THE ROMANCE OF PANAMA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16032, 25 September 1915, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE ROMANCE OF PANAMA.

BY ET-SIE K. MORTON". Just 402 years ago to-day, on September 25, 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, a Spanish fugitive, first sighted the Pacific Ocean, and with that first glimpse began the wonderful course of events that has culminated in the division of the American Continent by the Panama CanaL The thought of the' whole world to-day is turned to war, and at a time when destinies of great nations swing to the balance, and Europe quivers in the grip of Par to the death, mankind pays but little heed to happenings, which in other times would have been received with worldwide wonder and acclaim. And so while millions of men are at death grips, and all eyes are turned toward the worldjs most stupendous tragedy, the world's greatest triumph has come, only to be overshadowed by the dark war-cloud. The dream of olden days has been realised, and Atlantic and Pacific have been linked together For a year past, ships have ( come and igone through the Panama Canal, and we think scarcely any more of it, or what it means, than when they came through Suez. "So many days saved between New YoTk and New Zealand," we say, " and what a lot of trouble they have had with the Culebra Cut • Yet for gripping interest, for sheer wonder, as a record of old-time adventuring, and as a supreme triumph of modern skill and dauntless courage, the romance of Panama is the greatest romance in history. Even the tragedy of its culmination, coming last year in the very month of the outbreak of the great war, comes as a dramatic climax to a series of stirring dramas which for over four centuries have washed the narrow isthmus with blood, added unnumbered thousands of graves to the swamp land which once was Panama, and given a new chapter to the history of the world. So, even to-day, with the world overshadowed by war, there is interest in thinking back to that day, four centuries ago, when Balboa, with a handful of men, paused in his bitter struggle from coast to coast, and from a mountain peak glimpsed a great, unknown ocean—the Pacific, which laps our shores to-day, and bears the warriors of a new world back to fight the battles of the old. Hard it is for us to realise all that ' must hare been in the minds of the Spanish adventurers as "silent, upon a peak -in Darien," they gazed out with quickened pulse and questioning eyes upon the wide Pacific. Since that great moment, empires have risen and fallen. No mind could have conceived in wildest dream the vastness of that discovery, nor ever had vision of the strange and wonderful things traced even then on the tablets of futurity. . . So they fought their way onward as adventurers ever have, and four days later reached the shores of the great unknown sea. Only twenty-six of Balboa's men, we are told, reached the Pacific coast with him, over a hundred and sixty having perished under the fearful hardships of the fifty-mile march from coast to coast, a march through diseaseinfested swamp and strangling under--growth of densest tropical forest. Then followed long years of strife and bloodshed, when the fabulous wealth of the Incas drew a world's adventurers to the I shores of the new continent. TSbse were the "days of the greatness of Spain,'when her treasure-hunters roved the wide world i and poured into her lap the spoils; of far j Cathay, the gold, the silver, and" precious jewels wrested from strange, far lands. 'Slowly but very surely the iron hand of adventurer and robber tightened as the lure drew men on and on. The narrow isthmus was crossed and recrossed ,by many an expedition seeking the El Dorado of their dreams. The terrors of that strip of land where fugitive Balboa and his men faced such tearful odds, were vanquished in part, and roads and trails linked coast with coast. Slowly but surely the wealth ot the Peruvian Incas was wrested from them, and the old,' old fight went merrily on, seas infested with pirates of every nation, Spaniards, Indians, English, and Dutch robbing and slaying in .turn. Then in 1668 Henry Morgan and his pirate gang came rollicking across the ocean, routed the Spaniards, and laid waste the far-famed city of Puerto Bello, on the Atlantic side of the isthmus. And there the first lurid, chap-! ter in the romance of Panama- closes. The isthmus had been conquered, Panama Citv looked out to the Pacific, . Puerto Bello to the Atlantic. But the Peruvian treasure trove was exhausted, stormy days of fighting and bloodshed were over, and men no longer came in quest of gold. So Panama slipped back into obscurity for well-nigh two hundred years, finally waking once more to the echo of the tramp.of a host of men of a later age, men crazed once more by the gold-lust, hurrying hotfoot, over. half a world to rivers and mountains of California.. No railways threw shining tracks across the great deserts of the northern continent in the days of the " forty-niners." The goldseekers either travelled by caravan or followed the long, hard trail to the New El Dorado by way of the old, and the roads of Panama were once more thronged with men hurrying in their thousands to answer the old. old rail

As s natural sequence, there came a ynar or so later the third great step in the march of events, which hive made history in that little strip of landthe building of a Tailwav from ocean to ocean. The railway was finished a few years later. So far, man had conquered, but the jungle peril, though thrust back a little, was no more subdued than m those early days when Balboa's brave men fell one by one. For the isthmus had one great weapon before which civilisation itself fell back helplessthe deadly poison of its climate. its infected " swamps, ,its pest of flies and mosquitoes. The year 1881 marked the fourth step, when the great brain of De Lesseps conceived the stupendous idea of literally cutting America in half. The splendid courage and inflexible purpose of those brave Frenchmen, who, under his direction, laboured for years at their herculean task, can better be understood to-day. in the light of French heroism in the Great War. than ever before. Thousands went to their death in that plague-infested snot; they fell in whole armies be/ore the deadlv march of malaria and yellow fever, and tin re was no hand to stay the scourge. For eight terrible years" the work went on, finally ending in irretrievable disaster. But the heroic work of French engineers and labourers had paved -the way for final success. Earlv in the present century the United States undertook the responsibility of carrying to completion the greatest engineering feat of all time, and success finally crowned the effort. How it was done, how the unseen enemy was finally defeated and laid low forever, all the world knows. But the cost. . . Yet even the fearful price paid has left man the richer, for through' the conquest of Panama he has at last learned how to conquer the demon? the tropics, which has claimed its toll*in a million lives, learned that the mosquito is one of the most ruthless and deadly enemies mankind has ever faced. So, for the time being, the Tomance of Panama has ended, and the ends of the world are linked together by the great canaL When peace once more comes to the war-worn world, when civilisation readjusts and reasserts itself, and men have time to think of other things, the full measure of the importance of the cutting of the Great Canal will be brought home I to the present generation as the greatest i engineering triumph, of all ages*