The Railway Conquest of the World

by Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot

A little squad of four surveyors were busily engaged in pegging out the path for the line. They were deep in the intricacies of their task. Suddenly there was a savage blood-curdling whoop. A horde of Indians, in the full panoply of war-paint and feathers, were bearing down upon them on mischief bent. The engineers discarded their instruments hurriedly and grabbed their rifles. They were outnumbered hopelessly, but undaunted, they kept blazing away, picking off their foes with that stubbornness born of despair. There were no thoughts of surrender to the implacable enemy. Nor could they hope for aid; they were too far distant from their base. One by one they fell, and when at last their comrades came up, their mutilated corpses were the sole evidences of that forlorn struggle. To-day those four wooden crosses serve to recall that grim episode. Such dramatic incidents unfortunately were only too frequent in the early days of railway building upon the American continent, though they were far from being peculiar to the New World. They have been, and still are, repeated occasionally in connection with such enterprises in other parts of the globe.

It was only a year or two ago that one of the most ferocious acts of savage barbarity, such as is difficult to parallel in the annals of railway engineering, was perpetrated in South America. Only the fringe of that vast territory has been opened up by the iron horse. The greater part is more unknown to-day than the land around the North Pole.

A small party of engineers set off up country to map out a projected extension. They plunged boldly into the depths of the primeval forest. But they never returned. What happened when they disappeared within the tangled labyrinth of trees no one knows. The time slipped by, and their comrades outside, fretting at their prolonged absence, grew so alarmed that a relief party was organised. The worst was dreaded, for the hostility of the natives to the locomotive was known only too well. The relief party advanced warily, weapons in hand, ready for the slightest sign of fight. However, they were safe from molestation, but had not ventured far into the tangled jungle before they solved the mystery, and were able to reconstruct a tragic adventure only too realistically.

The steps of the surveying engineers had been dogged silently and relentlessly by the remorseless savages. When the former had gained a point sufficiently remote from the belt of civilisation, they were laid low by poisoned arrows. The relief-party accounted for every engineer, but one and all were beyond human succour. They were found in a gruesome row, poised upside down, with stakes driven lengthwise through their bodies and heads into the ground. They had been pinned down with no more compunction than the school-boy secures his etymological prize to a piece of cardboard.

A few years ago British North Borneo was the scene of a similar disaster. It had been decided to drive a railway from coast to coast, and a party set out on the reconnaissance, as the first step in a new railway undertaking is called. The path lay through the dense forest which had never been penetrated by the white man, and where the dreaded Head Hunters held undisputed sway. The prospect was forbidding in the extreme, but it did not dismay the engineers who plunged fearlessly into the bush. As the crow flies their journey was only one of some 150 miles, but the thick vegetation concealed difficulties innumerable.

That survey was doomed to failure. The party was overwhelmed by the Dyaks and massacred, with the exception of three native porters who succeeded in making good their escape. After experiencing terrible privations, this trio regained civilisation and communicated the sad tidings of the calamity. For years that stretch of forest defied conquest. Finally another attempt was made to traverse the jungle, and on this occasion no interference to progress was offered. The surveyors gained the opposite coast in about six months, being called upon to fight only one enemy—disease. It was a desperate plunge, for the party had to hack and hew its way foot by foot through the matted scrub and trees.

These afford instances of the hostility of mankind which fortunately to-day are encountered but seldom. It is the hostility of Nature which is feared more greatly now. Yet the work possesses a fascinating glamour. The existence of difficulty only spurs the determined to further effort.

Railway surveying in the effort to roll back the map in a new country offers the young man all the adventure in life that can be desired. As one surveyor who had spent more years than he could remember in the wilds between China and Peru remarked to me, “If it is not the natural difficulties or the hostility of the natives which lend variety to the work, the chances are a hundred to one that a revolution will fill the gap, especially in China or the South Americas.”

At times the work is exasperating. Perhaps the surveyor who has been imprisoned for months on end in an inhospitable country has been driven to his wits’ end to find a practicable location which is immune from the many disturbances of Nature. By dint of supreme effort finally he discovers a route which he congratulates himself to be absolutely safe, only to receive a rude awakening. In the survey of a new line through the Rockies, the mountains barring the engineer’s path had achieved an unenviable reputation, owing to the frequency and severity of the avalanches that tore down their steep slopes every spring. The surveyor reconnoitred that mountain chain from end to end, observed every path that the slides had been known to take, searched local records and questioned aged inhabitants to make himself acquainted thoroughly with the conditions.

At last he concluded that he had elaborated a path for the railway which was beyond the destructive efforts of the periodical visitations and work was commenced. Yet in the first spring, while the construction train was crawling along with a load of excavated spoil from the mountain-side, the slipping snow departed from its accustomed path, and in its descent caught the unlucky train, threw it into the gulch some distance below, ripped up the metals, buried the grade beneath thousands of tons of debris, and obliterated every vestige of the work.