THE NICARAGUA AND PANAMA ROUTES TO THE PACIFIC.
BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.
It is curious how often the first impression of experts has been confirmed by the verdict of posterity. During one of his journeys of inspection Peter the Great visited the mouth of the Volga River and pointed out the advantages of fortifying a certain promontory which a military commission, after long controversies, has now selected for the site of a bombproof arsenal. The gold discoveries in Upper California were predicted by Sir Francis Drake; those of the Ural by Baron Humboldt; and after fifty years of coast surveys, mountain surveys, negotiations, reports and counter reports, it seems now probable that two American Republics will ratify the opinion of Don Rodrigo Contreras, who more than three hundred years ago called the attention of the Spanish Government to the advantages of the Nicaragua Lake system, and its navigable effluent, as the rudiment of an inter-oceanic canal, and the superiority of that route over those both of Darien and Panama—Tehuantepec having then not yet entered into competition. This Rodrigo was the son-in-law of Davila Pedrarias, the first governor of Panama, and in his coasting trips between the landings of the southern isthmus had probably noticed a circumstance which may yet turn the scales in the decision of the canal problem, though it had escaped the attention of the routine sailors of a latter age, and perhaps even of some professional engineers who confined themselves to the comparison of altimetrical surveys.
The matter is this: Along the north shore of the Caribbean Sea the coasts are deep and rocky, but further south, as the Cordilleras decrease in elevation, the shore is lined with sandbanks, and can be approached only through shallow estuaries, just as the coasts of the Mediterranean become sandy at their southeastern extremity, the only point where the circle of lofty coast ranges is broken by the delta of a swamp river—the depth of the shore waters being apparently proportioned to the height of the shore lands. Even single depressions in the chain of a long-stretched coast range are often confronted by isolated sandbanks—as if a collapse of the mountain walls had shoaled the littoral sea. But at Panama that tendency is aggravated by another cause. For the last two hundred years the line of the overland route has followed the Rio Chagres and its western tributaries; the adjoining hill country became studded with settlements, and, as usual in Spanish colonies, “civilization” led to forest destruction and progressive aridity. The abundant rains of the summer solstice, which were formerly absorbed by the not less exuberant vegetation of a tropical coast region, now reach the valley in the form of raging torrents, saturated with the mould of the treeless hill-slopes; and the alluvium deposited at the river mouth has thus gradually formed silt banks, against which the repeated improvements of the estuary have proved only a temporary remedy. The Russians had a similar experience with the port of Azof, once the best harbor in the basin of the Euxine; but after the destruction of the inland forests the naked hills of the Don revenged themselves by a hydra growth of dunes that defied all expedients of human skill, and after diking and dredging away some ninety million roubles, the government yielded to Nemesis and removed the wharves to the harbor of Taganrog. In order to enable vessels of deeper draught to enter the mouth of the Chagres, the canal itself would have to be supplemented by a channel mole, a marine canal of nine miles, protected by dikes which in their turn might become a source of peril to sailing vessels approaching the estuary during the prevalence of the frequent gales which make the headlands of the southern Caribbean so many Guardafuis.
The Bay of San Juan de Nicaragua, on the contrary, is remarkably free from storms, and the San Juan is not a swamp river. It is the effluent of a chain of rockbound lakes, one of them of sufficient extent to equalize the drainage of torrents from above, so that an overflow of the San Juan could be caused only by the simultaneous rising of all its lower tributaries, aided by a northwest gale that would drive the waters of the lake toward the estuary. A conjunction of that sort occurred in the summer of 1872, when the San Juan rose some twenty feet in as many hours; but even then the river did not shoal its delta, but tore out a new channel through Costa Rican territory, which now receives a lion’s share of the outflow; but there is no doubt that an isolated mishap of that sort can be remedied by a short-line canal from the coast to a point above the divergence of the rival streams, or by the same means that reclaimed the channel of the Mississippi at New Orleans. Further up all serious difficulties cease. The rapids of the San Juan can be passed by locks of moderate depth, the total difference between the level of Lake Nicaragua and that of the Atlantic being hardly twenty-five feet. The lake itself will need no improvements. Throughout its breadth of seventy-five miles (three fifths of the distance from ocean to ocean) it maintains an average depth of fifteen fathoms, has no dangerous sandbanks, no driftwood islands, while its undercurrents secure it against the danger of being shoaled by the floods of its affluents. The project of locating the western terminus at Port Brito, on the Pacific, would reduce the length of the canal proper to about twenty-eight miles, and shorten the trip for vessels from our ports by nearly seven hundred miles—the distance from Port Brito to Panama.
The question is, if all these advantages would justify the construction of a second canal. For we need not delude ourselves with the fear—or hope—that the Panama project would be abandoned; the present interests of the French stockholders, if not the name of Monsieur de Lesseps, is a guarantee that their work will be completed. They have gone too far[A] to retreat before the completion of a single rival; for on the other hand it is equally sure that the Tehuantepec scheme has lost its last hope of practical support, since even the promise of a monopoly could hardly override the veto of Nature. It is enough to say that the Mexican projectors admit that the proposed route through the lowest gap of the Chimalapa Range would require the construction of one hundred and forty locks—with the alternative of tunneling through thirty miles of granite rocks—for we know how nearly a difference of fifteen locks defeated the chances of the Wellington canal against its American rivals.
Nor should we, in this respect, underrate the advantages of the Panama route. The distance from ocean to ocean is only forty-eight miles, against one hundred and fifteen at Nicaragua, and two hundred and twelve at Tehuantepec, and neither hills nor rocks oppose any obstacle that could not be overcome by the conqueror of Suez. Yet there remains a consideration which in connection with the result of other comparisons must leave a preponderance of arguments in favor of Nicaragua. For three fifths of the year the valley of the Rio Chagres is a reeking hotbed of malaria,[B] and from Aspinwall to Panama only dreary sandhills alternate with festering swamps. Nicaragua, on the other hand, is the healthiest region between Chili and California, and offers scenic attractions absolutely unequaled in any other part of the New World, and which can hardly have been surpassed when the Mediterranean peninsulas were still clad in the glory of their primeval forests. I visited the lake region of Nicaragua in 1875, after having seen California, the West Indies, and the highlands of Mexico, and only here I relinquished my doubt that the international park of Switzerland had, after all, a transatlantic rival. The harbor of San Juan is nearly a thousand miles from anything an Anglo-American would call civilization, and since their Walker and Spalding experiences the natives are, on the whole, rather inclined to dispense with the patronage of enterprising foreigners; but, for all that, the time is near when the islands of Lake Nicaragua will be studded with international hotels. The luxuriance of the tropical hill forests is equaled in the mountains of Oaxaca; the climate is not superior to that of the northern Antilles; but the scenery of the highlands, with their fourteen active volcanoes, would turn the scales. Of the forty-six craters in the maritime Cordilleras, five are eruptive and nine smouldering and smoking volcanoes, besides a score of infernillos—smoking caves and fissures, opening in the rocks of the foothills, as if the obstruction of the roof-chimneys had forced the subterranean fires to break a vent through the basement of the Sierra. And, moreover, these craters are, with few exceptions, of easy access from both sides of the mountains, and at all seasons of the year. The climate of Nicaragua enjoys the advantages of the real tropics. In the western hemisphere that term is as ambiguous as the “beginning of spring.” At Brownsville, Texas, nearly twelve hundred miles further south than Naples, I have seen snowstorms that would appall a Shetlander; and even in Mexico frosts are not confined to the upper tablelands. But the traveler who reaches the fourteenth parallel has left the winter zone behind. In Leon, near the northwest end of the lake system, he will find butterflies in December, and when he sits down to his Christmas dinner of sweetmeats and broiled bananas, mine host will introduce a caza-moscas, or fly-brush boy. Moscas of a larger variety also infest the lagoons of the old town, but mosquitoes are rare, and further inland unknown, for Leon is the gate city of the western highlands, one of its suburbs being only a short distance from the foothills of the Cerro de las Pilas, a naked peak whose summit affords a complete panorama of the lake region and the coast range. In the north the Sierra Madre of Honduras looms on the horizon like a white-crested cloud, flanked by the blue ridge of the coast range, and the volcanic domes of the central plateau which attains its maximum altitude in the uplands of Matagalpa. But forty miles southeast of Leon the great tableland which stretches in an almost unbroken line from Denver across Mexico and the highlands of Central America is intersected by the basin of the Isthmus lakes; and here, as if the disruption of the Sierra had opened a vent for the furnaces of the nether world, volcanoes and hot springs are massed in a way which to my knowledge is paralleled only in the Island of Java, where a highland region of twelve hundred square miles is veiled with the almost perpetual smoke of its burning mountains. About twenty miles north of Las Pilas the continuity of the coast range is broken, and the main chain seems to be segregated into numerous isolated mountain groups, each of them crowned with two or three volcanic cones. At the end of the cape which forms the breakwater of the sound known as the Estero Real stands the volcano of Conseguina, the Vesuvius of the New World. In one of its last eruptions it caused an inundation by completely obstructing the outlet of the Rio Casco, and in 1835 it scattered its ashes as far as La Guayra and Tehuantepec, i. e., over a circle fourteen hundred miles in diameter. The head of the bay is begirt by the dolerite cliffs of two other volcanoes, one of which fronts the shore with a sheer precipice of 4,400 feet, rising from a pedestal of rock colonnades with cavernous interspaces where trickling springs have generated a rank vegetation of climbing evergreens. The same arrangement repeats itself at the head of Lake Managua, where the volcano of Monotombo rises in tower-like basalt cliffs to a vertical height of 7,400 feet. Professor Vanhouten, of the canal survey, makes the highest point of the peak 7,700—at all events a thousand feet more than the summit of Mount Washington. The “South Dome” of the Yosemite, if my memory serves me right, rises hardly 5,000 feet above the valley, and the granite front of the “Captain” considerably less than 4,000, while the grandeur of the basalt coliseum is yet doubled by the mirror of the Island Sea, as the first colonists translated the Indian name of Lake Managua. The lake is dotted with wooded islands which accompany the south shore into the strait of Panalaya, and where that strait opens into the broad basin of the lower lake, the islands, too, expand, two of them so much, indeed, as to have mountain ranges, broad valleys and secondary lakes of their own. Like all the higher ridges those island mountains culminate in volcanoes; the steep peak of Ometepec rises to a height of 5,200 feet, and gives its island the form of a pyramid. West, east, and north of both lakes volcanoes rise above the shore mountains in all directions, and northeast of Lake Managua not less than seven of them stand close together, like the peaks of the Sieben-gebirge, on the upper Rhine. The volcano of Chiltepec can be recognized by its cloven peak, the upper part of the cone having collapsed during one of its eruptions; Tellica and Santa Clara by the smoke trails of their ever-seething craters. The “Hell of Mesaya,” sixty miles further south, has the deepest crater of any known volcano, as Kilauea has the widest, and Stromboli the most obstreperous. The upper two thousand feet of the cone form a mere shell, and from the brink of the crater the spectator looks down into a dizzy abyss of trachite cliffs, rent by vertical fissures, and now and then veiled by the eruption of a smoke whirl. From the hills on the east shore of the lake the prospect toward the peaks of the island mountains affords views of marvelous and almost incomparable beauty. Yet all along the shores of that lake land, with the exception of the richest alluvial creek estuaries, can be bought for three dollars an acre, even on flat topped bluffs and near rock springs in sheltered dells, more inviting than the finest artificial parks. Thus far only camping British sportsmen have now and then availed themselves of such opportunities, though Nicaragua offers hunting grounds to the lovers of nearly every kind of outdoor pastime and science. Geologists can watch the active operations of the Titans that have transformed so large a portion of our planet. Antiquarians can here find treasures, from the tomb of a Toltec warrior to the monuments of a buried city; the neighborhood of San Carlos and Mayagalpa is covered with ruins, and on the island of Zapotera colossal idols rise like sphinxes from the ground and from the debris of fallen temples. Naturalists can watch the jaguar and the tapir in their native haunts, catch butterflies enough to stock a museum, study the habits of five different species of quadrumana, including the large Coaiti (Lagothrix paniscus), with his spider arms and strange, flute-like cries, can visit the bat caves of Dipilta or the bird islands of Bluefield’s Lagoon, that make Nicaragua a zoological epitome of the American tropics, and offer a winter asylum to legions of feathered refugees from the North.
In Nicaragua the rainy season ends in November, and the winters are dry and pleasant, and far less capricious than in Florida, where sultry Gulf winds so often alternate with very perceptible polar waves. Nicaragua will become the winter rendezvous of American tourists. An international highway, built by American engineers and American capital, would soon aggregate North American settlements that would add to the charms of a tropical garden-land a feeling of security which the traveler in other parts of Spanish America must generally forego; villas, watering places, and hotels for the accommodation of winter guests will spring up by scores, and the canal will soon become something more than a thoroughfare of international travel. The stockholders of such an investment could well dispense with a formal protectorate, and the obstacle of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty[C] is precisely analogous to the scruple which no politician would blame Prince Bismarck for setting aside in the Congo affair. In both cases England had for years the refusal of an opportunity which she failed to improve, and in the unwritten by-laws of international ethics the iners non obstet is a rule which held good even in the Black Sea controversy. Besides, the alternative of a French monopoly and eventual protectorate in Panama may help to moderate the opponents of the Monroe Doctrine.[D]
While Nicaragua will be visited for its own sake, Panama, like Vera Cruz and Cayenne, will be shunned by northern travelers, though considerations of proximity will secure it the inter-oceanic traffic of South America. Vessels carrying tobacco from Brazil to Peru, or guano from Peru to Caracas, will prefer the risk of the Chagres fever swamps to the certain disadvantages of a voyage around the distant south cape of the continent.
Nicaragua will compete with Switzerland, Italy, and the winter resorts of southern California, as well as with our transcontinental railways. Panama will compete with Cape Horn.
[A] The Panama Star and Herald reports that $68,000,000 of the total appropriation of $120,000,000 have already been expended. The preliminary surveys alone cost 7,000,000 francs. After the plan of Monsieur de Lesseps the canal will be thirty feet deep, one hundred and twenty feet wide, and about forty-six miles long.
[B] Panama (the city), too, is one of the unhealthiest spots on earth. Two months ago (January 2, 1885) the wife of Monsieur Jules Dingler, the Director-General of the Canal Company, succumbed to the same fever that had cost the lives of all her children. Dr. Ferdinand Lahr, the Sanitary Superintendent, died on the same day.
[C] Captain Bedford Pim, of the British navy, states various reasons that would insure the tolerance, or even the coöperation of Great Britain. He estimates the aggregate cost at $200,000,000, and believes that England, under certain conditions, would assume one half of the demanded guarantee of three per cent. interest.
[D] It is a curious fact that the originator of that doctrine is not an American, but a British statesman. George Canning, on the eve of his departure for Verona, having got an inkling of a South-European federation for the purpose of assisting Spain in the reconquest of her lost transatlantic possessions, postponed his trip and put himself in communication with the American minister, in order to call the attention of our government to the favorable opportunity for asserting the claims of a counter alliance.