A Tour Through South America

by A. S. Forrest

As the maximum altitude to be reached was estimated at 656 feet (De Lesseps says 975 feet) above sea-level, Garay’s plan necessitated the construction of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty locks, and it was calculated that the passage from sea to sea would occupy a period of twelve days to accomplish. Within the last few years the Tehuantepec Railway has been constructed, and is now open for traffic. Should this prove as successful as is anticipated, there is little likelihood that anything more will be heard of a canal scheme here to compete with the one approaching completion in Panama. The other route, in the northern part of the American isthmus, was by way of Lake Nicaragua, and had been investigated as early as 1779 by Manuel Galisteo, who passed an opinion unfavourable to a canal project in this locality. However, some British agents at Belize, who accompanied Galisteo’s expedition in a private capacity, sent home glowing accounts to their Government; creating such an impression that when, a year later, war broke out between England and Spain, Captain Horatio Nelson organised an expedition to acquire possession of the Nicaraguan territory.

Although he was successful as far as the Spaniards were concerned, the climate proved an irresistible enemy, and few of the expedition survived to return to Jamaica. Nelson himself only escaped with life, after a long and severe illness.

A STRETCH OF THE CHAGRES RIVER.

Forty years afterwards John Bailey, sent out by an English corporation, surveyed the Nicaragua route, and made an able report, in which he projected a canal by way of the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua, to the River Lajas, and thence to San Juan del Sur on the Pacific coast.

The Americans have always looked with favour on a scheme for a canal here, owing to the fact that Lake Nicaragua, which is one hundred and ten miles long by thirty-five miles broad, offers navigation for a considerable portion of the route to be traversed. This lake, situated some hundred and twenty-five feet above the level of the sea, is fed by about forty different streams, and empties itself by means of the River San Juan into the Gulf of Mexico.

Difficulties, however, exist in the cataracts by which the course of this river is broken. Strangely enough one of these is the handiwork of those inhabitants of the country who, to block the river against incursions by the buccaneers, sank vessels in it and threw in fallen trees and masses of rock to form a barrier. To canalise the San Juan would involve the construction of seven or eight locks, and this was part of the proposal of Colonel Childs, who in 1852 surveyed the route for the purposes of a canal.

In addition to the utilisation of this river and the fifty-five miles of available navigation on the lake, he estimated that a cutting would have to be made for a distance of forty-seven miles, the total length of the route being one hundred and ninety-four miles, and the time occupied in traversing it being from four to six days. Further locks, to the number of twenty-eight, were embodied in his scheme, together with piers and embankments at each end of the lake, and finally the creation of harbours both on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

So little was realised of the extent to which shipbuilding would develop that this proposed canal was only to be of a depth of from seventeen to twenty feet, and capable of accommodating vessels of under 1999 tons burden.

At the same time that Colonel Childs was carrying on his survey in Nicaragua, an expedition under Mr. Lionel Gisborne was traversing the Darien in the neighbourhood of the Savana River, to verify, on behalf of an English syndicate, the observations and representations of Dr. Edward Cullen, an enthusiast who urged the construction of a canal from the Gulf of San Miguel, by way of the Savana River, to Caledonia Bay, the site of the ill-fated Scottish colony.