The Panama Canal
by Frederic J. Haskin · English · Gutenberg #41807 · 600,763 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Panama Canal
Author: Frederic J. Haskin
Release date: January 9, 2013 [eBook #41807]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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THE PANAMA CANAL
* * * * *
[Illustration: The 5 Points of Authority]
The 5 Points of Authority in this Book
1. All of the chapters in this book pertaining to the actual
construction of the Canal were read and corrected by Colonel
George W. Goethals, Chairman and Chief Engineer of the Isthmian
Canal Commission.
2. All of the illustrations were made from photographs taken by
Mr. Ernest Hallen, the official photographer of the Commission.
3. The book contains the beautiful, colored Bird's-eye View of
the Canal Zone, made under the direction of the National
Geographic Society, as well as the black-and-white official map
of the Canal.
4. The extensive index was prepared by Mr. G. Thomas Ritchie, of
the staff of the Library of Congress.
5. The final proofs were revised by Mr. Howard E. Sherman, of the
Government Printing Office, to conform with the typographical
style of the United States Government.
"The American Government,"
by the same author, was read by millions of Americans, and still holds
the record as the world's best seller among all works of its kind.
* * * * *
[Illustration: ATLANTIC OCEAN PACIFIC OCEAN
Courtesy, National Geographic Magazine, Washington, D. C.
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE PANAMA CANAL
Copyright, 1913, by the J. N. Matthews Co., Buffalo, N. Y.]
THE PANAMA CANAL
by
FREDERIC J. HASKIN
Author of "The American Government," etc.
[Illustration: logo]
Illustrated from photographs taken by
ERNEST ALLEN
Official Photographer of the Isthmian Canal Commission
Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1913
Copyright, 1913, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Co.
New York
PREFACE
The primary purpose of this book is to tell the layman the story of
the Panama Canal. It is written, therefore, in the simplest manner
possible, considering the technical character of the great engineering
feat itself, and the involved complexities of the diplomatic history
attaching to its inception and undertaking. The temptation to turn
aside into the pleasant paths of the romantic history of ancient
Panama has been resisted; there is no attempt to dispose of political
problems that incidentally concern the canal; in short, the book is
confined to the story of the canal itself, and the things that are
directly and vitally connected with it.
Colonel Goethals was good enough to read and correct the chapters
relating to the construction of the canal, and, when shown a list of
the chapters proposed, he asked that the one headed "The Man at the
Helm" be omitted. The author felt that to bow to his wishes in that
matter would be to fail to tell the whole story of the canal, and so
Colonel Goethals did not read that chapter.
Every American is proud of the great national achievement at Panama.
If, in the case of the individual, this book is able to supplement
that pride by an ample fund of knowledge and information, its object
and purpose will have been attained.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The grateful acknowledgments of the author are due to Mr. William
Joseph Showalter for his valuable aid in gathering and preparing the
material for this book. Acknowledgments are also due to Colonel George
W. Goethals, chairman and chief engineer of the Isthmian Canal
Commission, for reading and correcting those chapters in the book
pertaining to the engineering phases of the work; to Mr. Ernest
Hallen, the official photographer of the Commission, for the
photographs with which the book is illustrated; to Mr. Gilbert H.
Grosvenor, editor of the _National Geographic Magazine_, for
permission to use the bird's-eye view map of the canal; to Mr. G.
Thomas Ritchie, of the Library of Congress, for assistance in
preparing the index; and to Mr. Howard E. Sherman, of the Government
Printing Office, for revising the proofs to conform with the
typographical style of the United States Government.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Land Divided--The World United 3
II. Greatest Engineering Project 23
III. Gatun Dam 32
IV. The Locks 45
V. The Lock Machinery 57
VI. Culebra Cut 70
VII. Ends of the Canal 82
VIII. The Panama Railroad 93
IX. Sanitation 105
X. The Man at the Helm 118
XI. The Organization 133
XII. The American Workers 145
XIII. The Negro Workers 154
XIV. The Commissary 164
XV. Life on the Zone 176
XVI. Past Isthmian Projects 194
XVII. The French Failure 206
XVIII. Choosing the Panama Route 221
XIX. Controversy with Colombia 233
XX. Relations with Panama 246
XXI. Canal Zone Government 256
XXII. Congress and the Canal 268
XXIII. Sea Level Canal Impossible 277
XXIV. Fortifications 283
XXV. Fixing the Tolls 295
XXVI. The Operating Force 309
XXVII. Handling the Traffic 317
XXVIII. The Republic of Panama 326
XXIX. Other Great Canals 335
XXX. A New Commercial Map 347
XXXI. American Trade Opportunities 358
XXXII. The Panama-Pacific Exposition 368
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Birdseye View of the Panama Canal Zone _Color insert_
FACING PAGE
George W. Goethals, Chairman and Chief Engineer 10
A Street in the City of Panama 11
Theodore Roosevelt 18
William Howard Taft 18
Woodrow Wilson 18
Vendors in the Streets of Panama 19
A Native Boy Marketing 19
Lieut. Col. W. L. Sibert 43
The Upper Locks at Gatun 43
Toro Point Breakwater 43
Concrete Mixers, Gatun 50
A Center Wall Culvert, Gatun Locks 50
The Machinery for Moving a Lock Gate 51
Steam Shovels Meeting at Bottom of Culebra Cut 74
L. K. Rourke 74
The Man-made Canyon at Culebra 75
The Disastrous Effects of Slides in Culebra Cut 82
U. S. Ladder Dredge "Corozal" 83
A Mud Bucket of the "Corozal" 83
W. G. Comber 83
Col. William C. Gorgas 106
The Hospital Grounds, Ancon 106
Lieut. Frederic Mears 107
The Old Panama Railroad 107
Sanitary Drinking Cup 114
Mosquito Oil Drip Barrel 114
Spraying Mosquito Oil 114
Typical Quarters of the Married Laborer 115
A Native Hut 115
Maj. Gen. George W. Davis 138
Rear Admiral J. G. Walker 138
Theodore P. Shonts 138
John F. Wallace 138
John F. Stevens 138
Charles E. Magoon 138
Richard Lee Metcalfe 139
Emory R. Johnson 139
Maurice H. Thatcher 139
Joseph Bucklin Bishop 139
H. A. Gudger 139
Joseph C. S. Blackburn 139
Brig. Gen. Carroll A. Devol 146
American Living Quarters at Cristobal 146
Harry H. Rousseau 147
Lowering a Caisson Section 147
John Burke 170
Meal Time at an I. C. C. Kitchen 170
Washington Hotel, Colon 171
Major Eugene T. Wilson 171
The Tivoli Hotel, Ancon 171
Floyd C. Freeman 178
I. C. C. Club House at Culebra 178
A. Bruce Minear 179
Reading Room in the I. C. C. Club House, Culebra 179
Col. Chester L. Harding 202
The Gatun Upper Locks 202
Lieut. Col. David D. Gaillard 203
Culebra Cut, Showing Cucaracha Slide in Left Center 203
The Man of Brawn 210
Ferdinand de Lesseps 211
An Old French Excavator Near Tabernilla 211
Philippe Bunau-Varilla 211
S. B. Williamson 234
The Lower Gates, Miraflores Locks 234
Middle Gates, Miraflores Locks 235
H. O. Cole 235
The Pay Car at Culebra 242
Edward J. Williams 242
Uncle Sam's Laundry at Cristobal 243
Smoke from Heated Rocks in Culebra Cut 266
Tom M. Cooke 267
The Post Office, Ancon 267
A Negro Girl 274
A Martinique Woman 274
San Blas Chief 274
An Indian Girl 274
An Italian 274
A Timekeeper 274
A Spaniard 274
A Negro Boy 274
Testing the Emergency Dam, Gatun Locks 275
Col. Harry F. Hodges 275
The Ancon Baseball Park 298
Caleb M. Saville 399
Gatun Spillway from Above and Below 299
An Electric Towing Locomotive in Action 306
Blowing Up the Second Dike South of Miraflores Locks 307
DIAGRAMS
A Graphic Illustration of the Material Handled at Panama 25
A Cross Section of the Gatun Dam 35
Plan of the Gatun Dam and Locks 36
A Profile Section of the Canal 40
From a Model of Pedro Miguel Lock 48
A Cross-section of Locks, Giving an Idea of Their Size 49
One of the 92 Gate-leaf Master Wheels 64
A _Mauretania_ in the Locks 67
The Effect of Slides 72
Average Shape and Dimensions of Culebra Cut 75
The _Corozal_ and its Method of Attack 85
International Shipping Routes 351
A Map Showing Isthmus with the Completed Canal 379
The Panama Canal
"_I have read the chapters in 'The Panama Canal' dealing with the
engineering features of the Canal and have found them an accurate and
dependable account of the undertaking._"
GEO. W. GOETHALS.
THE PANAMA CANAL
CHAPTER I
THE LAND DIVIDED--THE WORLD UNITED
The Panama Canal is a waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans, cut through the narrow neck of land connecting the continents
of North and South America. It is the solution of the problem of
international commerce that became acute in 1452 when the Eastern
Roman Empire fell before the assaults of the Turks, and the land
routes to India were closed to Western and Christian Europe.
Forty years after the Crescent supplanted the Cross on the dome of St.
Sophia in Constantinople, Columbus set sail to seek a western route to
the Indies. He did not find it, but it was his fortune to set foot on
the Isthmus of Panama, where, more than four centuries later, the goal
of his ambition was to be achieved; not by discovery, but by virtue of
the strength and wealth of a new nation of which he did not dream,
although its existence is due to his own intrepid courage.
Columbus died not knowing that he had multiplied the world by two, and
many voyagers after him also vainly sought the longed-for western
passage. Magellan sought it thousands of leagues to the southward in
the cold and stormy seas that encircle the Antarctic Continent. Scores
of mariners sought it to the northward, but only one, Amundsen, in the
twentieth century, was able to take a ship through the frozen passages
of the American north seas.
Down the western coast of the new continent from the eternal ice of
Alaska through the Tropics to the southern snows of Tierra del Fuego,
the mighty Cordilleras stretch a mountain barrier thousands and
thousands and thousands of miles.
Where that mountain chain is narrowest, and where its peaks are
lowest, ships may now go through the Panama Canal. The canal is cut
through the narrowest part of the Isthmus but one, and through the
Culebra Mountain, the lowest pass but one, in all that longest,
mightiest range of mountains. There is a lower place in Nicaragua, and
a narrower place on the Isthmus east of the canal, but the engineers
agreed that the route from Colon on the Atlantic to Panama on the
Pacific through Culebra Mountain was the most practicable.
The canal is 50 miles long. Fifteen miles of it is level with the
oceans, the rest is higher. Ships are lifted up in giant locks, three
steps, to sail for more than 30 miles across the continental divide,
85 feet above the surface of the ocean, then let down by three other
locks to sea level again. The channel is 300 feet wide at its
narrowest place, and the locks which form the two gigantic water
stairways are capable of lifting and lowering the largest ships now
afloat. A great part of the higher level of the canal is the largest
artificial lake in the world, made by impounding the waters of the
Chagres River, thus filling with water the lower levels of the
section. Another part of the higher level is Culebra Cut, the channel
cut through the backbone of the continent.
Almost before Columbus died plans were made for cutting such a
channel. With the beginning of the nineteenth century and the
introduction of steam navigation, the demand for the canal began to be
insistent.
Many plans were made, but it remained for the French, on New Year's
Day of 1880, actually to begin the work. They failed, but not before
they had accomplished much toward the reduction of Culebra Cut. They
expended between 1880 and 1904 no less than $300,000,000 in their
ill-fated efforts.
In 1904 the United States of America undertook the task. In a decade
it was completed and the Americans had spent, all told, $375,000,000
in the project.
Because the Atlantic lies east and the Pacific west of the United
States, one is likely to imagine the canal as a huge ditch cut
straight across a neck of land from east to west. But it must be
remembered that South America lies eastward from North America, and
that the Isthmus connecting the two has its axis east and west. The
canal, therefore, is cut from the Atlantic south-eastward to the
Pacific. It lies directly south of Pittsburgh, Pa., and it brings Peru
and Chile closer to New York than California and Oregon. The first 7
miles of the canal, beginning at the Atlantic end, run directly south
and from thence to the Pacific it pursues a serpentine course in a
southeasterly direction.
At the northern, or Atlantic, terminus are the twin cities of Colon
and Cristobal, Colon dating from the middle of the nineteenth century
when the railroad was built across the Isthmus, and Cristobal having
its beginnings with the French attempt in 1880. At the southern, or
Pacific, terminus are the twin cities of Panama and Balboa. Panama was
founded in 1673 after the destruction by Morgan, the buccaneer, of an
elder city established in 1519. The ruins of the old city stand 5
miles east of the new, and, since their story is one, it may be said
that Panama is the oldest city of the Western World. Balboa is yet in
its swaddling clothes, for it is the new American town destined to be
the capital of the American territory encompassing the canal.
The waterway is cut through a strip of territory called the Canal
Zone, which to all intents and purposes is a territory of the United
States. This zone is 10 miles wide and follows the irregular line of
the canal, extending 5 miles on either side from the axis of the
channel. This Canal Zone traverses and separates the territory of the
Republic of Panama, which includes the whole of the Isthmus, and has
an area about equal to that of Indiana and a population of 350,000 or
about that of Washington City. The two chief Panaman cities, Panama
and Colon, lie within the limits of the Canal Zone, but, by the
treaty, they are excepted from its government and are an integral part
of the Republic of Panama, of which the city of Panama is the
capital. Cristobal and Balboa, although immediately contiguous to
Colon and Panama, are American towns under the American flag.
The Canal Zone historically and commercially has a record of interest
and importance longer and more continuous than any other part of the
New World. Columbus himself founded a settlement here at Nombre de
Dios; Balboa here discovered the Pacific Ocean; across this narrow
neck was transported the spoil of the devastated Empire of the Incas;
here were the ports of call for the Spanish gold-carrying galleons;
and here centered the activities of the pirates and buccaneers that
were wont to prey on the commerce of the Spanish Main.
Over this route, on the shoulders of slaves and the back of mules,
were transported the wares in trade of Spain with its colonies not
only on the west coasts of the Americas, but with the Philippines.
Not far from Colon was the site of the colony of New Caledonia, the
disastrous undertaking of the Scotchman, Patterson, who founded the
Bank of England, to duplicate in America the enormous financial
success of the East India Company in Asia.
Here in the ancient city of Panama in the early part of the nineteenth
century assembled the first Pan American conference that gave life to
the Monroe doctrine and ended the era of European colonization in
America.
Here was built with infinite labor and terrific toll of life the first
railroad connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans--a railroad
less than 50 miles in length, but with perhaps the most interesting
story in the annals of railroading.
Across this barrier in '49 clambered the American argonauts, seeking
the newly discovered golden fleeces of California.
This was the theater of the failure of Count de Lesseps, the most
stupendous financial fiasco in the history of the world.
And this, now, is the site of the most expensive and most successful
engineering project ever undertaken by human beings.
It cost the French $300,000,000 to fail at Panama where the Americans,
at the expenditure of $375,000,000, succeeded. And, of the excavation
done by the French, only $30,000,000 worth was available for the
purpose of the Americans. That the Americans succeeded where the
French had failed is not to be assigned to the superiority of the
American over the French nation. The reasons are to be sought, rather,
in the underlying purposes of the two undertakings, and in the
scientific and engineering progress made in the double decade
intervening between the time when the French failure became apparent
and the Americans began their work.
In the first place, the French undertook to build the canal as a
money-making proposition. People in every grade of social and
industrial life in France contributed from their surpluses and from
their hard-earned savings money to buy shares in the canal company in
the hope that it would yield a fabulously rich return. Estimates of
the costs of the undertaking, made by the engineers, were arbitrarily
cut down by financiers, with the result that repeated calls were made
for more money and the shareholders soon found to their dismay that
they must contribute more and yet more before they could hope for any
return whatever. From the beginning to the end, the French Canal
Company was concerned more with problems of promotion and finance than
with engineering and excavation. As a natural result of this spirit at
the head of the undertaking the whole course of the project was marred
by an orgy of graft and corruption such as never had been known. Every
bit of work was let out by contract, and the contractors uniformly
paid corrupt tribute to high officers in the company. No watch was set
on expenditures; everything bought for the canal was bought at prices
too high; everything it had to sell was practically given away.
In the next place, the French were pitiably at the mercy of the
diseases of the Tropics. The science of preventive medicine had not
been sufficiently developed to enable the French to know that
mosquitoes and filth were enemies that must be conquered and
controlled before it would be possible successfully to attack the land
barrier. Yellow fever and malaria killed engineers and common laborers
alike. The very hospitals, which the French provided for the care of
the sick, were turned into centers of infection for yellow fever,
because the beds were set in pans of water which served as ideal
breeding places for the death-bearing stegomyia.
In this atmosphere of lavish extravagance caused by the financial
corruption, and in the continual fear of quick and awful death, the
morals of the French force were broken; there was no determined spirit
of conquest; interest centered in champagne and women; the canal was
neglected.
Yet, in spite of this waste, this corruption of money and morals, much
of the work done by the French was of permanent value to the
Americans; and without the lessons learned from their bitter
experience it would have been impossible for the Americans or any
other people to have completed the canal so quickly and so cheaply.
The Americans brought to the task another spirit. The canal was to be
constructed not in the hope of making money, but, rather, as a great
national and popular undertaking, designed to bring the two coasts of
the great Republic in closer communication for purposes of commerce
and defense.
The early estimates made by the American engineers were far too low,
but the French experience had taught the United States to expect such
an outcome. Indeed, it is doubtful if anybody believed that the first
estimates would not be doubled or quadrupled before the canal was
finished.
[Illustration: Signature of George Goethals
_Chairman and Chief Engineer_]
[Illustration: A STREET IN THE CITY OF PANAMA]
The journey of the U. S. S. _Oregon_ around the Horn from Pacific
waters to the theater of the War with Spain in the Caribbean, in 1898,
impressed upon the American public the necessity of building the canal
as a measure of national defense. Commercial interests long had been
convinced of its necessity as a factor in both national and
international trade, and, when it was realized that the _Oregon_ would
have saved 8,000 miles if there had been a canal at Panama, the
American mind was made up. It determined that the canal should be
built, whatever the cost.
From the very first there was never any question that the necessary
money would be forthcoming. It is a fact unprecedented in all
parliamentary history that all of the appropriations necessary for the
construction and completion of the Isthmian waterway were made by
Congress without a word of serious protest.
During the same War with Spain that convinced the United States that
the canal must be built, a long forward step was taken in the science
of medicine as concerned with the prevention and control of tropical
diseases. The theory that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes
had been proved by a Cuban physician, Dr. Carlos Finley, a score of
years earlier. An Englishman, Sir Patrick Manson, had first shown that
disease might be transmitted by the bites of insects, and another
Englishman, Maj. Roland Ross, had shown that malaria was conveyed by
mosquitoes. It remained, however, for American army surgeons to
demonstrate, as they did in Cuba, that yellow fever was transmissible
only by mosquitoes of the stegomyia variety and by no other means
whatsoever.
With this knowledge in their possession the Americans were able to do
what the French were not--to control the chief enemy of mankind in
torrid climes. In the first years of the work the public, and
Congress, reflecting its views, were not sufficiently convinced of the
efficacy of the new scientific discoveries to afford the means for
putting them into effect. The Isthmian Canal Commission refused to
honor requisitions for wire screens, believing that they were demanded
to add to the comfort and luxury of quarters on the Zone, rather than
for protection against disease. But the outbreak of yellow fever in
1905 was the occasion for furnishing the Sanitary Department, under
Col. W. C. Gorgas, with the necessary funds, and thus provided, he
speedily and completely stamped out the epidemic. From that time on,
no one questioned the part that sanitation played in the success of
the project. The cities of Panama and Colon were cleaned up as never
were tropical cities cleaned before. All the time, every day, men
fought mosquitoes that the workers in the ditch might not be struck
down at their labors.
The Americans, too, made mistakes. In the beginning they attempted to
build the canal under the direction of a commission with headquarters
in Washington. This commission, at long distance and by methods
hopelessly involved in red tape, sought to direct the activities of
the engineer in charge on the Isthmus. The public also was impatient
with the long time required for preparation and insistently demanded
that "the dirt begin to fly."
The work was begun in 1904. It proceeded so slowly that two years
later the chairman of the Isthmian Canal Commission asserted that it
must be let out to a private contractor, this being, in his opinion,
the only way possible to escape the toils of governmental red tape.
The then chief engineer, the second man who had held that position
while fretting under these methods, was opposed to the contract
system. Bids were asked for, however, but all of them were rejected.
Fortunately, Congress from the beginning had left the President a
practically free hand in directing the course of the project. Mr.
Roosevelt reorganized the commission, made Col. George W. Goethals, an
Army engineer, chairman of the commission and chief engineer of the
canal. The constitution of the commission was so changed as to leave
all the power in the hands of the chairman and to lay all of the
responsibility upon his shoulders.
It was a master stroke of policy, and the event proved the choice of
the man to be admirable in every way. From the day the Army engineers
took charge there was never any more delay, never any halt in
progress, and the only difficulties encountered were those of
resistant Nature (such as the slides in Culebra Cut) and those of
misinformed public opinion (such as the absurd criticism of the Gatun
Dam).
The Americans, too, in the early stages of the work were hampered by
reason of the fact that the final decision as to whether to build a
sea-level canal or a lock canal was so long delayed by the conflicting
views of the partisans of each type in Congress, in the executive
branches of the Government, and among the engineers. This problem,
too, was solved by Mr. Roosevelt. He boldly set aside the opinion of
the majority of the engineers who had been called in consultation on
the problem, and directed the construction of a lock canal. The wisdom
of this decision has been so overwhelmingly demonstrated that the
controversy that once raged so furiously now seems to have been but a
tiny tempest in an insignificant teapot.
One other feature of the course of events under the American régime at
Panama must be considered. Graft and corruption had ruined the French;
the Americans were determined that whether they succeeded or not,
there should be no scandal. This, indeed, in part explains why there
was so much apparently useless circumlocution in the early stages of
the project. Congress, the President, the engineers, all who were in
responsible position, were determined that there should be no graft.
There was none.
Not only were the Americans determined that the money voted for the
canal should be honestly and economically expended, but they were
determined, also, that the workers on the canal should be well paid
and well cared for. To this end they paid not only higher wages than
were current at home for the same work, but they effectively shielded
the workers from the exactions and extortions of Latin and Oriental
merchants by establishing a commissary through which the employees
were furnished wholesome food at reasonable prices--prices lower,
indeed, than those prevailing at home.
As a result of these things the spirit of the Americans on the Canal
Zone, from the chairman and chief engineer down to the actual diggers,
was that of a determination to lay the barrier low, and to complete
the job well within the limit of time and at the lowest possible cost.
In this spirit all Americans should rejoice, for it is the highest
expression of the nearest approach we have made to the ideals upon
which the Fathers founded our Republic.
It is impossible to leave out of the reckoning, in telling the story
of the canal, the checkered history of the diplomatic engagements on
the part of the United States, that have served both to help and to
hinder the undertaking. What is now the Republic of Panama has been,
for the greater part of the time since continental Latin America threw
off the yoke of Spain, a part of that Republic having its capital at
Bogota, now under the name of Colombia, sometimes under the name of
New Granada, sometimes a part of a federation including Venezuela and
Ecuador. The United States, by virtue of the Monroe doctrine, always
asserted a vague and undefined interest in the local affairs of the
Isthmus. This was translated into a concrete interest when, in 1846, a
treaty was made, covering the construction of the railroad across the
Isthmus, the United States engaging always to keep the transit free
and open. Great Britain, by virtue of small territorial holdings in
Central America and of larger claims there, also had a concrete
interest, which was acknowledged by the United States, in the
Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850, under which a projected canal should be
neutral under the guarantee of the Governments of the United States
and Great Britain.
For years the United States was inclined to favor a canal cut through
Nicaragua, rather than one at Panama, and, after 1898, when the
American nation had made up its mind to build a canal somewhere, the
partisans of the Panama and Nicaragua routes waged a bitter
controversy.
Congress finally decided the issue by giving the President authority
to construct a canal at Panama, with the proviso that should he be
unable to negotiate a satisfactory treaty with Colombia, which then
owned the Isthmus, he should proceed to construct the canal through
Nicaragua. Under this threat of having the scepter of commercial power
depart forever from Panama, Colombia negotiated a treaty, known as the
Hay-Herran treaty, giving the United States the right to construct the
canal. This treaty, however, failed of ratification by the Colombian
Congress, with the connivance of the very Colombian President who had
negotiated it.
But President Roosevelt was most unwilling to accept the alternative
given him by Congress--that of undertaking the canal at Nicaragua--and
this unwillingness, to say the least, encouraged a revolution in
Panama. This revolution separated the Isthmus from the Republic of
Colombia, and set up the new Republic of Panama. As a matter of fact,
Panama had had but the slenderest relations with the Bogota
Government, had been for years in the past an independent State, had
never ceased to assert its own sovereignty, and had been, indeed, the
theater of innumerable revolutions.
The part the United States played in encouraging this revolution, the
fact that the United States authorities prevented the transit of
Colombian troops over the Panama Railway, and that American marines
were landed at the time, has led to no end of hostile criticism, not
to speak of the still pending and unsettled claims made by Colombia
against the United States. Mr. Roosevelt himself, years after the
event and in a moment of frankness, declared: "I took Panama, and left
Congress to debate it later."
Whatever may be the final outcome of our controversy with Colombia, it
may be confidently predicted that history will justify the coup d'état
on the theory that Panama was the best possible site for the
interoceanic canal, and that the rupture of relations between the
territory of the Isthmus and the Colombian Republic was the best
possible solution of a confused and tangled problem.
These diplomatic entanglements, however, as the canal is completed,
leave two international disputes unsettled--the one with Colombia
about the genesis of the canal undertaking, and the other with Great
Britain about the terms of its operation.
Congress, in its wisdom, saw fit to exempt American vessels engaged
exclusively in coastwise trade--that is to say, in trade solely
between ports of the United States--from payment of tolls in transit
through the canal. This exemption was protested by Great Britain on
the ground that the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, which took the place of the
Clayton-Bulwer treaty, provided that the canal should be open to all
nations on exact and equal terms. The future holds the termination of
both these disputes.
Congress, that never begrudged an appropriation, indulged in many
disputes concerning the building and operation of the canal. First,
there was the controversy as to site, between Nicaragua and Panama.
Next, came the question as to whether the canal should be at sea level
or of a lock type. Then there was the question of tolls, and the
exemption of American coastwise traffic. But, perhaps the most
acrimonious debates were on the question as to whether or not the
canal should be fortified. Those who favored fortification won their
victory, and the canal was made, from a military standpoint, a very
Gibraltar for the American defense of, and control over, the
Caribbean. That this was inevitable was assured by two facts: One that
the trip of the _Oregon_ in 1898 crystallized public sentiment in
favor of constructing the canal; and the other that the canal itself
was wrought by Army engineers under the direction of Colonel Goethals.
Colonel Goethals never for a moment considered the possibility that
Congress would vote against fortifications, and the whole undertaking
was carried forward on that basis.
If the military idea, the notion of its necessity as a feature of the
national defense, was the determining factor in initiating the canal
project, it remains a fact that its chief use will be commercial, and
that its money return, whether small or large, nearly all will be
derived from tolls assessed upon merchant vessels passing through it.
[Illustration: THE THREE PRESIDENTS UNDER WHOSE DIRECTION THE CANAL
WAS BUILT]
[Illustration: VENDERS IN THE STREETS OF PANAMA]
[Illustration: A NATIVE BOY MARKETING]
The question of the probable traffic the canal will be called upon to
handle was studied as perhaps no other world-wide problem of
transportation ever was. Prof. Emory R. Johnson was the student of
this phase of the question from the beginning to the end. He
estimates that the canal in the first few years of its operation will
have a traffic of 10,000,000 tons of shipping each year, and that by
1975 this will have increased to 80,000,000 tons, the full capacity of
the canal in its present form. Provision has been made against this
contingency by the engineers who have so constructed the canal that a
third set of locks at each end may be constructed at a cost of about
$25,000,000, and these will be sufficient almost to double the present
ultimate capacity, and to take care of a larger volume of traffic than
now can be foreseen.
Americans are interested, first of all, in what the canal will do for
their own domestic trade. It brings Seattle 7,800 miles nearer to New
York; San Francisco, 8,800 miles nearer to New Orleans; Honolulu 6,600
miles nearer to New York than by the Strait of Magellan. Such saving
in distance for water-borne freight works a great economy, and
inevitably must have a tremendous effect upon transcontinental
American commerce.
In foreign commerce, also, some of the distances saved are tremendous.
For instance, Guayaquil, in Ecuador, is 7,400 miles nearer to New York
by the canal than by the Strait of Magellan; Yokohama is nearly 4,000
miles nearer to New York by Panama than by Suez; and Melbourne is
1,300 miles closer to Liverpool by Panama than by either Suez or the
Cape of Good Hope. Curiously enough, the distance from Manila to New
York, by way of Suez and Panama, is almost the same, the difference in
favor of Panama being only 41 miles out of a total of 11,548 miles.
The difference in distance from Hongkong to New York by the two
canals is even less, being only 18 miles, this slight advantage
favoring Suez.
But it is not by measure of distances that the effect of the canal on
international commerce may be measured. It spells the development of
the all but untouched western coast of South America and Mexico. It
means a tremendous up-building of foreign commerce in our own
Mississippi Valley and Gulf States. It means an unprecedented
commercial and industrial awakening in the States of our Pacific coast
and the Provinces of Western Canada.
While it was not projected as a money-making proposition, it will pay
for its maintenance and a slight return upon the money invested
from the beginning, and in a score of years will be not only
self-supporting, but will yield a sufficient income to provide for the
amortization of its capital in a hundred years.
The story of how this titanic work was undertaken, of how it
progressed, and of how it was crowned with success, is a story without
a parallel in the annals of man. The canal itself, as Ambassador Bryce
has said, is the greatest liberty man has ever taken with nature.
Its digging was a steady and progressive victory over sullen and
resistant nature. The ditch through Culebra Mountain was eaten out by
huge steam shovels of such mechanical perfection that they seemed
almost to be alive, almost to know what they were doing. The rocks and
earth they bit out of the mountain side were carried away by trains
operating in a system of such skill that it is the admiration of all
the transportation world, for the problem of disposing of the
excavated material was even greater than that of taking it out.
The control of the torrential Chagres River by the Gatun Dam, changing
the river from the chief menace of the canal to its essential and
salient feature, was no less an undertaking. And, long after Gatun Dam
and Culebra Cut cease to be marvels, long after the Panama Canal
becomes as much a matter of course as the Suez Canal, men still will
be thrilled and impressed by the wonderful machinery of the
locks--those great water stairways, operated by machinery as ingenious
as gigantic, and holding in check with their mighty gates such floods
as never elsewhere have been impounded.
It is a wonderful story that this book is undertaking to tell. There
will be much in it of engineering feats and accomplishments, because
its subject is the greatest of all engineering accomplishments. There
will be much in it of the things that were done at Panama during the
period of construction, for never were such things done before. There
will be much in it of the history of how and why the American
Government came to undertake the work, for nothing is of greater
importance. There will be something in it of the future, looking with
conservatism and care as far ahead as may be, to outline what the
completion of this canal will mean not only for the people of the
United States, but for the people of all the world.
Much that might be written of the romantic history of the Isthmian
territory--tales of discoverers and conquistadores, wild tales of
pirates and buccaneers, serio-comic narratives of intrigue and
revolution--is left out of this book, because, while it is
interesting, it now belongs to that antiquity which boasts of many,
many books; and this volume is to tell not of Panama, but of the
Panama Canal--on the threshold of its story, fitted by a noble birth
for a noble destiny.
CHAPTER II
GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT
The Panama Canal is the greatest engineering project of all history.
There is more than the patriotic prejudice of a people proud of their
own achievements behind this assertion. Men of all nations concede it
without question, and felicitate the United States upon the remarkable
success with which it has been carried out. So distinguished an
authority as the Rt. Hon. James Bryce, late British ambassador to
Washington, and a man not less famous in the world of letters than
successful in the field of diplomacy, declared before the National
Geographic Society that not only is the Panama Canal the greatest
undertaking of the past or the present but that even the future seems
destined never to offer any land-dividing, world-uniting project
comparable to it in magnitude or consequence.
We are told that the excavations total 232,000,000 cubic yards; that
the Gatun Dam contains 21,000,000 cubic yards of material; and that
the locks and spillways required the laying of some 4,500,000 cubic
yards of concrete. But if one is to realize the meaning of this he
must get out of the realm of cubic yards and into the region of
concrete comparisons. Every one is familiar with the size and shape of
the Washington Monument. With its base of 55 feet square and its
height of 555 feet, it is one of the most imposing of all the hand
reared structures of the earth. Yet the material excavated from the
big waterway at Panama represents 5,840 such solid-built shafts.
Placed in a row with base touching base they would traverse the entire
Isthmus and reach 10 miles beyond deep water in the two oceans at
Panama. Placed in a square with base touching base they would cover an
area of 475 acres. If all the material were placed in one solid shaft
with a base as large as the average city block, it would tower nearly
100,000 feet in the air.
Another illustration of the magnitude of the quantity of material
excavated at Panama may be had from a comparison with the pyramid of
Cheops, of which noble pile some one has said that "All things fear
Time, but Time fears only Cheops." We are told that it required a
hundred thousand men 10 years to make ready for the building of that
great structure, and 20 years more to build it. There were times at
Panama when, in 26 working days, more material was removed from the
canal than was required to build Cheops, and from first to last the
Americans removed material enough to build sixty-odd pyramids such as
Cheops. Were it all placed in one such structure, with a base as large
as that of Cheops, the apex would tower higher into the sky than the
loftiest mountain on the face of the earth.
Still another way of arriving at a true conception of the work of
digging the big waterway is to consider that enough material had to be
removed by the Americans to make a tunnel through the earth at the
equator more than 12 feet square.
[Illustration: A GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF THE MATERIAL HANDLED AT
PANAMA]
But perhaps the comparison that will best illustrate the immensity of
the task of digging the ditch is that of the big Lidgerwood dirt car,
on which so much of the spoil has been hauled away. Each car holds
about 20 cubic yards of dirt, and 21 cars make a train. The material
removed from the canal would fill a string of these cars reaching
about three and a half times around the earth, and it would take a
string of Panama Railroad engines reaching almost from New York to
Honolulu to move them.
Yet all these comparisons have taken account of the excavations only.
The construction of the Panama Canal represents much besides digging a
ditch, for there were some immense structures to erect. Principal
among these, so far as magnitude is concerned, was the Gatun Dam, that
big ridge of earth a mile and a half long, half a mile thick at the
base, and 105 feet high. It contains some 21,000,000 cubic yards of
material, enough to build more than 500 solid shafts like the
Washington Monument. Then there was the dam at Pedro Miguel--"Peter
Magill," as the irreverent boys of Panama christened it--and another
at Miraflores, each of them small in comparison with the great
embankment at Gatun, but together containing as much material as 70
solid shafts like our Washington Monument.
Besides these structures there still remain the locks and spillways,
with their four and a half million cubic yards of concrete and their
hundreds and thousands of tons of steel.
With all these astonishing comparisons in mind, is it strange that the
digging of the Panama Canal is the world's greatest engineering
project? Are they not enough to stamp it as the greatest single
achievement in human history? Yet even they, pregnant of meaning as
they are, fail to reveal the full and true proportions of the work of
our illustrious army of canal diggers. They tell nothing of the
difficulties which were overcome--difficulties before which the
bravest spirit might have quailed.
When the engineers laid out the present project, they calculated that
103,000,000 cubic yards of material would have to be excavated, and
predicted that the canal diggers would remove that much in nine years.
Since that time the amount of material to be taken out has increased
from one cause or another until it now stands at more than double the
original estimate. At one time there was an increase for widening the
Culebra Cut by 50 per cent. At another time there was an increase to
take care of the 225 acres of slides that were pouring into the big
ditch like glaciers. At still another time there was an increase for
the creation of a small lake between the locks at Pedro Miguel and
Miraflores. At yet another time it was found that the Chagres River
and the currents of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans were
depositing large quantities of silt and mud in the canal, and this
again raised the total amount of material to be excavated. But none of
these unforeseen obstacles and additional burdens dismayed the
engineers. They simply attacked their problem with renewed zeal and
quickened energy, with the result that they excavated in seven years
of actual operations more than twice as much material as they were
expected to excavate in nine years. In other words, the material to be
removed was increased 125 per cent and yet the canal was opened at
least 12 months ahead of the time predicted.
How this unprecedented efficiency was developed forms in itself a
remarkable story of achievement. The engineers met with insistent
demands that they "make the dirt fly." The people had seen many months
of preparation, but they had no patience with that; they wanted to see
the ditch begin to deepen. It was a critical stage in the history of
the project. If the dirt should fail to fly public sentiment would
turn away from the canal.
So John F. Stevens addressed himself to making it fly. Before he left
he had brought the monthly output almost up to the million yard mark.
When that mark was passed the President of the United States, on
behalf of himself and the nation, sent a congratulatory message to the
canal army. Many people asserted that it was nothing but a burst of
speed; but the canal diggers squared themselves for a still higher
record. They forced up the mark to two million a month, and
straightway used that as a rallying point from which to charge the
heights three million. Once again the standard was raised; "four
million" became the slogan. Wherever that slogan was flashed upon a
Y.M.C.A. stereoptican screen there was cheering--cheering that
expressed a determined purpose. Finally, when March, 1909, came around
all hands went to work with set jaws, and for the only time in the
history of the world, there was excavated on a single project,
4,000,000 cubic yards of material in one month.
With the dirt moving, came the question of the cost of making it fly.
By eliminating a bit of lost motion here and taking up a bit of waste
there, even with the price of skilled labor fully 50 per cent higher
on the Isthmus than in the States, unit costs were sent down to
surprisingly low levels. For instance, in 1908 it was costing 11-1/2
cents a cubic yard to operate a steam shovel; in 1911 this had been
forced down to 8-7/8 cents a yard. In 1908 more than 18-1/2 cents were
expended to haul a cubic yard of spoil 8 miles; in 1911 a cubic yard
was hauled 12 miles for a little more than 15-1/5 cents.
Some of the efficiency results were astonishing. To illustrate: One
would think that the working power of a ton of dynamite would be as
great at one time as another; and yet the average ton of dynamite in
1911 did just twice as much work as in 1908. No less than $50,000 a
month was saved by shaking out cement bags.
It was this wonderful efficiency that enabled the United States to
build the canal for $375,000,000 when without it the cost might have
reached $600,000,000. In 1908, after the army had been going at
regulation double-quick for a year, a board was appointed to estimate
just how much material would have to be taken out, and how much it
would cost. That board estimated that the project as then planned
would require the excavation of 135,000,000 cubic yards of material,
and that the total cost of the canal as then contemplated would be
$375,000,000. Also it was estimated that the canal would be completed
by January 1, 1915. After that time the amount of material to be
excavated was increased by 97,000,000 cubic yards, and yet so great
was the efficiency developed that the savings effected permitted that
great excess of material to be removed without the additional expense
of a single penny above the estimates of 1908, and in less time than
was forecast.
Although the difficulties that beset the canal diggers were such as
engineers never before encountered, they were met and brushed aside,
and all the world's engineering records were smashed into smithereens.
It required 20 years to build the Suez Canal, through a comparatively
dry and sandy region. When the work at Panama was at its height the
United States was excavating the equivalent of a Suez Canal every 15
months. Likewise it required many years to complete the Manchester
Ship Canal between Liverpool and Manchester, a distance of 35 miles.
This canal cost so much more than was estimated that money was raised
for its completion only with the greatest difficulty. Yet at Panama
the Americans dug four duplicates of the Manchester Ship Canal in five
years. All of this was done in spite of the fact that they had to work
in a moist, hot, enervating climate where for nine months in a year
the air seems filled with moisture to the point of saturation, and
where, for more than half the length of the great ditch, the annual
rainfall often amounts to as much as 10 feet--all of this falling in
the nine months of the wet season.
A few comparisons outside of the construction itself will serve to
illustrate the tremendous proportions of the work. Paper money was not
handled at all in paying off the canal army. It took three days to pay
off the force with American gold and Panaman silver. When pay day was
over there had been given into the hands of the Americans, and thrown
into the hats of the Spaniards and West Indian negroes, 1,600 pounds
of gold and 24 tons of silver. When it is remembered that this
performance was repeated every month for seven years, one may imagine
the enormous outlay of money for labor.
The commissary also illustrates the magnitude of the work. Five
million loaves of bread, a hundred thousand pounds of cheese, more
than 9,000,000 pounds of meat, half a million pounds of poultry, more
than a thousand carloads of ice, more than a million pounds of onions,
half a million pounds of butter--these are some of the items handled
in a single year.
Wherever one turns he finds things which furnish collateral evidence
of the magnitude of the work. The Sanitary Department used each year
150,000 gallons of mosquito oil, distributed thousands of pounds of
quinine, cut and burned millions of square yards of brush, and spent
half a million dollars for hospital maintenance.
No other great engineering project has allowed such a remarkable
"margin of safety"--the engineering term for doing things better than
they need to be done. The engineers who dug the canal took nothing for
granted. No rule of physics was so plain or so obvious as to escape
actual physical proof before its acceptance, when such proof was
possible. No one who knows how the engineers approached the subject,
how they resolved every doubt on the side of safety, and how they kept
so far away from the danger line as actually to make their precaution
seem excessive can doubt that the Panama Canal will go down in history
as the most thorough as well as the most extensive piece of
engineering in the world.
CHAPTER III
GATUN DAM
The key to the whole Panama Canal is Gatun Dam, that great mass of
earth that impounds the waters of the Chagres River, makes of the
central portion of the canal a great navigable lake with its surface
85 feet above the level of the sea, and, in short, renders practicable
the operation of a lock type of canal across the Isthmus.
Around no other structure in the history of engineering did the fires
of controversy rage so furiously and so persistently as they raged for
several years around Gatun Dam. It was attacked on this side and that;
its foundations were pronounced bad and its superstructure not
watertight. Doubt as to the stability of such a structure led some of
the members of the Board of Consulting Engineers to recommend a
sea-level canal. Further examination of the site and experimentation
with the materials of which it was proposed to construct it, showed
the engineers that it was safe as to site and satisfactory as to
superstructure. The country had about accepted their conclusions,
when, in the fall of 1908, there was a very heavy rain on the Isthmus,
and some stone which had been deposited on the soil on the upstream
toe of the dam, sank out of sight--just as the engineers expected it
to do. A story thereupon was sent to the States announcing that the
Gatun Dam had given way and that the Chagres River was rushing
unrestrained through it to the sea. The public never stopped to recall
that the dam was not yet there to give way, or to inquire exactly what
had happened, and a wave of public distrust swept over the country.
To make absolutely certain that everything was all right, and to
restore the confidence of the people in the big project, President
Roosevelt selected the best board of engineers he could find and sent
them to the Isthmus in company with President-elect Taft to see
exactly what was the situation at Gatun.
They examined the site, they examined the material, they examined the
evidence in Colonel Goethal's hands. When they got through they
announced that they had only one serious criticism to make of the dam
as proposed. "It is not necessary to tie a horse with a log chain to
make sure he can not break away," observed one of them, "a smaller
chain would serve just as well." And so they recommended that the
crest of the dam be lowered from 135 feet to 115 feet. Still later
this was cut to 105 feet. They found that the underground river whose
existence was urged by all who opposed a lock canal, flowed nowhere
save in the fertile valleys of imagination. The engineers had known
this a long time, but out of deference to the doubters they had
decided to drive a lot of interlocking sheet piling across the Chagres
Valley. "What's the use trying to stop a river that does not exist?"
queried the engineers, and so the sheet piling was omitted.
As a matter of fact, Gatun Dam proved the happiest surprise of the
whole waterway. In every particular it more than fulfilled the most
optimistic prophecies of the engineers. They said that what little
seepage there would be would not hurt anything; the dam answered by
showing no seepage at all. They said that the hydraulic core would be
practically impervious; it proved absolutely so. Where it was once
believed that Gatun Dam would be the hardest task on the Isthmus it
proved to be the easiest. Culebra Cut exchanged places with it in that
regard.
Gatun Dam contains nearly 22,000,000 cubic yards of material. Assuming
that it takes two horses to pull a cubic yard of material it would
require twice as many horses as there are in the United States to move
the dam were it put on wheels. Loaded into ordinary two-horse dirt
wagons it would make a procession of them some 80,000 miles long. The
dam is a mile and a half long, a half mile thick at the base, 300 feet
thick at the water line, and 100 feet thick at the crest. Its height
is 105 feet.
Yet in spite of its vast dimensions it is the most inconspicuous
object in the landscape. Grown over with dense tropical vegetation it
looks little more conspicuous than a gradual rise in the surface of
the earth. Passengers passing Gatun on the Panama Railroad scarcely
recognize the dam as such when they see it, so gradual are its slopes.
An excellent idea of the gentle incline of the dam may be had by
referring to the accompanying figure, which shows the outlines of a
cross section of the dam.
The materials of which it is constructed are also shown there.
Starting on the upstream side there is a section made of solid
material from Culebra Cut. Beyond this is the upstream toe of the dam,
which is made of the best rock in the Culebra Cut. After this comes
the hydraulic fill. This material is a mixture of sand and clay which,
when it dries out thoroughly, is compact and absolutely impervious to
water. It was secured from the river channel and pumped with great
20-inch centrifugal pumps into the central portion of the dam, where a
veritable pond was formed; the heavier materials settled to the
bottom, forming layer after layer of the core, while the lighter
particles, together with the water, passed off through drain pipes. In
this way the water was not only the hod carrier of the dam
construction, but the stone mason as well. Where there was the tiniest
open space, even between two grains of sand, the water found it and
slipped in as many small particles as were necessary to stop it up.
[Illustration: A CROSS-SECTION OF THE GATUN DAM]
Above the hydraulic fill on the upstream side is a layer of solid
material, while that part of the face of the dam exposed to wave
action is covered with heavy rock. The same is true of the crest. On
the downstream half of the dam there is approximately 400 feet of
hydraulic fill, then 400 feet of solid fill, then a 30-foot toe, and
then ordinary excavated material.
The Chagres Valley is a wide one until it reaches Gatun. Here it
narrows down to a mile and a half. It is across this valley that the
Gatun Dam is thrown in opposition to the seaward journey of the
Chagres waters. At the halfway point across the valley there was a
little hill almost entirely of solid rock. It happened to be planted
exactly at the place the engineers needed it. Here they could erect
their spillway for the control of the water in the lake above.
[Illustration: GATUN LAKE PLAN OF THE GATUN DAM AND LOCKS]
The regulation of the water level in Gatun Lake is no small task, for
the Chagres is one of the world's moodiest streams. At times it is a
peaceful, leisurely stream of some 2 feet in depth, while at other
times it becomes a wild, roaring, torrential river of magnificent
proportions. Sometimes it reaches such high stages that it sends a
million gallons of water to the sea between the ticks of a clock.
In controlling the Chagres, the engineers again took what on any
private work would have been regarded as absurd precaution. In the
first place, Gatun Lake will be so big that the Chagres can break
every record it heretofore has set, both for momentary high water and
for sustained high water, and still, with no water being let out of
the lake, it can continue to flow that way for a day and a half
without disturbing things at all. It could flow for two days before
any serious damage could be done. Thus the canal force might be off
duty for some 45 hours, with the outlet closed, before any really
serious damage could be done by the rampage of the river.
But of course no one supposes that it would be humanly possible that
two such contingencies as the highest water ever known, and everybody
asleep at their posts for two days, could happen together. When the
water in the lake reached its normal level of 87 feet the spillway
gates would be opened, and, if necessary, it would begin to discharge
145,000 feet of water a second. This is 17,000 feet more than the
record for sustained flow heretofore set by the Chagres. But if it
were found that even this was inadequate the culverts in the locks
could be brought into play, and with them the full discharge would be
brought up to 194,000 feet a second, or 57,000 more than the Chagres
has ever brought down. But suppose even this would not suffice to take
care of the floods of the Chagres? The spillway is so arranged that as
the level of the water in the lake rises the discharging capacity
increases. With the spillway open, even if the Chagres were to double
its record for continued high water, it would take many days to bring
the lake level up to the danger point--92 feet. When it reached that
height the spillway would have a capacity of 222,000 feet, which, with
the aid of the big lock culverts, would bring the total discharge up
to 262,000 feet a second--only 12,000 cubic feet less than double the
highest known flow of the Chagres.
But this is only characteristic of what one sees everywhere. Whether
it be in making a spillway that would accommodate two rivers like the
Chagres instead of one, or in building dams with 63 pounds of weight
for every pound of pressure against it, or yet in building lock gates
which will bear several times the maximum weight that can ever be
brought against them, the work at Panama was done with the intent to
provide against every possible contingency.
The spillway through which the surplus waters of Gatun Lake will be
let down to the sea level, is a large semicircular concrete dam
structure with the outside curve upstream and the inside curve
downstream. Projecting above the dam are 13 piers and 2 abutments,
which divide it into 14 openings, each of them 45 feet wide. These
openings are closed by huge steel gates, 45 feet wide, 20 feet high,
and weighing 42 tons each. They are mounted on roller bearings,
suspended from above, and are operated by electricity. They work in
huge frames just as a window slides up and down in its frame. Each
gate is independent of the others, and the amount of water permitted
to go over the spillway dam thus can be regulated at will.
When a huge volume of water like a million gallons a second is to be
let down a distance of about 60 feet, it may be imagined that unless
some means are found to hold it back and let it descend easily, by the
time it would reach the bottom it would be transformed into a thousand
furies of energy. Therefore, the spillway dam has been made
semicircular, with the outside lines pointing up into the lake and the
inside lines downstream, so that as the water runs through the
openings it will converge all the currents and cause them to collide
on the apron below. This largely overcomes the madness of the water.
But still further to neutralize its force and to make it harmless as
it flows on its downward course, there are two rows of baffle piers on
the apron of the spillway. They are about 10 feet high and are built
of reinforced concrete, with huge cast-iron blocks upon their upstream
faces. When the water gets through them it has been tamed and robbed
of all its dangerous force. The spillway is so constructed that when
the water flowing over it becomes more than 6 feet deep it adheres to
the downstream face of the dam as it glides down, instead of rushing
out and falling perpendicularly.
The locks are situated against the high hills at the east side of the
valley, after which comes the east wing of the dam, then the spillway,
then the west wing of the dam, which terminates on the side of the low
mountain that skirts the western side of the valley. With the hills
bordering the valley and the dam across it, the engineers have been
able to inclose a gigantic reservoir which has a superficial surface
of 164 square miles. It is irregular in shape and might remind one of
a pressed chrysanthemum, the flower representing the lake and the
stem Culebra Cut. The surface of the water in this lake is normally 85
feet higher than the surface of the water seaward from Gatun and
Miraflores. The lake is entirely fresh water supplied by the Chagres
River. The accompanying figure shows the profile of the canal.
[Illustration: A PROFILE SECTION OF THE CANAL]
The Chagres River approaches the canal at approximately right angles
at Gamboa, some 21 miles above Gatun. The lake will be so large that
the river currents will all be absorbed, the water backing far up into
the Chagres, the river depositing its silt before it reaches the canal
proper.
With the currents thus checked, the Chagres will lose all power to
interfere with the navigation of the canal, although upon the bosom of
its water will travel for a distance of 35 miles all the ships that
pass through the big waterway from Gatun to Miraflores. This fresh
water will serve a useful purpose besides carrying ships over the
backbone of the continent. Barnacles lose their clinging power in
fresh water, and when a ship passes up through the locks from sea
level to lake level and from salt water to fresh, the barnacles that
have clung to the sides and bottom of the vessel through many a
thousand mile of "sky-hooting through the brine" will have their grip
broken and they will drop off helplessly and fall to the bed of the
lake, which, in the course of years, will become barnacle-paved. How
many times in dry-dock this will save can only be surmised, but the
ship that goes through the canal regularly will not have much bother
with barnacles.
The engineer who worked out the details of the engineering examination
of the dam in 1908 was Caleb M. Saville, who had had experience on
some of the greatest dams in the world. In the first place, the whole
foundation was honeycombed with test borings, and several shafts were
sunk so that the engineers could go down and see for themselves
exactly what was the nature of the material below. There are some
problems in engineering where a decision is so close between safety
and danger that none but an engineer can decide them. But Gatun Dam
could speak for itself and in the layman's tongue.
After investigating the site and getting such conclusive evidence that
the proverbial wayfaring man might understand it the engineers next
conducted a series of experiments to determine whether or not the
material of which they proposed to build the dam would be watertight.
They wanted to make sure whether enough water would seep through to
carry any of the dam material along with it. The maximum normal depth
of the water is 85 feet. The material it would have to seep through is
nearly a half mile thick. In order to determine how the water would
behave they took some 3 feet of the material and put it in a strong
iron cylinder with water above it and subjected it to a pressure
equivalent to a head of 185 feet of water. Only an occasional drop
came through. If only an occasional drop of clear water gets through 3
feet of material under a pressure of 185 feet of water, it does not
require a great engineer to determine that there will not be any
seepage through more than a thousand feet of the same material under a
head of only 85 feet.
And that is only a sample of their seeking after the truth. When they
had gone thus far it was then decided to build a little dam a few
yards long identical in cross section with Gatun Dam. It was built on
the scale of an inch to the foot, by the identical processes with
which it was intended to build the big dam. The result only added
confirmation to the other experiments. With a proportionate head of
water against it, it behaved exactly as they had concluded the big dam
would when completed. Every engineer who has read Saville's report
pronounces it a masterpiece of engineering investigation. It proved
conclusively that the site of the dam is stable, and the dam itself
impervious to seepage. The engineers who visited the Isthmus at the
time with President-elect Taft unanimously agreed that those
investigations removed every trace of doubt.
[Illustration: LIEUT. COL. W. L. SIBERT THE UPPER LOCKS AT GATUN]
[Illustration: TORO POINT BREAKWATER]
The Gatun Dam covers about 288 acres. The material in it weighs nearly
30,000,000 tons. The pressure of the highest part of the dam on the
foundations beneath amounts to many tons per square foot. The old
bugaboo about earthquakes throwing it down is a danger that exists
only in the minds of those who see ghosts. Some of the biggest
earth dams in the world are located in California. The Contra Costa
Water Company's dam at San Leandro is 120 feet high and not nearly so
immense in its proportions as Gatun Dam, yet it weathered the San
Francisco earthquake without difficulty. In Panama City there is an
old flat arch that once was a part of a church. It looks as though one
might throw it down with a golf stick, and yet it has stood there for
several centuries. As a matter of fact, Panama is out of the line of
earthquakes and volcanoes, but even if shocks much worse than those at
San Francisco were to come, there is no reason to fear for the safety
of the big structure.
The lack of knowledge of some of those who in years past criticized
the Gatun Dam was illustrated by an amusing incident that occurred at
a senatorial hearing on the Isthmus. Philander C. Knox, afterwards
Secretary of State, was then a Senator and a member of the committee
which went to the Isthmus. Another Senator in the party had grave
doubts about the stability of Gatun Dam, and asked Colonel Goethals to
explain how a dam could hold in check such an immense body of water.
Colonel Goethals, in his usual lucid way, explained that it was
because of that well-known principle of physics that the outward
pressure of water is determined by its depth and not by its
volume--that a column of water 10 feet high and a foot thick would
have just as much outward pressure as a lake 200 square miles in
extent and 10 feet deep. Still unconvinced, the Senator pressed his
examination further. At this juncture Senator Knox, who is a past
master at the art of answering a question with a question, interposed,
and asked his colleague: "Senator, if your theory holds good, how is
it that the dikes of Holland hold in check the Atlantic Ocean?"
CHAPTER IV
THE LOCKS
Ships that pass Panama way will climb up and down a titanic marine
stairway, three steps up into Gatun Lake and three steps down again.
These steps are the 12 huge locks in which will center the operating
features of the Isthmian waterway. The building of these locks
represents the greatest use of concrete ever undertaken. The amount
used would be sufficient to build of concrete a row of six-room
houses, reaching from New York to Norfolk, via Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Washington and Richmond--houses enough to provide homes for
a population as large as that of Indianapolis.
The total length of the locks and their accessories, including the
guide walls, approximates 2 miles. The length of the six locks through
which a ship passes on its voyage from one ocean to the other is a
little less than 7,000 feet.
If one who has never seen a lock canal is to get a proper idea of what
part the locks play in the Panama Canal, he must follow attentively
while we make an imaginary journey through the canal on a ship that
has just come down from New York. Approaching the Atlantic entrance
from the north, we pass the end of the great man-made peninsula,
jutting out 11,000 feet into the bay known as Toro Point Breakwater.
It was built to protect the entrance of the canal, the harbor, and
anchorages from the violent storms that sweep down from the north over
that region. Omitting our stops for the payment of tolls, the securing
of supplies, etc., we steam directly in through a great ditch 500 feet
wide and 41 feet deep, which simply permits the ocean to come inland 7
miles to Gatun. When we arrive there we find that our chance to go
farther is at an end unless we have some means of getting up into the
beautiful lake whose surface is 85 feet above us. Here is where the
locks come to our rescue. They will not only give us one lift, but
three.
When we approach the locks we find a great central pier jutting out
into the sea-level channel. If our navigating officers know their duty
they will run up alongside of this guide wall and tie up to it. If
they do not they will run the ship's nose into a giant chain, with
links made of 3-inch iron, that is guaranteed to bring a 1,000-ton
ship, going at the rate of 5 knots per hour, to a dead standstill in
70 feet. When we are once safely alongside the guide wall, four quiet,
but powerful locomotives, run by electricity, come out and take charge
of our ship. Two of them get before it to pull us forward, and two
behind it to hold us back. Then the great chain, which effectively
would have barred us from going into the locks under our own steam, or
from colliding with the lock gates, is let down and we begin to move
into the first lock.
Starting at the sea-level channel, the first, second, and third gates
are opened and our ship towed into the first lock. Then the second
and third gates are closed again, and the lock filled with water, by
gravity, raising the ship at the rate of about 2 feet a minute,
although, if there is a great rush of business, it may be filled at
the rate of 3 feet a minute. When the water in this lock reaches the
level of the water in the lock above, gates four and five are opened,
and we are towed in. Then gate four is closed again, and water is let
into this lock until it reaches the level of the third one. Gates six,
seven, and eight are next opened, and we are towed into the upper
lock. Gates six and seven are now closed, and the water allowed to
fill the third lock until we are up to the level of Gatun Lake. Then
gates nine and ten are opened, the emergency dam is swung from athwart
the channel, if it happens to be in that position, the fender chain
like the one encountered when we entered the first lock, and like the
ones which protect gates seven and eight, is let down, the towing
engines turn us loose, and we resume our journey, with 32 miles of
clear sailing, until we reach Pedro Miguel. Here, by a reverse
process, we are dropped down 30-1/3 feet. Then we go on to Miraflores,
a mile and a half away, where we are lifted down 54-2/3 feet in two
more lifts. This brings us back to sea level again, where we meet the
waters of the Pacific, and steam out upon it through a channel 500
feet wide and 8 miles long.
Having learned something of the part the locks play in getting us
across the Isthmus, by helping us up out of one ocean into Gatun Lake
and then dropping down into the other ocean, it will be interesting to
note something of the mechanism. A very good idea of how a lock looks
may be gathered from the accompanying bird's-eye view of the model of
Pedro Miguel Lock.
[Illustration: FROM A MODEL OF PEDRO MIGUEL LOCK]
It will be seen that there are two of them side by side--twin locks,
they are called, making them like a double-track railway. The lock on
the right is nearly filled for an upward passage. The ship will be
seen in it, held in position by the four towing engines, which appear
only as tiny specks hitched to hawsers from the stem and stern. Behind
the ship are the downstream gates. They were first opened to admit the
ship, and then closed to impound the water that flows up through the
bottom of the lock. Ahead are the upstream gates, closed also until
the water in the lock is brought up to the level of the water in the
lake. Then the gates will be opened, the big chain fender will be
dropped down, and the ship will be towed out into the lake and turned
loose. On the side wall of the right lock there is a big bridge set on
a pivot so that it can be swung around across the lock and girders let
down from it to serve as a foundation upon which to lay a steel dam if
anything happens to the locks or gates. On the other lock the bridge
has been swung into position, and the steel girders let down. Great
steel sheets will be let down on live roller bearings on these
girders, and when all are in place they will form a watertight dam of
steel. Between this bridge and the reader is a huge floating tank of
steel, which may be used to dam all the water out of the locks when
that is desired.
Referring to the next figure we see a cross section of the twin locks.
The side walls are from 45 to 50 feet thick at the floor. At a point
24-1/3 feet above the floor they begin to narrow by a series of 6-foot
steps until they are 8 feet wide at the top. The middle wall is 60
feet wide all the way up, although at a point 42-1/2 feet above the
lock floor room is made for a filling of earth and for a three-story
tunnel, the top story being used as a passageway for the operators,
the second story as a conduit for electric wires, and the lower story
as a drainage system.
[Illustration: A CROSS-SECTION OF LOCKS, GIVING AN IDEA OF THEIR
SIZE]
In this figure D and G are the big 18-foot culverts through which
water is admitted from the lake to the locks. Each of these three big
culverts, which are nearly 7,000 feet long, is large enough to
accommodate a modern express train, and is about the size of the
Pennsylvania tubes under the Hudson and East Rivers. H represents the
culverts extending across the lock from the big ones. Each of them is
big enough to accommodate a two-horse wagon, and there are 14 in each
lock. Every alternate one leads from the side wall culvert and the
others from the center wall culvert. F represents the wells that lead
up through the floor into the lock, each larger in diameter than a
sugar barrel in girth. There are five wells on each cross culvert, or
70 in the floor of each lock.
[Illustration: CONCRETE MIXERS, GATUN]
[Illustration: A CENTER WALL CULVERT, GATUN LOCKS]
[Illustration: THE MACHINERY FOR MOVING A LOCK GATE]
The flow of the water into the locks and out again is controlled by
great valves. The ones which control the great wall tunnels or
culverts are called Stoney Gate valves, and operate something like
giant windows in frames. They are mounted on roller bearings to make
them work without friction. The others are ordinary cylindrical
valves, but, having to close a culvert large enough to permit a
two-horse team to be driven through it, they must be of great size.
When a ship is passing from Gatun Lake down to the Atlantic Ocean, the
water in the upper lock is brought up to the level of that in the
lake, being admitted through the big wall culverts, whence it passes
out through the 14 cross culverts and up into the locks through the 70
wells in the floor. Then the ship is towed in, the gates are shut
behind it, the valves are closed against the water in the lake, the
ones permitting the escape of this water into the lock below are
opened, and it continues to flow out of the upper lock into the lower
one until the water in the two has the same level. Then the gates
between the two locks are opened, the ship is towed into the second
one and the operation is repeated for the last lock in the same way.
The gates of the locks are an interesting feature. Their total weight
is about 58,000 tons. There are 46 of them, each having two leaves.
Their weight varies from 300 to 600 tons per leaf, dependent upon the
varying height of the different gates. The lowest ones are 47 feet
high and the highest ones 82 feet, their height depending upon the
place where they are used. Some of these are known as intermediate
gates, and are used for short ships, when it is desired to economize
on both water and time. They divide each lock chamber into two smaller
chambers of 350 and 550 feet, respectively. Perhaps 90 per cent of all
the ships that pass Panama will not need to use the full length
lock--1,000 feet. Duplicate gates will always be kept on the ground as
a precaution against accident. Each leaf is 65 feet wide and 7 feet
thick. The heaviest single piece of steel in each one of them is the
lower sill, weighing 18 tons. It requires 6,000,000 rivets to put them
together. In the lower part of each gate is a huge tank. When it is
desired that the gate shall have buoyancy, as when operating it, this
tank will be filled with air. When closed it is filled with water. The
gates are opened and closed by a huge arm, or strut, one end of which
is connected to the gate and the other to a huge wheel in the manner
of the connecting rod to the driver of a locomotive. Leakage through
the space between the gate and the miter sill on the floor of the lock
is prevented by a seal which consists of heavy timbers with flaps of
rubber 4 inches wide and half an inch thick. A special sealing device
brings the edges of the two leaves of a gate together and holds them
firmly while the gates are closed.
Remembering that these gates are nothing more than Brobdingnagian
double doors which close in the shape of a flattened V, it follows
that they must have hinges. And these hinges are worth going miles to
see. That part which fastens to the wall of the lock weighs 36,752
pounds in the case of the operating gates, and 38,476 pounds in the
protection gates. These latter are placed in pairs with the operating
gates at all danger points--so that if one set of gates are rammed
down, another pair will still be in position. The part of the hinge
attached to the gate was made according to specifications which
required that it should stand a strain of 40,000 pounds before
stretching at all, and 70,000 pounds before breaking. Put into a huge
testing machine, it actually stood a strain of 3,300,000 pounds before
breaking--seven times as great as any stress it will ever be called
upon to bear. The gates are all painted a lead gray, to match the
ships of the American Navy. Those which come into contact with sea
water will be treated with a barnacle-proof preparation.
Now that we have described the locks, we may go back and see them in
course of construction. The first task was getting the lock building
plant designed and built. At Gatun the plant consisted of a series of
immense cableways, an electric railroad, and enormous concrete mixers.
Great towers were erected on either side of the area excavated for the
locks, with giant cables connecting them. These towers were 85 feet
high, and were mounted on tracks like steam shovels, so that they
could be moved forward as the work progressed. The cables connecting
them were of 2-1/2-inch lock steel wire covered with interlocking
strands. They were guaranteed to carry 6 tons at a trip, 20 trips an
hour, and to carry 60,000 loads before giving way. They actually did
better than the specifications called for as far as endurance was
concerned.
The sand for making the concrete for Gatun came from Nombre de Dios
(Spanish for Name of God), and the gravel from Porto Bello. The sand
and gravel were towed in great barges, first through the old French
Canal, and later through the Atlantic entrance of the present canal.
Great clamshell buckets on the Lidgerwood cableways would swoop down
upon the barges, get 2 cubic yards of material at a mouthful, lift it
up to the cable, carry it across to the storage piles and there dump
it. In this way more than 2,000,000 wagon loads of sand and gravel
were handled.
A special equipment was required to haul the sand, gravel, and cement
from the storage piles to the concrete mixers. There were two circular
railroads of 24-inch gauge, carrying little electric cars that ran
without motormen. Each car was stopped, started, or reversed by a
switch attached to the car. Their speed never varied more than 10 per
cent whether they were going empty or loaded, up hill or down. When a
car was going down hill its motor was reversed into a generator so
that it helped make electricity to pull some other car up the hill.
The cars ran into a little tunnel, where each was given its proper
load of one part cement, three parts sand, and six parts gravel--2
cubic yards, in all--and was then hurried on to the big concrete
mixers. These were so arranged in a series that it was not necessary
to stop them to receive the sand, gravel, and cement, or to dump out
the concrete.
On the emptying sides of the concrete mixers there were other little
electric railway tracks. Here there were little trains of a motor and
two cars each, with a motorman. The train, with two big 2-cubic-yard
buckets, drew up alongside two concrete mixers. Without stopping their
endless revolutions the mixers tilted and poured out their contents
into the two buckets, 2 yards in each. Then the little train hurried
away, stopping under a great cable. Across from above the lock walls
came two empty buckets, carried on pulleys on the cableway. When they
reached a point over the train they descended and were set on the
cars, behind the full buckets. The full buckets were then attached to
the lifting hooks, and were carried up to the cable and then across to
the lock walls, where they were dumped and the concrete spread out by
a force of men. Meanwhile the train hustled off with its two empty
buckets, ready to be loaded again.
On the Pacific side the concrete handling plant was somewhat
different. Instead of cableways there were great cantilever cranes
built of structural steel. Some of these were in the shape of a giant
T, while others looked like two T's fastened together. Here the
clamshell dippers were run out on the arms of the cranes to the
storage piles, where they picked up their loads of material. This was
put in hoppers large enough to store material for 10 cubic yards. The
sand and stone then passed through measuring hoppers and to the mixers
with cement and water added. After it was mixed it was dumped into big
buckets on little cars drawn by baby steam locomotives, which looked
like overgrown toy engines. These little fellows reminded one of a lot
of busy bees as they dashed about here and there with their loads of
concrete, choo-chooing as majestically as the great dirt train engines
which passed back and forth hard by. The cranes would take their
filled buckets and leave empty ones in exchange, and this was kept up
day in and day out until the locks were completed. When the plant was
removed from Pedro Miguel to Miraflores, a large part of the concrete
was handled directly from the mixers to the walls by the cranes
without the intermediary locomotive service.
The cost of the construction of the locks was estimated in 1908 at
upward of $57,000,000. But economy in the handling of the material and
efficiency on the part of the lock builders cut the actual cost far
below that figure. On the Atlantic side about a dollar was saved on
every yard of concrete laid--about $2,000,000. On the Pacific side
more than twice as much was saved.
Before the locks could be built it became necessary to excavate down
to bed rock. This required the removal of nearly 5,000,000 cubic yards
of material at Gatun. Then extensive tests were made to make certain
that the floor of the locks could be anchored safely to the rock.
These tests demonstrated that by using the old steel rails that were
left on the Isthmus by the French, the concrete and rock could be tied
together so firmly as to defy the ravages of water and time. A huge
apron of concrete was built out into Gatun Lake from the upper locks
at that place, effectively preventing any water from getting between
the rocks and the concrete lying upon them.
CHAPTER V
THE LOCK MACHINERY
One of the problems that had to be solved before the Panama Canal
could be presented to the American people as a finished waterway, was
that of equipping it with adequate and dependable machinery for its
operation. Panama canals are not built every year, so it was not a
matter of ordering equipment from stock; everything had to be invented
and designed for the particular requirement it was necessary to meet.
And the first and foremost requirement was safety. When we look over
the canal machinery we see that word "safety" written in every bolt,
in every wheel, in every casting, in every machine. We see it in the
devices designed for protection and in those designed for operation as
well. We see it in the giant chain that will stop a vessel before it
can ram a gate; we see it in the great cantilever pivot bridges that
support the emergency dams; we see it in the double lock gates at all
exposed points; we see it in the electric towing apparatus, in the
limit switches that will automatically stop a machine when the
operator is not attending to his business, in the friction clutches
that will slip before the breaking point is reached. Safety, safety,
safety, the word is written everywhere.
The first thing a ship encounters when it approaches the locks is the
giant chain stretched across its path. That chain is made of links of
3 inches in diameter. When in normal position it is stretched across
the locks, and the vessel which does not stop as soon as it should
will ram its nose into the chain. There is a hydraulic paying-out
arrangement at both ends of the chain, and when the pressure against
it reaches a hundred gross tons the chain will begin to pay out and
gradually bring the offending vessel to a stop. After a ship strikes
the chain its momentum will be gradually reduced, its energy being
absorbed by the chain mechanism. While the pressure at which the chain
will begin to yield is fixed at 100 gross tons, the pressure required
to break it is 262 tons. Thus the actual stress it can bear is two and
a half times what it will be called upon to meet. The mechanism by
which the paying-out of the chain is accomplished is exceedingly
ingenious. The principle is practically the reverse of that of a
hydraulic jack. The two ends of the 428-foot chain are attached to big
plungers in the two walls of the locks. These plungers fit in large
cylinders, which contain broad surfaces of water. They are connected
with very small openings, which are kept closed until a pressure of
750 pounds to the square inch is exerted against them. By means of a
resistance valve these openings are then made available, the water
shooting out as through a nozzle under high pressure. This permits the
chain plunger to rise gradually, while keeping the tension at 750
pounds to the inch, and the paying-out of the chain proceeds
accordingly. Of course not all ships will strike the chain at the
same speed, and in some cases the paying-out process will have to be
more rapid than in others. This is provided for by the automatic
enlargement of the hole through which the water is discharged, the
size of the hole again becoming smaller as the tension of the chain
decreases. This chain fender will stop the _Olympic_ with full load,
when going a mile and a half an hour, bringing it to a dead standstill
within 70 feet, or it will stop an ordinary 10,000-ton ship in the
same distance even if it have a speed of 5 miles. The function of the
resistance valve is to prevent the chain from beginning to pay out
until the stress against it goes up to 100 tons, and to regulate the
paying-out so as to keep it constant at that point, so long as there
is necessity for paying-out. Any pressure of less than a hundred tons
will not put the paying-out mechanism into operation.
When a ship is to be put through the locks the chain will be let down
into great grooves in the floor of the lock. There is a fixed plunger
operating within a cylinder, which, in turn, operates within another
cylinder, the resulting movement, by a system of pulleys, being made
to pay out or pull in 4 feet of chain for every foot the plunger
travels. The chain must be raised or lowered in one minute, and always
will have to be lowered to permit the passage of a ship. The fender
machines are situated in pits in the lock walls. These pits are likely
to get filled with water from drippings, leakages, wave action, and
drainage, so they are protected with automatic pumps. Float valves are
lifted when the water rises in the pits. This automatically moves the
switch controlling an electric motor, which starts a pump to working
whenever the water gets within 1 inch of the top of the sump beneath
the floor of the pit. Twenty-four of these chain fenders are required
for the protection of the locks, and each requires two such tension
machines.
No ship will be allowed to go through the canal except under the
control of a canal pilot. He will certainly bring it to a stop at the
approach wall. But if he does not, there is the chain fender. There is
not a chance in a thousand for a collision with it, and not a chance
in a hundred thousand that the ship will not be stopped when there is
such a collision.
But if the pilot should fail to stop the ship, and it should collide
with the fender chain, and then if the fender chain should fail to
stop it, there would be the double gates at the head of the lock.
There is not one chance in a hundred that a ship, checked as it
inevitably would be by the fender chain, could ram down the first, or
safety gate. But if it did, there would still be another set of gates
some 70 feet away. The chances here might be one in a hundred of the
second set being rammed down. From all this it will be seen that the
chances of the second pair of gates being rammed is so remote as to be
almost without the realm of possibility. But suppose all these
precautions should fail, and suddenly the way should be opened for the
water of Gatun Lake to rush through the locks at the destructive speed
of 20 miles an hour? Even that day has been provided against by the
construction of the big emergency dams. The emergency dams, like the
fender chains, are designed only for protection, and have no other use
in the operation of the locks. There will be six of these dams, one
across each of the head locks at Gatun, Pedro Miguel, and Miraflores.
These emergency dams will be mounted on pivots on the side walls of
the locks about 200 feet above the upper gates. When not in use they
will rest on the side wall and parallel with it. When in use they will
be swung across the locks, by electric machinery or by hand, and there
rigidly wedged in. It will require two minutes to get them in position
by electricity and 30 minutes by hand. There is a motor for driving
the wedges which will hold the dam securely in position, and limit
switches to prevent the dams being moved too far.
When a bridge is put into position across the lock, a series of wicket
girders which are attached to the upstream side of the floor of the
bridge are let down into the water, the connection between the bridge
and one end of each girder being made by an elbow joint. The other end
goes down into the water, its motion being controlled by a cable
attached some distance from the free end of the girder and paid out or
drawn in over an electrically operated drum. This free end passes down
until it engages a big iron casting embedded in the concrete of the
lock floor. This makes a sort of inclined railway at an angle of about
30 degrees from the perpendicular, over which huge steel plates are
let down into the water. There are six of these girders, and they are
all made of the finest nickel steel. When they are all in position, a
row of six plates are let down, and they make the stream going
through the locks several feet shallower. Then another row of plates
is let down on these, and the stream becomes that much shallower.
Another row of plates is added, and then another, until there is a
solid sheet of steel plates resting on the six girders, and they make
a complete steel dam which effectively arrests the mad impulse of the
water in Gatun Lake to rush down into the sea. The plates are moved up
and down by electrical machinery, and are mounted on roller-bearing
wheels, so that the tremendous friction caused by their being pressed
against the girders by the great force of the water may be overcome.
That the emergency dams will be effective is shown by the experience
at the "Soo" locks, on the canal connecting Lakes Superior and Huron.
There, a vessel operating under its own power, rammed a lock gate.
Although the emergency dam had grown so rusty by disuse that it could
be operated only by hand, it was swung across the lock and effectively
fulfilled its mission of checking the maddened flow of the water.
Another protective device for the locks is the big caisson gates that
will be floated across the head and tail bays when it is desired to
remove all the water from the locks for the purpose of permitting the
lower guard gates to be examined, cleaned, painted, or repaired, and
for allowing the sills of the emergency dams to be examined in the
dry. The caisson gates are 112-1/2 feet long, 36 feet beam, and have a
light draft of 32 feet and a heavy draft of 61 feet. When one is
floated into position to close the lock, water will be admitted to
make it sink to the proper depth. Then its large centrifugal pumps,
driven by electric motors, will pump the water out of the lock. When
the work on the lock is completed these pumps will pump the water out
of the caisson itself until it becomes buoyant enough to resume its
light draft, after which it will be floated away.
The machinery for opening and closing the lock gates called for
unusual care in its designing. The existing types of gate-operating
machinery were all studied, and it was found that none of them could
be depended on to prove satisfactory, so special machines had to be
designed.
A great wheel, resembling a drive wheel of a locomotive, except that a
little over half of the rim is cog-geared, is mounted in a horizontal
position on a big plate, planted firmly in the concrete of the wall
and bolted there with huge bolts 11 feet long and 2-1/4 inches in
diameter. This plate weighs over 13,000 pounds, and the wheel, cast in
two pieces, weighs 34,000 pounds. As the weight of the rim of the
wheel on the eight spokes probably would tax their strength too much
when the wheel is under stress, this is obviated by four bearing
wheels, perpendicular to the big wheel, which support the rim. Between
the crank pin and the point of attachment on the gate leaf there is a
long arm, or strut, designed to bear an operating strain of nearly a
hundred tons. The wheel will be revolved by a motor geared to the
cogged part of the rim.
An ingenious arrangement of electric switches is that used to protect
the gate-moving machines from harm. The big connecting rod between the
master wheel and the gate leaf is attached to the gate leaf by a nest
of springs capable of sustaining a pressure of 184,000 pounds, in
addition to the fixed pressure of 60,000 pounds. Should any
obstruction interfere with the closing of the gate and threaten a
dangerous pressure on the connecting rod, the springs, as soon as they
reach their full compression, establish an electrical contact and thus
stop the motor. Likewise, should any obstruction come against the gate
as the connecting rod is pulling it open, the springs again permit the
establishment of an electrical contact and stop the motor. All of
these precautions are entirely independent of and supplemental to the
limit switches, which cut off the power from the gate-moving machine
should the strain reach the danger line. These big machines move the
huge gate leaves without the slightest noise or vibration. Such a
machine is required for each of the 92 leaves used in the 46 gates
with which the locks are equipped. The operator can open or close one
of these big gates in two minutes.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE 92 GATE-LEAF MASTER WHEELS]
The control of the water in the culverts of the locks is taken care of
by an ingeniously designed series of valves. The big wall culverts, 18
feet in diameter, are divided into two sections at the points where
the valves are installed, by the construction of a perpendicular pier.
This makes two openings 8 by 18 feet. The big gates of steel are
placed in frames to close these openings just as a window sash is
placed in its frame. They are mounted on roller bearings, so as to
overcome the friction caused by the pressure of water against the
valve gates. They must be mounted so that there is not more than a
fourth of an inch play in any direction. The big wall culvert gates
will weigh about 10 tons each, and must be capable of operating under
a head of more than 60 feet of water. They will be raised and lowered
by electricity.
The electric locomotives which will be used to tow ships through the
locks are one of the interesting features of the equipment. There will
be 40 of them on the 3 sets of locks. The average ship will require
four of them, two at the bow and two at the stern, to draw it through
the locks. They will run on tracks on the lock walls, and will have
two sets of wheels. One set will be cogged, and will be used when the
locomotives are engaged in towing. The other set will be pressed into
service when they are running light. When a vessel is in one lock
waiting for the water to be equalized with that in the next one and
the gates opened to permit passage, the forward locomotives will run
free up the incline to the lock wall above, paying out hawser as they
go. When they get to the next higher level they are ready to exert
their maximum pull. Each locomotive consists of three parts: two
motors hitched together, and the tandem may be operated from either
end. The third part is a big winding drum around which the great
hawsers are wound. This towing windlass permits the line to be paid
out or pulled in and the distance between the ship and the locomotives
varied at will. The locomotive may thus exert its pull or relax it
while standing still on the track, a provision especially valuable in
bringing ships to rest. In the main, however, the pull of the
locomotive is exercised by its running on the semi-suppressed rack
track anchored in the coping of the lock walls. Each flight of locks
will be provided with two towing tracks, one on the side and one on
the center wall. Each wall will be equipped with a return track of
ordinary rails, so that when a set of locomotives has finished towing
a ship through the locks they can be switched over from these tracks
and hustled back for another job. When they reach the inclines from
one lock to the next above the rack track will be pressed into service
again until they reach the next level stretch.
Here again one meets the familiar safeguard against accident. Some
engineer of one of these towing locomotives might sometime overload
it, so the power of doing so has been taken out of his hands. On the
windlass or drum that holds the towing hawser there is a friction
coupling. If the engineer should attempt to overload his engine, or if
for any other reason there should suddenly come upon the locomotive a
greater strain than it could bear, or upon the track, or upon the
hawser, the friction clutch would let loose at its appointed tension
of 25,000 pounds, and all danger would be averted.
When the locomotives are towing a ship from the walls it is natural
that there should be a side pull on the hawser. This is overcome by
wheels that run against the side of the track and are mounted
horizontally. All of the towing tracks extend out on the approach
walls of the locks so that the locomotives can get out far enough to
take charge of a ship before it gets close enough to do the locks any
damage.
[Illustration: A _Mauretania_ IN THE LOCKS]
From the foregoing it will be seen that a great deal of electric
current will be required in the operation of the locks. This will be
generated at a big station at Gatun, with a smaller one at Miraflores,
and they will be connected. The overflow water will be used for
generating the required current, and in addition to the operation of
the lock machinery it will operate the spillway gates, furnish the
necessary lighting current, and eventually it may furnish the power
for an electrified Panama Railroad.
In passing a ship through the canal it will be necessary to open and
close 23 lock gates, of an aggregate weight of more than 25,000 tons,
to lower and raise 12 fender chains, each weighing 24,000 pounds, and
to shut and open dozens of great valves, each of which weighs tons.
All these operations at each set of locks will be controlled by one
man, at a central switchboard. In addition to these operations there
is the towing apparatus. The arrangement at Gatun is typical; there 4
fender chains must be operated, 6 pairs of miter gates, and 46 valves.
In all not less than 98 motors will be set in motion twice, and
sometimes this number may be increased to 143. Some of them are more
than half a mile away from the operator, and half of them are nearly a
quarter of a mile away.
The operator in his control house will be high enough to have an
uninterrupted view of the whole flight of locks over which he has
command. His control board will consist of a representation of the
locks his switches control. On his model he will see the rise and fall
of the fender chains as he operates them, the movement of the big lock
gates as they swing open or shut, the opening and closing of the
valves which regulate the water in the culverts, and the rise and fall
of the water in the locks.
A system of interlocked levers will prevent him from doing the wrong
thing in handling his switches. Before he can open the valves at one
end of a lock he must close those at the other end. Before he can
open the lock gates, the valves in the culverts must be set so that no
harm can result. Before he can start to open a lock gate, he must
first have released the miter-forcing machine that latches the gates.
Before he can close the gates protected by a fender chain, he must
first have thrown the switch to bring the fender chain back to its
protecting position, and he can not throw the switch to lower the
chain until he first has provided for the opening of the gate it
protects. All of this interlocking system makes it next to impossible
to err, and taking into consideration the additional safeguard of
limit switches, which automatically cut off the power when anything
goes wrong, it will be seen that the personal equation is all but
removed from the situation.
CHAPTER VI
CULEBRA CUT
Culebra Cut! Here the barrier of the continental divide resisted to
the utmost the attacks of the canal army; here disturbed and outraged
Nature conspired with gross mountain mass to make the defense stronger
and stronger; here was the mountain that must be moved. Here came the
French, jauntily confident, to dig a narrow channel that would let
their ships go through. The mountain was the victor. And then here
came the Americans, confident but not jaunty. They weighed that mass,
laid out the lines of a wider ditch, arranged complicated
transportation systems to take away the half hundred million cubic
yards of earth and rocks that they had measured. Nature came to the
aid of the beleaguered mountain. The volcanic rocks were piled
helter-skelter and when the ditch deepened the softer strata
underneath refused to bear the burden and the slides, slowly and like
glaciers, crept out into the ditch, burying shovels and sweeping aside
the railway tracks. Even the bottom of the canal bulged up under the
added stress of the heavier strata above.
Grim, now, but still confident, the attackers fought on. The mountain
was defeated.
Now stretches a man-made canyon across the backbone of the continent;
now lies a channel for ships through the barrier; now is found what
Columbus sought in vain--the gate through the west to the east. Men
call it Culebra Cut.
Nine miles long, its average depth is 120 feet. At places its sides
tower nearly 500 feet above its channel bottom, which is nowhere
narrower than 300 feet.
It is the greatest single trophy of the triumph of man over the
terrestrial arrangement of his world. Compared to it, the scooping out
of the sand levels of Suez seems but child's play--the tunnels of
Hoosac and Simplon but the sport of boys. It is majestic. It is awful.
It is the Canal.
When estimates for digging the canal were made, it was calculated that
53,000,000 cubic yards of material would have to be removed from the
cut, and that under the most favorable conditions it would require
eight and a half years to complete the work. But at that time no one
had the remotest idea of the actual difficulties that would beset the
canal builders; no one dreamed of the avalanches of material that
would slide into the cut.
One can in no way get a better idea of the meaning of the slides and
breaks in Culebra Cut than to refer to the accompanying figure. There
it will be seen that whereas it was originally planned that the top
width of the cut at one point should be 670 feet, it has grown wider,
because of slides and breaks, to as much as 1,800 feet at one place.
In all, some 25,000,000 cubic yards of material which should have
remained outside the canal prism slipped into it and had to be
removed by the steam shovels.
[Illustration: THE EFFECT OF SLIDES]
No less than 26 slides and breaks were encountered in the construction
of Culebra Cut, their total area being 225 acres. The largest covered
75, and another 47 acres. When the slides, which were more like
earthen glaciers than avalanches, began to flow into the big ditch,
sometimes steam shovels were buried, sometimes railroad tracks were
caught beneath the débris, and sometimes even the bottom of the cut
itself began to bulge and disarrange the entire transportation system,
at the same time interfering with the compressed air and water
supplies. But with all these trials and tribulations, the army that
was trying to conquer the eternal hills that had refused passage to
the ships of the world for so many centuries, kept up its courage and
renewed its attack. The result is that ships sail through Culebra and
that engineers everywhere have new records of efficiency to inspire
them.
These efficiency records are told in the cost-keeping reports based
upon one of the most careful and thorough cost-accounting systems ever
devised. This system was instituted for the purpose of keeping a check
upon all expenditures by reducing everything to a unit basis and then
comparing the cost of doing the same thing at different places. For
instance, if it were found that it cost more to excavate a cubic yard
of material at one place than at another, under identical conditions,
this fact was brought to the attention of the men responsible and an
intimation given that there seemed to be room for taking up a little
lost motion. The lost motion usually was recovered or else someone had
to be satisfied that conditions were not identical after all.
In no other part of the canal work do these cost-keeping reports tell
such a graphic story as in Culebra Cut. In spite of the fact that as
the cut became deeper it became narrower, and the slides and breaks
became more troublesome, to say nothing of the extra effort required
to get the excavated material out of the cut, every unit cost was
forced down notch by notch and year by year until the bottom in costs
was reached only a little before the actual bottom of the cut was
exposed to view.
For instance, in 1908 it cost 11-1/2 cents a yard to load material
with steam shovels, while in 1912 it cost less than 7 cents. In 1908
it cost more than 14 cents a yard for drilling and blasting; in 1912
it cost less than 12 cents. In 1908 it cost $18.54 to haul away a
hundred yards of spoil; in 1912 it required only $13.31 to perform the
same operation, although the average distance it had to be hauled had
increased 50 per cent. In 1908 it cost more than 13 cents a yard to
dump the material as compared with less than 5 cents in 1912. The
whole operation of excavating and removing the material, including
overhead charges and depreciation, fell from $1.03 a cubic yard in
1908 to less than 55 cents a yard in 1912. And that is why 232,000,000
cubic yards of material were removed for less than it was estimated
135,000,000 cubic yards would cost.
To remove the 105,000,000 cubic yards of earth from the backbone of
the Americas required about 6,000,000 pounds of high-grade dynamite
each year to break up the material, so that it might be successfully
attacked by the steam shovels. To prepare the holes for placing the
explosives required the services of 150 well drills, 230 tripod rock
drills, and a large corps of hand drillers. Altogether they drilled
nearly a thousand miles of holes annually. During every working day in
the year about 600 holes were fired. They had an average depth of
about 19 feet. In addition to this a hundred toe holes were fired each
day, and as many more "dobe" blasts placed on top of large boulders to
break them up into loadable sizes. So carefully was the dynamite
handled that during a period of three years, in which time some
19,000,000 pounds were exploded in Culebra Cut, only eight men were
killed.
[Illustration: STEAM SHOVELS MEETING AT BOTTOM OF CULEBRA CUT
L. K. ROURKE]
[Illustration: THE MAN-MADE CANYON AT CULEBRA]
The transportation of the spoil from Culebra Cut was a tremendous job.
A large percentage of it was hauled out in Lidgerwood flat cars.
Twenty-one cars made up the average Lidgerwood train. It required
about 140 locomotives to take care of the spoil, and the average day
saw nearly 3,700 cars loaded and hauled out of the cut. In a single
year 1,116,286 carloads of material were hauled out. There were 75
trains in constant operation, for each 2-1/2 miles of track in the
Central Division, which was approximately 32 miles long. A huge steam
shovel, taking up 5 yards of material at a mouthful, would load one of
these trains in less than an hour with some 400 yards of material.
Then the powerful locomotive attached to it, assisted by a helper
engine, would pull the train out of the cut, and then, unassisted,
would haul it to the dumping ground some 12 miles or more away.
[Illustration: AVERAGE SHAPE AND DIMENSIONS OF CULEBRA CUT]
Arriving near the scene of the dump, another engine, having in front
of it a huge horizontal steam windlass mounted on a flat car, was
hooked on the rear end of the train. Then the locomotive which had
brought the train to the dump was uncoupled and moved away, and in its
stead there was attached an empty flat car, on which there was a huge
plow. A long wire cable was stretched from the big windlass at the
other end of the train and attached to this plow. As the drum of the
windlass began to turn it gradually drew the plow forward over the 21
cars, plowing the material off as it went forward. The cars were
equipped with a high sideboard on one side and had none at all on the
other. A flat surface over which the plow could pass from car to car
was made by hinging a heavy piece of sheet steel to the front end of
each car and allowing it to cover the break between that car and the
next, thus affording a practically continuous car floor over 800 feet
long. The operation of unloading 400 yards of material with this plow
seldom required more than 10 minutes.
After the plow had finished its work it left a long string of spoil on
one side of the track which must be cleared away. So another plow,
pushed by an engine, attacked the spoil and forced it down the
embankment. This process of unloading and spreading the material was
kept up until the embankment became wide enough to permit the track to
be shifted over. Here another especially designed machine, the track
shifter, was brought into play. It was a sort of derrick mounted on a
flat car, and with it the track shifters were able to pick up a piece
of track and lift it over to the desired position. With this machine a
score of men could do the work that without it would have required a
gang of 600 men.
In addition to the Lidgerwood dirt trains there were a large number of
trains made up of steel dump cars which were dumped by compressed air,
and still other trains made up of small hand-dumped cars, and each
class found its own peculiar uses.
As has been said, the problem of digging the big ditch has been one of
the transportation of the spoil, and this has involved numerous
difficulties. In Culebra Cut no little difficulty was experienced in
keeping open enough tracks to afford the necessary room for dirt
trains. Slides came down and forced track after track out of
alignment, burying some of them beyond the hope of usable recovery;
often the very bottom of the cut itself heaved up under the stress of
the heavy weight of faulty strata on the sides of the mountain; and
sometimes the slides and breaks threatened entirely to shut up one end
of the cut.
In hauling away the spoil one improvement after another was made in
the interest of efficiency. It was found at first that the capacity of
a big Lidgerwood flat car was only about 16 cubic yards, and that with
a sideboard on only one side of the car, the load did not center well
on the car, thus placing an undue strain on the wheels on one side.
The transportation department, therefore, extended the bed of the car
further out over the wheels on the open side, and this served a triple
purpose--it permitted the steam shovels to load the cars so that the
load rested in the center, increased the capacity of each car by about
3 yards, and permitted the unloader plow to throw the spoil further
from the track, thus adding to the efficiency of the dumping
apparatus.
Frequent breaks in the trains were caused by worn couplers. These
accidents were almost entirely overcome by equipping each train with a
sort of "bridle" which prevented the separation of the cars in the
event of the parting of a defective coupler. In the operation of the
unloader plows it was found that the big cables frequently broke when
a plow would strike an obstruction on the car, and this caused no end
of annoyance and frequent delays. Then someone thought of putting
between the cable and the plow a link whose breaking point was lower
than that of the cable. After that when a plow struck an obstruction
the cable did not part--the link simply gave way, and another was
always at hand. On the big spreaders no less than 51 improvements were
made, each the answer of the engineers to some challenge from the
stubborn material with which they had to contend.
The major portion of the material excavated from the canal had to be
hauled out and dumped where it was of no further use. From the Central
Division alone, which includes Culebra Cut, upward of a hundred
million cubic yards of material was hauled away and dumped as useless.
At Tabernilla one dump contained nearly 17,000,000 cubic yards. A
great deal of spoil, however, was used to excellent advantage.
Wherever there was swampy ground contiguous to the permanent
settlements it was covered over with material from the cut and brought
up above the water level. Many hundreds of acres were thus converted
from malaria-breeding grounds into high and dry lands.
During the last stages of the work in Culebra Cut it was found that
some of the slides were so bad that they were breaking back of the
crest of the hills that border the cut. Therefore it was found to be
feasible to attack the problem by sluicing the material down the side
of the hills into the valley beyond. To this end a big hydraulic plant
which had been used on the Pacific end of the canal was brought up and
installed beyond the east bank of the cut. A reservoir of water was
impounded and tremendous pumps installed. They pumped a stream of
water 40 inches in diameter. This was gradually tapered down to a
number of 4-inch nozzles, and out of these spouted streams of water
with a pressure of 80 pounds to the square inch. These streams ate
away the dirt at a rapid rate.
The slides did not hold up the completion of the canal a minute, at
least to the point of usability. The day that the lock gates were
ready there was water enough in the canal to carry the entire American
navy from ocean to ocean. That day the big dredges from the Atlantic
and the Pacific were brought into the cut, and with them putting the
finishing touches on the slides at the bottom, and the hydraulic
excavators attacking them at the top, the problem of the slides was
solved.
Viewing Culebra Cut in retrospect, it proved an immensely less
difficult task than some prophesied, and a much more serious one than
others predicted. There were those who opposed the building of the
Panama Canal because of the belief that Culebra Cut could not be dug,
that Culebra Mountain was an effective barrier to human ambition.
Also, there were those who asserted that Gold Hill and Contractor's
Hill were in danger of sliding into the big ditch and that they were
mountains which neither the faith nor the pocketbooks of the Americans
could remove. Others saw the handwriting of Failure on the wall in
the heaving up of the bottom of the cut, interpreting this as a
movement from the very depths of the earth. Still others saw it in the
smoke that issued from fissures in the cut, which spoke to them of
volcanoes being unearthed and told them that the Babel of American
ambitions must totter to the ground. They did not know that these were
only little splotches of decomposing metals suddenly exposed to the
air, any more than their fellow pessimists knew that the heaving up of
the bottom of the cut was due to the pressure of the earth on the
adjacent banks.
To-day Culebra Mountain bows its lofty head to the genius of the
American engineer and to the courage of the canal army. Through its
vitals there runs a great artificial canyon nearly 9 miles long, 300
feet wide at its bottom, in places as much as a half mile wide at its
top and nearly 500 feet deep at the deepest point. Out of it there was
taken 105,000,000 cubic yards of material, and at places it cost as
much as $15,000,000 a mile to make the excavations. Through it now
extends a great ribbon of water broad enough to permit the largest
vessels afloat to pass one another under their own power, and deep
enough to carry a ship with a draft beyond anything in the minds of
naval constructors to-day. With towering hills lining it on either
side, with banks that are precipitous here and farflung there, with
great and deep recesses at one place and another telling of the
gigantic breaks and slides with which the men who built it had to
contend, going through Culebra Cut gives to the human heart a thrill
such as the sight of no other work of the human hand can give. Its
magnitude, its awe-inspiring aspect as one navigates the channel
between the two great hills which stand like sentinels above it, and
the memory of the thousands of tons of dynamite, the hundreds of
millions of money and the vast investment of brain and brawn required
in its digging, all conspire to make the wonder greater. It is the
mightiest deed the hand of man has done.
CHAPTER VII
ENDS OF THE CANAL
While the completed Panama Canal does not wed the two oceans, or
permit their waters to mingle in Gatun Lake, it does bring them a
little closer together. On the Atlantic side a sea-level channel has
been dug from deep water due south to Gatun, a distance of 7 miles. On
the Pacific side a similar channel has been dug from deep water in a
northwesterly direction to Miraflores, a distance of 8 miles. It
follows that 15 of the 50 miles of the canal will be filled with salt
water. The remaining 35 miles will be filled with fresh water supplied
by the Chagres and the lesser rivers of Panama. The task of digging
these sea-level sections was a considerable one and almost every
method of ditch digging that human ingenuity has been able to devise
was employed. Steam shovels, dipper dredges, ladder dredges,
stationary suction dredges, and sea-going suction dredges, all
contributed their share toward bringing the waters of the Atlantic to
Gatun and those of the Pacific to Miraflores. In addition to these
methods, on the Pacific side use was made of the hydraulic process of
excavating soft material, washing it loose with powerful streams of
water and pumping it out with giant pumps.
[Illustration: THE DISASTROUS EFFECTS OF SLIDES IN CULEBRA CUT]
[Illustration: W. G. COMBER
U. S. LADDER DREDGE "COROZAL" AND ONE OF HER MUD BUCKETS]
As one travels along the Pacific end of the canal he is reminded of
the words of Isaiah:
"Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall
be made low; and the uneven shall be made level, and the rough
places a plain."
Hundreds of acres of low, marshy land have been filled up, either with
mud from the suction dredges and the hydraulic excavators, or with
spoil from Culebra Cut. Much of this made land will be valuable for
tropical agriculture, while other parts will never serve any purpose
other than to keep down the marshes. But they afforded a dumping
ground for material taken out of the canal prism, and added something
to the improvement of health and living conditions on the Isthmus.
Probably the most interesting process of excavation in the sea-level
channels was that of the sea-going suction dredges. These dredges took
out material more cheaply than any other kind of excavating machinery
used on the Isthmus. Two of them were put to work in 1908, about the
time the operations reached full-blast and have been kept in
commission ever since. While it cost as much as $70,000 a year to keep
each one in commission, they were able to maintain an annual average
of about 5,000,000 cubic yards of material excavated at a cost per
yard of 5 cents and even less. With steam shovels it ranged from 10 to
20 times as much per yard. These big dredges were built with great
bins in their holds and equipped with powerful 20-inch centrifugal
pumps. When at work they steamed up and down the channel, sucking up
the mud, and carrying it out to sea.
Another interesting dredge used was the big ladder dredge Corozal. It
is a great floating dock, as it were, with a huge endless chain
carrying 52 immense, 35-cubic-foot buckets. On the center line
amidships there is a large opening down to the water. The big elevator
framework carrying the endless chain goes down through this and into
the water at a considerable angle. The buckets pass around this, and
as they round the end of it their great steel lips dig down into the
material until filled, then they come up at the rate of three every
five seconds and deposit their burden in a huge hopper which conveys
it to the barge at the side of the dredge. The dredge is anchored fast
at a given place, and keeps on attacking the material beneath it until
the desired level is reached. This dredge, with the sea-going suction
dredges, will be retained as the permanent dredging fleet. The
stationary suction dredges at the two ends of the canal were used to
pump up the soft material and to force it out through long pipe lines
into the swamps or into the hydraulic cores of the earth dams.
[Illustration: THE _Corozal_ AND ITS METHOD OF ATTACK]
Several old French ladder dredges were rescued from the jungle and put
into commission at the beginning of the work, and they held out
faithfully to the end, dividing honors with the newer equipment in
hastening the day when the oceans might go inland to Gatun and
Miraflores. While they looked like toys beside such giant excavators
as the Corozal, they probably showed more efficiency than any other
class of excavators of their period of construction. They were
attended by large self-propelling scows built by the French. When
these were filled they steamed out to sea and dumped their burden and
then steamed back again for another load. Some of the dredges were
attended by ordinary barges which were towed out to sea by tugs and
dumped.
Another interesting machine used on the Pacific end of the canal was
the Lobnitz rock breaker. This consists of a sort of pile driver
mounted on a large barge. Instead of a pile driving weight there is a
big battering ram made of round steel, pointed at one end. It is
lifted up perhaps 10 feet and allowed to drop suddenly. As some of
these rams weigh as much as 25 tons their striking force may be
imagined. When the ram struck the rock the top would shake back and
forth like a bamboo pole, in spite of the fact that it was made of the
best steel and more than 15 inches in diameter. Sooner or later the
rams would break off at the water line, this being due to the fact
that the constant flexion at that point set the molecules in the steel
and took away all its elasticity.
It was found desirable to excavate a part of the sea-level channel
before the water was let into it. To accomplish this a big dam, or
dike, was built across the channel several miles inland, and steam
shovels were used behind this dike. As the work neared completion,
however, it was found advisable to let the water come further inland,
so that the dredges could extend the field of their activities. To do
this another dike was thrown across the channel about a mile north of
the first one, and water was admitted to the section of the big ditch
between these two dikes. The engineers were afraid to cut a small
ditch in the top of the first dike, and allow the water to eat the dam
away as it flowed in, for fear that it would rush in so rapidly it
would destroy the second dike. Therefore they filled the basin between
the two dikes by siphon and by pumping, a process which required the
drawing in of billions of gallons of water. This was accomplished in
due time, however, and then 16 tons of dynamite was placed in the no
longer useful dike. An electric spark did the rest.
The distinguishing features of the ends of the canal are the big
breakwaters at Toro Point, at the Atlantic end, and Naos Island, at
the Pacific end. The former extends from the shore out into the sea
for a distance of 2 miles and has a large lighthouse at the seaward
end. It was built by dumping stone from the shore out into the sea,
this process being followed by driving piles into the dumped stone and
building a railroad on the crest, over which the stone was hauled for
its further extension. The top of the breakwater is covered with huge
stones weighing from 8 to 20 tons each, these to make sure that it
will stand against the pounding of the waves. Two minor breakwaters
were also built at the Atlantic end to protect the terminal basin.
The big dike at Naos Island in the Pacific is more than 17,000 feet
long and transforms the island into the cape of a small peninsula.
There was a threefold purpose in its construction--to cut out the
cross currents that brought thousands of yards of sand and silt into
the canal channel, to afford a dumping place for a large quantity of
the spoil from Culebra Cut, and to make a connection with the mainland
for the fortifications on Naos, Flamenco, and Perico Islands. In
building it the engineers were under the necessity of first building a
trestle on which the spoil trains could be backed and dumped. The
piles had to be driven in soft, blue mud, and as the rock was dumped,
it sank down and down until, at places, ten times as much stone was
required as would have been necessary if the ocean bottom had been
firm. In addition to this thousands of trainloads of material were
dumped in the landward end of the dike, some 20,000,000 cubic yards of
material being thus disposed of.
The last part of the canal work to be completed will be the terminal
facilities at the ends of the big waterway. At the time this book went
to press they were something more than a year from completion, but the
indications were that they would be finished within the time limit
originally set for the completion of the canal itself. These terminal
facilities consist of dry docks, wharfage space, storehouses, and
everything else necessary to perform any service that might ordinarily
be required for passing ships, whether they be those of commerce or of
war. The main coaling station is to be established at the Atlantic
end. The storehouses, the laundry, the bakery, and the other equipment
of the Isthmian Canal Commission and the Panama Railroad also will be
made a part of the permanent terminal plant on that side of the
Isthmus.
A large dry dock is being built at the Pacific end having the same
usable dimensions as the canal locks, capable of accommodating any
vessel that can pass through the canal. The principal machine shops
will also be erected there, and a coaling plant of half the capacity
of the one at the Atlantic end will be provided. A little to the east
of the Pacific terminal works will be stationed the capital of the
Canal Zone, where the administrative offices, the governor's
residence, and two new towns will be built. The administration
building, which is to be a three-story structure of concrete, hollow
tile, and structural steel, is to occupy an eminence on the side of
Ancon Hill, which will afford a splendid view of the Pacific
fortifications, the entrance to the canal channel, a part of the port
works, and of the canal itself from the great continental divide to
the Pacific.
There one may sit and see ships coming into the canal, tying up at the
docks, sailing up the big ditch, and passing through the locks at
Miraflores and Pedro Miguel. Near by will be the permanent home of the
marines who will be stationed on the Isthmus, their barracks and
grounds occupying the broad plateau on the side of Ancon Hill made by
taking out the millions of cubic yards of stone required for the
concrete works on the Pacific side of the Isthmus. Two permanent towns
will be built at Balboa, one for the Americans and the other for the
common laborers. The American town will be built under the capitol
hill on a broad plain that was made by pumping hydraulic material into
a swamp and by dumping spoil from Culebra Cut.
When the terminal plant at Balboa is completed it will represent
probably the most extensive and adequate port works in the New World.
In addition to the main dry dock it will have a second one which will
be smaller, but which will be large enough to accommodate a majority
of the ships that will pass through the canal. The existing dry dock
at the Atlantic end will be continued in service.
It is certain that none of these port works will ever fail by reason
of insecure foundations. Wherever unusual loads were to be carried
great piers of reinforced concrete were sent down to solid rock, often
a distance of 60 feet below the surface. They consisted of a hollow
shell of reinforced concrete which was allowed to sink to hardpan of
its own accord or under heavy weight. These shells were built in
sections 6 feet high. The bottom section was 10 feet in diameter, and
the lower end was equipped with a sharp steel shoe. As the section cut
down into the earth of its own weight and that above it, laborers on
the inside removed the material under the shoe and as they did so it
sank further down. The sections above were only 8 feet in diameter,
and did not quite fill up the hole made by the bottom of the section,
thus overcoming all skin friction, and permitting the full weight of
the series of sections to fall on the lower one. A jet of water was
forced around the sinking pier all the time it was going down, and
this made its progress the more easy. At times the weight of the
superimposed sections was sufficient to force the pier down through
the soft mud, while at other times the material became so heavy that
even a 25-ton weight on top of the pier scarcely moved it. At one
place a stratum of material was struck about 25 feet below the surface
which yielded sulphuretted hydrogen gas. This affected the laborers'
eyes, and some of them had to go to the hospital for treatment. The
work of digging out the material was continued until the lower section
reached bed rock, where it was anchored. The sections themselves were
tied together with heavy iron rods. After they were firmly in place
the interior was filled up with concrete, itself reinforced, so that
the foundations became, in reality, a series of huge concrete piles, 8
feet in diameter, anchored to bed rock.
The coaling plants at the two terminals will be the crowning features
of the terminal facilities. With an immense storage capacity, and with
every possible facility for the rapid handling of coal, both in
shipping and unshipping it, no other canal in the world will be so
well equipped. The coal storage basin at the Atlantic end will hold
nearly 300,000 tons. This basin will be built of reinforced concrete,
and will permit the flooding of the coal pile so that one-half of it
will be stored under water for war purposes. It is said that
deterioration in coal is not as great in subaqueous storage, and at
the same time the pile is less subject to fire. The plant will be able
to discharge a thousand tons of coal an hour and to load 2,000 tons an
hour. Ships will not go alongside the wharves to be coaled, but will
lie out in the ship basin and be coaled from barges with reloader
outfits. Special efforts have been made to provide for the quick
loading of colliers in case of war. The coal handling plant at the
Pacific entrance will have a normal capacity of 135,000 tons and will
be able to handle half as much coal in a given time as the one at the
Atlantic end.
There will be big supply depots where ships can get any kind of stores
they need from a few buckets of white lead to an anchor or a hawser; a
laundry in which a ship's wash can be accepted at the hour it begins
its transit of the canal, for delivery by railroad at the other end
before it is ready to resume its ocean journey; an ice plant which
will replenish the cold storage compartments of ships lacking such
facilities. In short, it is proposed to attempt to do everything that
may be done to make more attractive the bid of the canal for its share
of business.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PANAMA RAILROAD
When the United States acquired the properties of the new French Canal
Company it found itself in the possession of a railroad for which it
had allowed the canal company $7,000,000. This road, in the high tide
of its history, had proved a bonanza for its stockholders, and during
the 43 years between 1855 and 1898 it showed net profits five times as
great as the original cost of its construction.
When the United States took over the road someone described it as
being merely "two streaks of rust and a right of way." While the
Panama road as acquired by the United States in its purchase of the
assets of the new French Canal Company might have been all that this
phrase implies, it was none the less as great a bargain as was ever
bought by any Government, and probably the greatest bargain ever sold
in the shape of a railroad. It was not the rolling stock that was
valuable, nor yet the road itself; the real value was to be found in
the possibilities of the concession. Not only was this road destined
to render to the United States a service in the building of the Panama
Canal, worth to Uncle Sam a great many times more than its cost, but
it was also destined to yield a net profit from its commercial
operations which in 10 years would amount to double the price paid for
it. Since the Americans took it over it has been yielding net returns
ranging from a million and a quarter to a million and three-quarters
dollars a year. In these 10 years it has brought an aggregate profit
of some $15,000,000 into the coffers of the United States.
While $7,000,000 may have been a high price, judged from the
standpoint of the physical value of the road, it was a very reasonable
one, indeed, as compared with the price paid for it by the new French
Canal Company. This company, which sold it to the United States for
$7,000,000, paid the Panama Railroad Company $18,000,000 for it 23
years before. When the French Canal Company decided to undertake the
building of the canal, it found that the Panama Railroad Company held
concessions that were absolutely necessary to the construction of the
canal. The Colombian Government had granted the company the concession
to complete the road in 1849, and had agreed that no other
interoceanic communication should be opened without the consent of the
railroad. This gave to the railroad company the whip hand in trading
with the canal company and it was able to name its own price.
When the United States wanted to buy the rights and properties of the
new French Canal Company the shoe was on the other foot. There was
only one buyer--the United States; and it could choose between the
Panama and Nicaragua routes. If the United States did not buy the
property its principal value would have been what it was worth as an
uncertain prospect that at some future time a second Isthmian canal
might be built. That is why the United States was able to buy from the
French for $7,000,000 property that they had bought for $18,000,000.
After the United States acquired possession of the railroad, one
change after another took place--now in the location, now in the
rolling stock, now in directorate, and again in location--until almost
all that remained of the original road was its name. It is now built
almost every foot of the distance on a new location and the permanent
Panama Railroad is a thoroughly modern, well-ballasted, heavy-railed,
block-signal operated line of railway, built along the east bank of
the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Nearly half of the
old right of way lies on the bottom of Lake Gatun, while the new line
skirts that artificial body of water along its eastern shore, at
places crossing its outlying arms over big bridges and heavy trestles.
The construction of this new line was attended with much difficulty
and probably no other road in the world has such a great percentage of
fills and embankments in proportion to its length. One embankment, a
mile and a quarter long and 82 feet high, required upward of 2,500,000
yards of material for its construction. The road is built about 10
feet above the water's edge, and more than 12,000,000 cubic yards of
material was required to make the fills necessary to carry the road
bed at this elevation.
When the United States took over the French property it was decided
that the canal work and the railroad operations should be maintained
as distinct activities. It was agreed that the Canal Commission
should have the right to haul its dirt trains over the Panama
Railroad, and in compensation therefor the commission undertook to
build a new road to take the place of the old line, which was in the
way of the completion of the canal.
The work of relocating the road was undertaken early in the
construction of the canal in order that it might be completed by the
time the old road had to be abandoned. It was built at a cost of
approximately $9,000,000, or close to $170,000 a mile. It is
interesting to note that the cost of this thoroughly modern railroad
was only about a million dollars more than the cost of the first
Panama road which has been built with rather less than usual attention
to grades, and with small rails and light bridges. The relocated
Panama Railroad was turned over to the railroad company in 1912.
How good a bargain the United States secured when it acquired the
Panama Railroad is shown by the fact that during the 10 years of canal
work the net earnings of the railroad company have reimbursed the
United States for the cost of the old road and the construction of the
new one, to say nothing of the invaluable aid rendered in the building
of the canal.
The relations existing between the Isthmian Canal Commission and the
Panama Railroad Company during the years of the construction of the
canal were somewhat peculiar. The Panama Railroad Company is as much
the property of the United States as the canal itself, yet the books
of the two organizations were kept as carefully separate and distinct
as though they were under entirely different ownership. The Panama
Railroad Company, being a chartered corporation, under the terms of
its ownership could engage in commercial business with all of the
facility of a private corporation. Money received by the Isthmian
Canal Commission from outside sources had to be covered into the
treasury and reappropriated for distinct and special purposes. On the
other hand, the railroad company could use its money over and over
again without turning it back into the treasury. This advantage of
operation was a useful one in conducting the road itself, and also in
the construction of the canal.
There was another reason which led the canal authorities to advocate
the maintenance of the two organizations as separate entities. This
had to do with the concession rights. Under the terms of the
concession of the railroad company the property was to revert to the
Republic of Colombia in 1967, or at any earlier date should the
company cease to exist as such. While most authorities agree that with
the secession of Panama and the setting up of the new Government all
of Colombia's rights in the railroad company passed with the
territory, and while the treaty between the United States and the
Republic of Panama expressly provides that the United States shall
have "absolute title--free from every present or reversionary interest
or claim" in the railroad, the Republic of Colombia contends that it
possesses some rights with reference to the railroad and, not desiring
to complicate matters, the canal authorities thought it best to live
up to the letter of the treaty, in spite of Panama's express grant of
title free from reversionary interest or claim.
While it was deemed desirable to have the Panama Railroad operated as
a separate organization, it was equally important that it should be
operated in a way that its interests always would be subordinate to
those of the canal. It was decided that the best way to accomplish
this was to make the chairman and chief engineer of the Canal
Commission the president of the railroad company, and the members of
the commission its directors. The stock of the company is held in the
name of the Secretary of War, with the exception of a few shares held
by the directors to entitle them to membership on the board. There are
also a few directors chosen from other parts of the Government
service, but their activities are purely perfunctory.
In addition to the railroad, the Panama Railroad Company also operates
a steamship line between New York and Colon. This line was acquired
with other properties of the new French Canal Company as a part of the
Panama Railroad's holdings. There were only a few years during the
construction period when this steamship line did not show a loss. But
the advantages of having a steamship line for carrying the supplies of
the canal were so great, because of the special facilities that could
be provided, that the loss was more than compensated by them. During
the year 1912 the cost of operating this steamship line was $305,000
greater than the revenues derived from its operation. But, at the same
time there was a return of net earnings by the Panama Railroad of
over $2,000,000, at least a part of which was made possible by the
operation of the steamship line. Even after deducting the losses
sustained in the operation of the steamship company there was a net
profit of more than $1,700,000, which for a railroad of less than 50
miles in length is no small item.
As a matter of fact, Government ownership of railways as applied at
Panama is remarkably successful from the standpoint of the Government,
and partially so to the patrons of the railroad. Probably no railroad
in the United States could show net earnings per mile of line anywhere
comparable with those of the Panama Railroad.
The rates for passengers and baggage across the Isthmus were rather
high for first-class passengers, the fare for the 48-mile trip being
$2.40, or 5 cents a mile. The second-class rate was only half as much.
On the handling of freight the railroad had to divide the through rate
with the steamship companies of the Atlantic and the Pacific, but,
while the rates were high, judged by American standards, and the
percentages of profits very large, the service maintained was so
superior to that encountered on the privately owned railroads of the
Tropics that no one ever seriously complained of the charges.
One of the most important services rendered by the Panama Railroad
Company in the construction of the canal was in connection with the
commissary. It had more to do with the maintenance of a reasonable
standard of living cost on the Isthmus than anything else.
When the canal was nearing completion it became advisable to
determine what rôle the Panama Railroad should play after the
permanent organization went into effect. Should it be continued as a
separate entity distinct from the canal but controlled by the canal
authorities? Or should it be merged into the Canal Government and
operated purely as an auxiliary of the canal with no separate
existence? This matter was carefully weighed by the canal authorities
and the Government at Washington, and it was finally decided that the
best plan would be to operate them as separate entities, but to have
all the work done by single organization. Another question that arose
was whether the Panama Railroad Steamship Line should be operated as a
Government line after the completion of the canal. Recalling the fact
that the line never had been a profitable one, and that there was no
further reason why it should be continued in operation with an annual
deficit, the recommendation was made by the chairman and the chief
engineer that the ships should be disposed of and the line
discontinued.
As the tide of tourist travel set toward Panama, the serious problem
of taking care of thousands of visitors confronted the canal
authorities. There were times when every available facility for taking
care of lodgers was called into requisition, and still hundreds of
American tourists had to find quarters in cheap, vermin-infested
native hotels at Colon. Believing that the situation demanded a modern
hotel at the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, and having in mind the
success of the Government in the construction and maintenance of the
Tivoli Hotel at the Pacific side, it was decided by the Secretary of
War that the Panama Railroad Company should build a new hotel at
Colon, to be operated by that company for the Government. The result
was the beautiful Washington Hotel, in whose architecture one finds
the world's best example of northern standards of hotel construction
adapted to tropical needs.
Built of concrete and cement block, it is constructed in a modified
Spanish Mission style that makes it cool and comfortable at all times.
Its public rooms, from the main lobby to the dining-rooms, from the
ladies' parlor to the telephone and cable rooms, from the barber shop
to the billiard room, are large, airy, and most attractively
furnished. Its ball room, opening on three sides to the breezes borne
in from the Caribbean is a delight to the disciples of Terpsichore,
while its open-air swimming pool, said to be the largest hotel
swimming pool in the world, affords ideal facilities for those who
otherwise would sigh for the surf. Persons who have visited every
leading hotel in the New World, from the Rio Grande southward to the
Strait of Magellan, say that it is without a superior in all that
region and, perhaps, without an equal except for one in Buenos Aires.
Here one may find accommodations to suit his taste and largely to meet
the necessities of his pocketbook. The best rooms with bath cost $5 a
day for one, or $6 for two. Table d'hote meals are served at $1 each,
while those who prefer it may secure club breakfasts and a la carte
service. Anyone who has visited the Hotel Washington, situated as it
is on Colon Beach, where the breakers sweep in from the Caribbean Sea,
feels that Uncle Sam is no less successful as a hotel keeper than as
a builder of canals.
The Panama Railroad, under the American régime, has always looked well
after the comfort of its patrons. The coaches are of the standard
American type, and enough of them are run on every train to make it
certain that no patron need stand for lack of a seat. The most popular
trains carry from 8 to 12 cars. These trains are run on convenient
schedules, permitting a person to go and come from any point on the
road in any forenoon or afternoon. All coaches are supplied with
hygienic drinking cups, and in every way the Panama Railroad shows
that Uncle Sam is solicitous for the welfare of his patrons.
All the rolling stock on the Isthmus is built on a 5-foot gauge, this
having been the gauge of the original Panama Railroad. As the rolling
stock of the Canal Commission had to run over the lines of the Panama
Railroad, it also was built on the gauge. When this rolling stock is
disposed of it will be necessary to readjust the gauge to meet the
ordinary American standard which is 2-1/2 inches narrower. It has been
estimated that the engine axles can be shortened for $750 per
locomotive and those of cars at prices ranging from $27 to $31 per
car.
The first attempt to build the Panama Railroad was made in 1847, when
a French company secured a charter from the Government of Colombia for
a building of a road across the Isthmus. This company was unable to
finance the project and the concession lapsed.
In 1849 William H. Aspinwall, John L. Stevens, and Henry Chauncey,
New York capitalists, undertook the construction of the road. The
terms of the concession provided that the road would be purchased by
the Government at the expiration of 20 years after its completion for
$5,000,000. The loss of life in the construction of this road, serious
as it was, has been monumentally exaggerated. It is an oft-repeated
statement that a man died for every tie laid on the road. This would
mean that there were 150,000 deaths in its construction. As a matter
of fact, the total number of persons employed during the six years the
line was being built did not exceed 6,000. But among these the death
rate was very high. Several thousand Chinese were brought over and
they died almost like flies. Malaria and yellow fever were the great
scourges they had to encounter, although smallpox and other diseases
carried away hundreds.
The road was completed in January, 1855. Before the last rail was laid
more than $2,000,000 had been taken in for hauling passengers as far
as the road extended. The way in which the original 50-cent per mile
rate across the Isthmus was established is interesting. The chief
engineer encountered much trouble from people who wanted to use the
road as far inland as it went from Colon, so he suggested that a
50-cent rate be established, thinking to make it prohibitory. But the
people who wanted to cross the Isthmus were willing to pay even 50
cents a mile. Hence for years after the completion of the road the
passenger rate continued at $25 for the one-way trip across the
Isthmus.
The railroad proved to be such an unexpectedly good investment that
the Republic of Colombia began to establish its claim to acquire
ownership of the road at the expiration of the 2-year term, which
would take place in 1875. It was necessary therefore, that the
railroad company should take steps to save the railroad from a forced
sale with $5,000,000 as the consideration. Representatives were
dispatched to Bogota with instructions to get an extension of the
concession under the most favorable terms possible. As it was realized
that the Republic of Colombia held the whip hand in the negotiations,
the railroad company understood that if it wished to escape selling
its great revenue producing road for $5,000,000 it would have to meet
any terms Colombia might dictate. The result of this mission was an
agreement by the railroad that in consideration of an extension of the
concession for a term of 99 years it would pay to the Colombian
Government $1,000,000 spot cash and $250,000 a year during the life of
the concession. That annual payment was continued as long as the
Isthmus remained a part of the Republic of Colombia. Under the terms
of the treaty between the United States and the Republic of Panama it
was resumed again in 1913, to be paid by the United States to the
Republic of Panama throughout all the years that the United States
maintains and operates the Panama Canal.
CHAPTER IX
SANITATION
Primarily, the conquest of the Isthmian barrier was the conquest of
the mosquito. Not mountains to be leveled, nor wild rivers to be
tamed, nor yet titanic machinery to be installed, presented the
gravest obstacles to the canal builders. Their most feared enemies
were none of these, but the swarms of mosquitoes that bred in myriads
in every lake, in every tiny pool, in every clump of weeds on the
rain-soaked, steaming, tropical land. For these mosquitoes were the
bearers of the dread germs of yellow fever and of malaria; and the
conditions that encouraged their multiplication bred also typhoid and
all manner of filthy disease. Each mosquito was a potential messenger
of death. The buzzing, biting pests had defeated the French in Panama
without the French ever having recognized the source of the attack. It
was because the Americans, thanks to Great Britain and to Cuba, knew
the deadly qualities of the mosquitoes that they were able to plan,
under the leadership of Col. W. C. Gorgas, a sanitary campaign of
unprecedented success. It achieved two victories. One was that it made
of the Canal Zone the most healthful strip of land under tropic skies.
The other is the Panama Canal.
When one looks about in an effort to place the credit for these great
sanitary achievements he must go back to Cuba, where the yellow fever
commission, consisting of Reed, Carroll, Lazear, and Agrimonte, made
the remarkable investigations proving that yellow fever is
transmissible only through the bite of a mosquito. He must go still
further back to Maj. Roland Ross of the British Army, and his
epoch-making discovery that malaria is conveyed only by the bite of
another kind of mosquito. And, if he is just to all who have
contributed to the establishment of the insect-bearing theory of
disease, he must not forget Sir Patrick Manson who first proved that
any disease could be transmitted by insect bites. It was he who
discovered that filariasis is transmissible by this method alone. It
was from him that Ross gathered the inspiration that is releasing
humanity from one of the most insidious of all the diseases to which
mortal flesh is heir. And it was from Ross's malaria discoveries, in
turn, that Reed carried forward to successful proof the theory which
had persisted in some quarters for generations that yellow fever was
transmissible through mosquitoes; a theory already partially proved by
Dr. Carlos Finley, of Havana, 20 years earlier.
[Illustration: COL. WILLIAM C. GORGAS
THE HOSPITAL GROUNDS, ANCON]
[Illustration: LIEUT. FREDERIC MEARS
THE OLD PANAMA RAILROAD]
But all of the surmises and theories came short of the truth until
Reed, Carroll, Lazear, and Agrimonte (Lazear at the cost of his life
and Carroll at the cost of a nearly fatal attack of yellow fever) took
up the work of proving that there was only one way in which yellow
fever could be transmitted; namely, by the bite of the mosquito.
Sleeping with patients who had yellow fever, wearing the clothes of
those who had died from it, eating from utensils from which yellow
fever victims had eaten--in short, putting to the most rigid test
every other possible method of infection, they proved by every
negative test that yellow fever could not be produced in any way other
than by the bite of a mosquito.
The next step was to give affirmative proof that yellow fever was
caused by the bite of the female "stegomyia"--she of the striped
stockings and the shrill song. This meant that someone had to have
enough love for humanity to risk his life by inviting one of the worst
forms of death to which human flesh is heir. Those doctors knew that
they could not as brave men ask others to undergo the risks that they
themselves might not accept, so in a little council chamber in Havana
the three Americans--Reed, Carroll, and Lazear--entered into a compact
that they themselves would permit infected mosquitoes to bite them.
Reed was called home, but Carroll and Lazear stood with the keen and
cold eyes of scientists and saw the mosquitoes inject the fateful
poison into their blood. Later, after Lazear had died and Carroll had
stood in the jaws of death, soldiers of the American army in Cuba
volunteered in the interest of humanity to undergo these same risks.
And it was thus, at this price, that the world came to know how yellow
fever is caused, and that the United States was to be able to build
the Panama Canal.
After the guilt of the female "stegomyia" mosquito was firmly
established the next problem was to find a method of combating her
work. Dr. Reed and his associates thought that it might be done
through a process of immunization, using the mosquito to bite patients
with very mild cases, and after the necessary period of incubation, to
transmit the disease to those who were to be rendered immune. It was
soon found, however, that there was no method of transmitting a mild
infection, and the next problem was to combat the work of the mosquito
by isolation of yellow fever patients, and by the extermination of the
mosquitoes themselves.
In Havana at this time there was another army surgeon who was destined
to write his name high upon the pages of medical achievement. He was
Dr. William C. Gorgas. Under the patronage of Gen. Leonard Wood,
himself a physician and alive to the lessons of the yellow fever
commission's investigations, Major Gorgas undertook to apply the
doctrine of yellow fever prevention promulgated by the commission, and
his efforts were attended with brilliant success. The result was that
Havana, in particular, and Cuba, in general, were freed from this
great terror of the Tropics. When President Roosevelt came to provide
for the building of the Panama Canal one of his earlier acts was to
appoint Dr. Gorgas the chief sanitary officer of the Canal Zone.
At first there was difficulty in establishing practical sanitation in
Panama. The chief sanitary officer was then a subordinate of the
commission, and, along with all of the other men who were trying to do
things on the Isthmus, he found himself hindered by unsatisfactory
conditions both as to supplies and as to force; consequently, his work
was no more satisfactory to himself than it was to the commission or
to the American people. Under these conditions an epidemic of yellow
fever broke out in Panama in 1905, and it was not long before the
yellow fever mosquito had seemingly established an alibi and had
secured a reopening of her case before the jury of public sentiment.
People, to emphasize their disbelief in the mosquito theory of the
transmission of the disease, tore the screens from their doors and
windows, and otherwise proclaimed their contempt for the doctors and
their doctrines. This matter went so far that the Isthmian Canal
Commission proposed not only a change in method but a change in
personnel as well.
At this juncture Charles E. Magoon became governor of the Canal Zone,
and he declared that Dr. Gorgas should have adequate financial and
moral support. He was determined that the panic which the yellow fever
outbreak had engendered should be halted--and a panic it was, for men
rushed madly to Colon and defied the efforts of the commission, and of
the captains and crews of the Panama Railroad steamships, to prevent
them from returning to the States without other transportation
arrangements than a determination to get aboard and stay there until
the Statue of Liberty had been passed in New York Harbor. So great was
this panic that Chief Engineer Stevens declared that there were three
diseases at Panama: Yellow fever, malaria, and cold feet: and that the
greatest of these was cold feet. The newspapers of the United States
at that time quoted the poetry of such writers as Gilbert, who said:
"Beyond the Chagres River
'Tis said (the story's old)
Are paths that lead to mountains
Of purest virgin gold;
But 'tis my firm conviction
What e'er the tales they tell,
That beyond the Chagres River
All paths lead straight to hell."
It did not matter that in four months there were only 47 deaths on the
Isthmus from yellow fever as compared with 108 from malaria in the
same period--men do not stop to study mortality tables and to compare
the relative fatalities of diseases when yellow fever stares them in
the face.
But after all, the yellow fever panic of 1905 served a good purpose,
for if the mosquito thereby secured a reopening of its case, it
stirred the United States Government to give to the sanitary officers
of the Canal Zone the powers they needed, and the means required to
prove finally and forever in the court of last resort, the guilt of
the mosquito, and to establish for once and all the method of
combating its stealthy work.
The whole world recognizes the remarkable results in sanitary work
that have been achieved at Panama. While it must be remembered that
the population of the Canal Zone is made up largely of able-bodied
men, and that, therefore, the death rate naturally would be lower than
under like conditions with a normal population of infancy and old
age, the fact remains that sanitary science has converted the Zone
from a mosquito paradise of swamp and jungle into a region where
mosquitoes have all but disappeared, and where men are as free from
danger of epidemic diseases as in the United States itself.
The sanitary statistics of the Canal Zone, and of the cities of Panama
and Colon, were based for several years upon an erroneous assumption
of population. The Department of Sanitation estimated the population
of the Canal Zone by deducting the recorded emigrants from the
recorded immigrants and assumed that the difference represented a
permanent addition to the Zone's population. Under this method of
estimating population a serious error crept in, since hundreds of
people came into Panama from the Panaman outports and were recorded as
arrivals, but who, departing in small sailing vessels and launches at
night after the port officers had gone home, were not recorded as
having departed. In this way the sanitary department estimates of
population in the Canal Zone reached a total of 93,000 in 1912. The
census taken that year showed only 62,000 population in the Zone. This
served to make the death rate given out by the Department of
Sanitation 50 per cent lower than was justified by actual population
conditions.
But one does not need to consider figures to realize what has been
accomplished at Panama. Anyone who goes there and sees the remarkable
evidence of the success of the efforts to conquer the disease of the
tropical jungles, finds a lesson taught that is too impressive to
need the confirmation of medical statistics.
The United States, after the yellow fever outbreak of 1905, never
counted the cost when the health of the canal army was at stake. Not
only was Uncle Sam successful in his efforts to make the Canal Zone
and the terminal cities of Panama and Colon healthful places of abode,
but no worker on the canal was denied the privilege of the best
medical care. An average of $2,000,000 a year was expended in the
prevention of sickness and the care of those who were sick. At Ancon
and at Colon large hospitals were maintained where the white American
and the West Indian negro had their respective wards. At Taboga a
large sanitarium was maintained to assist the recuperation of those
who had recovered sufficiently to leave the hospital. Besides this
there were rest camps along the line for those not ill enough to be
removed to the hospitals, and dispensaries where those who felt they
were not in need of other medical attention could consult with the
physicians and get the necessary medicines. All medical services to
the employees of the Canal Commission and the Panama Railroad were
free, and only nominal charges were made for members of their
families. No passenger train crossed the Isthmus of Panama without
carrying a hospital car for taking patients to or from the hospitals.
No way station was without its waiting shed bearing the inscription:
"For Hospital Patients Only." Each community had its dispensary, its
doctor, and its sanitary inspector.
During the year 1912 there were 48,000 cases of sickness in the Canal
Zone, of which 26,000 were white and 22,000 colored. During the same
year 633,000 trips to the dispensaries were made by employees and
nonemployees, divided almost evenly between white and colored. The
average number of employees constantly sick in Ancon Hospital was 712;
in Colon Hospital 209; and in Taboga Sanitarium 54. An average of 119
were in the sick camps all the time and 50 in the quarters. The
average number of days' treatment per employee in the hospitals was a
little over 14; in the sick camps a little under 3; and in quarters
2-1/3. It cost $160,000 a year to feed the patients in the hospitals
and $739,000 a year to operate the hospitals.
The work of sanitation proper cost some $400,000 a year. This includes
many items. During one year about 16,000,000 square yards of brush
were cut and burned; a million square yards of swamp were drained;
30,000,000 square yards of grass were cut; 250,000 feet of ditches
were dug; and some 2,000,000 linear feet of old ditches were cleaned.
During the same year nearly a million garbage cans and over 300,000
refuse cans were emptied. In addition to looking after the health of
the Canal Zone itself, it was necessary to care for that of the cities
of Panama and Colon. In the city of Panama 11,000 loads of sweepings
and 25,000 loads of garbage were removed in one year; 3,000,000
gallons of water were sprinkled on the streets and as much more
distributed to the poor of the city.
During one year the quarantine service, which keeps a strict lookout
for yellow fever, bubonic plague, and other epidemic diseases,
inspected over 100,000 passengers coming into the Zone. It required
about 150,000 gallons of mosquito oil a year to keep down the
mosquitoes. There are 50 known breeds of these insects on the Isthmus
and perhaps some 20 species more which have not been identified. Of
the 50 or more species of mosquitoes 11 belonged to the
malaria-producing family--anopheles. Their cousins of the
yellow-fever-producing family--the stegomyias--boast of only two
species. What the other 40 or more kinds are doing besides annoying
suffering humanity has not been determined. The mosquito is
comparatively easy to exterminate. Its life habits are such that a
terrific mortality may be produced among them during infancy. The
average young mosquito, during its "wriggler" state of development,
lives under the water and has to make about 8,000 trips to the surface
for air before it can spread its wings and fly. If oil is poured upon
the water it can get no air and death by asphyxiation follows. Two
classes of larvaecide are used on the waters to exterminate the baby
mosquitoes: One is an oil used to make a scum over the surface; the
other a carbolic solution which poisons the water. At the head of
every little rivulet and tiny, trickling stream one sees a barrel out
of which comes an endless drip! drip! drip! These drops of oil or
poison are carried down the stream and make inhospitable all of the
mosquito nurseries of the marshes through which the waters flow. In
addition to these barrels, men go about with tanks on their backs,
spraying the marshy ground and the small, isolated pools of water with
larvaecides.
[Illustration: SANITARY DRINKING CUP]
[Illustration: MOSQUITO OIL DRIP BARREL]
[Illustration: SPRAYING MOSQUITO OIL]
[Illustration: TYPICAL QUARTERS OF THE MARRIED LABORER]
[Illustration: A NATIVE HUT]
This method of treatment has not exterminated all mosquitoes on the
Isthmus, but it has so materially reduced their number that one may
stay in the Zone for weeks without seeing a single one. This is a
freedom, however, that must be paid for by vigilance of the most
painstaking and unremitting sort. The moment the work is relaxed the
mosquitoes again spread over the territory.
The United States Government will have to continue with the utmost
care its work of sanitation and quarantine at Panama. If, after the
canal is completed, an epidemic of bubonic plague or yellow fever
should break out, it might very seriously interfere with the operation
of the canal in several ways. To begin with, it would demoralize the
operating force. Further than this, India and China are afraid of
yellow fever because in both of these countries the stegomyia mosquito
abounds. If the disease should obtain a foothold there it would be
difficult to exterminate. Europe, also, might be expected to
quarantine against Panama under such conditions. A 10,000-ton
freighter carrying cargo through the canal would lose at least a
thousand dollars for every day it was detained in quarantine by reason
of having visited the canal.
A shrewd observer has said that the successful sanitation of the
Isthmus of Panama is a triumph at once of medical science and of
despotic government. Probably this does not overstate the case. The
methods employed at Panama were arbitrary, and had to be. They
probably could not be enforced at all in a democratic community in
ordinary times. The people would rebel against the severity of the
regulations and against the incidental invasion of their privacy. But
strike any community, however free, with the fear of a swift and
deadly disease and it will submit--as witness the shot-gun quarantines
that used to demark the northern limits of the yellow fever zone in
our own Southern States, or the despotism that governed New Orleans in
the terror of 1905. At Panama this fear is ever present, so there is
little danger that a responsible majority there ever would resist the
sanitary work on the grounds of outraged democracy. It may be that a
popular government would become careless, or inefficient, but it would
not renounce the pretension. This has been proved in Cuba.
The sanitarians at Panama gave to the workers there a sense of
security that contributed no little to the spirit of determination so
universally remarked and commended by visitors to the Zone during the
era of construction. While there was no immunity from sickness and
death, yet there was no panic, no constant dread, such as destroyed
the morale of the French force. The Isthmus of Panama still remained
hot, its inhabitants still were forced to take the precautions that
aliens must take in the Tropics; but they were inspired with a
confidence that if these precautions were taken they would not be in
any greater danger than if they had remained in their northern homes.
Pestilence, the scourge of the on-sweeping epidemic, the plague of
swift death that is only a little worse than the panic of fear it
inspires--this was the thing that was stamped out.
Not since the Science of Healing opened its doors to the Science of
Prevention have physicians scored a greater victory in their fight
against disease and death than on the Isthmus of Panama. Not only did
they help to build the canal; they demonstrated that tropical diseases
are capable of human control and thereby opened up a vista of hope
undreamed of to all that sweltering and suffering mass of humanity
that inhabits the Torrid Zone.
CHAPTER X
THE MAN AT THE HELM
In 1905, William H. Taft, then Secretary of War, made a trip to the
Isthmus of Panama to look over the preparations for the construction
of the Panama Canal, and at the same time to consider the question of
the fortification of the big waterway. On that trip a member of the
General Staff of the Army, who at that time was but little known
outside of Army circles, went with him. He was a tall, broad-shouldered,
bronze-faced, gray-haired man, 47 years old. He came and went
unheralded. Few people knew of the engineering record he had made, and
no one on the Isthmus dreamed that he was destined to become the
commander in chief of the army that would conquer the Isthmian
barrier.
He returned to the United States and wrote his report--a report which,
from the deep mastery of the subject it revealed, attracted the
favorable attention of the Secretary of War. Later when the board of
consulting engineers came to make its report upon the type of canal
which should be built--whether it should be a sea level or a lock
canal--the Secretary of War asked this officer to prepare a draft of
his report to the President recommending the lock canal.
Soon after New Year's Day, 1907, the chief engineer of the canal,
John F. Stevens, dissatisfied with the relations that existed between
the Government and himself, came to the conclusion that he could not
build the canal hampered as he was by red tape at Washington. It then
became a question of whether or not the canal should be built by
contract or by the Army. President Roosevelt asked for a preliminary
report upon this proposition and the unheralded Army engineer who had
visited the Canal Zone in 1905, made it. A few days later there was a
conference between President Roosevelt, Gen. Alexander MacKenzie,
Chief of Engineers of the United States Army, and the Secretary of
War. After this conference Maj. George Washington Goethals was
summoned to the White House and informed by the President that it had
been determined to build the Panama Canal under the auspices of the
Army, and that he was appointed chairman and chief engineer of the
Isthmian Canal Commission. He was requested to keep the fact of his
appointment a secret and to prepare immediately to go to Panama. A
ship sailed for the Isthmus three days thereafter, and he was ready to
sail when the President advised him that he might wait over and
arrange affairs in Washington, leaving in time to get to the Isthmus
to take charge on the first of April.
When the announcement was made to the country that the work of
building the canal was to be put in the hands of the Army, the whole
country began to inquire: Who is Major Goethals? that inquiry revealed
the fact that he was a man who had accomplished much in his 49 years.
Born in 1858, of Dutch parents, whose ancestors had settled in New
York when it was still New Amsterdam, he was appointed to the United
States Military Academy at West Point where he was graduated in the
class of 1880 with such honors that he was entitled to enter the
Engineer Corps of the Regular Army.
In 1891 he rose to the rank of captain, and in 1898 became lieutenant
colonel and chief engineer of the First Volunteer Army Corps in Cuba.
On the last day of that year he was honorably discharged from the
volunteer service, and, in 1900, became a major in the Engineer Corps
of the Regular Army. For a number of years prior to 1898 he had been
instructor in civil and military engineering at West Point. He had
been in charge of the Mussel Shoals canal construction on the
Tennessee River, a work which won praise from engineers both in civil
and in military life. It was in a measure his record made on the
Tennessee River work that led to his appointment as chairman and chief
engineer of the Isthmian Canal.
When he took charge of the work at Panama he was promoted to
lieutenant colonel. Arriving there he immediately informed all hands
that while the work of building the canal had been placed under Army
engineers, no man who was then on the job and faithfully executing his
work need fear anything from that administration. From that time down
to the last stages of the work that statement held good. Trained at
West Point, brought up in the atmosphere of the Army, a lover of its
traditions and in full sympathy with its spirit, he laid aside
everything that might handicap the success of the undertaking and
sought at once to get the full benefit of all that was best in the
Army and in civil life as well. He put his uniform in moth balls when
he started to the Isthmus, and from that day to this no man has ever
seen him on the Canal Zone wearing an Army uniform.
When he took charge of the big job, the foundations upon which he was
to build the superstructure of his success had been laid by his
predecessors, but there were many weak points in these foundations as
well as many strong ones. With a spirit of utilizing to the fullest
extent every advantage that the administrations of the former chief
engineers had left on the Isthmus, he undertook to make only such
changes as time demonstrated were necessary to the success of the
project. At that time 6,000,000 cubic yards of material had been
removed from the big waterway. Confronting him was the task of
removing some 215,000,000 yards the while building a great dam
containing 21,000,000 cubic yards, constructing a series of gigantic
locks containing four and a half million cubic yards of concrete, and
providing for the happiness and welfare of the sixty-odd thousand
people who constituted the canal army and its camp followers.
In the years that followed his appointment he proved himself in every
way worthy of his assignment as the managing director of the most
stupendous piece of work ever undertaken by man. Furthermore, he
established a claim to the title of the "Great Digger." No other man
in the history of the world has ever superintended the excavation of
an amount of earth half as great as that which has been taken out of
the Panama Canal during his administration. Since he went to the canal
to "make the dirt fly" the material excavated under his command,
together with that placed in the locks and dams, equals the amount
necessary to take out to cut a tunnel 13 feet square through the earth
at the Equator.
No man ever carried to a great position less fuss and feathers than
Colonel Goethals took to his work as chairman and chief engineer of
the Panama Canal. When, during the construction period, one visited
his office at Culebra, on almost any afternoon, he would find there an
unpretentious little room in the corner of the administration
building, about 18 feet square, containing four windows, overlooking
the cut from two sides, its painted walls hung with maps, its floors
uncarpeted, and in the center a large double-sided, flat-top desk
covered with papers. A swivel chair at the desk and two or three other
chairs constituted the furnishings of this room. The visitor walked
directly into the office of his private secretary and the chief clerk,
and if he had anything worth while about which to see the chairman and
chief engineer he was detained only long enough for the man ahead of
him to get out. With "no time like the present" as his motto in
handling the business of his office, he, the busiest man on the
Isthmus, and one of the busiest in the world for that matter, always
seemed to have more time than many men of lesser responsibilities and
far fewer burdens. He once declared that he had a contempt for the man
who always tried to make it appear that he was too busy to see his
callers, because his callers were frequently as busy as he himself.
The fact is that he is a man with a very unusual gift in the dispatch
of work. System has been the key-note of his success. With thousands
of details every day to look after, he has always kept his work so
well in hand that to the casual observer he seemed to be the most
leisurely man on the Isthmus. He maintained a well-established routine
all through his career on the canal. His mornings usually were spent
going over the work. When the morning trains passed Culebra at 7
o'clock they found him up, breakfasted, and at the station.
Although these trains carried parlor cars, one would seldom see the
chairman and chief engineer riding in them. Rather, he consistently
chose to ride in the ordinary day coaches with his sub-engineers, with
the steam-shovel men, and with the rank and file of the Americans who
made possible the success of the work at Panama. There were few of
these Americans whom he did not know by name, and with whom he did not
pass a pleasant word whenever he chanced to meet them.
A morning trip over the work with this presiding genius of the big
ditch reveals perhaps better than anything else the makeup of the man
and the secret of his success.
"Meet me on the early train to-morrow morning at Miraflores," said he
to one of his visitors in the early summer of 1913, "and we will go
over the Pacific end of the work."
This meant that both the chief engineer and the visitor had to leave
comfortable beds at 5 o'clock in the morning to keep the appointment.
At 7 o'clock they met at Miraflores. "We will walk through the tunnel
if you don't mind," said he, "as I don't want to hold up a dirt train
if it can be avoided."
At the other end of the railroad tunnel, the only one on the Isthmus,
a railway motor car stood on the siding ready to pick up the
distinguished engineer and carry him to the Miraflores Locks. This
motor car is something like a limousine on railroad trucks, and was
affectionately known by the people on the Isthmus, as "the yellow
peril" and "the brain wagon." The first stop was at the concrete work
on the spillway dam at Miraflores.
"How soon do you expect to have this dam up to its full height?" he
asked of the division engineer who joined him there. "Can't you find
room to operate another temporary concrete mixer down there?" he
queried further. "Is there anything else you need to keep the work
moving forward so as to be certain to complete the dam by the time you
promised?"
Going a little farther he came to a place where one division was doing
some work for another division. "Don't you think it would be more
satisfactory to keep both parts of that work under one division? Why
don't you allow it all to be done by the other people?"
Walking across the locks on the temporary bridge the chief engineer
and his assistant came to a point where the concrete lamp posts for
lighting the locks were being set up. "Don't you think that it would
better avoid any settling if you were to place beams of railroad iron
across those spaces and rest the posts on them?" he queried.
A little farther on he met the engineer in charge of the work of the
company erecting the gates. "When do you think you will have the gates
in the west chambers completed so that we can put the dredge through?"
he inquired of Mr. Wright.
"Well, sir," replied Mr. Wright, "if we have good luck I hope to have
them done by the first of September; if we have fair luck we ought to
have them completed by the middle of September; but at the lowest
calculation I can promise them to you by the first of October."
"But have you taken into consideration all of the time you are likely
to lose as the result of heavy rains?" queried the chief engineer.
"I have made full allowance therefor, I think," responded Mr. Wright.
Walking on, the watchful eye of the chief engineer fell upon a new
baby railway track which was being laid through the eastern lock
chambers. "What are you planning to do there?" he asked of the
division engineer.
"We wanted to get some additional material through the locks and Mr.
Wright informed us that if we would furnish the timbers, he would make
it so that we could run these little engines through there," responded
the engineer.
"But did you have a definite understanding with him that this should
afford no excuse for any further delay in completing the gates?"
queried Colonel Goethals.
"We did, sir," responded the division engineer.
"All right then, go ahead."
At this point the party boarded the motor car again and was taken to
the big dike which was to hold the Pacific Ocean from flooding the
locks after a dike a mile farther down had been blown out. "How much
water do you have in the stretch between the two dikes?" he asked of
the division engineer. He next wanted to know how many million cubic
feet they were able to pump and siphon in, and how much the Rio Grande
was bringing in per day. Then he wanted to know if every possible
precaution had been taken to insure the watertightness of the new
dike; how many thousand pounds of dynamite had been placed under the
one to be blown up; how many holes this dynamite was placed in; and a
large number of other bits of information which would tell him whether
every safeguard had been thrown around the plan to insure its success.
Going up on the other side of the canal the party came to the earth
dam joining the west lock walls with the hills, so as to impound 58
feet of water in Miraflores Lake. "How soon do you expect to get that
connection made between the lock walls and the dam proper?" he queried
of the engineer in immediate charge.
"In four weeks, sir."
"All right," answered Colonel Goethals, "you can't get that done any
too soon to suit me."
And so he went over the work around Miraflores from beginning to end,
talking now with an Irishman in charge of dumping the material on the
inside of the dam, now with a man in charge of some concrete work,
and now with the division engineer himself. By 11 o'clock he had
inspected every part of this division and was ready to take his car
back to Culebra. In four hours he had seen every man responsible for
any important work around Miraflores; had offered a suggestion there,
a word of encouragement here, and had obtained a bit of information at
another place.
Each day's morning program was like this one except as to the place he
visited and the people with whom he talked. One morning he might be
tramping over Cucaracha Slide, studying the prospects of its future.
Another morning he might be down at Gatun watching an official test of
an emergency dam. On these trips he usually wore either a most
unmilitary-looking blue serge or gray cheviot, with a somewhat
weather-beaten sailor straw hat, and carried a cheap dollar umbrella.
When Colonel Goethals went to the Isthmus he promised that every man
with a grievance should have a hearing. Each Sunday morning he had at
his office at Culebra what he termed his Sunday "at homes," the best
attended functions on the Isthmus, where the blackest Jamaica negro on
the job found as much of a welcome as the highest official. These
functions were for the purpose of hearing the canal employees who had
grievances. Once a visitor was congratulating him upon the smooth
manner in which the canal-building machine seemed to be working. "You
ought to attend one of my Sunday 'at homes,'" he replied. "You would
think that there was no smoothness at all to its running."
Here is the wife of one of the engineers: She wants to find out why it
is that she cannot get bread from the Ancon Hospital bakery. She
informs Colonel Goethals that Joseph B. Bishop, secretary of the
commission, gets bread from the hospital bakery and wants to know why
she cannot. "I will look into the matter for you," says the chief
engineer, and a note of this complaint is made. Later the telephone
bell rings and Mr. Bishop is asked if he gets bread at the hospital
bakery. He replies in the affirmative, explaining that about three
years ago he had breakfasted with Colonel Gorgas who arranged for him
to buy his bread there instead of at the commissary, this bread being
more to his liking. "Can't any other employee of the Canal Commission
get bread there under the same terms?" queries the chief engineer. "I
will see, sir," responds the secretary of the commission. "If they can
not," answers the chief engineer, "you must have your bread stopped at
once." And it was stopped.
The next person received is the representative of the Kangaroos, a
fraternal order. "The Spanish American War veterans get free
transportation on a special train on Memorial Day," he is informed,
"and the fraternal orders on the Zone are crowded out." "Let a
committee of all the fraternal orders appear next Sunday and talk it
over with me and we will see what we can do," responds the chief
engineer.
Here comes a negro who says that his boss is a tyrant and abuses his
men: "I will look into that," responds the presiding genius of the
canal, and the Jamaican goes away with an expansive smile on his
face.
And so it went. Small affairs, big affairs, and indifferent ones were
brought to his attention. In perhaps 80 per cent of them he could not
do what was requested, but when able he did it so promptly, and in
such a positive, straightforward manner, that his "at homes" have been
compared, by the French ambassador to the United States, to the court
of justice held by Saint Louis beneath the oak at Vincennes.
A railroad engineer on one of the dirt trains got drunk and ran over a
negro. He was sent to the penitentiary. The railroad men issued an
ultimatum saying that if he were not released by a certain hour on a
certain day, every dirt train on the canal would stop. A committee
conveyed this ultimatum to Colonel Goethals and asked his decision.
"You will get it at the penitentiary," he replied. "This man will
remain in prison and every man who quits work on that account will be
dropped from the rolls." There was no strike of engineers.
At another time the waiters at the Tivoli Hotel went on strike. The
whole force was promptly discharged, and the official paper of the
Canal Commission carried their names with the announcement that
thereafter they would not be eligible to employment in any capacity on
the Canal Zone.
If the chairman and chief engineer of the canal is just and firm in
his relations with his men, he is no less generous in giving credit
where credit belongs. Upon one occasion he was talking about the
success of the canal project with a friend, and declared that the
world would never give to John F. Stevens the credit that was due him
in the construction of the canal. "You know," said he, "the real
problem of building this canal has been that of removing the spoil;
that problem was preeminently the problem of a railroad man and to
solve it demanded the services of one of the best men in the railroad
business. We have extended the facilities laid out by Mr. Stevens, and
have modified them as experience and conditions have demanded, but
they have been operated from that day to this under the general plan
of transportation laid out by Mr. Stevens. I do not think that any
Army engineer in the United States could have laid out such excellent
transportation facilities."
At another time, in discussing this same matter, he declared that it
was his firm opinion that the canal could have been built by either of
the former chief engineers, John F. Wallace or John F. Stevens, if
they had been allowed a free hand. "You see," said he, "they were men
who were accustomed to handling big construction jobs. They would
outline their project and the cost of executing it to a board of
directors who would pass upon it and then leave them absolutely
unhampered in the matter of personnel and method, with results as the
only criterion of their success. When they came to the Isthmus they
found their hands tied by red tape. They had never dealt with a
President, a Secretary of War, a Congress, and the public at large.
Naturally, they grew restive under the conditions which confronted
them and resigned.
"The whole difference is largely that of training. The Army officer
knows from th
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