CHAPTER XIII PANAMA CANAL-GENERAL GOETHALS C HRISTOPHER COLUMBUS started with the Cross of Christ for India, by a new route, and headed straight from Spain toward India. He did not know that a hemisphere was between him and the Far East, and in his voyage westward struck the island of San Salvador and revealed a new world. Had it not been that God had hung two continents by a narrow strip of land he could have gone straight through the Atlantic into the Pacific and to India. Ever since that time men have tried to cut a canal across that strip at the Isthmus of Panama, making the Atlantic and the Pacific one. Four hundred years ago Spain felt that there ought to be such a passageway opened that she might have access to the gold and the rich agricultural products of Peru, and her kings and engineers undertook to set in motion such plans, but they found that the difficulties were so insurmountable that the proposition was abandoned. The United States, feeling the importance of such a trans-Isthmian route in the promotion of its commercial and military interests, turned its attention to the building of such a canal. About seventy years ago a treaty was signed by our government with New Granada, afterward Colombia, as a preliminary step to the great undertaking. In 1850 the Clayton-Bulwer treaty between United States and Great Britain was signed. In 1866 the first canal commission was appointed by the United States government. Ten years later the committee reported in favor of the Nicaraguan Canal. Five years after this Ferdinand de Lesseps, having earned world-fame as the promoter of the Suez Canal, organized a French company to build a sea-level canal at the Isthmus of Panama. After eight years, the expenditure of three hundred million dollars, and the sacrifice of many precious lives the project was given up as a failure. There was bad engineering and business recklessness, if not dishonesty, in the administration, and the dream of four centuries went up in smoke. The SpanishAmerican War called fresh attention to the necessity of America's building and owning a canal at the Isthmus of Panama. In 1901 the Hay-Pauncefoote treaty between the United States and Great Britain revoked the Clayton-Bulwer treaty and gave our government full sovereignty rights on any canal across the isthmus. In the same year a new Panama committee was created, which made a report favoring the Nicaraguan route, and in 1902 Congress passed a bill authorizing the purchase of the old French rights of the canal for forty million dollars and recommending the construction of the canal at Panama. Theodore Roosevelt had just gotten settled in the saddle as President of the United States when things began to move with reference to this gigantic enterprise. The Panama Canal, requiring the greatest piece of engineering since the world began, appealed to him-it was his size. The failures of the centuries meant nothing to an intellect like his, and a will that knew no obstacles. He determined it should be built, and he built it. Obstacles as great as those that made the dream of the centuries a failure confronted him, but one after another he met and conquered them, and the canal stands perhaps as his greatest monument, if not the greatest monument to any character in the world. The early canal commissions being led by civilians was so tied up with governmental red tape that they made unsatisfactory progress. President Roosevelt picked out a West Point graduate, a professional engineer, secured authority from Congress to give him a free hand in the Canal Zone, which it had acquired, and Lieut.-Col. George W. Goethals, magnificently equipped for his work in every way, stood as a mighty giant by the side of Roosevelt and was his strong right arm in cutting through the Panama Canal. The canal extends from deep water at Colon on the Atlantic to deep water at Panama on the Pacific, a distance of fifty miles, or forty miles from shore to shore. It has great lakes and locks, and it is a practical business proposition with ships, even the largest of them going both ways from ocean to ocean. In time of war our ownership of it is of unspeakable advantage. One of the most mighty triumphs of the Panama administration was the sanitary revolution affected in the Canal Zone. The mosquitoes were killed, yellow and other deadly fevers that formerly made success impossible were banished, and one of the worst plague. spots on the earth was made as healthy as the average American city. This work was done under the direction of Colonel Gorgas of the medical corps of the United States army. These two magnificent giants stand side by side in |