Heroes of To-Day

by Mary Rosetta Parkman

The admiral did not send a shot after his threat, but he did forward a complaint to the engineer’s commanding officer, who directed that lumber be employed instead of the barges.

Major Goethals sent back the reply that there was no lumber to be had, and, while the offended admiral darkly threatened a court-martial, completed the wharf.

“It was pretty uncomfortable during the time the admiral passed by without speaking, was it not?” a brother officer asked the major.

“Well—we landed the supplies,” returned the engineer, quietly, as if that was the only thing that mattered after all. As usual, he was content to let results speak for themselves.

All of the work that this master engineer had done up to this time, however, was really unconscious preparation for a mighty task that lay waiting for a man great enough to face with courage and commanding mind and will the difficulties and problems involved in the biggest engineering job in America, or, indeed, in the whole world—the digging of the Panama Canal. Ever since Columbus made his four voyages in the vain hope of finding a waterway between the West and the East, ever since Balboa, “silent upon a peak in Darien,” gazed out over the limitless expanse of the Pacific, it had seemed as if man must be able to make for himself a path for his ships across the narrow barrier of land that nature had left there as a challenge to his powers. At first it seemed that it must be as simple as it was necessary to cut a canal through forty miles of earth, but time showed that the mighty labors of Hercules were but child’s play compared to this.

Before Sir Francis Drake, the daring pirate whom destiny and patriotism made into an explorer and an admiral, died in his ship off the Isthmus in 1596, a survey had been made of the trail along which the Spanish adventurers had been carrying the plunder of their conquests in South America across the narrow neck of land from the town of Panama to Porto Bello, where it could be loaded on great galleons and taken to Spain. For three centuries men of different nations—Spain, France, Colombia, and the United States—made surveys and considered various routes for a canal, but when they came face to face with the project at close range, the tropical jungle and the great rocky hills put a check on their ventures before they were begun.

In 1875, however, when the Suez Canal was triumphantly completed by the French canal company it seemed as if Count de Lesseps, the hero of this enterprise, might well be the man to pierce the New World isthmus. Blinded by his brilliant success, the venerable engineer (de Lesseps was at this time seventy-five years old) undertook the leadership of a vast enterprise to dig a similar canal across Panama. A canal was a canal; an isthmus was an isthmus. Of course, the man who had made a way for ships through Suez could join the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific at Panama. No one seemed to realize that the digging of a ditch through one hundred miles of level, sandy desert was an entirely different problem from cutting a waterway through solid rock and removing mountains, to say nothing of diverting into a new channel the flow of a turbulent river and reconciling the widely different tides of two oceans.

Other engineers realized that the difficulties in the way of a sea-level ditch were stupendous and that the lock canal was the type for Panama. Trusting, however, in the careless plans of Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse of the French Navy, who did not cover in his hasty survey more than two thirds of the territory through which the canal was to pass, Count de Lesseps estimated that the work could be completed for $120,000,000, and promised that in six years the long-sought waterway to the Pacific and the East would be open. None could doubt that the tolls paid by ships which would no longer be compelled to round Cape Horn in order to reach the western coast of the continents of North and South America, the islands of the Pacific, and the rich trading centers of the Orient, would repay tenfold the people who supplied the money for the great enterprise.

Trusting in the magic name of the engineer who had brought glory to France and wealth to those who had supported his Suez venture, thousands of thrifty people throughout France offered their savings in exchange for stock in the canal company. But the only persons who ever made any money out of the enterprise were the dishonest men in high positions who took advantage alike of the unsuspecting optimism of de Lesseps and the faith of the public in his fame. They drew large salaries and lived like princes, while, for want of proper management the money expended for labor and machinery on the isthmus was for the most part thrown away. Many of the tools imported were suited to shoveling sand, not to removing rock. The matter of transportation for men and supplies seemed not to have been considered at all. And the engineers and workmen fell prey in large numbers to yellow fever and malaria, for at that time it was not known that the mosquito was responsible for the spread of these diseases. Even the splendid hospitals built by the French provided favorable breeding-places for the carriers of the fever germs.

The success of any large enterprise depends above everything else on the skilful handling of the problems of human engineering. For the quality of any work depends on the character of the workers. This means that a master of any great undertaking that involves the labor of many must first of all be a master of men. The successful engineer of the Panama Canal had not only to secure the loyalty and coöperation of all the workers of many races and prejudices, but also to provide comfortable houses, wholesome food, and healthful living conditions, alike for body and mind, of his army of workers. The French did not know the country in which they worked—the difficulties and dangers it presented. They did not know the men who worked for them—their needs and how to meet them. They did not know the men they worked with—their inefficiency and graft and how to forestall them. The de Lesseps enterprise was, therefore, doomed to failure. After expending $260,000,000 (more than twice as much as the entire cost of Suez) in nine years, less than a quarter of the canal was dug and the chief problems, presented by the unruly Chagres River and the floods of the rainy season, were still untouched.