Now that we can shake hands with Brother Jonathan in twelve days by means of weekly steamers; travel from one end of Great Britain to another, or from the Hudson to the Ohio, as fast as the wind, and make our words dance to distant friends upon the magic tight wire a great deal faster—now that the European and Columbian Saxon is spreading his children more or less over all the known habitable world: it seems extraordinary that the simple expedient of opening a twenty-eight mile passage between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, to save a dangerous voyage of some eight thousand miles, has not been already achieved. In this age of enterprise that so simple a remedy for so great an evil should not have been applied appears astonishing. Nay, we ought to feel some shame when we reflect that evidences in the neighborhood of both isthmuses exist of such junction having existed, in what we are pleased to designate "barbarous" ages.
Does nature present insurmountable engineering difficulties to the Panama scheme? By no means: for after the Croton aqueduct, our own railway tunneling, and the Britannia tubular bridge, engineering difficulties have become obsolete. Are the levels of the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, which should be joined, so different, that if one were admitted the fall would inundate the surrounding country? Not at all. Hear Humboldt on these points.
Forty years ago he declared it to be his firm opinion that "the Isthmus of Panama is suited to the formation of an oceanic canal—one with fewer sluices than the Caledonian Canal—capable of affording an unimpeded passage, at all seasons of the year, to vessels of that class which sail between New York and Liverpool, and between Chili and California." In the recent edition of his "Views of Nature," he "sees no reason to alter the views he has always entertained on this subject." Engineers, both British and American, have confirmed this opinion by actual survey. As, then, combination of British skill, capital, and energy, with that of the most "go-ahead" people upon earth, have been dormant, whence the secret of the delay? The answer at once allays astonishment: Till the present time, the speculation would not have "paid."
Large works of this nature, while they create an inconceivable development of commerce, must have a certain amount of a trading population to begin upon. A gold-beater can cover the effigy of a man on horseback with a sovereign; but he must have the sovereign first. It was not merely because the full power of the iron rail to facilitate the transition of heavy burdens had not been estimated, and because no Stephenson had constructed a "Rocket engine," that a railway with steam locomotives was not made from London to Liverpool before 1836. Until the intermediate traffic between these termini had swelled to a sufficient amount in quantity and value to bear reimbursement for establishing such a mode of conveyance, its execution would have been impossible, even though men had known how to set about it.
What has been the condition of the countries under consideration? In 1839, the entire population of the tropical American isthmus, in the states of central America and New Grenada did not exceed three millions. The number of the inhabitants of pure European descent did not exceed one hundred thousand. It was only among this inconsiderable fraction that any thing like wealth, intelligence, and enterprise, akin to that of Europe, was to be found; the rest were poor and ignorant aboriginals and mixed races, in a state of scarcely demi-civilization. Throughout this thinly-peopled and poverty-stricken region, there was neither law nor government. In Stephens's "Central America," may be found an amusing account of a hunt after a government, by a luckless American diplomatist, who had been sent to seek for one in central America. A night wanderer running through bog and brake after a will-o'-the-wisp, could not have encountered more perils, or in search of a more impalpable phantom. In short, there was nobody to trade with. To the south of the isthmus, along the Pacific coast of America, there was only one station to which merchants could resort with any fair prospect of gain—Valparaiso. Except Chili, all the Pacific states of South America were retrograding from a very imperfect civilization, under a succession of petty and aimless revolutions. To the north of the isthmus matters were little, if any thing better. Mexico had gone backward from the time of its revolution; and, at the best, its commerce in the Pacific had been confined to a yearly ship between Acapulco and the Philippines. Throughout California and Oregon, with the exception of a few European and half-breed members, there were none but savage aboriginal tribes. The Russian settlements in the far north had nothing but a paltry trade in furs with Kamschatka, that barely defrayed its own expenses. Neither was there any encouragement to make a short cut to the innumerable islands of the Pacific. The whole of Polynesia lay outside of the pale of civilization. In Tahiti, the Sandwich group, and the northern peninsula of New Zealand, missionaries had barely sowed the first seeds of morals and enlightenment. The limited commerce of China and the Eastern Archipelago was engrossed by Europe, and took the route of the Cape of Good Hope, with the exception of a few annual vessels that traded from the sea-board states of the North American Union to Valparaiso and Canton. The wool of New South Wales was but coming into notice, and found its way to England alone round the Cape of Good Hope. An American fleet of whalers scoured the Pacific, and adventurers of the same nation carried on a desultory and inconsiderable traffic in hides with California, in tortoise-shell and mother of pearl with the Polynesian Islands.
What, then, would have been the use of cutting a canal, through which there would not have passed five ships in a twelvemonth? But twenty years have worked a wondrous revolution in the state and prospects of these regions.
The traffic of Chili has received a large development, and the stability of its institutions has been fairly tried. The resources of Costa Rica, the population of which is mainly of European race, is steadily advancing. American citizens have founded a state in Oregon. The Sandwich Islands have become for all practical purposes an American colony. The trade with China—to which the proposed canal would open a convenient avenue by a western instead of the present eastern route—is no longer restricted to the Canton river, but is open to all nations as far north as the Yang-tse-Kiang. The navigation of the Amur has been opened to the Russians by a treaty, and can not long remain closed against the English and American settlers between Mexico and the Russian settlements in America. Tahiti has become a kind of commercial emporium. The English settlements in Australia and New Zealand have opened a direct trade with the Indian Archipelago and China. The permanent settlements of intelligent and enterprising Anglo-Americans and English in Polynesia, and on the eastern and western shores of the Pacific, have proved so many dépôts for the adventurous traders with its innumerable islands, and for the spermaceti whalers. Then the last, but greatest addition of all, is California: a name in the world of commerce and enterprise to conjure with. There gold is to be had for fetching. Gold, the main-spring of commercial activity, the reward of toil—for which men are ready to risk life, to endure every sort of privation; sometimes, alas! to sacrifice every virtue; one most especially, and that is patience. They will away with her now.
Till the discovery of the new gold country how contentedly they dawdled round Cape Horn; creeping down one coast, and up another: but now such delay is not to be thought of. Already, indeed, Panama has become the seat of a great, increasing, and perennial transit trade. This can not fail to augment the settled population of the region, its wealth and intelligence. Upon these facts we rest the conviction that the time has arrived for realizing the project of a ship canal there or in the near neighborhood.
That a ship canal, and not a railway, is what is first wanted (for very soon there will be both), must be obvious to all acquainted with the practical details of commerce. The delay and expense to which merchants are subjected, when obliged to "break bulk" repeatedly between the port whence they sail and that of their destination, is extreme. The waste and spoiling of goods, the cost of the operation, are also heavy drawbacks, and to these they are subject by the stormy passage round Cape Horn.
Two points present themselves offering great facilities for the execution of a ship canal. The one is in the immediate vicinity of Panama, where the many imperfect observations which have hitherto been made, are yet sufficient to leave no doubt that, as the distance is comparatively short, the summit levels are inconsiderable, and the supply of water ample. The other is some distance to the northward. The isthmus is there broader, but is in part occupied by the large and deep fresh-water lakes of Nicaragua and Naragua. The lake of Nicaragua communicates with the Atlantic by a copious river, which may either be rendered navigable, or be made the source of supply for a side canal. The space between the two lakes is of inconsiderable extent, and presents no great engineering difficulties. The elevation of the lake of Naragua above the Pacific is inconsiderable; there is no hill range between it and the gulf of Canchagua; and Captain Sir Edward Belcher carried his surveying ship Sulphur sixty miles up the Estero Real, which rises near the lake, and falls into the gulf. The line of the Panama canal presents, as Humboldt remarks, facilities equal to those of the line of the Caledonian canal. The Nicaragua line is not more difficult than that of the canal of Languedoc, a work executed between 1660 and 1682, at a time when the commerce to be expedited by it did not exceed—it is equaled—that which will find its way across the Isthmus; when great part of the maritime country was as thinly inhabited by as poor a population as the Isthmus now is; and when the last subsiding storms of civil war, and the dragonnades of Louis XIV., unsettled men's minds, and made person and property insecure.