Under this classification will be described the construction work on the canal, work which at the time of the author’s visit was clear to view, impressive in its magnitude, appalling in the multiplicity of its details, and picturesque in method and accomplishment. With the turning of the water into the channel all this will be hidden as the works of a watch disappear when the case is snapped shut. The canal, they say, and rightly, will be Goethals’ monument—though there are those who think it a monument to Col. Gorgas, while quite a few hold that the fame of Theodore Roosevelt might be further exalted by this work. But whomsoever it may commemorate as a monument it was even more impressive in the building than in the completed form.
Photo by S. H. Elliott
BAS OBISPO END OF CULEBRA CUT
One Sunday late in my stay on the Isthmus I was going over the line from Ancon to Culebra. As we approached the little tunnel near Miraflores I noticed an unusual stir for the day, for on the Canal Zone the day of rest is almost religiously observed. Men were swarming along the line, moving tracks, driving spikes, ramming ballast. I asked one in authority what it all meant. “Oh”, said he, “we’re going to begin running dirt trains through the tunnel, and that necessitates double tracking some of the line. The Colonel said it must be done by tomorrow and we’ve got more than 1000 men on the job this quiet Sunday. The Colonel’s orders you know”.
Yes, I knew, and everybody on the Canal Zone knows.
CHAPTER X
GATUN DAM AND LOCKS
Entering the Panama Canal from the Atlantic, one finds the beginning of that section called by the engineers the Atlantic Division, four miles out at sea in Limon Bay, a shallow arm of the Caribbean on the shore of which are Colon and the American town of Cristobal. From its beginning, marked only by the outermost of a double line of buoys, the canal extends almost due south seven miles to the lowest of the Gatun Locks. Of this distance four miles is a channel dredged out of the bottom of Limon Bay and the bottom width of the canal from its beginning to the locks is 500 feet. Its depth on this division will be 41 feet at mean tide. For the protection of vessels entering the canal at the Atlantic end, or lying in Colon harbor, a great breakwater 10,500 feet, or a few feet less than two miles long, made of huge masses of rock blasted along the line of the Canal, or especially quarried at Porto Bello, extends from Toro Point to Colon light. In all it will contain 2,840,000 cubic yards of rock and its estimated cost is $5,500,000.