ONE OF THE OLD CANAL DREDGES BUILT BY THE SCOTCH, LEFT BY THE FRENCH, AND REPAIRED AND USED BY THE AMERICANS
A STEAM-SHOVEL LOADING ROCKS IN THE CULEBRA CUT
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LARGER IMAGE
Neat little concrete lighthouses, rising incongruously out of the forest, mark the approach to Gatun. Here is the key-point of the canal. From the northwest corner of the veranda round Colonel Sibert’s office, the whole scheme of things leaps to the eye. Four miles to the north lies Limon Bay, with the Caribbean beyond, the long breakwater stretching out from Toro Point on the left, to make the open roadstead a safe harbor, and on the right the new docks of Cristobal, the American-owned port of Colon. What looks like an over-fed dreadnought guarding the entrance is the sea-going suction-dredge Caribbean at work on the four miles of canal that run under the bay to deep water. The next four miles of all-but-finished sea-level canal, up which ships will sail to Gatun; the profile of the three great locks that will lift them eighty-five feet; the beginning of the broad lake, over which they will sail at that level to Bas Obispo and through the cut, and then down through Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks to sea-level on the Pacific side, can here be seen and comprehended with a turn of the head. From east and west the hills that inclose the valley of the Chagres close in to the gap, little more than a mile wide, now filled by the Gatun Dam.
THE ADMINISTRATION BUILDING AT CULEBRA
Colonel Goethals’s office is in this building.
THE ANCON BASE-BALL PARK
From a photograph taken on July 4, 1912.
You must not think of the Gatun Dam as an ordinary dam, a high, thin wall holding back a body of water, but as an artificial continuation of the gently sloping hills it joins together. In cross-section it resembles the most obtuse of triangles. A cow could walk over it anywhere, and find fairly good pasturage by the way; for coarse, thick-stemmed grass springs up wherever the surface is left undisturbed for a few days. By the time the canal is opened, so quickly is bare earth overgrown in the tropics, those seeing the dam for the first time from the deck of a steamer will have the greatest difficulty telling where it begins and the hills end.