THE PANAMA CANAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 192, 16 August 1939, Page 8

THE PANAMA CANAL.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN USE.

This week the Panama Canal eelebratee its twenty-fifth birthday, (being finished in 1914 after seven years of intensive effort following many decades of tentative (building.

The first formal step toward a Panama Canal was taken <by Emperor Charles V. in 1534, ivhen he directed a survey to be made of "the narrow place" for the purpose of making a water route. All the sixteenthcentury surveyors agree with those of to-day —that just four canal routes are possible: Panama, Darien. Tehuantepec and Nicaragua,

Charles V.'s project and a subsequent one by his son, Philip 11., were both side-tracked by their religious advisers, who argued that such a canal would be a-n act of blasphemy. "What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder." They did not know "what geology has since discovered—that not until the early Pleistocene era did the isthmus exist. Before that the oceans flowed freely (between the two continents. For two centuries after Philip 11. the isthmus was- troubled Iby no attempts at a canal. Then there was for years a great deal of talk throughout Europe and America, although nothing materialised. The Real Pioneers. ' The real pioneers of the Panama Canal were the 'builders of the first Panama railroad in 1855. Through virgin jungle and pestilential morass they cut a pathway which the canal of the future was to follow. Theirs is a record of pluck of a very high order. Those who followed them in later canal work, under French and American enterprises, encountered nothing comparable with what those pioneers overcame, though at fearful cost. Ten years of French effort to canalise the isthmus, beginning in 1880, were a failure, but they marked another great step forward. America's later operations profited hugely from the French experiment, disillusioning though it was politically and financially. Two out of every three Frenchmen sent to Panama died. Xot yet had the nation that produced Pasteur learned how to maintain public health in the tropics. The Republic of Panama, established in November, 1903, settled many of Uncle Sam's political and financial problems regarding the proposed canal. The new republic, organised by those who favoured the canal, recognised the value of meeting the United States halfway in uniting the Atlantic and Pacific. Though the United States now has entire sovereignty over the Canal Zone, the two cities, Balboa at the canal's Atlantic end, and Panama at the Pacific end, are not under American jurisdiction save in the important matter of public health and public morals. After two engineering commissions failed to function adequately, President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 put the Canal's construction in charge of the United States Army, with General Goethals as engineering chief and General Gorgas in charge of public health. Under them the work went forward rapidly and satisfactorily. There were no real labour troubles; never at any time after the United States took over the enterprise were there charges of "graft" or profiteering—disease diminished almost miraculously. To make the canal it was necessary to cut a passage through a mountain range to the Pacific and to erect a lower mountain range or ridge at the Atlantic end. The first is known as the Culebra Cut; the second, composed largely of the earth and rock taken from the cut and transported thirty miles, is known as the Gatun Dam. A mountain had to be moved by dynamite, steam shovels and railway trains and set up thirty miles away. Across the lower end of a valley this dirt was placed, forming in that valley what is known as Gatun Lake, of which the Culebra Cut is one arm, and making what is called the "water-bridge." When President Theodore Roosevelt visited the isthmus in 1906 he had his picture taken seated in the monster steam shovel. This shovel bit into Culebra Cut at five cubic yards a bite. As Big As the Chinese Wall. The soil excavated at Panama would make a wall as high and as wide as the ancient Chinese wall, and reaching all the way from San Francisco to New York. During six years the amount of quinine distributed free among canal employees was 15,0001b, an average of 20001b a vear.

The money spent on the canal seems small in these days of huge expenditures, but at the time the expense of the building was loudly denounced both in Congress and out. Hc; p is a brief review of the costs. When the canal was thrown open to commercial traffic oil August 13, 1915, a total of 224,000,000 cubic yards had been excavated, and the estimated cost was 375,210,000 dollars. During the next few years slides or breaks called for further excavations. When the canal was declared formally completed by President Wilson, July 12, 1920, a total of about 240,000,000 cubic yards had been excavated, and the actual cost to that date was given at 366,650,000 , dollars, exclusive of the expenditures for its military and naval defence.

'•'The greatest of the world's wonder*," is what Joseph Fennel!, the artist, called the canal. "I have tried/' lit- added, "to express this in my drawings at the moment before; ii was opened, for, when the water is turned in, the amazing masses of masonry will be baneath the water on one side and filled with earth upon the other, and the picturesquenesfi—the beauty—that I have tried to capture—will he vanished—for ever. The superb arches and buttresses, the splendid springing lines—as fine as the flying buttresses of a cathedral —can never be seen again."