THE GREAT CANAL
On a glorious afternoon, a few days later, the boys sat on the upper deck
of the liner, as it drew near the city of Colon, on the Atlantic side of
the Isthmus of Panama. With the quick rebound of youth, they had wholly
recovered from the strain of the preceding days, and were looking forward
with the keenest zest, to the opening of the great canal, now only two
weeks distant. They gazed with interest at the Toro lighthouse, as the
steamer left the gleaming waters of the Caribbean Sea, and threaded its
way up the Bay of Limon to Cristobal, the port of Colon.
"And to think," Dick was saying, "that it's four hundred years almost to
a day, since the isthmus was discovered, and in all that time they never
cut it through. To cover that distance of forty-nine miles from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, ships have sailed ten thousand, five hundred
miles. It almost seems like a reflection on the intelligence of the
world, doesn't it?"
"It surely does," asserted Bert, "and yet it wasn't altogether a matter
of intelligence, but of ways and means. In every century since then,
lots of people have seen the advantages of a canal, but they've been
staggered, when they came to count the cost. It's easy enough to talk of
cutting through mountains and building giant dams and changing the course
of rivers. But it's a long jump from theory to performance, and they've
all wilted until your Uncle Samuel took up the job. Even France, the
most scientific nation in Europe, gave it up after she'd spent two
hundred million dollars."
"It's a big feather in our cap," said Tom--"the very biggest thing that
has happened in the way of engineering, since this old earth began. It's
the eighth wonder of the world. The building of the pyramids was
child's play, compared to the problems our people have had to meet. But
we've met them--health problems, labor problems, political problems,
mechanical problems--met and solved them all. The American Eagle has
certainly got a right to scream."
And their enthusiasm for the American Eagle grew with every hour that
passed, after they drew up to the docks and went ashore. Everywhere
there were evidences of thrift and progress and law and order, to be seen
nowhere else in Central or South America. After the slovenly towns and
cities of Mexico, it was refreshing to note the contrast. For five miles
on either side of the canal--the Canal Zone--it was United States
Territory. From being the abode of fever and pestilence, it had been
transformed into one of the healthiest places in the world. Mosquitoes
had been exterminated and the dreaded scourge of "Yellow Jack" wiped out
completely. It was a cosmopolitan district, where all the nations of the
world met together and all classes were to be found, from the highest to
the lowest. But over this mixed and often turbulent population, the
civil and military arms of the United States, ruled with such strength
and wisdom, as to make it a model for the world's imitation. The city
was bright, clean, animated, abounding in amusements and diversions; but
lawlessness and disorder were unsparingly repressed. The boys were
delighted at the novelty of what they saw and heard, and it was late when
they went to their rooms, with an eager anticipation of all that awaited
them on their trip across the isthmus.
For this trip from end to end of the canal was one of the most cherished
features of their general plan. They wanted to study it at their
leisure--the dams, the locks, the gates, the lakes, the feeders, the
spillways, the attractions--the thousand and one things that made it the
marvel of the twentieth century. And they vowed to themselves that what
their eyes did not take in would not be worth seeing.
Colon, itself, held them for two more days, and during that time they
lost one of their party. Wah Lee--for that they had discovered to be
their Chinaman's name--had justified his statement that he had "flends
in Panama." They had rather suspected that these alleged friends
resembled the mythical Mrs. Harris, whose chief claim to fame was that
"there wasn't no such person." They were agreeably surprised, therefore,
when, before they had been twenty-four hours in the city, he told them
that, through one of his "flends," he had found employment in the
household of a wealthy Japanese residing in the suburbs. He would have
gladly stayed with the boys, to whom he had become greatly attached. But
although they were fond of him, and got a good deal of amusement from his
quaint ways, they had really no need of him, and he was a clog on their
freedom of movement. They wanted to be footloose--to go where they
pleased and when they pleased--and they were glad to learn that he was
so well provided for.
"Me clome and slee you melly times," he assured them, benignantly.
"Sure thing, old boy," answered Tom. "We're always glad to see you."
"Me play you back," said Wab Lee.
"Pay back nothing," responded Bert. "You don't owe us anything. You've
worked your passage, all right."
"Me play you back," he repeated, as calmly as though they had not
protested, and pattered off, after including them all in his irresistible
smile.
"And he will," affirmed Dick, despairingly. "We're just clay in the
hands of the potter, when we come up against that old heathen. If he
says he'll pay you back, paid back you'll be, as surely as my name is
Dick Trent."
Which proved to be true enough, although the payment was made in
different coin and in an other fashion than they dreamed of at the
moment.
Two days later, bright and early they took the train on the little
railroad that runs from Colon to Panama. Their first stop was to be at
the Gatun Dam and Locks, the mightiest structure of its kind in the
world.
As they came in sight of it, the boys gasped in amazement and admiration.
What they had read about it in cold type, had utterly failed to give
them an adequate idea of the reality. Here was a work that might have
been hammered out by Thor. There were the mighty gates, weighing each,
from three hundred to six hundred tons. The locks each had four gates,
seven feet thick and from forty-seven to seventy-nine feet high. The
gates were operated by electricity and open or shut in less than two
minutes, and absolutely without noise.
In these locks were three chambers, lower, middle and upper. Each was a
thousand feet Long, one hundred and ten feet wide and eighty-one feet
deep. As the vessel enters the lower chamber, it finds there a depth of
over forty feet. The gate is closed and the water pours in, lifting the
vessel as it rises. In fifteen minutes, the water rises over
twenty-eight feet. Now the ship has reached the middle chamber, and
again the gates are closed and the process repeated. The upper chamber
is the last stage, and then the vessel reaches the artificial lake of
Gatum. It has climbed eighty-five feet in about ninety minutes.
"Just like climbing a flight of stairs," exclaimed Dick.
"Precisely," said Bert. "Where a train climbs a mountain by a steady
grade, the vessel leaps up to the top in three jumps."
"Think of trying to lift one of those enormous vessels with a derrick or
a crane," murmured Tom; "and yet how gently and easily the water does it
by pushing up from underneath."
"Look at the width of those concrete walls," pointed Bert. "Fifty-two
feet thick!
"Well, twenty-five million dollars will do a lot, and I've read that it
cost that much for these locks alone. And that's only a fraction of the
entire work."
At every turn, they came across something that evoked their wonder and
admiration. Most of the figures and statistics connected with the
colossal work they were already familiar with, but the information thus
gained was, in a certain sense, hazy and unreal. It was seen through the
mirage of distance, and not until their eyes actually saw the work in
course of construction, did the knowledge lying in their minds, take a
sharp and clearly cut outline.
As they moved about the dam, they came in contact with many of the
engineers connected with the work. These were picked men, Americans like
themselves, and of the very highest class of skilled engineers. They
were glad to meet the young fellows from the States--"God's country," as
they named it to themselves, in moments of homesickness--and the
intelligent interest of the boys, in marked contrast to many of the "fool
questions" put to them by the general run of tourists, made them eager to
impart to them all they wanted to know. They grew "chummy" at once, and
by the time the boys had spent a half a day in their inspection, they
knew more about it than they would have gained in a month of reading.
Among other things, they learned that the locks were the greatest
reinforced concrete structure in the world. They had been built in
sections, thirty-six feet long, and these had been joined together so as
to make one gigantic rock, thirty-five hundred feet long and three
hundred and eighty-four feet wide. This reached down fifty feet under
tide, and towered one hundred and fifteen feet above the level of the
sea. The concrete necessary was brought in barges that if strung along
in one tow would have stretched from Colon to the southern coast of the
United States, a distance of fifteen hundred miles. Great masses of
steel were first erected, and then the concrete was poured into these by
giant mixers.
The wall at the west wing held back the waters of the Chagres River.
This was allowed to spread out into a lake, covering nearly two hundred
square miles, at a level of eighty-seven feet. From this the water was
drawn to feed the locks, and even in the dryest season would prove
sufficient for that purpose.
Then there was the great spillway, in the hill that forms part of Gatun
Dam. Here one hundred and forty thousand cubic feet of water can be
discharged every second. The waters made a magnificent picture as they
poured through the gates. As Dick remarked, it was "an abridged edition
of Niagara Falls." At the east of the spillway, was the power plant,
where the water, dropping seventy-five feet, developed enough electric
power and light to operate the canal from end to end.
At Bohio, the southern end of Gatun Lake, they came to the place where
the canal enters the foothills of the mountain range. Up to this point,
there had been but little digging, but here the real work of excavation
had begun. The earth and rock that had to be removed here was equal to
that involved in cutting a ditch across the United States, ten feet deep
and fifty-five feet wide. The dirt would load a train that reached four
times around the earth.
"Only a little matter of a hundred thousand miles," exclaimed Tom. "Gee,
these figures are enough to make your head ache. Everything is in
thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions."
"Yes," said Bert, "it's simply inconceivable. We mention figures, but we
can't really grasp what they mean. It seems like the work of giants,
rather than men."
"Right you are," assented Dick. "Why, even the blast holes drilled for
the dynamite, if put together, would stretch from New York to
Philadelphia."
At the great Culebra Cut, where at one point the depth was over four
hundred feet, the wonder grew. Twenty million pounds of dynamite had
been used in this cut and the cost of the excavation was over eighty
millions of dollars. Yet with such care and skill had this been managed
that very few men had lost their lives; not as many as are killed in the
erection of an ordinary office building in New York.
And here, at Culebra, the problem had been harder to solve than anywhere
else. There had been enormous landslides, that made it necessary to do
the work over and over again. Twenty-one million cubic yards of earth
had fallen from the mountain side, in many cases covering the engines and
shovels engaged in the work of excavation. One slide involved
sixty-three acres. At another place, forty-seven acres moved entirely
across the Canal at the rate of fourteen feet a day, and rose at one
point to a height of thirty feet. Over twenty times, these avalanches
came down the sides of the cut. It seemed as though Nature were angered
at the attempts of man to change what she had ordained, and were
determined to drive him to despair. But the attempts were renewed with
dogged persistence, and now the course of the Canal had been fully
protected, and baffled Nature could rage in vain. It was heart-breaking
work, but when Uncle Sam puts his hand to the plough, he doesn't turn
back. Science and pluck, working hand in hand with splendid audacity,
had come out triumphant.
Part of the excavation had been made by hydraulic action. Where the
ground was soft, tremendous streams of water played upon the banks,
washing the dirt away. In other sections, there were enormous steam
shovels, some of them weighing ninety-five tons, and scooping up the
earth, a carload at a time.
"Nice little toys," remarked Dick, as he gazed into the maw of one of
them.
"Right you are," responded Bert, "but they're toys that only giants can
play with."
On the third day of their trip, they reached the Pedro Miguel Locks,
forty miles from the Atlantic. In its general features, it was patterned
after those at Gatun. Here, the vessel, which had been sailing along at
a height of eighty-five feet above sea level after it left Gatun, would
begin to drop toward the Pacific. It would descend thirty feet, then
sail across an artificial lake for a mile and a half, until it reached
the Miraflores Locks, the last place where it would be halted on its trip
to the Western Ocean. Here there were two chambers, each lowering the
ship twenty-seven and a half feet, making a drop of fifty-five feet in
all. From there, for a distance of eight miles, it would pass through a
channel, five hundred feet wide and forty-five deep, until at last it
reached the sea.
And now the whole stupendous plan lay before them as clear as crystal.
As in a panorama, they saw the vessel, as it left the Atlantic and
prepared to climb the backbone of the continent. It would come up the
Bay of Limon to the entrance of the Canal, and there the sailing craft
would fold its wings, the liner would shut off steam. On the wide
expanse of Gatun Lake they would again proceed under their own power.
Through the Canal proper they would be drawn by electric traction
engines, running upon the walls. At Gatun, they would climb, by three
successive steps, to a point eighty-five feet above sea level. Crossing
Gatun Lake, they would pass through the Culebra Cut to the Pedro Miguel
Locks. A downward jump of thirty feet here, another of fifty-five feet
at the Mirafiores Locks, a level sail for eight miles more, and they
would emerge on the broad bosom of the Pacific. Then the sails would be
broken out, the engines begin to throb, and away to the western coast or
Manila, or Australia, or China and Japan. The dream of four hundred
years would have become a glorious reality.
In ten hours, the largest steamship could ride in safety from ocean to
ocean. The distance from New York to San Francisco by sea would be
shortened by over nine thousand miles. Liverpool would be brought seven
thousand miles nearer the Pacific Slope. From New York to Manila, five
thousand miles were saved. The commercial supremacy of the sea would be
taken from the maritime nations of Europe and put in the hands of the
United States. That shining strip of water, fifty miles in length, would
prove the "path of empire," and mark a peaceful revolution in the history
of the world.
"And it's time that we came into our own again," declared Bert, as, their
trip finished, they sat on the veranda of the hotel at Colon. "Eighty
years ago, our flag was to be found on every sea. But we've been so busy
with our internal development that we've let the control of the ocean
pass into the hands of others, especially England. It's a burning shame
that most of our commerce is carried in English ships. I hope that, now
the Canal is ready for use, there'll be a big upbuilding of our merchant
marine, and that it'll be no longer true that 'Britannia rules the
waves.'"
"I think that the British already see the handwriting on the wall,"
remarked Dick. "Perhaps that explains their unwillingness to take part
in the San Francisco Exposition. They've made a big fuss because we
don't make our coastwise vessels pay any tolls for going through the
Canal. But I think the real reason lies deeper than that."
"Germany and Russia are none too cordial, either, I notice," said Tom.
"When you come to think of it, we haven't many friends in Europe, anyway."
"No," mused Bert. "About the only real friend that we have over there is
France. As a rule, she's been on pretty good terms with us, ever since
she helped us in our Revolutionary War. We had a little scrap with her
on the sea, once, and we had to warn her to get out of Mexico, when she
tried to back up Maximilian there. But our republican form of government
appeals to her, and, on the whole, she likes us.
"But Russia feels a little sore, because she thinks we sympathized with
Japan in her recent war. And Germany has always kicked like a steer
about our Monroe Doctrine. If she felt strong enough, she'd knock that
doctrine into a cocked hat. She wants to expand, to establish colonies
for her surplus population. She's especially keen on getting into
Brazil. But wherever she turns, she finds the Monroe Doctrine blocking
her way. She says it isn't fair: it isn't reasonable; it isn't based on
international law."
"Well, isn't she right?" asked Tom. "It's always seemed rather nervy to
me, for us to say that no other power shall acquire territory in North or
South America. By what right do we say so?"
"By no right at all," admitted Bert. "We fall back on the law of
self-preservation. We've simply figured out that we want to keep the
ocean between us and the nations of Europe. Otherwise, we'd have to keep
an enormous standing army. If they had territory near by, where they
could drill and recruit and establish food and coal depots, so as to be
ready to attack us suddenly, we'd be on edge all the time. As it is, we
can go to sleep nights, without any fear of finding the enemy in our
backyard the next morning when we look out of the window."
"Well," remarked a Californian, named Allison, whose acquaintance they
had recently made, and who now drew his chair nearer and joined in the
conversation; "we don't need to worry about Europe. The real enemy lies
in another direction." And he pointed toward Asia.
"You mean Japan?" queried Bert.
"Exactly," was the answer.
"Aren't you California people a little daffy on the Japanese question?"
chaffed Dick.
"Not a bit of it," replied Allison, with marked emphasis. "As sure as
you're alive, there's going to be a tremendous fight between Japan and
the United States. Just when it's coming, I don't know. But that it is
coming, I haven't the slightest shadow of a doubt. I'd stake my life
upon it."
His deep earnestness impressed the boys in spite of themselves.
"But why?" asked Tom. "There doesn't seem any real reason for bad blood
between us, as far as I can see."
"Then, too, we opened up Japan to modern civilization in 1859, and
brought her into the family of nations," added Dick. "She's always
professed the greatest friendship for us."
"'Professed,' yes," answered Allison, "but, for some time past, those
professions have sounded hollow. There's the immigration problem.
There's the Magdalena Bay concession. There's the California school
question and the alien land bill. Have you read of the mass meetings at
Tokio, and the passionate harangues against America? Wasn't that pretty
near an ultimatum that the Viscount Chenda put before the Washington
Government a little while ago? I tell you, gentlemen, that many a nation
has been plunged into bloody war for reasons less than these."
"But, after all," objected Tom, "if anything of the kind threatens, we'll
have time enough to see it coming, and get ready to meet it."
"Will we?" cried Allison. "Did the Russians have any warning, before the
Japanese smashed their fleet at Port Arthur? Do you know that for two
years past, her arsenals have been working night and day? With what
object? When Japan is ready, she will strike as the lightning strikes.
She may be ready now. Perhaps at this very moment, her fleet may be on
the way to San Francisco."
In his excitement, he half rose from his chair, and his voice rang out
like a clarion.