
fresh-water lakes of Nicaragua and Naragua. The lake of Nicaragua
communicates with the Atlantic by a copious river, which may either be
rendered navigable, or be made the source of supply for a side canal.
The space between the two lakes is of inconsiderable extent, and
presents no great engineering difficulties. The elevation of the lake of
Naragua above the Pacific is inconsiderable; there is no hill range
between it and the gulph of Canchagua; and Captain Sir Edward Belcher
carried his surveying ship _Sulphur_ sixty miles up the Estero Real,
which rises near the lake, and falls into the gulf. The line of the
Panama canal presents, as Humboldt remarks, facilities equal to those of
the line of the Caledonian canal. The Nicaragua line is not more
difficult than that of the canal of Languedoc, a work executed between
1660 and 1682, at a time when the commerce to be expedited by it did not
exceed—if it equalled—that which will find its way across the Isthmus;
when great part of the maritime country was as thinly inhabited by as
poor a population as the Isthmus now is; and when the last subsiding
storms of civil war, and the dragonnades of Louis XIV., unsettled men’s
minds and made person and property insecure.
The cosmopolitan effects of such an undertaking, if prosecuted to a
successful close, it is impossible even approximatively to estimate. The
acceleration it will communicate to the already rapid progress of
civilisation in the Pacific is obvious. And no less obvious are the
beneficial effects it will have upon the mutual relations of civilised
states, seeing that the recognition of the independence and neutrality
in times of general war of the canal and the region through which it
passes, is indispensable to its establishment.
We have dwelt principally on the commercial, the economical
considerations of the enterprise, for they are what must render it
possible. But the friends of Christian missions, and the advocates of
Universal Peace among nations, have yet a deeper interest in it. In the
words used by Prince Albert at the dinner at the Mansion House
respecting the forthcoming great Exhibition of Arts and Industry,
‘Nobody who has paid any attention to the particular features of our
present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of
most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great
end—to which indeed all history points—the realisation of the unity of
mankind. Not a unity which breaks down the limits and levels the
peculiar characteristics of the different nations of the earth, but
rather a unity the result and product of those very national varieties
and antagonistic qualities. The distances which separated the different
nations and parts of the globe are gradually vanishing before the
achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with
incredible speed; the languages of all nations are known, and their
acquirements placed within the reach of everybody; thought is
communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power of lightning.’
Every short cut across the globe brings man in closer communion with his
distant brotherhood, and results in concord, prosperity, and peace.