Nine Different Routes Proposed
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.