GATUN LAKE AND THE CHAGRES RIVER
That section of the Canal, which for the convenience of engineering
records and directions is known as the Central Division, comprises
within its boundaries two of the great spectacular features of the
Isthmus--Gatun Lake and the Culebra Cut. I have already described the
scenic characteristics of this lake, but some discussion of the part it
plays in the economy of the Canal will not be out of place.
In the first place the creation of the lake depended on the type of
canal to be selected. A sea-level canal could not exist with the lake; a
lock canal could not have been built without it. The meanderings of the
Chagres, crossing and recrossing the only practicable line for the
Canal, and its passionate outbursts in the rainy season made it an
impossible obstacle to a sea-level canal, and all the plans for a canal
of that type contemplated damming the stream at some point above
Gatun--at Bohio, Gamboa or Alhajuela--and diverting its outflow into the
Pacific. On the other hand the lock canal could not be built without
some great reservoir of water to repeatedly fill its locks, and to
supply the waterpower whereby to operate them. Hence Gatun Lake was
essential to the type of canal we adopted.
The lay reader will probably be surprised when he hears how carefully
the area of the Chagres watershed and the average rainfall were studied,
and the height of the dam and the spillway adjusted to make certain a
sufficient supply of water for the locks. The only locks with which
these could be compared are those at the “Soo”, or outlet of Lake
Superior. That canal, the busiest one in the world for eight months in
the year, averaged 39 lockages a day during that period on the American
side and a smaller number through the Canadian locks. The water in Gatun
Lake will be sufficient for 41 passages, if the full length of the locks
is used or 58 if only the partial length is used, which will be the case
with steamships of less than 15,000 tons--and in ships of this class the
bulk of the world’s trade is conducted. If the limit of 41 lockages
seems low, it must be remembered that time is quite as much a factor in
the case as is the water supply. It will take an hour and a half to put
a ship through the locks. That time therefore technically constitutes a
“passage”. In the 24 hours there would be 36 passages possible, and
under the circumstances that would draw most heavily on the lake there
will be water enough for 41.
[Illustration: THE CHAGRES, SHOWING OBSERVER’S CAR
From the swinging car the observer measures the crest of the flood and
rapidity of the current]
For the creation of this lake our engineers found the Chagres River
available. It had dug the valley in which would be stored the vast
volume of water needed, and the unfailing flow from its broad watershed
could be relied upon at all seasons--though indeed in the rainy season
its contribution is sometimes embarrassingly lavish.
[Illustration: FLUVIOGRAPH AT BOHIO, NOW SUBMERGED]
[Illustration: AUTOMATIC FLUVIOGRAPH ON GATUN LAKE]
Every land comes to be judged largely by its rivers. Speak of Egypt and
you think of the Nile; India suggests the Ganges; England the Thames;
and France the Seine. The Chagres is as truly Panamanian as the Rhine is
German and there have been watches on the Chagres, too, when buccaneers
and revolutionists urged their cayucas along its tortuous highway. It
was the highway by which the despoilers of Peru carried their loot to
the Atlantic on the way to Spain, and along its tide drifted the later
argonauts who sought the golden fleece in California in the days of ’49.
The poet too has sung it, but not in words of praise. Listen to its most
famous lyric from the pen of James Henry Gilbert, Panama’s most famous
bard and most cruel critic.
“Beyond the Chagres River
Are the paths that lead to death--
To the fever’s deadly breezes,
To malaria’s poisonous breath!
Beyond the tropic foliage,
Where the alligator waits,
Are the mansions of the Devil--
His original estates.
“Beyond the Chagres River
Are the paths fore’er unknown,
With a spider ’neath each pebble
A scorpion ’neath each stone.
’Tis here the boa-constrictor
His fatal banquet holds,
And to his slimy bosom
His hapless guest enfolds!
“Beyond the Chagres River
’Tis said--the story’s old--
Are paths that lead to mountains
Of purest virgin gold;
But ’tis my firm conviction,
Whatever tales they tell,
That beyond the Chagres River
All paths lead straight to Hell”!
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
THE VILLAGE OF BOHIO, NOW SUBMERGED]
A much maligned stream is the River Chagres. Pioneers, pirates,
prospectors and poets have vied with each other in applying the
vocabulary of contumely and abuse to it, and the practitioners of
medicine have attached its name to a peculiarly depressing and virulent
type of tropical fever. But the humble native loves it dearly and his
homes, either villages of from ten to forty family huts, or mere
isolated cabins cling to its shores all the way from Fort Lorenzo to the
head waters far beyond the boundary of the Canal Zone. The native too
has something of an eye for the picturesque. Always his huts are erected
on a bluff of from 15 to 40 feet rise from the river, with the ground
cleared before them to give an unblocked view of the stream. Whether by
accident or because of a real art instinct he is very apt to choose a
point at a bend in the river with a view both up and down the stream.
Possibly however art had less to do with his choice than an instinct of
self-defense, for in the days of Isthmian turbulence, or for that matter
today, the rivers were the chief highways and it was well to be on
guard for hostile forces coming from either direction.
[Illustration: STEPS LEADING TO FLUVIOGRAPH STATION AT ALHAJUELA
This is one of the more distant stations, being ten or more miles
outside the Canal Zone]
[Illustration: A LIGHT HOUSE IN THE JUNGLE]
I saw the upper Chagres in the last days of its existence as a swirling
stream full of rapids, rushing along a narrow channel between banks
sometimes rising in limestone cliffs 60 feet high and capped by dense
tropical foliage ascending perhaps as much higher into the blue tropical
sky. The river was at its best and most picturesque as at the opening of
the dry season we poled our way up from Matachin towards its source.
Then Matachin was a hamlet of canal workers, and a weekly market for the
natives who brought thither boat loads of oranges, bananas, yams and
plantains. Sometimes they carried stranger cargoes. I heard a commission
given one native to fetch down a young tiger for somebody who wanted to
emulate Sarah Bernhardt in the choice of pets. Iguanas, the great edible
lizard of Panama, young deer, and cages of parrots or paroquets
occasionally appear. But as a market Matachin is doomed, for it is to be
submerged. With it will go an interesting discussion of the etymology of
its name, one party holding that it signifies “dead Chinamen” as being
the spot where imported Chinese coolies died in throngs of homesickness
during the construction of the Panama Railroad. But the word also means
“butcher” in Spanish and some think it commemorates some massacre of the
early days. However sanguinary its origin there will presently be water
enough to wash out all the stains of blood. In 1913 the place was one of
the principal zone villages, with large machine shops and a labor colony
exceeding 1500 in number. All vanishes before the rising lake, which
will be here a mile wide.
The native craft by which alone the Chagres could be navigated prior to
the creation of the lake are long, slender canoes fashioned usually from
the trunks of the espevé tree, hollowed out by fire and shaped within
and without with the indispensable machete. It is said that occasionally
one is hewn from a mahogany log, for the native has little idea of the
comparative value of the different kinds of timber. Mahogany and
rosewood logs worth thousands of dollars in New York are doing humble
service in native huts in Panama. But the native has a very clear
understanding of the comparative labor involved in hewing out a hardwood
log, and the cayucas are therefore mainly of the softer espevé, a
compact wood with but little grain which does not crack or splinter when
dragged roughly over the rocks of the innumerable rapids. The river
cayuca is about 25 feet along with an extreme beam of about 2¹⁄₂ feet
and a draft of 6 to 10 inches. Naturally it is crank and can tip a white
man into the stream with singular celerity, usually righting itself and
speeding swiftly away with the rushing current. But the natives tread it
as confidently as though it were a scow. For upstream propulsion long
poles are used, there being usually two men to a boat, though one man
standing in the stern of a 30-foot loaded cayuca and thrusting it
merrily up stream, through rocky rapids and swirling whirlpools is no
uncommon sight.
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
THE RIVERSIDE MARKET AT MATACHIN]
Our craft was longer--35 feet in all, and in the official service of the
Canal commission had risen to the dignity of a coat of green paint
besides having a captain and a crew of two men. Our captain, though but
in his nineteenth year, was a person of some dignity, conveying his
orders to the crew in tones of command, though not averse to joining in
the lively badinage with which they greeted passing boatmen, or rallied
maidens, washing linen in the streams, upon their slightly concealed
charms. The corrupt Spanish they spoke made it difficult to do more than
catch the general import of these playful interchanges. Curiously enough
the native peasant has no desire to learn English, and frequently
conceals that accomplishment, if he has attained it, as though it were a
thing of which to be ashamed. This attitude is the more perplexing in
view of the fact that the commission pays more to English speaking
natives.
“This boy Manuel”, said my host to me in low tones, “understands English
and can speak it after a fashion, but rarely does so. I entrapped him
once in a brief conversation and said to him, ‘Manuel, why don’t you
speak English and get on the roll of English speaking employees? You are
getting $62.50 gold a month now; then you’d get $75 at least’.
“Manuel dropped his English at once. ‘No quiero aprender a hablar
ingles’, said he, ‘Para mi basta el español’”. (I don’t care. Spanish
good enough for me.)
[Illustration: RAILROAD BRIDGE OVER THE CHAGRES AT GAMBOA
River is at low water. For picture showing it at flood, see page 141]
Manuel indeed was the son of the alcalde of his village, and the alcalde
is a person of much power and of grandeur proportionate to the number of
thatched huts in his domain. The son bore himself as one of high lineage
and his face indeed, Caucasian in all save color, showed that Spanish
blood predominated over the universal admixture of negro. He saved his
money, spending less than $10 a month and investing the rest in horses.
[Illustration: A QUIET BEACH ON THE CHAGRES]
From Matachin up to Cruces the river is comparatively commonplace,
spanned at one point by the Gamboa bridge up at which the voyager looks
reflectively from below as he hears that when the spillway is closed and
the lake filled up there will be but 15 feet headway above the river’s
crest, where at the moment there is more than 60. Higher up are the
towers, housing the machinery for recording the river’s rise, one of
them a relic of the French régime, while a slender wire spanning the
stream carries the pendulous car in which observers will go out at flood
time to measure the height of the tide’s crest and the speed of the
current. A stream of many moods is the Chagres, sometimes rising 40 feet
in 24 hours. Accordingly along its banks and those of its principal
tributaries are fluviographic stations whence watchers may telephone to
the keepers of the flood gates of the dam warnings of the coming of any
sudden freshet.
[Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT
THE RIVER AND VILLAGE OF CHAGRES
The little hamlet of rude thatched huts with a frame Catholic church in
the middle has seen history in its time. The Spanish fortress of San
Lorenzo on the hill was taken by Sir Henry Morgan’s buccaneers and later
by the British under Admiral Vernon after hard fighting.]
In the matter of conserving the waters of the Chagres, estimating the
total capacity of the watershed and in providing for swift forwarding of
information concerning sudden rises we shall always be under great
obligations to the French. Their hydrographic observations and records
are invaluable, and their stations established before we assumed control
are still used, with much of their machinery. Stations are maintained
far up the valleys of the Chagres and tributary rivulets, and all are
connected with the central control at Gatun dam by telephone. Some of
the stations are equipped with automatic machinery which, in the event
of a rise during the night summons the keeper by ringing an alarm bell.
The life of the keeper of a fluviograph station, miles perhaps of jungle
isolating him from the nearest human habitation, is lonesome enough. Yet
its monotony is sometimes relieved by lively incident. The irascible
Chagres, for example, once caught the keeper at Alhajuela with a sudden
rise, and compelled him to camp out a night and day in a tree top and
see his house, pigs and poultry swept away on the rushing tide. There
was a fair chance that the tree would follow.
[Illustration: POLING UP THE RAPIDS]
[Illustration: _Photo by S. H. Elliott_
CONSTRUCTION WORK ON THE SPILLWAY]
On our way up the river to visit some of the fluviographs we landed at
Cruces, went a brief space into the jungle and cleared away with
machetes the tangled vegetation until the old trail, or Royal Road to
Panama, was laid bare. Three to four feet wide or thereabouts it was,
and at points rudely paved with cobble stones. The nature and dimensions
of the trail show that it was not intended for wheeled carriages, and
indeed a native vehicle is a rarity on the Isthmus today, except in the
towns. Time came when with the growing power and cruelty of the
Spaniards this Camina Reale, or King’s Highway, was watered with the
blood of Indian slaves, bearing often their own possessions stolen from
them by the Spaniard who plied on their bent backs his bloody lash. It
may have been over this trail that Balboa carried, with incredible
labor, the frames of three ships or caravels, which he afterwards
erected and launched in the Pacific. Several years ago there were found
in the jungle near Cruces two heavy anchors, with 14-foot shafts and
weighing about 600 pounds which had been carried thus far on the way to
the Pacific and there dropped and left to the kindly burial of the
tropical jungle. When they were discovered a too loyal graduate of our
military academy at West Point in charge of some engineering work on the
Isthmus, thought it would be a fine thing to send them up there and have
them preserved on the parade ground of the academy. Without announcing
his intention he had them removed from the spot where they were found
and had taken them as far as the steamship wharf at Colon when Col.
Goethals--who has a habit of hearing of things that are not
announced--quietly interfered. The anchors were removed to some safe
spot and in due time will form part of the historic decorations of the
new city of Balboa.
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
WATER GATES IN LOCK WALL
Through these gates the water is admitted to the great conduit in the
center wall of the lock]
[Illustration: _Photo by Underwood & Underwood_
THE LAKE ABOVE GATUN]
Doubtless by the standards of these days the wealth that was carried
back and forth along the Royal Road by men crushed low like termite ants
beneath their heavy burdens, was not great. Yet one gets some idea of
the volume of the trade from Bancroft’s statement that in the year 1624,
just four years after the landing of the Mayflower, goods to the amount
of 1,446,346 pesos d’oro (practically an equal number of dollars), were
registered at the Casa, or custom house, while probably 7¹⁄₂ millions of
dollars’ worth of goods were smuggled through. There were great
warehouses then and a stone church with a neighboring monastery to which
it was customary to send the children of the richer people at Nombre de
Dios to be kept until they had attained their seventh year. For that
piously named town was almost a plague spot and its miasmatic
atmosphere was fatal to tender infants.
The paved trail echoes no more with the muleteer’s cry, or the clatter
of hoofs, nor are there wine shops to tempt the traveler, for there are
none to be tempted. But even in its palmiest days Cruces could have been
but a dismal spot. Gage, a soldier of fortune and an itinerant preacher,
visited the village in 1638 and left us this record:
“Before ten of the clock we got to Venta de Cruces where lived none but
mulattoes and blackmores who belong unto the flat boates that
merchandize to Portobel. There I had much good entertainment by the
people who desired me to preach unto them the next Sabbath day and gave
me twenty crownes for my sermon and procession. After five days of my
abode there, the boats set out, which were much stopped in their passage
down the river, for in some places we found the water very low, so that
the boats ran upon the gravel; from whence with poles and the strength
of the blackmores they were to be lifted off again”.
After the lapse of almost four centuries we found the shallows still
there and the blackmores--or their descendants--ready to carry our boat
past their fall. But the people who paid the early traveler twenty
crowns for a sermon had vanished as irrevocably as the city’s public
edifices, and no descendants of like piety remain. Morgan’s fierce
raiders swept through the village in 1670, and its downfall may have
begun then, for the stout Protestantism of the buccaneers manifested
itself in burning Catholic churches and monasteries in intervals of the
less pious, but more pleasing, occupation of robbing the Spaniards or
torturing them to extort confessions of the hiding places of their
wealth.
[Illustration: HOW THEY GATHER AT THE RIVER]
Sir Henry Morgan, however, was not the only famous man of battles to
pass through Cruces. In 1852 a very quiet young captain in the army of
the United States, one Ulysses S. Grant, was there in command of a
company of the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, U. S. A., proceeding from
New York to San Francisco. Cholera broke out among the men and the loss
while on the Isthmus was heavy. At Cruces the men were detained for
days, the roster of the sick growing daily, while rascally contractors
who had agreed to furnish mules to the army sold them at higher prices
to private parties eager to get away from the pest hole. According to
the surgeon’s report the situation was saved by Grant, who made a new
contract and enforced it--the latter being a practice that grew on him
in later days.
[Illustration: WASHERWOMEN’S SHELTERS BY THE RIVER
For protection against the burning sun they erect small shanties of
palms]
For a brief space in the days of the gold rush to California in
1848-’54, Cruces bade fair to regain its early importance. Once the
half-way place on the trail of Spaniards marching to steal gold from the
Peruvians, and Englishmen following to rob and murder the robbers in
turn, it became the meeting place of prospectors going out to California
full of hope, and of miners returning, some laden with gold but more
bowed with disappointment. Again Cruces became the point at which people
and freights were transferred from the river to the trail, or vice
versa. But another trail reached the river’s bank at Gorgona and this
village became a considerable rival to the older and larger place higher
up stream. Here were several rambling wooden houses dignified by the
name of hotels of which no trace remains today. The whole village, a
considerable one in the spring of 1913, with a population of at least
3,000, is to be abandoned to the rising tide of Gatun Lake, and such
portions of it as escape submergence by the water will be overwhelmed by
the equally irresistible jungle.
[Illustration: A FERRY ON THE UPPER CHAGRES]
Charles T. Bidwell, an English traveler who crossed the Isthmus in 1853
by way of the Gorgona route, says of the pleasures of a sojourn in that
town, “The place contained a few stores and more drinking saloons, most
of which were kept by the ‘enterprising Yankee’. The Gorgona road to
Panama was just then open, it being passable only in the dry season, and
it was estimated that 2,000 persons had passed through this place on
their way to or from California. * * * We decided to take the Gorgona
road and arranged to have saddle mules ready in the morning to convey us
to Panama for $20 each and to pay 16¹⁄₂ cents a pound additional for the
conveyance of our luggage”. (The distance now by rail, which closely
follows the old trail is 16 miles, the fare 80 cents.) “We then went to
inspect ‘a free ball’ which had been got up with all available splendor
in honor of some feast, and here we had a rare opportunity of seeing
assembled many shades of color in the human face divine; a gorgeous
display of native jewelry and not the most happy mixture of bright
colors in the toilettes of those who claimed to be the ‘fair sex’.
Dancing however, and drinking too, seemed to be kept up with no lack of
spirit and energy to the inharmonious combination of a fiddle and a
drum; and those of the assembly whose tastes led them to quieter
pursuits had the opportunity of losing at adjoining gaming tables the
dollars they had so easily and quickly extracted from the travelers who
had had occasion to avail themselves of their services. These tables too
were kept by the enterprising Yankee. Having seen all this, and smoked
out our cigars, we sought our beds, when we found for each a shelf or
bunk in a room which our host boasted had at a push contained
twenty-five or thirty people. * * * On awakening at daylight I found a
basin and a pail of water set out in the open air on an old pianoforte,
which some traveler had probably been tempted to bring thus far on the
road”.
[Illustration: _Photo by W. T. Beyer_
THE MUCH PRIZED IGUANA
This lizard, which attains a length of five feet, is esteemed a delicacy
in Panama]
The writer goes on to say that it took a little over two days to
traverse the distance to Panama, the guides having stolen the mules they
had rented and made off during the night.
Above Cruces the banks of the Chagres begin to rise in perpendicular
limestone cliffs, perhaps 60 or 70 feet high while from their crests the
giant tropic trees, the wild fig, the Panama, the Ceiba and the sentinel
rise yet another one hundred feet into the bright blue sky. Amongst them
flash back and forth bright colored parrots and paroquets, kingfishers
like those of our northern states, only gaudier, and swallows
innumerable. Up and down the river fly heavy cormorants disturbed by the
clank of the poles among the stones of the river bottom, but not too shy
to come within 50 feet or so of our boat where, much to my satisfaction,
there is no gun. White and blue herons stand statuesque in the shallows
with now and then an aigret. Of life other than feathered one sees but
little here. A few fish leaped, but though the river was crystalline and
my guide assured me it was full of fish I saw none lurking in either
deeps or shallows. Yet he must have been right for the natives make much
of fish as an article of diet, catching them chiefly by night lines or
the unsportsmanlike practice of dynamiting the stream, which has been
prohibited by the Panama authorities, although the prohibition is but
little enforced.
Now and then an alligator slips lazily from the shore into the stream
but they are not as plentiful here as in the tidal waters of the lower
river. Occasionally, too, a shrill cry from one of our boatmen, taken up
by the other two at once, turns attention to the underbrush on the bank,
where the ungainly form of an iguana is seen scuttling for safety.
Ugliest of beasts is the iguana, a greenish, bulbous, pop-eyed
crocodile, he serves as the best possible model for a dragon to be slain
by some St. George. The Gila monster of Arizona is a veritable Venus of
reptiles in comparison to him, and the devil fish could give him no
lessons in repulsiveness. Yet the Panamanian loves him dearly as a dish.
Let one scurry across the road, or, dropping from a bough, walk on the
surface of a river--as they literally do--and every dark-skinned native
in sight will set up such a shout as we may fancy rose from oldtime
revellers when the boar’s head was brought in for the Yuletide feast.
Not more does the Mississippi darkey love his possum an’ sweet ’taters,
the Chinaman his bird’s nest soup and watermelon seeds, the Frenchman
his absinthe or the German his beer than does the Panamanian his iguana.
[Illustration: CRUCES--A LITTLE TOWN WITH A LONG HISTORY]
In a mild way the Chagres may lay claim to being a scenic stream, and
perhaps in future days when the excellence of its climate in the winter
becomes known in our United States, and the back waters of the lake have
made its upper reaches navigable, excursion launches may ply above
Cruces and almost to Alhajuela. Near the latter point is a spot which
should become a shrine for Progressive Republican pilgrims. A low cliff
of white limestone, swept clear of vegetation and polished by the river
at high water describes an arc of a circle hollowed out by the swift
river which rushes underneath. Springs on the bluff above have sent out
little rivulets which trickling down the face of the stone have scarred
it with parallel vertical grooves a foot or two apart. Seen from the
further side of the stream it bears a startling likeness to a huge human
upper jaw with glistening teeth. With a fine sense of the fitness of
things the river men have named it “Boca del Roosevelt”--Roosevelt’s
mouth.
[Illustration: A NATIVE CHARCOAL BURNER]
Some of the fluviograph stations are located far beyond the limits of
the Canal Zone, but by the terms of the treaty with the Republic of
Panama the Canal Commission has over such headwaters and reaches of the
Chagres such jurisdiction as may be necessary for the protection and
regulation of Gatun Lake. We went to one of these stations some 20 miles
of poling up the Chagres beyond Alhajuela. The keeper was a native of
the Canary Islands who had mastered English sufficiently to make his
reports over the ’phone. His wife, who greeted us in starched cotton
with a pink hair ribbon, pink shoes and a wealth of silver ornaments,
was a native, dark of complexion as a Jamaica negress, but her sister
who was there on a visit was as white as a Caucasian. Doctors on the
Zone say that these curious variations in type in the same family are so
common that they can never foretell within several shades, the
complexion of a baby about to be born.
The keeper of this station was paid $65.50 monthly and the Commission
supplied his house, which was of the native type and cost about $85.
Though many children, pickaninnies, little Canaries or whatever
clustered about his door, his living expenses were practically nothing.
Expense for clothing began only when the youngsters had reached 11 or 12
years of age and thereafter was almost negligible--as indeed were the
clothes. The river furnished fish, the jungle iguanas, wild pigs and
birds; the little garden patch yams, bananas, mangoes and other fruits.
He was far removed from the temptations of Matachin, or other riotous
market places and he saved practically all of his pay. His ambition was
to get enough to return to his native isles, buy a wine-shop and settle
down to a leisurely old age--though no occupation could much outdo for
laziness the task of watching for the rising of the Chagres in the dry
season.
[Illustration: THE NATIVES’ AFTERNOON TEA]
Returning from the upper waters of the Chagres one reaches Gatun Lake at
Gamboa where the railway bridge crosses on seven stone piers. A little
above is a fluviograph station fitted with a wire cable extending across
the stream and carrying a car from which an observer may take
measurements of the crest of any flood. Indeed the river is watched and
measured to its very sources. It long ago proved itself unfit for trust,
and one who has seen it in flood time, 40 feet higher than normal,
bearing on its angry, tawny bosom houses, great trees, cayucas stolen
from their owners, and dead animals, sweeping away bluffs at bends and
rolling great boulders along its banks, will readily understand why the
builders of the Canal stationed scouts and spies throughout the Chagres
territory to send ample and early warning of its coming wrath.
Leaving the Chagres, turning into Gatun Lake and directing our course
away from the dam and toward the Pacific end of the Canal, we traversed
a broad and placid body of water interspersed with densely wooded
islands, which very soon narrows to the normal width of the Canal. In
midsummer, 1913, when the author conducted his inspection, a broad dyke
at Bas Obispo cut off Gatun Lake and its waters from the Canal trench,
then dry, which here extends in an almost straight line, 300 feet wide,
through steadily rising banks to the continental divide at Culebra. The
railroad then crossed upon this dyke to the western side of the Canal
and passed through several construction towns and villages, abandoned
later when the Canal was filled and the railroad moved to the other
side. Tourists with an eye for the spectacular used to stand on this
dyke and speculate upon the thrilling sight when a huge blast of
dynamite should rend the barrier, and in a mighty wave the waters of
Gatun Lake should rush down the broad channel betwixt the eternal hills
to make at last the long desired waterway from Orient to Occident. But
unhappily Col. Goethals and his associates unsentimentally put the
picturesque aside for the practical. No dynamite blast, no surging
charge of waters through the cut, entered into their program. Instead
with mighty siphons the water was to be lifted over the barrier and
poured into the Canal for days until the two bodies of water were nearly
at a level. Then by the prosaic use of floating dredges the dyke would
be removed and the Canal opened from Gatun Locks to the locks at Pedro
Miguel.
[Illustration: PIERS OF THE ABANDONED PANAMA RAILWAY]