OVERWHELMED BY THE JUNGLE
A LOTTERY TICKET SELLER
In my description of the canal work the fundamental differences between the respective advantages of the sea-level and the lock type of canal will continually reappear. At this moment it is enough to say that the obstacles to the sea-level plan are to be found in Culebra Hill and the Chagres River. In the lock type of canal the cut at Culebra is 495 feet below the crest of Gold Hill and 364 feet below the crest of Contractor’s Hill opposite. The top width of this cut is over half a mile. To carry the canal to sea-level would mean a further cut of eighty-five feet with vastly enhanced liability of slides. As for the Chagres River, that tricky stream crosses the line of the old French canal twenty-three times. As the river is sometimes three or four feet deep one day and nearly fifty feet deep at the same point the next—a turbid, turbulent, roaring torrent, carrying trees, huts and boulders along with it—the canal could obviously not exist with the Chagres in its path. The French device was to dam the stream some miles above the point at which the canal first crossed it and lead it away through an artificial channel into the Pacific instead of into the Atlantic, where it now empties. This task the American engineers have avoided by damming the Chagres at Gatun, and making a great lake eighty-five feet above the level of the sea through which the canal extends and which covers and obliterates the twenty-three river crossings which embarrassed the engineers of the sea-level canal.
It is fair to say, however, that today (1913), with the lock canal approaching completion, there is a very large and intelligent body of Americans who still hold that the abandonment of the sea-level plan was an error. And it is a curious fact that while De Lesseps was accused of “packing” his congress so as to vote down the report for a lock canal which a majority of the engineers voting favored, Roosevelt, after a majority of his “International Board of Consulting Engineers” had voted for a sea-level canal, set aside their recommendation and ordered the lock type instead.
MACHINERY SEEMINGLY AS HOPELESS AS THIS WAS RECOVERED AND SET TO WORK
Immediately after the adjournment of the International Congress at Paris the stock of the canal company, $60,000,000 as a first issue, was offered to the investing public. It was largely over-subscribed. The French are at once a thrifty and an emotional people. Their thrift gives them instant command of such sums of ready cash as astound financiers of other nations. Their emotionalism leads them to support any great national enterprise that promises glory for La Patrie, has in it a touch of romance and withal seems economically safe. The canal enterprise at the outset met all these conditions, and the commanding figure of De Lesseps at its head, the man who had made Africa an island and who dogmatically declared, “the Panama Canal will be more easily begun, finished and maintained than the Suez Canal,” lured the francs from their hiding places in woolen stockings or under loose hearth stones.
THE POWER OF THE JUNGLE
Note how the tree has grown around and into this steel dump car at San Pablo