THE PANAMA CANAL AS IT IS TO-DAY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1263, 14 May 1896, Page 13

THE PANAMA CANAL AS IT IS TO-DAY.

Upon the eastern extremity of tho artificial peninsula, which was constructed to guard tho entrance to the canal from the storms of the Caribbean Sea, and to furnish the ephemeral aristocrats of tho groat enterprise, with a select and salubrious dwelling-place, stands on a high pedestal a splendid bronze statue of Columbus. Under his right arm is tho half-crouching figure of an° Indian girl, who is supposed to be peering out of savagery into civilisation, and looking over what was to have been tho mouth of the Panama Canal. Behind tho statue stands what was once the groat pleasure house which Ferdinand do Lesseps built for himself, and behind it is another, onco of equal splendour, built by his son, one palace not being deemed enough for both, while tho golden stream was flowing in all its fulness. They are built, of course, of wood, and there they stand, rotting away in the hot, damp climate, a quarter of a million's worth "of material, labour, and imported ostentation—monuments to the folly, and worse than folly, that began to build before it had counted the cost. Nearly the whole of this little, peninsula, which lies between the town of Aspinwall (or Colon) and the canal, is covered by the settlement of San Cristobal, which was once like a strip of the Boulevards transported to the tropics, with its streets of broad-roofed, vorandahed chalets shaded by double rows of ernerald-leaved, far-branching palms, glittering all night with hundreds of electric lamps, and gay with tho sounds of revelry which echoes the far-away voices of tho Place do l'Opera, the Folies Bergeros, and the Moulin Eouge, only a little more so. Now it is a collection of mouldering wooden houses, ghastly in their sun-bleached and rain-sodden shabbiness, with cracked doors and broken windows, for tho most part tenantless, or housing only a few negroes or Chinamen and tho meanest of mean whites. How much of the subscriptions of the trustful went to build San Cristobal before a yard of the canal was dug out may bo guessed from tho fact that the whole of °the curving sea front, along which runs the palm-shaded carriage-drive of "ravel and silver sand, over which onco rolled the imported equipages of contractors, financier;-; and "engineers,' is faced with thousands of blocks of concrete piled pell-mell together, every- ono of which cost from .£1 to 25s to throw into its place. To walk through the streets of San Cristobal to-day ought to bo enough to brine a blush to the face of any I- renchman who i 3 not either a journalist or a politician, and yet San Cristobal is but a very small part of the wilderness of waste and ruin which stretches for 46 miles across the Isthmus from the Atlantic to

cavators which were brought out from Prance in sections, and put together in pools and backwaters of the Chagres, and left there to rot and rust without ever excavating a cubic yard of earth. Sometimes the machinery ordered from one firm Tould not go into tho hull supplied by another, and sometimes the hull would be sizes too large for the machinery, and there they lay to this day, having fulfilled tho only purposo they were ever intended to serve—that of swelling the bank accounts of insatiable swindlers, wdio, like flies on decaying carrion, fattened on their country's shame. In proof of this, a story that I heard at first hand may not come amiss. A British steamer was chartered to bring a cargo of railway iron and machinery out to Colon. She got thero just as the mighty bubble was on point of bursting, Tho cargo and freight were paid for, and the captain naturally wanted to clear his ship. Ho could find no one to act as consignee for tho Canal Company, and so, after waiting two days, he gave notice to the engineer in charge at Colon that, if the cargo was not taken out the next day lie would heave the whole lot overboard. The reply was, "Do so, and get rid of it." What is left of that cargo is now lying at the bottom of Colon Bay.— Pearson's Moncaine.