Are in thy hands—O, blessed Mother of Sighs!
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.