Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

134 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. DIAGRAM SHOWING RELATIVE LENGTHS OF THE PRO- POSED NICARAGUA CANAL AND THE ADOPTED PANAMA CANAL ROUTE. hospitals, offices, machine-shops, storehouses, and barracks—most of which are still being used ; surgical, medical, and other stores ; and possibly the largest and, in its time, most valuable assortment of excavating and trans- port plant ever gathered together. For years the world had been told that all these things were worthless—the buildings deserted and decaying, the machinery and plant rotten, so badly corroded that a knife cut the metal as it would cheese. Yet, marvellous as it may appear, much of this plant has well repaid overhauling and repair, and is now working with good results side by side with the latest products of American machine-shops. No one who knows it, especially in the rainy season, can conscientiously say much in favour of the Isthmian climate. Never- The Climate røieless, as been amply of the ’ , „ V Isthmus proved by the events or the past few years, it is quite pos- sible for men and women accustomed to more temperate climes to retain good health, in the Isthmus. There is no doubt that the building of the Panama Railroad and the operations of the French along the Canal line were attended with terrible mortality. The latter, how- ever, has been grossly exaggerated. Take, for example, the almost classic statement that every cross-tie of the original railroad represented a death among the workers. Many also have heard of Matachin—“ Dead Chinamen ”—the station said to have been so named in memory of the many hundreds of Orientals, stricken with mental depression, who there committed suicide by hari-kari, drowning, or sudden rushes in front of passing locomotives. Let it be noticed that the original single-track railroad possessed no fewer than 140,000 cross-ties, and that the largest number of labourers employed upon it at any one time was 7,000. “ Matachin,” moreover, is not Chinese, or even pidgin Pana- mese, but excellent Spanish for our homely word “ butcher,” and occurs in a map of the Isthmus printed in Holland in 1679 to illus- trate an account of the buccaneer Morgan’s famous raid upon Panama seven years earlier. Though thousands of travellers have crossed it by means of the Panama Railroad, the country of the future Canal is still, to all intents and purposes, an unknown land. And this it might well remain, without loss to the outside world, so far as its scenery is concerned. First impres- sions of the country in days anterior to the MAP SHOWING VARIOUS ISTHMIAN CANAL PROJECTS.