Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

132 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. harvest as fell to the lot of the original owners of this enterprise. Its phenomenal success stimulated to fever heat the desire for a maritime canal, and for several years surveys and explorations were conducted up and down the isthmian country to ascertain and develop the possibilities of the various routes and schemes which had been proposed since the Spanish conquest. The positions of the most important of these routes are indicated in the map on page 134. The first route to be noted, that through, the Mexican Isthmus of Tehuan- Many . ^epec attracted much atten- Schemes. tion during the years 1881-87, owing to the endeavours of Mr. James B. Eads to secure support for his bold scheme for transporting ships from ocean to ocean by steam traction. It is now traversed by a railway, constructed and partially owned by Messrs. S. Pearson and Son, the great English contractors. Nos. 2 to 7 are variants of what is known as the Nicaragua route, which pro- posed to utilize for the purpose of navigation the San Juan River, on the Atlantic side, and Lake Nicaragua, a great sheet of water, 110 feet above sea-level, adjacent to the Pacific. The San Blas route (No. 8) had many advo- cates, because the Isthmus is here only 31 miles wide; but the difficulty lay in the height of the summit-level, and to overcome this a tunnel, 8 to 10 miles long, was proposed. Caledonia Bay, the Atlantic end of the so- called Caledonia route (No. 9), has the dis- tinction of having been the starting-place of the first party of white men to cross the American continent, and became notorious two centuries later as the headquarters of Paterson’s ill-fated colony of New Edin- burgh. Of the routes (Nos. 11 to 19) ad- jacent to the valley of the Atrato, several claimed for a time the energetic support of English engineers and promoters. Gradu- ally, however, all the projects were with- drawn from serious consideration, except The First and Second Panama Companies. two favoured by the French and Americans respectively. It is now an old story how the great French- man, Ferdinand de Lesseps, persuaded many thousands of his countrymen to invest their savings in a scheme for pierc- ing the Isthmus of Panama with a sea-level canal; how ducks and drakes were made of the money subscribed ; how De Lesseps abandoned his original scheme in favour of a locked canal ; and how finally the crash came in 1889. Five years later the liquidators of the De Lesseps Company formed a new company to continue the enterprise. But funds gave out before any really serious attack had been made on the defences of Nature, and in 1902 the Panama stockholders, alarmed by the fact that the United States had completed surveys for a rival canal through Nicaragua, decided to sell their property to the United States. To retrace our steps a little. President M‘Kinley had, in 1899, nominated a Com- mission to investigate finally all practicable canal routes, select the most feasible, and report as to the cost of constructing a canal which should be under the “ control, manage- ment, and ownership of the United States.” Between this Commission and the directors of the second French Company many com- munications passed concerning the terms upon which the latter would transfer its rights and properties. No compromise, however, could be arranged between the Company’s proposal of £22,500,000 and the Commission’s valua- tion of rather less than £8,250,000, and the Commission accordingly, in November, 1901, “ finally ” reported in favour of the construc- tion of a canal through Nicaragua at an esti- mated cost of £39,150,000. Within very few weeks the shareholders of the French Company, gathered in general meeting, elected a new board, and directed it to submit without discussion to the terms