"I have barely time to add that Mr. Fairbairn has left for America, which is his home, and has been for many years. He must have been at Birkenhead or Liverpool at the date of your letter to me. I was not aware that he had written to you. He brought me a paper with your remarks about the meeting of Mr. Robert Stephenson and Mr. Trevithick, and asked me if it were true that they met at Carthagena as stated, as he (Mr. Fairbairn) thought it was at Angostura, and that Mr. Trevithick was in danger of being drowned at the Bocasses, i. e. the mouths of the Orinoco, the Apure, &c., &c. I explained that it was near the mouth of the Magdalena.
"I will just say that it was quite possible Mr. R. Stephenson had forgotten Mr. Trevithick, but they must have seen each other many times. This was shown by Mr. Trevithick's exclamation, 'Is that Bobby?' and after a pause he added, 'I've nursed him many a time.'
"I know not the cause, but they were not so cordial as I could have wished. It might have been their difference of opinion about the construction of the proposed engine, or it might have been from another cause, which I should not like to refer to at present; indeed, there is not time.
"Pray address me as before. I hold no rank in the British service, and in England never assume any.
"I have the honour to be, dear Sir,
"Faithfully yours,
"Bruce Napier Hall.
"Edward W. Watkin, Esq., M.P., &c.,
"Currente Calamo."
These notes from Mr. Hall and Mr. Fairbairn to Mr. (now Sir Edward) Watkin[133] arose from the latter repeating what Mr. Robert Stephenson had related, of his meeting with Trevithick and Gerard at the inn at Carthagena. Stephenson said, "on his way home from Colombo, and in the public room at the inn, he was much struck by the appearance and manner of two tall persons speaking English; the taller of them, wearing a large-brimmed straw or whitish hat, paced restlessly from end to end of the room." Gerard and Stephenson entered into conversation, and Trevithick joined them. Stephenson said that he had a hundred pounds in his pocket, of which he gave fifty to Trevithick to enable him to reach England. It seems that had it not been for Mr. Hall's quick eye and steady hand rescuing Trevithick from the jaws of the blind alligator, he never would have returned to his native country.
Here was the inventor of the locomotive a beggar in a strange land, helped by the man whom he had nursed in baby-boyhood, then returning to England to become a great railway engineer in making known the use of the locomotive on the level road of the Liverpool and Manchester, while the real inventor, who looked upon railways and locomotives as things of a quarter of a century before, was about to recommend them as the means of passing across the isthmus of Costa Rica from the Atlantic to the Pacific, over the heights of the Cordillera, by the river San Juan from Greytown, and by its tributary the Serapique, then by railway towards the high ground of San José, the capital, and down the western slope, passing, somewhere not far from the mines, forward to the Gulf of Nicoya in the Pacific.
The approximate distance would be fifty miles of river navigation, and eighty or a hundred of railway, with perhaps stiffish but still manageable inclines, and no avalanches.