RAILROAD BRIDGE OVER THE CHAGRES AT GAMBOA
River is at low water. For picture showing it at flood, see [page 141]
Manuel indeed was the son of the alcalde of his village, and the alcalde is a person of much power and of grandeur proportionate to the number of thatched huts in his domain. The son bore himself as one of high lineage and his face indeed, Caucasian in all save color, showed that Spanish blood predominated over the universal admixture of negro. He saved his money, spending less than $10 a month and investing the rest in horses.
A QUIET BEACH ON THE CHAGRES
From Matachin up to Cruces the river is comparatively commonplace, spanned at one point by the Gamboa bridge up at which the voyager looks reflectively from below as he hears that when the spillway is closed and the lake filled up there will be but 15 feet headway above the river’s crest, where at the moment there is more than 60. Higher up are the towers, housing the machinery for recording the river’s rise, one of them a relic of the French régime, while a slender wire spanning the stream carries the pendulous car in which observers will go out at flood time to measure the height of the tide’s crest and the speed of the current. A stream of many moods is the Chagres, sometimes rising 40 feet in 24 hours. Accordingly along its banks and those of its principal tributaries are fluviographic stations whence watchers may telephone to the keepers of the flood gates of the dam warnings of the coming of any sudden freshet.
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT
THE RIVER AND VILLAGE OF CHAGRES
The little hamlet of rude thatched huts with a frame Catholic church in the middle has seen history in its time. The Spanish fortress of San Lorenzo on the hill was taken by Sir Henry Morgan’s buccaneers and later by the British under Admiral Vernon after hard fighting.
In the matter of conserving the waters of the Chagres, estimating the total capacity of the watershed and in providing for swift forwarding of information concerning sudden rises we shall always be under great obligations to the French. Their hydrographic observations and records are invaluable, and their stations established before we assumed control are still used, with much of their machinery. Stations are maintained far up the valleys of the Chagres and tributary rivulets, and all are connected with the central control at Gatun dam by telephone. Some of the stations are equipped with automatic machinery which, in the event of a rise during the night summons the keeper by ringing an alarm bell. The life of the keeper of a fluviograph station, miles perhaps of jungle isolating him from the nearest human habitation, is lonesome enough. Yet its monotony is sometimes relieved by lively incident. The irascible Chagres, for example, once caught the keeper at Alhajuela with a sudden rise, and compelled him to camp out a night and day in a tree top and see his house, pigs and poultry swept away on the rushing tide. There was a fair chance that the tree would follow.
