T H E"-^ PANAMA CANAL Frederic J. Haskin The 5 Points of Authority in this Book 1. All of the chapters in this book pertaining to the actual construction of the Canal were read and corrected by Colonel George W. Goethals, Chairman and Chief Bn^eer of the Isthmian Canal Commission. 2. All of the illuslrations were made from photographs tak«n by Mr. Ernest Hallen, the ofBcial photographer of the Commission. * 3. The book contains the beautiful, colored Bird's-eye ■yiew of the Canal Zone, made under the direction of the National Geographic Society, as well as the black-and- white ofiScial map of the Canal. 4. The extensive index was prepared by Mr. G. Thomas Bifojiie, of Hie stafi of the Library of Congress. 5. llie final ]|^\x>fe were revised by Mr. Howard E, Sherman, of the Govranment Printing OflSce, to conform with the typographiaal style of the United States Govern- ment. »» "The American Government,* by the same author, was read by millions of Americans, and still holds the record as the world's best seller among all works of its kind. THE PANAMA CANAL BY FREDERIC J. HASKTN AUTHOK PP " THE AMEEICAN GOVBENMENT," HTO. Illustrated from photographs taken hg BKNBST HAIiLBN Official Fbetographer ef the Isthmian Canal (hmmiseioa Gaeden City New York DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1913 Copyright, "DOTJBLEDAT, PaGE & COMPANT All rights resened, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian Preas of J. J. LitfleilvraCo. New York PREFACE The primary purpose of this book is to tell the layman the story of the Panama Canal. It is written, therefore, in the simplest manner possible, considering the technical character of the great engineeriQg feat itself, and the involved complex- ities of the diplomatic history attaching to its inception and undertaking. The temptation, to turn aside into the pleasant paths of the romantic history of ancient Panama has been resisted; there is no attempt to dispose of political problems that incidentally concern the canal; in short, the book is confined to the story of the canal itself, and the things that are directly and vitaUy con- nected with it. Colonel Goethals was good enough to read and correct the chapters relating to the construction of the canal, and, when shown a list of the chapters proposed, he asked that the one headed "The Man at the Hehn" be omitted. The author felt that to bow to his wishes in that matter would be to fail to tell the whole story of the canal, and so Colonel Goethals did not read that chapter. Every American is proud of the great national achievement at Panama. If, in the case of the individual, this book is able to supplement that pride by an ample fund of knowledge and in- formation, its object and purpose will have been attained. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The grateful acknowledgments of the author are due to Mr. William Joseph Showalter for his valu- able aid in gathering and preparing the material for this book. Acknowledgments are also due to Colonel George W. Goethals, chairman and chief engineer of the Isthmian Canal Commission, for reading and correcting those chapters in the book pertain- ing to the engineering phases of the work; to Mr. Ernest Hallen, the official photographer of the Commission, for the photographs with which the book is illustrated; to Mr. Gilbert H. Grosvenor, editor of the National Geographic Magazirm^ for permission to use the bird's-eye view map of the canal; to Mr. G. Thomas Ritchie, of the Library of Congress, for assistance in preparing the index; and to Mr. Howard E. Sherman, of the Govern- ment Printing Office, for revising the proofs to conform with the typographical style of the United States Government. CONTENTS I. II. III. IV. V, VI. VII. VIII. IX. X, XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII. XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII. PABE ' The Land Divided— The Worid Untted .... S^ Greatest Engineering Project S3 / Gatun Dam 32 The Locks 45 The Lock Mac^nery S7 Cnlebra Cut 70 Ends of the Canal 82 The Panama Railroad 93 Sanitation 105 The Man at the Helm 118 The Organization 133 The American Workers 145 The Negro Workers 154 The Commissary 164 Life on the Zone 178 Past Isthmian , Projects 194 The French Failure ,.206 Choosing the !^anama Route 331 t^ Controversy with Colombia . . «, 333 Relations with Panama « t« . 246 Canal Zone Government o . . . 256 Congress and the Canal ■,. m .-. 368 Sea Level Canal Impossible ........ 377 *- Fortifications .»«■*:.. 283 Fixing the Tolls , . , . 29S The Operating Force . . . .., m .1 . • . . 309 Handling the Traffic 317 The Republic of Panama .326 Other Great Canals 336 A New Commercial Map 347 American Trade Opportunities ....... 358 The Panama-Pacific Exposition 368 THE ILLUSTRATIONS Birdseye View of the Panama Canal Zone .... Color insert PACING PAGE George W. Goethals, Chairman and Chief Engineer .... 10 A Street in the City of Panama 11 Theodore Roosevelt 18 William Howard Taft 18 Woodrow Wilson • 18 Vendors in the Streets of Panama 19 A Native Boy Marketing 19 Lieut. Col. W. L. Sibert 42 The Upper Locks at Gatun 43 Toro Point Breakwater 43 Concrete Mixers, Gatun 50 A Center Wall Culvert, Gatun Locks SO The Machinery for Moving a Lock Gate 51 Steam Shovels Meeting at Bottom of Culebra Cut .... 74 L. K. Rourke 74 The Man-made Canyon at Culebra 75 The Disastrous Effects of Slidef in Culebra Cut 83 U. S. Ladder Dredge "Corozal" 83 A Mud Bucket of the "Corozal" 83 W. G. Comber 83 Col. William C. Gorgas 106 The Hospital Grounds, Ancon 106 Lieut. Frederic Mears 107 The Old Panama Railroad 107 Sanitary Drinking Cup 114 Mosquito Oil Drip Barrel 114 Spraying Mosquito Oil 114 Typical Quarters of the Married Laborer 115 A Native Hut . 115 Maj. Gen. George W. Davis 138 Rear Admiral J. G. Walker 138 Theodore P. Shonts .' 138 John F. Wallace 138 VIII ILLUSTRATIONS ix FACING PAGE John F. Stevens 138 Charles E. Magoon . . . , 138 Richard Lee Metcalfe . . I39 Emory R. Johnson I39 Maurice H. Thatcher . 139 Joseph Bucklln Bishop 139 H. A. Gudger 139 Joseph G. S. Blackburn 139 Brig. Gen. Carroll A. Devol 14S American Living Quarters at Cristobal 146 Harry H. Rousseau 147 Lowering a Caisson Section . . 147 John Burke 170 Meal Time at an I. C. C. Kitchen 170 Washington Hotel, Colon 171 Major Eugene T. Wilson 171 The Tivoli Hotel, Ancon 171 Floyd C. Freeman 178 I. C. C. Club House at Culebra 178 A. Bruce Minear < 179 Reading Room in the I. C. C. Club House, Culebra .... 179 Col. Chester L. Harding g03 The Gatun Upper Locks 203 Lieut. Col. David D. Gaillard 203 Culebra Cut, Showing Cucaracha Slide in Left Center . . . 203 The Man of Brawn 210 Ferdinand de Lesseps 211 An Old French Excavator Near TaberniUa 311 Philippe Bunau-Varilla 211 S. B. Williamson 234 The Lower Gates, Miraflores Locks 234 Middle Gates, Miraflores Locks 23S H. O. Cole o .... 335 The Pay Car at Culebra 343 Edward J. Williams 243 Uncle Sam's Laundry at Cristobal 343 Smoke from Heated Rocks in Culebra Cut 26& Tom M. Cooke S&T The Post Office, Ancon . ., 267 A Negro Girl 274 A Martinique Woman 374 X ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE San Bias Chief 274 An Indian Girl 274 An Italian 274 A Timekeeper 274 A Spaniard 374 A Negro Boy 274 Testing the Emergency Dam, Gatun Locks 275 Col. Harry F. Hodges 275 The Ancon Baseball Park 298 Caleb M. Saville 299 Gatun Spillway from Above and Below 299 An Electric Towing Locomotive in Action . 306 Blowing Up the Second Dike South of Miraflores Locks . . . 307 DIAGRAMS A Graphic Illustration of the Material Handled at Panama . 25 A Cross Section of the Gatun Dam 33 Plan of the Gatun Dam and Locks 36 A Profile Section of the Canal 40 From a Model of Pedro Miguel Lock 48 A Cross-section of Locks, Giving an Idea of Their Size . . 49 One of the 93 Gate-leaf Master Wheels ....... 64 A Mauretania in the Locks 67 The Effect of SUdes 72 Average Shape and Dimensions of Culebra Cut 75 The Oorozal and Its Method of Attack 85 International Shipping Routes 351 A Map Showing Isthmus with the Completed Canal . . . 379 The Panama Canal "7 have read the chapters in 'The Panama Canal' dealing with the engineering features of the Canal and have found them an accurate and dependable account of the undertaking." Geo. W. Goethals. THE PANAMA CANAL CHAPTER I THE LAND DIVIDED — THE WORLD UNITED THE Panama Canal is a waterway connect- ing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, cut through the narrow neck of land con- necting the continents of North and South America. It is the solution of the problem of international commerce that became acute in 1452 when the Eastern Roman Empire fell before the assaults of the Turks, and the land routes to India were closed to. Western and Christian Europe. Forty years after the Crescent supplanted the Cross on the dome of St. Sophia in Constantinople, Columbus set sail to seek a western route to the Indies. He did not find it, but it was his fortune to set foot on the Isthmus of Panama, where, more than four centuries later, the goal of his ambition was to be achieved; not by discovery, but by virtue of the strength and wealth of a new nation of which he did not dream, although its existence is due to his own intrepid courage. Columbus died not knowing that he had mul- tiplied the world by two, and many voyagers after him also vainly sought the longed-for western pas- 4 THE PANAMA CANAL sage. Magellan sought it thousands of leagues to the southward in the cold and stormy seas that encircle the Antarctic Continent. Scores of mar- iners sought it to the northward, but only one, Amundsen, in the twentieth century, was able to take a ship through the frozen passages of the American north seas. Down the western ' coast of the new continent from the eternal ice of Alaska through the Tropics to the southern snows of Tierra del Fuego, the mighty Cordilleras stretch a mountain barrier thou- sands and thousands and thousands of miles. Where that mountain chain is narrowest, and where its peaks are lowest, ships may now go through the Panama Canal. The canal is cut through the narrowest part of the Isthmus but one, and through the Culebra Mountain, the lowest pass but one, in all that longest, mightiest range of mountains. There is a lower place in Nicaragua, and a narrower place on the Isthmus east of the canal, but the engineers agreed that the route from Colon on the Atlantic to Panama on the Pacific through Cidebra Mountain was the most practicable. The canal is 50 miles long. Fifteen miles of it is level with the oceans, the rest is higher. Ships are lifted up in giant locks, three steps, to sail for more than 30 miles across the continental divide, 85 feet above the surface of the ocean, then let down by three other locks to sea level again. The channel is 300 feet wide at its narrowest place, and the locks which form the two gigantic water stairways are capable of hfting and lowering the largest ships now afloat. A great part of the THE LAND DIVIDED 5 higher level of the canal is the largest artificial lake in the world, made by impounding the waters of the Chagres River, thus filling with water the lower levels of the section. Another part of the higher level is Culebra Cut, the channel cut through the backbone of the continent. Almost before Columbus died plans were made for cutting such a channel. With the beginning of the nineteenth century and the introduction of steam navigation, the demand for the canal began to be insistent. Many plans were made, but it remained for the French, on New Year's Day of 1880, actually to begin the work. They failed, but not before they had accomplished much toward the reduction of Culebra Cut. They expended between 1880 and 1904 no less than $300,000,000 in then- ill-fated efforts. In 1904 the United States of America undertook the task. In a decade it was completed and the Americans had spent, all told, $375,000,000 in the project. Because the Atlantic lies east and the Pacific west of the United States, one is likely to imagine the canal as a huge ditch cut straight across a neck of land from east to west. But it must be remembered that South America lies eastward from North America, and that the Isthmus con- necting the two has its axis east and west. The canal, therefore, is cut from the Atlantic south- eastward to the Pacific. It lies directly south of Pittsburgh, Pa., and it brings Peru and Chile closer to New York than California and Oregon. The first 7 miles of the canal, beginning at the 6 THE PANAMA CANAL Atlantic end, run directly south and from thence to the Pacific it pursues a serpentine course in a southeasterly direction. At the northern, or Atlantic, terminus are the twin cities of Colon and Cristobal, Colon dating from the middle of the nineteenth century wjien the railroad was built across the Isthmus, and Cristobal having its beginnings with the French attempt in 1880. At the southern, or Pacific, terminus are the twin cities of Panama and Bajlboa. Panama was founded in 1673 after the destruption by Morgan, the buccaneer, of an elder city ekab- iished in 1519. The ruins of the old city stand 5 miles east of the new, and, since their story is one, it may be said that Panama is the oldest city of the Western World. Balboa is yet in its swad- dhng clothes, for it is the new American town des- tined to be the capital of the American territory encompassing the canal. The waterway is cut through a strip of terri- tory called the Canal Zone, which to all intents and purposes is a territory of the United States. This zone is 10 miles wide and follows the irregufar line of the canal, extending 5 miles on either side from the axis of the channel. This Canal Zone traverses and separates the territory of the Re- public of Panama, which includes the whole of the Isthmus, and has an area about equal to that of Indiana and a population of 350,000 or about that of Washington City. The two chief Panaman cities, Panama and Colon, lie within the limits of the Canal Zone, but, by the treaty, they are excepted from its government and are an integral part of the Republic of Panama, of which THE LAND DIVIDED 7 the city of Panama is the capital. Cristobal and Balboa, although immediately contiguous to Colon and Panama, ai;e American towns under the Amer- ican flag. The Canal Zone historically and commercially has a record of interest and importance longer and more continuous than any other part of the New World. Columbus himself founded a settlement here at Nombre de Dios; Balboa here discovered the Pacific Ocean; across this narrow neck was transported the spoil of the devastated Empire of the Incas; here were the ports of call for the Spanish gold-carrying galleons; and here cen-' tered the activities of the pirates and buccaneers that were wont to prey on the conxtnerce of the Spanish Main. Over this route, on the shoulders of slaves and the back of mules, were transported the wares in trade of Spain with its colonies not only on the west coasts of the Americas, but with the Philip- pines. Not far from Colon was the site of the colony of New Caledonia, the disastrous undertaking of the Scotchman, Patterson, who founded the Bank of England, to duplicate in America the enormous financial success of the East India Company in Asia. Here in the ancient city of Panama in the early part of the nineteenth century assembled the first Pan American conference that gave life to the Monroe doctrine and ended the era of European colonization in America. Here was built with infinite labor and terrific toll of life the first railroad connecting the Atlantic 8 THE PANAMA CANAL and the Pacific Oceans — a railroad less than 50 miles in length, but with perhaps the most in- teresting story in the annals of railroading. Across this barrier in '49 clambered the American argonauts, seeking the newly discovered golden fleeces of California. This was the theater of the failure of Count de Lesseps, the most stupendous financial fiasco in the history of the world. And this, now, is the site of the most expensive and most successful engineering project ever under- taken by human beings. It cost the French $300,000,000 to fail at Panama where the Americans, at the expenditure of $375,- 000,000, succeeded. And, of the excavation done by the French, only $30,000,000 worth was avail- able for the purpose of the Americans. That the Americans succeeded where the French had failed is not to be assigned to the superiority of the American over the French nation. The reasons are to be sought, rather, in the underlying purposes of the two undertakings, and in the scientific and engineering progress made in the double decade intervening between the time when the French failure became apparent and the Americans began their work. In the first place, the French undertook to build the canal as a money-making proposition. People in every grade of social and industrial life in France contributed from their surpluses and from their hard-earned savings money to buy shares in the canal company in the hope that it would yield a fabulously rich return. Estimates of the costs of the undertaking, made by the engineers, were THE LAND DIVIDED 9 arbitrarily cut down by financiers, with the result that repeated calls were made for more money and the shareholders soon found to their dismay that they must contribute more and yet more before they could hope for any return whatever. From the beginning to the end, the French Canal Com- pany was concerned more with problems of pro- motion and finance than with engineering and excavation. As a natural result of this spirit at the head of the undertaking the whole course of the project was marred by an orgy of graft and corruption such as never had been known. Every bit of work was let out by contract, and the con- tractors uniformly paid corrupt tribute to high officers in the company. No watch was set on expenditures; everything bought for the canal was bought at prices too high; everything it had to sell was practically given away. In the next place, the French were pitiably at the mercy of the diseases of the Tropics. The science of preventive medicine had not been suf- ficiently developed to enable the French to know that mosquitoes and filth were enemies that must be conquered and controlled before it would be possible successfully to attack the land barrier. Yellow fever and malaria killed engineers and common laborers alike. The very hospitals, which the French provided for the care of the sick, were turned into centers of infection for yellow fever, because the beds were set in pans of water which served as ideal breeding places for the death-bear- ing stegomyia. In this atmosphere of lavish extravagance caused by the financial corruption, and in the continual 10 THE PANAMA CANAL fear of quick and awful death, the morals of the French force were broken; there was no determined spirit of conquest; interest centered in champagne and women ; the canal was neglected. Yet, in spite of this waste, this corruption of money and morals, much of the work done by the French was of permanent value to the Americans; and without the lessons learned from their bitter experience it would have been impossible for the Americans or any other people to have completed the canal so quickly and so cheaply. The Americans brought to the task another spirit. The canal was to be constructed not in the hope of making money, but, rather, as a great national and popular undertaking, designed to bring the two coasts of the great Repubhc in closer communication for purposes of commerce and defense. The early estimates made by the American engineers were far too low, but the French ex- perience had taught the United States to expect such an outcome. Indeed, it is doubtful if any- body believed that the first estimates would not be doubled or quadrupled before the canal was finished. The journey of the U. S. S. Oregon around the Horn from Pacific waters to the theater of the War with Spain in the Caribbean, in 1898, impressed upon the American public the necessity of building the canal as a measure of national defense. Com- mercial interests long had been convinced of its necessity as a factor in both national and inter- national trade, and, when it was realized that the Oregon would have saved 8,000 miles if there Chairman and Chief Engineer A STREET IN THE CITY OF PANAMA. THE LAND DIVIDED li had been a canal at Panama, the American mind was made up. It determined that the canal should be built, whatever the cost. From the very first there was never any question that the necessary money would be forthcoming. It is a fact unprecedented in all parliamentary history that all of the appropriations necessary for the construction and completion of the Isth- mian waterway were made by Congress without a word of serious protest. During the same War with Spain that convinced the United States that the canal must be built, a long forward step was taken in the science of medicine as concerned with the prevention and control of tropical diseases. The theory that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes had been proved by a Cuban physician, Dr. Carlos Finley, a score of years earlier. An Englishman, Sir Patrick Mauson, had first shown that disease might be transmitted by the bites of insects, and another Englishman, Maj. Roland Ross, had shown that malaria was conveyed by mosquitoes. It remained, however, for American army surgeons to demonstrate, as they did in Cuba, that yellow fever was transmissible only by mosquitoes of the stegomyia variety and by no other means whatsoever. With this knowledge in their possession the Americans were able to do what the French were not — to control the chief enemy of mankind in torrid climes. In the first years of the work the public, and Congress, reflecting its views, were not sufficiently convinced of the efficacy of the new scientific discoveries to aflford the means for put- 12 THE PANAMA CANAL ting them into effect. The Isthmian Canal Com- mission refused to honor requisitions for wire screens, believing that they were demanded to add to the comfort and luxury of quarters on the Zone, rather than for protection against disease. But the outbreak of yellow fever in 1905 was the occasion for furnishing the Sanitary Department, under Col. W. C. Gorgas, with the necessary funds, and thus provided, he speedily and com- pletely stamped out the epidemic. From that time on, no one questioned the part that sanitation played in the success of the project. The cities of Panama and Colon were cleaned up as never were tropical cities cleaned before. All the time, every day, men fought mosquitoes that the workers in the ditch might not be struck down at their labors. The Americans, too, made mistakes. In the beginning they attempted to build the canal under the direction of a commission with headquarters in Washington. This commission, at long dis- tance and by methods hopelessly involved in red tape, sought to direct the activities of the engineer in charge on the Isthmus. The public also was impatient with the long time required for preparation and insistently demanded that "the dirt begin to fly." The work was begun in 1904. It proceeded so slowly that two years later the chairman of the Isthmian Canal Commission asserted that it must be let out to a private contractor, this being, in his opinion, the only way possible to escape the toils of governmental red tape. The then chief engineer, the second man who had held that position while fretting under these methods, was opposed THE LAND DIVIDED 13 to the contract system. Bids were asked for, however, but all of them were rejected. Fortunately, Congress from the beginning had left the President a practically free hand in di- recting the course of the project. Mr. Roosevelt reorganized the commission, made Col. George W. Goethals, an Army engineer, chairman of the commission and chief engineer of the canal. The constitution of the commission was so changed as to leave all the power in the hands of the chair- man and to lay all of the responsibiUty upon^ his shoulders. It was a master stroke of policy, and the event proved the choice of the man to be admirable in every way. From the day the Army engineers took charge there was never any more delay, never any halt in progress, and the only difficulties encountered were those of resistant Nature (such as the slides in Culebra Cut) and those of misin- formed public opinion (such as the absurd criticism of the Gatun Dam). The Americans, too, in the early stages of the work were hampered by reason of the fact that the final decision as to whether to build a sea- level canal or a lock canal was so long delayed by the conflicting views of the partisans of each type in Congress, in the executive branches of the Government, and among the engineers. This problem, too, was solved by Mr. Roosevelt. He boldly set aside the opinion of the majority of the engineers who had been called in consultation on the problem, and directed the construction of a lock canal. The wisdom of this decision has been so overwhelmingly demonstrated that the con- 14 THE PANAMA CANAL troversy that once raged so furiously now seems to have been but a tiny tempest in an insignificant teapot. One other feature of the course of events under the American regime at Panama must be considered. Graft and corruption had ruined the French; the Americans were determined that whether they succeeded or not, there should be no scandal. This, indeed, in part explains why there was so much apparently useless circumlocution in the early stages of the project. Congress, the President, the engineers, all who were in responsible position, were determined that there should be no graft. 'There was none. Not only were the Americans determined that the money voted for the canal should be honestly and economically expended, but they were deter- mined, also, that the workers on the canal should be well paid and well cared for. To this end they paid not only higher wages than were current at home for the same work, but they effectively shielded the workers from the exactions and extor- tions of Latin and Oriental merchants by estab- hshing a commissary through which the employees were furnished wholesome food at reasonable prices — prices lower, indeed, than those pre- vailing at home. As a result of these things the spirit of the Ameri- cans on the Canal Zone, from the chairman and chief engineer down to the actual diggers, was that of a determination to lay the barrier low, and to complete the job well within the limit of time and at the lowest possible cost. In this spirit all Americans should rejoice, for it is the THE LAND DIVIDED 15 highest expression of the nearest approach we have made to the ideals upon which the Fathers founded our Repubhc. It is impossible to leave out of the reckoning, in telling the story of the canal, the checkered history of the diplomatic engagements on the part of the United States, that have served both to help and to hinder the undertaking. What is now the Republic of Panama has been, for the greater part of the time since continental Latin America threw oflf the yoke of Spain, a part of that Republic having its capital at Bogota, now under the name of Colombia, sometimes under the name of New Granada, sometimes a part of a federation including Venezuela and Ecuador. The United States, by virtue of the Monroe doctrine, always asserted a vague and undefined interest in the local afifairs of the Isthmus. This was translated into a concrete interest when, in 1846, a treaty was made, covering the construction of the railroad across the Isthmus, the United States engaging always to keep the transit free and open. Great Britain, by virtue of small terri- torial holdings in Central America and of larger claims there, also had a concrete interest, which was acknowledged by the United States, in the Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850, under which a pro- jected canal should be neutral under the guarantee of the Governments of the United States and Great Britain. For years the United States was inclined to favor a canal cut through Nicaragua, rather than one at Panama, and, after 1898, when the American nation had made up its mind to build a canal some- 16 THE PANAMA CANAL where, the partisans of the Panama and Nicaragua routes waged a bitter controversy. Congress finally decided the issue by giving the President authority to construct a canal at Panama, with the proviso that should he be unable to negotiate a satisfactory treaty with Colombia, which then owned the Isthmus, he should proceed to construct the canal through Nicaragua. Under this threat of having the scepter of commercial power depart forever from Panama, Colombia negotiated a treaty, known as the Hay-Herran treaty, giving the United States the right to construct the canal. This treaty, however, failed of ratification by the Colombian Congress, with the connivance of the very Colombian President who had negotiated it. But President Roosevelt was most unwilling to accept the alternative given him by Congress — that of undertaking the canal at Nicaragua — and this unwillingness, to say the least, encour- aged a revolution in Panama. This revolution separated the Isthmus from the Republic of Co- lombia, and set up the new Repubhc of Panama. As a matter of fact, Panama had had but the slenderest relations with the Bogota Government, had been for years in the past an independent State, had never ceased to assert its own sov- ereignty, and had been, indeed, the theater of innumerable revolutions. The part the United States played in encourag- ing this revolution, the fact that the United States authorities prevented the transit of Colombian troops over the Panama Railway, and that Ameri- can marines were landed at the time, has led to THE LAND DIVIDED 17 no end of hostile criticism, not to speak of the still pending and unsettled claims made by Colom- bia against the United States. Mr. Roosevelt himself, years after the event and in a moment of frankness, declared: "I took Panama, and left Congress to debate it later." Whatever may be the final outcome of our controversy with Colombia, it may be confidently predicted that history will justify the coup d' etat on the theory that Panama was the best possible site for the interoceanic canal, and that the rupture of relations between the territory of the Isthmus and the Colombian Republic was the best possible solution of a confused and tangled problem. These diplomatic entanglements, however, as the canal is completed, leave two international disputes unsettled — the one with Colombia about the genesis of the canal undertaking, and the other with Great Britain about the terms of its operation. Congress, in its wisdom, saw fit to exempt American vessels engaged exclusively in coastwise trade — that is to say, in trade solely between ports of the United States — from payment of tolls ill transit through the canal. This exemption was protested by Great Britain on the ground that the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, which took the place of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, provided that the canal should be open to all nations on exact and equal terms. The future holds the termination of both these disputes. Congress, that never begrudged an appropria- tion, indulged in many disputes concerning the 18 THE PANAMA CANAL building and operation of the canal. First, there was the controversy as to site, between Nicaragua and Panama. Next, came the question as to whether the canal should be at sea level or of a lock type. Then there was the question of tolls, and the exemption of American coastwise traflBc. But, perhaps the most acrimonious debates were on the question as to whether or not the canal should be fortified. Those who favored forti- fication won their victory, and the canal was made, from a military standpoint, a very Gibraltar for the Ainerican defense of, and control over, the Caribbean. That this was inevitable was assured by two facts: One that the trip of the Oregon in 1898 crystallized public sentiment in favor of constructing the canal; and the other that the canal itself was wroughtby Army engineers under the direction of Colonel Goethals. Colonel Goethals never for a moment considered the possibility that Congress would vote against forti- fications, and the whole undertaking was carried forward on that basis. If the military idea, the notion of its necessity as a feature of the national defense, was the determining factor in initiating the canal project, it remains a fact that its chief-use will be commercial, and that its money return, whether small or large, nearly all will be derived from tolls assessed upon merchant vessels passing through it. The question of the probable traffic the canal will be called upon to handle was studied as perhaps no other world-wide problem of trans- portation ever was. Prof. Emory R. Johnson was the student of this phase of the question from THE THREE PRESIDENTS UNDER WHOSE DIRECTION THE CANAL WAS BUILT VENDEES IN THE STEEETS OP PANAMA A NATIVE BOY MARKETING THE LAND DIVmED 19 the beginning to the end. He estimat^ps that the canal in the first few years of its operation will have a traffic of 10,000,000 tons of shipping each year, and that by 1975 this will have increased to 80,000,- 000 tons, the full capacity of the canal in its present form. Provision has been made against this contingency by the engineers who have so constructed the canal that a third set of locks at each end may be constructed at a cost of about $25,000,000, and these will be sufficient almost to double the present ultimate capacity, and to take care of a larger volume of traffic than now can be foreseen. Americans are interested, first of all, in what the canal will do for their own domestic trade. It brings Seattle 7,800 miles nearer to New York; San Francisco, 8,800 miles nearer to New Orleans; Honolulu 6,600 miles nearer to New York than by the Strait of Magellan. Such saving in distance for water-borne freight works a great economy, and inevitably must have a tremendous ^ effect upon transcontinental American commerce. In foreign con^merce, also, some of the distances saved are tremendous. For instance, Guayaquil, in Ecuador, is 7,400 miles nearer to New York by the canal than by the Strait of Magellan; Yoko- hama is nearly 4,000 miles nearer to New York by Panama than by Suez; and Melbourne is 1,300 miles closer to Liverpool by Panama than by either Suez or the Cape of Good Hope. Curi- ously enough, the distance from Manila to New York, by way of Suez and Panama, is almost the same, the difference in favor of Panama being only 41 miles out of a total of 11,548 miles. The 20 . THE PANAMA CANAL difference in distance from Hongkong to New York by the two canals is even less, being only 18 miles, this slight advantage favoring Suez. ^ut it is not by measure of distances that the effect of the canal on international commerce may be measured. It spells the development of the all but untouched western coast of South America and Mexico. It means a tremendous up-building of foreign commerce in our own Mis- sissippi Valley and Gulf States. It means an unprecedented commercial and industrial awaken- ing in the States of our Pacific coast and the Provinces of Western Canada. While it was not projected as a money-making proposition, it will pay for its maintenance and a slight return upon the money invested from the beginning, and in a score of years will be not only seff-supporting, but will yield a sufficient income to provide for the amortization of its capital in a hundred years. The story of how this titanic work was under- taken, of how it progressed, and of how it was crowned with success, is a story without a parallel in the annals of man. The canal itself, as Am- bassador Bryce has said, is the greatest hberty man has ever taken with nature. Its digging was a steady and progressive vic- tory over sullen and resistant nature. The ditch through Culelbra Mountain was eaten out by huge steam shovels of such mechanical perfection that they seemed almost to be alive, almost to know what they were doing. The rocks and earth they bit out of the mountain side were carried away by trains operating in a system of THE LAND DIVIDED 21 such skill that it is the admiration of all the trans- portation world, for the problem of disposing of the excavated material was even greater than that of taking it out. The control of the torrential Chagres River by the Gatun Dam, changing the river from the chief menace of the canal to its essential and salient feature, was no less an undertaking. And, long after Gatun Dam and Culebra Cut cease to be marvels, long after the Panama Canal becomes as much a matter of course as the Suez Canal, men still will be thrilled and impressed by the wonderful machinery of the locks — those great water stair- ways, operated by machinery as ingenious as gigantic, and holding in check with their mighty gates such floods as never elsewhere have been impounded. It is a wonderful story that this book is under- taking to tell. There will be much in it of engi- neering feats and accomplishments, because its subject is the greatest of all engineering accomplish- ments. There will be much in it of the things that were done at Panama during the period of construction, for never were such things done before. There will be much in it of the history of how and why the American Government came to undertake the work, for nothing is of greater importance. There will be something in it of the future, looking with conservatism and care as far ahead as may be, to outline what the com- pletion of this canal will mean not only for the people of the United States, but for the people of all the world. Much that might be written of the romantic 22 THE PANAMA CANAL history of the Isthmian territory — tales of dis- coverers and conquistadores, wild tales of pirates and buccaneers, serio-comic narratives of intrigue and revolution — is left out of this book, because, while it is interesting, it now belongs to that antiquity which boasts of many, many books; and this volume is to tell not of Panama, but of the Panama Canal — on the threshold of its story, fitted by a noble birth for a noble destiny. CHAPTER II GKEATBST ENGINEERING PROJECT THE Panama Canal is the greatest engineer- ing project of all history. There is more than the patriotic prejudice of a people proud of their own achievements behind this assertion. Men of all nations concede it without question, and felicitate the United States upon the remarkable success with which it has been carried out. So distinguished an authority as the Rt. Hon. James Bryce, late British ambassador to Washington, and a man not less famous in the world of letters than successful in the field of diplomacy, declared before the National Geo- graphic Society that not only is the Panama Canal the greatest undertaking of the past or the present but that even the future seems destined never to offer any land-dividing, world-uniting project com- parable to it in magnitude or consequence. We are told that the excavations total 232,000,- 000 cubic yards; that the Gatun Dam contains 21,000,000 cubic yards of material; and that the locks and spillways required the laying of some 4,500,000 cubic yards of concrete. But if one is to realize the meaning of this he must get out of the realm of cubic yards and into the region of concrete comparisons. Every one is familiar with the size and shape of the Washington Monu- 23 24 THE PANAMA CANAL ment. With its base of 55 feet square and its height of 555 feet, it is one of the most imposing of all the hand reared structures of the earth. Yet the material excavated from the big water- way at Panama represents 5,840 such sohd-built shafts. Placed in a row with base touching base they would traverse the entire Isthmus and reach 10 miles beyond deep water in the two oceans at Panama. Placed in a square with base touching base they would cover an area of 475 acres. If all the material were placed in one solid shaft with a base as large as the average city block, it would tower nearly 100,000 feet in the air. Another illustration of the magnitude of the quantity of material excavated at Panama may be had from a comparison with the pyramid of Cheops, of which noble pile some one has said that "All things fear Time, but Time fears only Cheops." We are told that it required a hundred thousand men 10 years to make ready for the building of that great structure, and 20 years more to build it. There were times at Panama when, in 26 working days, more material was removed from the canal than was required to build Cheops, and from first to last the Americans removed mate- rial enough to build sixty-odd pyramids such as Cheops. Were it all placed in one such structure, with a base as large as that of Cheops, the apex would tower higher into the sky than the loftiest mountain on the face of the earth. Still another way of arriving at a true con- ception of the work of digging the big water- way is to consider that enough material had to be removed by the Americans to make a tunnel GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT 25 through the earth at the equator more than 12 feet square. But perhaps the comparison that will best il- lustrate the immensity of the task of digging the ditch is that of the big Lidgerwood dirt car. A GRAPHIC KEPKESENTATION OF THE MATEHIAL HANDLED AT PANAMA on which so much of the spoil has been hauled away. Each car holds about 20 cubic yards of dirt, and 21 cars make a train. The material removed from the canal would fill a string of these cars reaching about three and a half times around the earth, and it would take a string of Panama Railroad engines reaching almost from New York to Honolulu to move them. Yet all these comparisons have taken account of the excavations only. The construction of the Panama Canal represents much besides dig- ging a ditch, for there were some immense struc- tures to erect. Principal among these, so far as magnitude is concerned, was the Gatun Dam, that big ridge of earth a mile and a half long, half a mile thick at the base, and 105 feet high. It contains some 21,000,000 cubic yards of mate- rial, enough to build more than 500 solid shafts like the Washington Monument. Then there was the dam at Pedro Miguel — "Peter Magill," 26 THE PANAMA CANAL as the irreverent boys of Panama christened it — and another at Miraflores, each of them small in comparison with the great embankment at Gatun, but together containing as much material as 70 solid shafts like our Washington Monument. Besides these structures there still remain the locks and spillways, with their four and a half million cubic yai^ds of concrete and their hundreds and thousands of tons of steel. With all these astonishing comparisons in mind, is it strange that the digging of the Panama Canal is the world's greatest engineering project? Are they not enough to stamp it as the greatest single achievement in human history.? Yet even they, pregnant of meaning as they are, fail to reveal the full and true proportions of the work of our illustrious army of canal diggers. They tell nothing of the difficulties which were overcome — difficulties before which the bravest spirit might have quailed. When the engineers laid out the present proj- ect, they calculated that 103,000,000 cubic yards of material would have to be excavated, and pre- dicted that the canal diggers would remove • that much in nine years. Since that time the amount of material to be taken out has increased from one cause or another until it now stands at more than double the original estimate. At one time there was an increase for widening the Culebra Cut by 50 per cent. At another time there was an increase to take care of the 225 acres of slides that were pouring into the big ditch like glaciers. At still another time there was an increase for the creation of a small lake between the locks at GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT 27 Pedro Miguel and Miraflores. At yet another time it was found that the Chagres River and the currents of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans were depositing large quantities of silt and mud in the canal, and this again raised the total amount of material to be excavated. But none of these unforeseen obstacles and additional burdens dis- mayed the engineers. They simply attacked their problem with renewed zeal and quickened en- ergy, with the result that they excavated in seven years of actual operations more than twice as much jnaterial as they were expected to excavate in nine years. In other words, the material to be removed was increased 125 per cent and yet the canal was opened at least 12 months ahead of the time predicted. How this unprecedented efficiency was developed forms in itself a remarkable story of achievement. The engineers met with insistent demands that they "make the dirt fly." The people had seen many months of preparation, but they had no patience with that; they wanted to see the ditch begin to deepen. It was a critical stage in the history of the project. If the dirt should fail to fly public sentiment would turn away from the canal. So John F. Stevens addressed himself to making it fly. Before he left he had brought the monthly output almost up to the million yard mark. When that mark was passed the President of the United States, on behalf of himself and the nation, sent a congratulatory message to the canal army. Many people asserted that it was nothing but a burst of speed; but the canal diggers squared 28 THE PANAMA CANAL themselves for a still higher record. They forced up the mark to two million a month, and straight- way used that as a rallying point from which to charge the heights three million. Once again the standard was raised; "four million" became the slogan! Wherever that slogan was flashed upon a Y. M. C. A. stereoptican screen there was cheering — cheering that expressed a determined purpose. Finally, when March, 1909, came around all hands went to work with set jaws, and for the only time in the history of the world there was excavated on a single project, 4,000,000 cubic yards of material in one month. With the dirt moving, came the question of the cost of making it fly. By eliminating a bit of lost motion here and taking up a bit of waste there, even with the price of skilled labor fully 50 per cent higher on the Isthmus than in the States, unit costs were sent down to surprisingly low levels. For instance, in 1908 it was costing 11| cents a cubic yard to operate a steam shovel; in 1911 this had been forced down to 8| cents a yard. In 1908 more than 18^ cents were expended to haul a cubic yard of spoil 8 miles; in 1911 a cubic yard was hauled 12 miles for a little more than 15^^ cents. Some of the efficiency results were astonishing. To illustrate: One would think that the working power of a ton of dynamite would be as great at one time as another; and yet the average ton of dynamite in 1911 did just twice as much work as in 1908. No less than $50,000 a month was saved by shaking out cement bags. It was this wonderful efficiency fliat enabled GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT 29 the United States to build the canal for $375,- 000,000 when without it the cost might have reached $600,000,000. In 1908, after the army had been going at regulation double-quick for a year, a board was appointed to estimate just how much material would have to be taken out, and how much it would cost. That board estimated that the project as then planned would require the excavation of 135,000,000 cubic yards of material, and that the total cost of the canal as then contemplated would be $375,000,000. Also it was estimated that the canal would be completed by January 1, 1915. After that time the amount of material to be excavated was increased by 97,000,000 cubic yards, and yet so great was the efficiency developed that the savings effected permitted that great excess of material to be removed without the additional expense of a single penny above the estimates of 1908, and in less time than was forecast. Although the difficulties that beset the canal diggers were such as engineers never before en- countered, they were met and brushed aside, and all the world's engineering records were smashed into smithereens. It required 20 years to build the Suez Canal, through a comparatively dry and sandy region. When the work at Panama was at its height the United States was excavating the equivalent of a Suez Canal every 15 months. Likewise it required many years to complete the Manchester Ship Canal between Liverpool and Manchester, a distance of 35 miles. This canal cost so much more than was estimated that money was raised for its completion only with the greatest 30 THE PANAMA CANAL difficulty. Yet at Panama the Americans dug four duplicates of the Manchester Ship Canal in five years. AU of this was done in spite of the fact that they had to work in a moist, hot, enervating climate where for nine months in a year the air seems filled with moisture to the point of saturation, and where, for more than half the length of the great ditch, the annual rainfall often amounts to as much as 10 feet — all of this falling in the nine months of the wet season. A few comparisons outside of the construction itself will serve to illustrate the tremendous pro- portions of the work. Paper money was not handled at all ia paying off the canal army. It took three days to pay^ off the force with American gold and Panaman silver. When pay day was over there had been given into the hands of the Americans, and thrown into the hats of the Span- iards and West Indian negroes, 1,600 pounds of gold and 24 tons of silver. When it is remembered that this performance was repeated every month for seven years, one may imagine the enormous outlay of money for labor. The commissary also illustrates 'the magnitude of the work. Five million loaves of bread, a hundred thousand pounds of cheese, more than 9,000,000 pounds of meat, half a million pounds of poultry, more than a thousand carloads of ice, more than a million pounds of onions, half a mil- lion pounds of butter — these are some of the items handled in a single year. Wherever one turns he finds things which fur- nish collateral evidence of the magnitude of the work. The Sanitary Department used each year GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT 31 150,000 gallons of mosquito oil, distributed thousands of pounds of quinine, cut and burned millions of square yards of brush, and spent half a million dollars for hospital maintenance. No other great engineering project has allowed such a remarkable "margin of safety" — the engineering term for doing things better than they need to be done. The engineers who dug the canal took nothing for granted. No rule of physics was so plain or so obvious as to escape actual physical proof before its acceptance, when such proof was possible. No one who knows how the engineers approached the subject, how they resolved every doubt on the side of safety, and how they kept so far away from the danger line as actually to make their precaution seem excessive can doubt that the Panama Canal will go down in history as the most thorough as well as the most extensive piece of engineering in the world. CHAPTER III GATUN DAM THE key to the whole Panama Canal is Gatun Dam, that great mass of earth that impounds the waters of the Chagres River, makes of the central portion of the canal a great navigable lake with its surface 85 feet above the level of the sea, and, in short, renders practicable the operation of a lock type of canal across the Isthmus. Around no other structure in the history of engineering did the fires of controversy rage so furiously and so persistently as they raged for sev- eral years around Gatun Dam. It was attacked on this side and that; its foundations were pro- nounced bad and its superstructure not watertight. Doubt as to the stability of such a structure led some of the members of the Board of Con- sulting Engineers to recommend a sea-level canal. Further examination of the site and experimen- tation with the materials of which it was proposed to construct it, showed the engineers that it was safe as to site and satisfactory as to superstructure. The country had about accepted their conclusions, when, in the fall of 1908, there was a very heavy rain on the Isthmus, and some stone which had been deposited on the soil on the upstream toe of the dam, sank out of sight — just as the engineers GATUN DAM 33 expected it to do. A story thereupon was sent to the States announcing that the Gatun Dam had given way and that the Chagres River was rush- ing unrestrained through it to the sea. The public never stopped to recall that the dam was not yet there to give way, or to inquire exactly what had happened, and a wave of pubUc distrust swept over the country. To make absolutely certain that everything was all right, and to restore the confidence of the people in the big project. President Roosevelt selected the best board of engineers he could find and sent them to the Isthmus in company with President-elect Taf t to see exactly what was the situation at Gatun. They examined the site, they examined the material, they examined the evidence in Colonel Goethal's hands. When they got through they announced that they had only one serious criti- cism to make of the dam as proposed. "It is not necessary to tie a horse with a log chain to make sure he can not break away," observed one of them, "a smaller chairt, would serve just as well." And so they recommended that the crest of the dam be lowered from 135 feet to 115 ^eet. Still later this was cut to 105 feet. They found that the underground river whose existence was urged by all who opposed a lock canal, fiowed nowhere save in the fertile valleys of imagination. The engineers had known this a long time, but out of deference to the doubters they had decided to drive a lot of interlocking sheet pihng across the Chagres Valley. "What's the use trying to stop a river that does not exist? " queried the engineers, and so the sheet piling was omitted. 34 THE PANAMA CANAL As a matter of fact, Gatun Dam proved the happiest surprise of the whole waterway. In every particular it more than fulfilled the most optimistic prophecies of the engineers. They said that what little seepage there would be would not hurt anything; the dam answered by showing no seepage at all. They said that the hydraulic core ' would be practically impervious; it proved abso- lutely so. Where it was once believed that Gatun Dam would be the hardest task on the Isthmus it proved to be the easiest. Culebra Cut exchanged places with it in that regard. Gatun Dam contains nearly 22,000,000 cubic yards of material. Assuming that it takes two horses to pull a cubic yard of material it would re- quire twice as many horses as there are in the United States to move the dam were it put on wheels. Loaded into ordinary two-horse dirt wagons it would make a procession of them some 80,000 miles long. The dam is -a mile and a half long, a half mile thick at the base, 300 feet thick at the water line, and 100 feet thick at the crest. Its height is 105 feet. Yet in spite of its vast dimensions it is the most inconspicuous object in the landscape. Grown over with dense tropical vegetation it looks little more conspicuous than a gradual rise in the sur- face of the earth. Passengers passing Gatun on the Panama Railroad scarcely recognize the dam as such when they see it, so gradual are its slopes. An excellent idea of the gentle incline of the dam may be had by referring to the accompanying figure, which shows the outlines of a cross section of the dam. GATUN DAM 35 The materials of which it is constructed are also shown there. Starting on the upstream side there is a section made of solid material from Culebra Cut. Beyond this is the upstream toe of the dam, which is made of the best rock in the A CEOSS-SECTION OF THE GATUN DAM Culebra Cut. After this comes the hydraulic fillo^ This material is a mixture of sand and clay which, when it dries out thoroughly, is compact and absolutely impervious to water. It was secured from the river channel and pumped with great 20-inch centrifugal pumps into the central portion of the dam, where a veritable pond was formed; the heavier materials settled to the bot- tom, forming layer after layer of the core, while the lighter particles, together with the water, passed off through drain pipes. In this way the water was not only the hod carrier of the dam construction, but the stone mason as well. Where there was the tiniest open space, even between two grains of sand, the water found it and slipped in as many small particles as were necessary to stop it up. Above the hydraulic fill on the upstream side is a layer of solid material, while that part of the face of the dam exposed to wave action is covered with heavy rock. The same is true of the crest. On the downstream half of the dam there is approximately 400 feet of hydrauHc fill, then 400 feet of solid fill, then a 30-foot toe, and then ordinary excavated material. 36 THE PANAMA CANAL The Chagres Valley is a wide one until it reaches Gatun. Here it narrows down to a mile and a half. It is across this valley that the Gatun Dam is thrown in opposition to the seaward journey of the Chagres waters. At the halfway point across the valley there was a httle hill almost entirely of soHd rock. It happened to be planted exactly at the place the engineers needed it. Here they could erect their spillway for the control of the water in the lake above. GATUH UiKBT pIjAN op the gatun dam and locks The regulation of the water level in Gatun Lake is no small task, for the Chagres is one of the world's moodiest streams. At times it is a peace- ful, leisurely stream of some 2 feet in depth, while at other times it becomes a wild, roaring, torrential river of magnificent proportions. Sometimes it reaches such high stages that it sends a million gallons of water to the sea between the ticks of a clock. In controlling the Chagres, the engineers again GATUN DAM 37 took what on any private work would have been regarded as absurd precaution. In the first place, Gatun Lake will be so big that the Chagres can break every record it heretofore has set, both for momentary high water and for sustained high water, and still, with no water being let out of the lake, it can continue to flow that way for a day and a half without disturbing things at all. It could flow for two days before any serious damage could be done. Thus the canal force might be off duty for some 45 hours, with the outlet closed, before any really serious damage could be done by the rampage of the river. But of course no one supposes that it would be humanly possible that two such contingencies as the highest water ever known, and everybody asleep at their posts for two days, could happen together. When the water in the lake reached its normal level of 87 feet the spillway gates would be opened, and, if necessary, it would begin to dis- charge 145,000 feet of water a second. This is 17,000 feet more than the record for sustained flow heretofore set by the Chagres. But if it were foimd that even this was inadequate the culverts in the locks could be brought into play, and with them the full discharge would be brought up to 194,000 feet a second, or 57,000 more than the Chagres has ever brought down. But suppose even this would not suffice to take care of the floods of the Chagres.'* The spillway is so ar- ranged that as the level of the water in the lake rises the discharging capacity increases. With the spillway open, even if the Chagres were to double its record for continued high water, it would take 38 THE PANAMA CANAL many days to bring the lake level up to the danger point — 92 feet. When it reached that height the spillway would have a capacity of 222,000 feet, which, with the aid of the big lock culverts, would bring the total discharge up to 262,000 feet a second — only 12,000 cubic feet less than double the highest known flow of the Chagres. But this is only characteristic of what one sees everywhere. Whether it be in making a spillway that would accommodate two rivers hke the Chagres instead of one, or in building dams with 63 pounds of weight for every pound of pressure against it, or yet in building lock gates which will bear several times the maximum weight that can ever be brought against them, the work at Panama was done with the intent to provide against every possible con- tingency. The spillway through which the surplus waters of Gatun Lake will be let down to the sea level, is a large semicircular concrete dam structure with the outside curve upstream and the inside curve downstream. Projecting above the dam are 13 piers and 2 abutments, which divide it into 14 openings, each of them 45 feet wide. These openings are closed by huge steel gates, 45 feet wide, 20 feet high, and weighing 42 tons each. They are mounted on roller bearings, suspended from above, and are operated by electricity. They work in huge frames just as a window slides up and down in its frame. Each gate is independent of the others, and the amount of water permitted to go over the spillway dam thus can be regulated at will. When a huge volume of water like a million GATUN DAM 39 gallons a second is to be let down a distalice of about 60 feet, it may be imagined that unless some means are found to hold it back and let it descend easily, by the time it would reach the bottom it would be transformed into a thousand furies of energy. Therefore, the spillway dam has been made semicircular, with the outside lines pointing up into the lake and the inside lines downstream, so that as the water rims through the openings it will converge all the currents and cause them to collide on the apron below. This largely over- comes the madness of the water. But still fur- ther to neutralize its force and to make it harmless as it flows on its downward course, there are two rows of baffle piers on the apron of the spillway. They are about 10 feet high and are built of rein- forced concrete, with huge cast-iron blocks upon their upstream faces. When the water gets through them it has been tamed and robbed of all its dangerous force. The spillway is so con- structed that when the water flowing over it becomes more than 6 feet deep it adheres to the downstream face of the dam as it glides down, instead of rushing out and falling perpendicularly. The locks are situated against the high hills at the east side of the valley, after which comes the east wing of the dam, then the spillway, then the west wing of the dam, which terminates on the side of the low mountain that skirts the western side of the valley. With the hills bordering the valley and the dam across it, the engineers have been able to inclose a gigantic reservoir which has a superficial surface of 164 square miles. It is irregular in shape and might remind one of a 40 THE PANAMA CANAL pressed chrysanthemum, the flower representing the lake and the stem Culebra Cut. The surface of the water in this lake is normally 85 feet higher than the surface of the water seaward from Gatun and Miraflores. The lake is entirely fresh water supplied by the Chagres River. The accompany- ing figure shows the profile of the canal. ATuumeoenm ' SunrACc o» Catvh Lace ft ii(lf' I A PBOPILE SECTION OF THE CANAL The Chagres River approaches the canal at approximately right angles at Gamboa, some 21 miles above Gatun. The lake will be so large that the river currents will all be absorbed, the water backing far up into the Chagres, the river depositing its silt before it reaches the canal proper. With the currents thus checked, the Chagres will lose all power to interfere with the navigation of the canal, although upon the bosom of its water will travel for a distance of 35 miles all the ships that pass through the big waterway from Gatun to Miraflores. This fresh water will serve a useful purpose besides carrying ships over the backbone of the continent. Barnacles lose their clinging power in fresh water, and when a ship passes up through the locks from sea level to lake level and from salt water to fresh, the barnacles that have dung to the sides and bottom of the vessel through many a thousand mile of "sky-hooting through GATUN DAM 41 the brine" will have their grip broken and they will drop off helplessly and fall to the bed of the lake, which, in the course of years, will become barnacle-paved. How many times in dry-dock this will save can only be surmised, but the ship that goes through the canal regularly will not have much bother with barnacles. The engineer who worked out the details of the engineering examination of the dam in 1908 was Caleb M. Saville, who had had experience on some of the greatest dams in the world. In the first place, the whole foundation was honeycombed with test borings, and several shafts were sunk so that the engineers could go down and see for themselves exactly what was the nature of the material below. There are some problems in en- gineering where a decision is so close between safety and danger that none but an engineer can decide them. But Gatun Dam could speak for itself and in the layman's tongue. After investigating the site and getting such conclusive evidence that the proverbial wayfaring man might understand it the engineers next conducted a series of experiments to determine whether or not the material of which they pro- posed to build the dam would be watertight. They wanted to make sure whether enough water would seep through to carry any of the dam material along with it. The maximum normal depth of the water is 85 feet. The material it would have to seep through is nearly a half mile thick. In order to determine how the water would behave they took some 3 feet of the material and put it in a strong iron cylinder with water 42 THE PANAMA CANAL above it and subjected it to a pressure equivalent to a head of 185 feet of water. Only an occasional drop came through. If only an occasional drop of clear water gets through 3 feet of material under a pressure of 185 feet of water, it does not require a great engineer to determine that there will not be any seepage through more than a thousand feet of the same material under a head of only 85 feet. And that is only a sample of their seeking after the truth. When they had gone thus far it was then decided to build a little dam a few yards long identical in cross section with Gatun Dam. It was built on the scale of an inch to the foot, by the identical processes with which it was intended to build the big dam. The result only added confirmation to the other experiments. With a proportionate he!ad of water against it, it behaved exactly as they had concluded the big dam would when completed. Every engineer who has read Saville's report pronounces it a masterpiece of engineering investigation. It proved conclu- sively that the site of the dam is stable, and the dam itself impervious to seepage. The engineers who visited the Isthmus at the time with President- elect Taft unanimously agreed that those investi- gations removed every trace of doubt. The Gatun Dam covers about 288 acres. The material in it weighs nearly 30,000,000 tons. The pressure of the highest part of the dam on the foundations beneath amounts to many tons per square foot. The old bugaboo about eartiiquakes throwing it dgwn is a danger that exists only in the minds of those who see ghosts. Some of the TORO POINT BREAKWATER GATUN DAM 43 biggest earth dams in the world are located in California. The Contra Costa Water Com- pany's dam at San Leandro is 120 feet high and not nearly so immense in its proportions as Gatun Dam, yet it weathered the San Francisco earth- quake without difficulty. In Panama City there is an old flat arch that once was a part of a church. It looks as though one might throw it down with a golf stick, and yet it has stood there for several centuries. As a matter of fact, Panama is out of the line of earthquakes and volcanoes, but even if. shocks much worse than those at San Fran- cisco were to come, there is no reason to fear for the safety of the big structure. The lack of knowledge of some of those who in years past criticized the Gatvm Dam was illus- trated by an amusing incident that occurred at a senatorial hearing on the Isthmus. Philander C. Knox, afterwards Secretary of State, was then a Senator and a member of the committee which went to the Isthmus. Another Senator in the party had grave doubts about the stability of Gatun Dam, and asked Colonel Goethals to ex- plain how a dam could hold in check such an immense body of water. Colonel Goethals, in his usual lucid way, explained that it was because of that well-known principle of physics that the outward pressure of water is determined by its depth and not by its volume — that a column of water 10 feet high and a foot thick would have just as much outward pressure as a lake 200 square miles in extent and 10 feet deep. Still uncon- vinced, the Senator pressed his examination fur- ther. At this juncture Senator Knox, who is a 44 THE PANAMA CANAL past master at the art of answering a question with a question, interposed, and asked his col- league: "Senator, if your theory holds good, how is it that the dikes of Holland hold in check the Atlantic Ocean?" CHAPTER IV THE LOCKS SHIPS that pass Panama way will climb up and down a titanic marine stairway, three steps up into Gatun Lake and three steps down again. These steps are the 12 huge locks in which will center the operating features of the Isthmian waterway. The building of these locks represents the greatest use of concrete ever under- taken. The amount used would be sufficient to build of concrete a row of six-room houses, reach- ing from New York to Norfolk, via Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington and Richmond — houses enough to provide homes for a population as large as that of Indianapolis. The total length of the locks and their acces- sories, including the guide walls, approximates 2 miles. The length of the six locks through which a ship passes on its voyage from one ocean to the other is a httle less than 7,000 feet. If one who has never seen a lock canal is to get a proper idea of what part the locks play in the Panama Canal, he must follow attentively while we make an imaginary journey through the canal on a ship that has just come down from New York. Approaching the Atlantic entrance from the north, we pass the end of the great man-made peninsula, jutting out 11,000 feet into the bay known as 45 46 THE PANAMA CANAL Toro Point Breakwater. It was built to protect the entrance of the canal, the harbor, and anchor- ages from the violent storms that sweep down from the north over that region. Omitting our stops for the payment of tolls, the securing of sppplies, etc., we steam directly in through a great ■ ditch 500 feet wide and 41 feet deep, which simply permits the ocean to come inland 7 miles t6 Gatun. iWhen we arrive there we find that our chance to go farther is at an end imless we have some means of getting up into the beautiful lake whose surface is 85 feet above us. Here is where the locks come to our rescue. They will not only give us one hft, but three. When we approach the locks we find a great central pier jutting out into the sea-level channel. If our navigating oflBcers know their duty they will run up alongside of this guide wall and tie up to it. If they do not they wiU run the ship's nose into a giant chain, with links made of 3-inch iron, that is guaranteed to bring a 1,000-ton ship, going at the rate of 5 knots per hour, to a dead standstill in 70 feet. When we are once safely alongside the guide wall, four quiet, but powerful locomotives, run by electricity, come out and take charge of our ship. Two of them get before it to pull us forward, and two behind it to hold us back. Then the great chain, which effectively would have barred us from going into the locks under our own steam, or from colUding with the lock gates, is let down and we begin to move into the fijst lock. Starting at the sea-level channel, the first, second, and third gates are opened and our ship THE LOCKS 47 towed into the first lock. Then the second and third gates are closed again, and the lock filled with water, by gravity, raising the ship at the rate of about 2 feet a minute, although, if there is a great rush of business, it may be filled at the rate of 3 feet a minute. When the water in this lock reaches the level of the water in the lock above, gates four and five are opened, and we are towed in. Then gate four is closed again, and water is let into this lock until it reaches the level of the third one. Gates six, seven, and eight are next opened, and we are towed into the upper lock. Gates six and seven are now closed, and the water allowed to fill the third lock imtil we are up to the level of Gatun Lake. Then gates nine and ten are opened, the emergency dam is swung from athwart the channel, if it happens to be in that position, the fender chain Hke the one encountered when we entered the first lock, and Hke the ones which protect gates seven and eight, is let down, the towing engines turn us loose, and we resume our journey, with 32 miles of clear saihng, until we reach Pedro Miguel. Here, by a reverse process, we are dropped down 30| feet. Then we go on to Miraflores, a mile and a half away, where we are lifted down 54| feet in two more Ufts. This brings us back to sea level again, where we meet the waters of the Pacific, and steam out Upon it through a channel 500 feet wide and 8 miles long. Having learned something of the part the locks play in getting us across the Isthmus, by helping us up out of one ocean into Gatun Lake and then dropping down into the other ocean, it will be inter- esting to note something of the mechanism. A 48 THE PANAMA CANAL very good idea of how a lock looks may be gathered from the accompanying bird's-eye view of the model of Pedro Miguel Lock. FROM A MODEL OF PEDRO MIGUEL LOCK It will be seen that there are two of them side by side ■ — twin locks, they are called, making them Uke a double-track railway. The lock on the right is nearly filled for an upward passage. The ship will be seen in it, held in position by the four towing engines, which appear only as tiny specks hitched to hawsers from the stem and stern. Behind the ship are the downstream gates. They were first opened to admit the ship, and then closed to impound the water that flows up through the bottom of the lock. Ahead are the upstream gates, closed also until the water in the lock is brought up to the level of the water in the lake. Then the gates will be opened, the big THE LOCKS 49 chain fender will be dropped down, and the ship will be towed out into the lake and turned loose. On the side wall of the right lock there is a big bridge set on a pivot so that it can be swimg around across the lock and girders let down from it 'to serve as a foundation upon which to lay a steel dam if anything happens to the locks or gates. On the other lock the bridge has been swung into position, and the steel girders let down. Great steel sheets will be let down on Uve roller bearings on these girders, and when all are in place they will form a watertight dam of steel. Between this bridge and the reader is a huge float- ing tank of steel, which may be used to dam all the water out of the locks when that is desired. Referring to the next figure we see a cross sec- tion of the twin locks. The side walls are from 45 to 50 feet thick at the floor. At a point 24| feet above the floor they begin to narrow by a series of 6-foot steps until they are 8 feet wide at the top. The middle wall is 60 feet wide all the way up, although at a point 42^ feet above the lock floor room is made for a fllling of earth and for a three-story tunnel, the top story being used as a passageway for the - operators, the second story as a conduit for electric wires, and the lower story as a drainage system. A CROSa-SECTION OF LOCKS, GIVING AN IDEA OP THEIR SIZE 50 THE PANAMA CANAL In this figure D and G are the big 18-foot cul- verts through which water is admitted from the lake to the locks. Each of these three big culverts, which are nearly 7,000 feet long, is large enough to accommodate a modern express train, and is about the size of the Pennsylvania tubes under the Hudson and East Rivers. H represents the cul- verts extending across the lock from the big ones. Each of them is big enough to accommodate a two- horse wagon, and there are 14 in each lock. Every alternate one leads from the side wall cul- vert and the others from the center waU culvert. F represents the wells that lead up through the floor into the lock, each larger in diameter than a sugar barrel in girth. There are five wells on each cross culvert, or 70 in the floor of each lock. The flow of the water into the locks and out again is controlled by great valves. The ones which control the great wall tunnels or culverts are called Stoney Gate valves, and operate some- thing like giant windows in frames. They are mounted on roller bearings to make them work without friction. The others are ordinary cylin- drical valves, but, having to close a culvert large enough to permit a two-horse team to be driven through it, they must be of great size. When a ship is passing from Gatun Lake down to the Atlantic Ocean, the water in the upper lock is brought up to the level of that in the lake, being admitted through the big wall culverts, whence it passes out through the 14 cross culverts and up into the locks through the 70 wells in the floor. Then the ship is towed in, the gates are shut behind CONCEETE MIXEHS, GATUN, A CENTER WALL CULVERT, GATUN LOCKS THE LOCKS 51 it, the valves are closed against the water in the lake, the ones permitting the escape of this water into the lock below are opened, and it continues to flow out of the upper lock into the lower one until the water in the two has the same level. Then the gates between the two locks are opened, the ship is towed into the second one and the operation is repeated for the last lock in the same way. The gates of the locks are an interesting feature. Their total weight is about 58,000 tons. There are 46 of them, each having two leaves. Their weight varies from 300 to 600 tons per leaf, dependent upon the varying height of the dif- ferent gates. The lowest ones are 47 feet high and the highest ones 82 feet, their height depend- ing upon the place where they are used. Some of these are known as intermediate gates, and are used for short ships, when it is desired to economize on both water and time. They divide each lock chamber into two smaller chambers of 350 and 550 feet, respectively. Perhaps 90 per cent of aU the ships that pass Panama will not need to use the full length lock — 1,000 feet. Duphcate gates will always be kept on the ground as a pre- caution against accident. Each leaf is 65 feet wide and 7 feet thick. The heaviest single piece of steel in each one of them is the lower sill, weigh- ing 18 tons. It requires 6,000,000 rivets to put them together. In the lower part of each gate is a huge taSs. When it is desired that the gate shall have buoyancy, as when operating it, this tank will be filled with air. When closed it is filled with water. The gates are opened and closed by a 52, THE PANAMA CANAL huge arm, or strut, one end of which is connected to the gate and the other to a huge wheel in the manner of the connecting rod to the driver pi a locomotive. Leakage through the space between the gate and the miter siU on the floor of the lock is prevented by a seal which consists of heavy timbers with flaps of rubber 4 inches wide and half an inch thick. A special sealing device brings the edges of the two leaves of a gate together and holds them firmly while the gates are closed. Remembering that these gates are nothing more than Brobdingnagian double doors which close in the shape of a flattened V, it follows that they must have hinges. And these hinges are worth going miles to see. That part which fastens to the wall of the lock weighs 36,752 pounds in the case of the operating gates, and 38,476 pounds in the protection gates. These latter are placed in pairs with the operating gates at all danger points — so that if one set of gates are rammed down, an- other pair will still be in position. The part of the hinge attached to the gate was made according to specifications which required that it should stand a strain of 40,000 pounds before stretching at all, and 70,000 pounds before breaking. Put into a huge testing machine, it actually stood a strain of 3,300,000 pounds before brealong — seven times as great as any stress it will ever be called upon to bear. The gates are all painted a lead gray, to match the ships of the American Navy. Those which come into contact with sea water will be treated with a barnacle-proof preparation. Now that we have described the locks, we may go back and see them in course of construction. THE LOCKS 53 The first task was getting the lock building plant designed and built. At Gatun the plant con- sisted of a series of immense cableways, an electric railroad, and enormous concrete mixers. Great towers were erected on either side of the area excavated for the locks, with giant cables connect- ing them. These towers were 85 feet high, and were mounted on tracks hke steam shovels, so that they could be moved forward as the work pro- gressed. The cables connecting them were of 2j-inch lock steel wire covered with interlocking strands. They were guaranteed to carry 6 tons at a trip, 20 trips an hour, and to carry 60,000 loads before giving way. They actually did better than the specifications called for as far as endur- ance was concerned. The sand for making the concrete for Gatun came from Nombre de Dios (Spanish for Name of God), and the gravel from Porto Bello. The sand and gravel were towed in great barges, first through the old French Canal, and later through the Atlantic entrance of the present canal. Great clamshell buckets on the Lidgerwood cableways would swoop down upon the barges, get 2 cubic yards of material at a mouthful, lift it up to the cable, carry it across to the storage piles and there dump it. In this way more than 2,000,000 wagon loads of sand and gravel were handled. A special equipment was required to haul the sand, gravel, and cement from the storage piles to the concrete mixers. There were two circular railroads of 24-ineh gauge, carrying little electric cars that ran wi\;hout motormen. Each car was stopped, started, or reversed by a switch attached 54 THE PANAMA CANAL to the car. Their speed never varied more than 10 per cent whether they were going empty or loaded, up hill or down. When a car was going down hill its motor was reversed into a generator so that it helped make electricity to pull some other car up the hill. The cars ran into a httle tunnel, where each was given its proper load of one part cement, three parts sand, and six parts gravel — 2 cubic yards, in all — and was then hurried on to the big concrete mixers. These were so arranged in a series that it was not necessary to stop them to receive the sand, gravel, and cement, or to dump out the concrete. On the emptying sides of the concrete mixers there were other little electric railway tracks. Here there were little trains of a motor and two cars each, with a motorman. The train, with two big 2-cubic-yard buckets, drew up alongside two concrete mixers. Without stopping their endless revolutions the mixers tilted and poured out their contents into the two buckets, 2 yards in each. Then the little train hurried away, stopping under a great cable. Across from above the lock walls came two empty buckets, carried on pulleys on the cableway. When they reached a point over the train they ctescended and were set on the cars, behind the full buckets. The full buckets were then attached to the lifting hooks, and were car- ried up to the cable and then across to the lock walls, where they were dumped and the concrete spread out by a force of men. Meanwhile the train hustled off with its two empty buckets, ready to be loaded again. '"'On the Pacific side tiie concrete handling plant THE LOCKS 55 was somewhat diflferent. Instead of cableways there were great cantilever cranes built of struc- tural steel. Some of these were in the shape of a giant T, while others looked like two T's fastened together. Here the clamshell dippers were run out on the arms of the cranes to the storage piles, where they picked up their loads of material. This was put in hpppers large enough to store material for 10 cubic yards. The sand and stone then passed through measuring hoppers and to the mixers with cement and water added. After it was mixed it was dumped into big buckets on little cars drawn by baby steam locomotives, which looked like overgrown toy engines. These little fellows reminded one of a lot of busy bees as they dashed about here and there with their loads of concrete, choo-chooing as majestically as the great dirt train engines which passed back and forth hard by. The cranes would take their filled buckets and leave empty ones in exchange, and this was kept up day in and day out until the locks were completed. When the plant was removed from Pedro Miguel to Miraflores, a large part of the concrete was handled directly from the mixers to the walls by the cranes without the intermediary locomotive service. The cost of the construction of the locks was estimated in 1908 at upward of $57,000,000. But economy in the handling of the material and efficiency on the part of the lock builders cut the actual cost far below that figure. On the Atlantic side about a dollar was saved on every yard of concrete laid — about $2,000,000. On the Pacific side more than twice as much was saved. 56 THE PANAMA CANAL Before the locks could be built it became nec- essary to excavate down to bed rock. THis re- quired the removal of nearly 5,000,000 cubic yards of material at Gatun. Then extensive tests were made to make certain that the floor of the locks could be anchored safely to the rock. These tests demonstrated that by using the old steel rails that were left on the Isthmus by the French, the concrete and rock could be tied to- gether so firmly as to defy the ravages of water and time. A huge apron of concrete was built out into Gatun Lake from the upper locks at that place, effectively preventing any water from getting between the rocks and the concrete lying upon them. CHAPTER V THE LOCK MACHINEET ONE of the problems that had to be solved before the Panama Canal could be pre- sented to the American people as a finished waterway, was that of equipping it with adequate and dependable machinery for its operation. Panama canals are not built every year, so it was not a matter of ordering equipment from stock; everything had to be invented and designed for the particular requirement it was necessary to meet. And the first and foremost requirement was safety. When we look over the canal machinery we see that word "safety" written in every bolt, in every wheel, in every casting, in every machine. We see it in the devices designed for protection and in those designed for operation as well. We see it in the giant chain that will stop a vessel before it can ram a gate; we see it in the great cantilever pivot bridges that support the emer- gency dams; we see it in the double lock gates at all exposed points; we see it in the electric towing apparatus, in the limit switches that will auto- matically stop a machine when the operator is not attending to his business, in the friction clutches that wiU slip before the breaking point is reached. Safety, safety, safety, the word is written every- where, 57 58 THE PANAMA CANAL The first thing a ship encounters when it ap- proaches the locks is the giant chain stretched across its path. That chain is made of Unks of 3 inches in diameter. When in normal position it is stretched across the locks, and the vessel which does not stop as soon as it should will ram its nose into the chain. There is a hydraulic paying-out arrangement at both ends of the chain, and when the pressure against it reaches a hundred gross tons the chain will begin to pay out and gradually bring the offending vessel to a stop. After a ship strikes the chain its momentum will be gradually reduced, its energy being absorbed by the chain mechanism. "While the pressure at which the chain will begin to yield is fixed at 100 gross tons, the pressure required to break it is 262 tons. Thus the actual stress it can bear is two and a half times what it will be called upon to meet. The mechanism by which the paying- out of the chain is accomplished is exceeding^ ingenious. The principle is practically the re- verse of that of a hydrauHc jack. The two ends of the 428-foot chain are attached to big plungers in the two walls of the locks. These plungers fit in large cylinders, which contain broad surfaces of water. They are connected with very small openings, which are kept closed until a pressure of 750 pounds to the square inch is exerted against them. By means of a resistance valve these open- ings are then made available, the water shooting out as through a nozzle under high pressure. This perniits the chain plunger to rise gradually, while keeping the tension at 750 pounds to the inch, and the paying-out of the chain proceeds accord- THE LOCK MACHINERY 59 ingly. Of course not all ships will strike the chain at the same speed, and in some cases the paying- out process will have to be more rapid than in others. This is provided for by the automatic enlargement of the hole through which the water is discharged, the size of the hole again becoming smaller as the tension of the chain decreases. This chain fender will stop the Olympic with full load, when going a mile and a half an hour, bringing it to a dead standstill within 70 feet, or it will stop an ordinary 10,000-ton ship in the same distance even if it have a speed of 5 miles. The function of the resistance valve is to prevent the chain from beginning to pay out until the stress against it goes up to 100 tons, and to regulate the paying-out so as to keep it constant at that point, so long as there is necessity for paying-out. Any pressure of less than a hundred tons wiU not put the paying- out mechanism into operation. When a ship is to be put through the locks the chain will be let down into great grooves in the floor of the lock. There is a fixed plunger operat- ing within a cyhnder, which, in turn, operates within another cyhnder, the resulting movement, by a system of pulleys, being made to pay out or pull in 4 feet of chain for every foot the plunger travels. The chain must be raised or lowered in one minute, and always will have to be lowered to permit the passage of a ship. The fender machines are situated in pits in the lock walls. These pits are likely to get filled with water from drippings, leakages, wave action, and drainage, so they are protected with automatic pumps. Float valves are hfted when the water rises in the 60 THE PANAMA CANAL pits. This automatically moves the switch con- trolling an electric motor, which starts a pump to working whenever the water gets within 1 inch of the top of the sump beneath the floor of the pit. Twenty-four of these chain fenders are required for the protection of the locks, and each requires two such tension machines. No ship will be allowed to go through the canal except under the control of a canal pilot. He will certainly bring it to a stop at the approach wall. But if he does not, there is the chain fender. There is not a chance in a thousand for a collision with it, and not a chance in a hundred thousand that the ship will not be stopped when there is such a collision. But if the pilot should fail to stop the ship, and it should collide with the fender chain, and then if the fender chain should fail to stop it, there would be the double gates at the head of the lock. There is not one chance in a hundred that a ship, checked as it inevitably would be by the fender chain, could ram down the first, or safety gate. But if it did, there would still be another set of gates some 70 feet away. The chances here might be one in a hundred of the second set being rammed down. From all this it will be seen that the chances of the second pair of gates being rammed is so remote as to be almost without the realm of possibility. But suppose all these precautions should fail, and suddenly the way should be opened for the water of Gatun Lake to rush through the locks at the destructive speed of 20 miles an hour? Even that day has been provided against by the construction of the big emergency dams. The THE LOCK MACHINERY 61 emergency dams, like the fender chains, are de- signed only for protection, and have no other use in the operation of the locks. There will be six of these dams, one across each of the head locks at Gatun, Pedro Miguel, and Miraflores. These emergency dams will be mounted on pivots on the side walls of the locks about 200 feet above the upper gates. When not in use they will rest on the side wall and parallel with it. When in use they wiU be swung across the locks, by electric machinery or by hand, and there rigidly wedged in. It will require two minutes to get them in position by electricity and 30 minutes by hand. There is a motor for driving the wedges which will hold the dam securely in position, and Umit switches to prevent the dams being moved too far. When a bridge is put into position across the lock, a series of wicket girders which are attached to the upstream side of the floor of the bridge are let down into the water, the connection between the bridge and one end of each girder being made by an elbow joint. The other end goes down into the water, its motion being controlled by a cable attached some distance from the free end of the girder and paid out or drawn in over an electrically operated drum. This free end passes down until it engages a big iron casting embedded in the con- crete of the lock floor. This makes a sort of in- chned railway at an angle of about 30 degrees from the perpendicular, over which huge steel plates are let down into the water. There are six of these girders, and they are all made of the finest nickel steel. When they are all in position, a row of six plates are let down, and they make the 62 THE PANAMA CANAL stream going through the locks several feet shal- lower. Then another row of plates is let down on these, and the stream becomes that much shal- lower. Another row of plates is added, and then another, until there is a solid sheet of steel plates resting on the six girders, and they make a com- plete steel dam which effectively arrests the mad impulse of the water in Gatun Lake to rush down into the sea. The plates are moved up and down by electrical machinery, and are mounted on roller-bearing wheels, so that the tremendous friction caused by their being pressed against the girders by the great force of the water may be overcome. That the emergency dams will be effective is shown by the experience at the "Soo" locks, on the canal connecting Lakes Superior and Huron. There, a vessel operating under its own power, rammed a lock gate. Although the emer- gency dam had grown so rusty by disuse that it could be operated only by hand, it was swung across the lock and effectively fulfilled its mission of checking the maddened flow of the water. Another protective device for the locks is the big caisson gates that will be floated across the head and tail bays when it is desired to remove all the water from the locks for the purpose of per- mitting the lower guard gates to be examined, cleaned, painted, or repaired, and for allowing the sills of the emergency dams to be examined in the dry. The caisson gates are 112| feet long, 36 feet beam, and have a light draft of 32 feet and a heavy draft of 61 feet. When one is floated into position to close the lock, water will be admitted to make it sink to the proper depth. Then its THE LOCK MACHINERY 63 large centrifugal pumps, driven by electric motors, will pump the water out of the lock. When the work on the lock is completed these pumps will pump the water out of the caisson itself until it becomes buoyant enough to resume its light draft, after which it will be floated away. The machinery for opening and closing the lock gates Called for unusual care in its designing. The existing types of gate-operating machinery were all studied, and it was found that none of them could be depended on to prove satisfactory, so special machines had to be desigiled. A great wheel, resembling a drive wheel of a locomotive, except that a httle over half of the rim is cog-geared, is mounted in a horizontal position on a big plate, planted firmly in the con- crete of the wall and bolted there with huge bolts 11 feet long and 2^ inches in diameter. This plate weighs over 13,000 pounds, and the wheel, cast in two pieces, weighs 34,000 pounds. As the weight of the rim of the wheel on the eight spokes probably would tax their strength too much when the wheel is under stress, this is obviated by four bearing wheels, perpendicular to the big wheel, which support the rim. Between the crank pin and the point of attachment on the gate leaf there is a long arm, or strut, designed to bear an operating strain of nearly a hundred tons. The wheel will be revolved by a motor geared to the cogged part of the rim. An ingenious arrangement of electric switches IS that used to protect the gate-moving machines from harm. The big cormecting rod between the master wheel and the gate leaf is attached to the 64 THE PANAMA CANAL gate leaf by a nest of springs capable of sustaining a pressure of 184,000 pounds, in addition to the fixed pressure of 60,000 pounds. Should any obstruction interfere with the closing of the gate and threaten a dangerous pressure on the con- necting rod, the springs, as soon as they reach their full compression, establish an electrical contact and thus stop the motor. Likewise, should any obstruction come against the gate as the connecting rod is pulling it open, the springs again permit the establishment of an electrical contact and stop the motor. All of these pre- cautions are entirely independent of and supple- mental to the hmit switches, which cut off the power from the gate-moving machine should the strain reach the danger line. These big machines move the huge gate leaves without the slightest noise or vibration. Such a machine is required for each of the 92 leaves used in the 46 gates with which the locks are equipped. The operator can open or close one of these big gates in two minutes. ^n St* irS^iI/i^i ONE OF THE 92 GATE-LEAP MASTEB WHEELS THE LOCK MACHINERY 65 The control of the water in the culverts of the locks is taken care of by an ingeniously designed series of valves. The big wall culverts, 18 feet in diameter, are divided into two sections at the points where the valves are installed, by the con- struction of a perpendicular pier. This makes two openings 8 by 18 feet. The big gates of steel are placed in frames to close these openings just as a window sash is placed in its frame. They are mounted on roller bearings, so as to overcome the friction caused by the pressure of water against the valve gates. They must be mounted so that there is not more than a fourth of an inch play in any direction. The big wall culvert gates will weigh about 10 tons each, and must be capable of operating under a head of more than 60 feet of water. They will be raised and lowered by electricity. The electric locomotives which will be used to tow ships through the locks are one of the inter- esting features of the equipment. There will be 40 of them on the 3 sets of locks. The average ship will require four of them, two at the bow and two at the stern, to draw it through the locks. They wiU run on tracks on the lock walls, and wiU have two sets of wheels. One set will be cogged, and will be used when the locomotives are engaged in towing. The other set will be pressed into service when they are running light. When a vessel is in one lock waiting for the water to be equalized with that in the next one and the gates opened to permit passage, the forward locomotives will run free up the incline to the lock wall above, paying out hawser as they go. When they get 66 THE PANAMA CANAL to the next higher level they are ready to exert their maximum pull. Each locomotive consists of three parts: two motors hitched together, and the tandem may be operated from either end. The third part is a big winding drum around which the great hawsers are wound. This towing wind- lass permits the line to be paid out or pulled in and the distance between the ship and the locomotives varied at will. The locomotive may thus exert its pull or relax it while standing still on the track, a provision especially valuable in bringing ships to rest. In the main, however, the pull of the , locomotive is exercised by its running on the semi- j suppressed rack track anchored in the coping of .the lock walls. Each flight of locks will be pro- ; vided with two towing tracks, one on the side and one on the center wall. Each \Yall will be equipped with a return track of ordinary rails, so that when a set of locomotives has finished towing a ship through the locks they can be switched over from these tracks and hustled back for another job. When they reach the inchnes from one lock to the next above the rack track will be pressed into service again until they reach the next level stretch. Here again one meets the familiar safeguard against accident. Some engineer of one of these towing locomotives might sometime overload it, so the power of doing so has been taken out of his hands. On the windlass or drum that holds the towing hawser there is a friction coupling. If the engineer should attempt to overload his engine, or if for any other reason there should suddenly come upon ihe locomotive a greater strain than it could bear, or upon the track, or upon the hawser. THE LOCK MACHINERY 67 the friction clutch would let loose at its appointed tension of 25,000 pounds, and all danger would be averted. When the locomotives are towing a ship from the walls it is natural that there should be a side pull on the hawser. This is overcome by wheels that run against the side of the track and are mounted horizontally. AH of the towing tracks extend out on the approach walls of the locks so that the locomotives can get out far enough to take charge of a ship before it gets close enough to do the locks any damage. A Mauretania in the lacES From the foregoing it will be seen that a great deal of electric current will be required in the operation of the locks. This wiU be generated at a big station at Gatun, with a smaller one at Miraflores, and they will be connected. The overflow water will be used for generating the required current, and in addition to the operation of the lock machinery it will operate the spillway gates, furnish the necessary Hghting current, and 68 THE PANAMA CANAL eventually it may furnish the power for an elec- trified Panama Railroad. In passing a ship through the canal it will be necessary to open and clbse 23 lock gates, of an aggregate weight of more than 25,000 tons, to lower and raise 12 fender chains, each weighing 24,000 pounds, and to shut and op'en dozens of great valves, each of which weighs tons. All these operations at each set of locks will be con- trolled by one man, at a central switchboard. In addition to these operations there is the towing apparatus. The arrangement at Gatun is typical; there 4 fender chains must be operated, 6 pairs of miter gates, and 46 valves. In all not less than 98 motors will be set in motion twice, and some- times this number may be increased to 143. Some of them are more than half a mile away from the operator, and half of them are nearly a quarter of a mile away. The operator in his control house will be high enough to have an uninterrupted view of the whole flight of locks over which he has command. His control board will consist of a representation of the locks his switches control. On his model he will see the rise and fall of the fender chains as he operates them, the movement of the big lock gates as they swing open or shut, the opening and closing of the valves which regulate the water in the cul- verts, and the rise and fall of the water in the locks. A system of interlocked levers will prevent him from doing the wrong thing in handUng his switches. Before he can open the valves at one end of a lock he must close those at the other end. THE LOCK MACHINERY 69 Before he can open the lock gates, the valves in the culverts must be set so that no harm can result. Before he can start to open a lock gate, he must first have released the miter-forcing machine that latches the gates. Before he can close the gates protected by a fender chain, he must first have thrown the switch to bring the fender chain back to its protecting position, and he can not throw the switch to lower the chain until he first has provided for the opening of the gate it protects. All of this interlocking system makes it next to impossible to err, and taking into consideration the additional safeguard of limit switches, which automatically cut off the power when anything goes wrong, it will be seen that the personal equation is all but removed from the situation. CHAPTER VI CULEBRA CUT CULEBRA CUT! Here the barrier of the continental divide resisted to the utmost the attacks of the canal army; here dis- turbed and outraged Nature conspired with gross mountain mass to make the defense stronger and stronger; here was the mountain that must be moved. Here came the French, jauntily con- fident, to dig a narrow channel that would let their ships go through. The mountain was the victor. And then here came the Americans, confident but not jaunty. They weighed that mass, laid out the fines of a wider ditch, arranged compficated transportation systems to take away the half hundred million cubic yards of earth and rocks that they had measured. Nature came to the aid of the beleaguered mountain. The vol- canic rocks were piled helter-skelter and when the ditch deepened the softer strata underneath refused to bear the burden and the sUdes, slowly and fike glaciers, crept out into the ditch, burying shovels and sweeping aside the railway tracks. Even the bottom of the canal bulged up under the added stress of the heavier strata above. Grim, now, but still confident, the attackers fought on. The mountain was defeated. Now stretches a man-made canyon across the 70 CULEBRA CUT n backbone of the continent; now lies a channel for ships through the barrier; now is found what Columbus sought in vain — the gate through the west to the east. Men call it Culebra Cut. Nine miles long, its average depth is 120 feet. At places its sides tower nearly 500 feet above its channel bottom, which is nowhere narrower than 300 feet. It is the greatest single trophy of the triumph of man over the terrestrial arrangement of his world. Compared to it, the scooping out of the sand levels of Suez seems but child's play' — the tunnels of Hoosac and Simplon but the sport of boys. It is majestic. It is awful. It is the Canal. When estimates for digging the canal were made, it was calculated that 53,000,000 cubic yards of material would have to be removed from the cut, and that under the most favorable con- ditions it would require eight and a half years to complete the work. But at that time no one had the remotest idea of the actual difficulties that would beset the canal builders; no one dreamed of the avalanches of material that would sUde into the cut. One can in no way get a better idea of the mean- ing of the slides and breaks in Culebra Cut than to refer to the accompanying figure. There it wiU be seen that whereas it was originally planned that the top width of the cut at one point should be 670 feet, it has grown wider, because of slides and breaks, to as much as 1,800 feet at one place. In all, some 25,000,000 cubic yards of material which should have remained outside the canal 72 THE PANAMA CANAL prism slipped into it and had to be removed by the steam shovels. THE EFFECT OP SMDES No less than 26 slides and breaks were encount- ered in the construction of Culebra Cut, their total area being 225 acres. The largest covered 75, and another 47 acres. "When the slides, which were more like earthen glaciers than avalanches, began to flow into the big ditch, sometimes steam shovels were buried, sometimes railroad tracks were caught beneath the debris, and sometimes even the bottom of the cut itself began to bulge and disarrange the entire transportation system, at the same time interfering with the compressed air and water supphes. But with all these trials and tribulations, the army that was trying to conquer the eternal hills that had refused passage to the ships of the world for so many centuries, kept up its courage and renewed its attack. The result is that ships sail through Culebra and that engi- neers everywhere have new records of efliciency to inspire them. These efficiency records are told in the cost- keeping reports based upon one of the most care- ful and thorough cost-accounting systems ever devised. This system was instituted for the purpose of keeping a check upon all expenditures CULEBRA CUT 73 by reducing everything to a unit basis and then comparing the cost of doing the same thing at diflferent places. For instance, if it were found that it cost more to excavate a cubic yard of material at one place than at another, under identical conditions, this fact was brought to the attention of the men responsible and an intimation given that there seemed to be room for taking up a little lost motion. The lost motion usually was recovered or else someone had to be satisfied that conditions were not identical after all. In no other part of the canal work do these cost-keeping reports tell such a graphic story as in Culebra Cut. In spite of the fact that as the cut became deeper it became narrower, and the slides and breaks became more troublesome, to say nothing of the extra effort required to get the excavated material out of the cut, every unit cost was forced down notch by notch and year by year until the bottom in costs was reached only a little before the actual bottom of the cut was exposed to view. For instance, in 1908 it cost 11| cents a yard to load material with steam shovels, while in 1912 it cost less than 7 cents. In 1908 it cost more than 14 cents a yard for drilling and blasting; in 1912 it cost less than 12 cents. In 1908 it cost $18.54 to haul away a hundred yards of spoil; in 1912 it required only $13.31 to perform the same opera- tion, although the average distance it had to be hauled had increased 50 per cent. In 1908 it cost more than 13 cents a yard to dump the ma- terial as compared with less than 5 cents in 1912. The whole operation of excavating and removing 74 THE PANAMA CANAL the material, including overhead charges and depreciation, fell from $1.03 a cubic yard in 1908 to less than 55 cents a yard in 1912. And that is why 232,000,000 cubic yards of material were removed for less than it was estimated 135,000,000 cubic yards would cost. To remove the 105,000,000 cubic yards of earth from the backbone of the Americas required about 6,000,000 pounds of high-grade dynamite each year to break up the material, so that it might be successfully attacked by the steam shovels. To prepare the holes for placing the explosives required the services of 150 well drills, 230 tripod rock drills, and a large corps of hand drillers. Altogether iJiey drilled nearly a thousand miles of holes annually. During every working day in the year about 600 holes were fired. They had an average depth of about 19 feet. In ad- dition to this a hundred toe holes were fired each day, and as many more "dobe" blasts placed on top of large boulders to break them up into load- able sizes. So carefully was the dynamite handled that during a period of three years, in which time some 19,000,000 pounds were exploded in Culebra Cut, only eight men were killed. The transportation of the spoil from Culebra Cut was a tremendous job. A large percentage of it was hauled out in Lidgerwood flat cars. Twenty-one cars made up the average Lidgerwood train. It required about 140 locomotives to take care of the spoil, and the average day saw nearly 3,700 cars loaded and hauled out of the cut. In a single year 1,116,286 carloads of material were hauled out. There were 75 trains in constant CULEBKA CUT 75 operation, one for each 2| miles of track in the Central Division, which was approximately 32 miles long. A huge steam shovel, taking up 5 AVERAGE SHAPE AND DIMENSIOM'S OF CUIiEBBA CUT yards of material at a mouthful, would load one of these trains in less than an hour with some 400 yards of material. Then the powerful locomotive attached to it, assisted by a helper engine, would pull the train out of the cut, and then, unassisted, would haul it to the dumping ground some 12 miles or more away. Arriving near the scene of the dump, another engine, having in front of it a huge horizontal steam windlass mounted on a flat car, was hooked on the rear end of the train. Then the locomo- tive which had brought the train to the dump was uncoupled and moved away, and in its stead there was attached an empty flat car, on which there was a huge plow. A long wire cable was stretched from the big windlass at the other end of the train 76 THE PANAMA CANAL and attached to this plow. As the drum of the windlass began to turn it gradually drew the plow forward over the 21 cars, plowing the material oflf as it went forward. The cars were equipped with a high sideboard on one side and had none at all on the other. A flat surface over which the plow could pass from car to car was made by hinging a heavy piece of sheet steel to the front end of each car and allowing it to cover the break between that car and the next, thus affording a practically continuous car floor over 800 feet long. The operation of unloading 400 yards of material with this plow seldom required more than 10 minutes. After the plow had finished its worjc it left a long string of spoil on one side of the track which must be cleared away. So another plow, pushed by an engine, attacked the spoil and forced it down the embankment. This process of unload- ing and spreading the material was kept up until the embankment became wide enough to permit the track to be shifted over. Here another espe- cially designed machine, the track shifter, was brought into play. It was a sort of derrick mounted on a flat car, and with it the track shifters were able to pick up a pi^ce of track and lift it over to the desired position. With this machine a score of men could do the work that without it would have required a gang of 600 men. In addition to the Lidgerwood dirt trains there were a large number of trains made up of steel dump cars which were dumped by compressed air, and stiU other trains made up of small hand-dumped cars, and each class found its own pecuhar uses, r- CULEBRA CUT !?7 As has been said, the problem of digging the big ditch has been one of the transportation of the spoil, and this has involved numerous difficulties. In Culebra Cut no little difficulty was experienced in keeping open enough tracks to afford the necessary room for dirt trains. Slides came down and forced track after track out of alignment, burying some of them beyond the hope of usable recovery; often the very bottom of the cut itself heaved up under the stress of the heavy weight of faulty strata on the sides of the mountain; and sometimes the slides and breaks threatened entirely to shut up one end of the cut. In hauUng away the spoil one improvement after another was made in the interest of efficiency. It was found at first that the capacity of a big Lidgerwood flat car was only about 16 cubic yards, and that with a sideboard on only one side of the car, the load did not center well on the car, thus placing an undue strain on the wheels on one side. The transportation department, therefore, extended the bed of the car further out over the wheels on the open side, and this served a triple purpose — it permitted the steam shovels to load the cars so that the load rested in the center, increased the capacity of each car by about 3 yards, and permitted the unloader plow to throw the spoil further from the track, thus adding to the efficiency of the dumping apparatus. Frequent breaks in the trains were caused by worn couplers. These accidents were almost entirely overcome by equipping each train with a sort of "bridle" which prevented the separation of the cars in the event of the parting of a defective 78 THE PANAMA CANAL coupler. In the operation of the unloader plows it was found that the big cables frequently broke when a plow would strike an obstruction on the car, and this caused no end of annoyance and fre- quent delays. Then someone thought of putting between the cable and the plow a link whose break- ing point was lower than that of the cable. After that when a plow struck an obstruction the cable did not part — the link simply gave way, and another was always at hand. On the big spread- ers no less than 51 improvements were made, each the answer of the engineers to some challenge from the stubborn material with which they had to contend. The major portion of the material excavated from the canal had to be hauled out and dumped where it was of no further use. From the Central Division alone, which includes Culebra Cut, up- ward of a hundred million cubic yards of material was hauled away and dumped as useless. At Tabemilla one dump contained nearly 17,000,000 cubic yards. A great deal of spoil, however, was used to excellent advantage. Wherever there was swampy ground contiguous to the permanent settlements it was covered over with material from the cut and brought up above the water level. Many hundreds of acres were thus con- verted from malaria-breeding grounds into high and dry lands. During the last stages of the work in Culebra Cut it was found that some of the sUdes were so bad that they were breaking back of the crest of the hills that border the cut. Therefore it was found to be feasible to attack the problem by CULEBKA CUT 79 sluicing the material down the side of the hills into the valley beyond. To this end a big hy- drauUc plant which had been used on the Pacific end of the canal was brought up and installed [beyond the east bank of the cut. A reservoir of water was impounded and tremendous pumps in- stalled. They pumped a stream of water 40 inches in diameter. This was gradually tapered down to a number of 4-inch nozzles, and out of these ^pouted streams of water with a pressure of 80 pounds to the square inch. These streams ate away the dirt at a rapid rate. The slides did not hold up the completion of the canal a minute, at least to the point of usability. The day that the lock gates were ready there was water enough in the canal to carry the entire American navy from ocean to ocean. That day the big dredges from the Atlantic and the Pacific were brought into the cut, and with them putting the finishing touches on the sHdes at the bottom, and the hydraulic excavators attacking them at the top, the problem of the slides was solved. Viewing Culebra Cut in retrospect, it proved an immensely less difficult task than some prophesied, and a much more serious one than others pre- dicted. There were those who opposed the build- ing of the Panama Canal because of the belief that Culebra Cut could not be dug, that Culebra Mountain was an effective barrier to human ambition. Also, there were those who asserted that Gold Hill and Contractor's Hill were in danger of sliding into the big ditch and that they were mountains which neither the faith nor the pocket- books of the Americans could remove. Others 80 THE PANAMA CANAL saw the handwriting of Failure on the wall in the heaving up of the bottom of the cut, inter- preting this as a movement from the very depths of the earth. Still others saw it in the smoke that issued from fissures in the cut, which spoke to them of volcanoes being unearthed and told them that the Babel of American ambitions must totter to the ground. They did not know that these were only little splotches of decomposing metals suddenly exposed to the air, any more than their fellow pessimists knew that the heaving up of the bottom of the cut was due to the pressure of the earth on the adjacent banks. To-day Culebra Mountain bows its lofty head to the genius of the American engineer and to the courage of the canal army. Through its vitals there runs a great artificial canyon nearly 9 miles long, 300 feet wide at its bottom, in places as much as a half mile wide at its top and nearly 500 feet deep at the deepest point. Out of it there was taken 105,000,000 cubic yards of ma- terial, and at places it cost as much as $15,000,000 a mile to make the excavations. Through it now extends a great ribbon of water broad enough to permit the largest vessels afloat to pass one another under their own power, and deep enough to carry a ship with a draft, beyond anything in the minds of naval constructors to-day. With towering hills Hning it on either side, with banks that are precipitous here and farflung there, with great and deep recesses at one place and another telling of the gigantic breaks and slides with which the men who built it had to contend, going through Culebra Cut gives to the human heart a thrill CULEBRA CUT 81 such as the sight of no other work of the human hand can give. Its magnitude, its awe-inspiring aspect as one navigates the channel between the two great hills which stand Uke sentinels above it, and the memory of the thousands of tons of dyna- mite, the hundreds of millions of money and the vast investment of brain and brawn required in its digging, aU conspire to make the wonder greater. It is the mightiest deed the hand of man has done. CHAPTER VII ENDS OF THE CANAL WHILE the completed Panama Canal does not wed the two oceans, or permit their waters to mingle in Gatun Lake, it does bring them a Uttle closer together. On the Atlantic side a sea-level channel has been dug from deep water due south to Gatun, a distance of 7 miles. On the Pacific side a similar channel has been dug from deep water in a northwesterly direc- tion to Miraflores, a distance of 8 miles. It follows that 15 of the 50 miles of the canal wiU be filled with salt water. The remaining 35 miles will be filled with fresh water supplied by the Chagres and the lesser rivers of Panama. The task of dig- ging these sea-level sections was a considerable one and almost every method of ditch digging that human ingenuity has been able to devise was employed. Steam shovels, dipper dredges, ladder dredges, stationary suction dredges, and sea-going suction dredges, all contributed their share toward bringing the waters of the Atlantic to Gatun and those of the Pacific to Miraflores. In addition to these methods, on the Pacific side use was njade of the hydraulic process of exca- vating soft material, washing it loose with power- ful streams of water and pumping it out with giant pumps. 82 ENDS OF THE CANAL 83 As one travels along the Pacific end of the canal he is reminded of the words of Isaiah: "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the uneven shall be made level, and the rough places a plain." Hundreds of acres of low, marshy land have been filled up, either with mud from the suction dredges and the hydrauhc excavators, or with, spoil from Culebra Cut. Much of this made land will be valuable for tropical agriculture, while other parts will never serve any purpose other than to keep down the marshes. But they afforded a dumping ground for material taken out of the canal prism, and added something to the improvement of health and living conditions on the Isthmus. Probably the most interesting process of exca- vation in the sea-level channels was that of the sea-going suction dredges. These dredges took out material more cheaply than any other kind of excavating machinery used on the Isthmus. Two of them were put to work in 1908, about the time the operations reached full-blast and have been kept in commission ever since. While it cost as much as $70,000 a year to keep each one in com- mission, they were able to maintain an annual average of about 5,000,000 cubic yards of material excavated at a cost per yard of 5 cents and even less. "With steam shovels it ranged from 10 to 20 times as much per yard. These big dredges were built with great bins in their holds and equipped 84 THE PANAMA CANAL , with powerful SO-inch centrifugal pumps. When at work they steamed up and down the channel, suck- ing up the mud, and carrying it out to sea. Another interesting dredge used was the big ladder dredge Corozal. It is a great floating dock, as it were, with a huge endless chain carrying 52 immense, 35-cubic-foot buckets. On the center line amidships there is a large opening down to the water. The big elevator framework carrying the endless chain goes down through this and into the water at a considerable angle. The buckets pass around this, and as they round the end of it their great steel lips dig down into the material until filled, then they come up at the rate of three every five seconds and deposit their burden in a huge hopper which conveys it to the barge at the side of the dredge. The dredge is anchored fast at a given place, and keeps on attacking the material beneath it until the desired level is reached. This dredge, with the sea-going suction dredges, will be retained as the permanent dredging fleet. The stationary suction dredges at the two ends of the canal were used to pump up the soft material and to force it out through long pipe lines into the swamps or into the hydraulic cores of the earth dams. Several old French ladder dredges were rescued from the jimgle and put into commission at the beginning of the work, and they held out faith- fully to the end, dividing honors with the newer equipment in hastening the day when the oceans might go inland to Gatun and Miraflores. While they looked like toys beside such giant excavators as the Corozal, they probably showed more 86 THE PANAMA CANAL efficiency than any other class of excavators of their period of construction. They were attended by large self-propelling scows built by the French. When these were filled they steamed out to sea and dumped their burden and then steamed back again for another load. Some of the dredges were attended by ordinary barges which were towed out to sea by tugs and dumped. Another interesting machine used on the Pacific end of the canal was the Lobnitz rock breaker. This consists of a sort of pile driver mounted on a large barge. Instead of a pile driving weight there is a big battering ram made of round steel, pointed at one end. It is lifted up perhaps 10 feet and allowed to drop suddenly. As some of these rams weigh as much as 25 tons their striking force may be imagined. When the ram struck the rock the top would shake back and forth like a bamboo pole, in spite of the fact that it was made of the best steel and more than 15 inches in diameter. Sooner or later the rams would break off at the water line, this being due to the fact that the constant flexion at that point set the molecules in, the steel and took away all its elasticity. It was found desirable to excavate a part of the sea-level channel before the water was let into it. To accomplish this a big dam, or dike, was buUt across the channel several miles inland, and steam shovels were used behind this dike. As the work neared completion, however, it was found advis- able to let the water come further inland, so that the dredges could extend the field of their activi- ties. To do this another dike was thrown across the channel about a mile north of the first one. ENDS OF THE CANAL 87 and water was admitted to the section of the big ditch between these two dikes. The engineers were afraid to cut a small ditch in the top of the first dike, and aUow the water to eat the dam away as it flowed in, for fear that it would rush in so rapidly it would destroy the second dike. There- fore they filled the basin between the two dikes by siphon and by pumping, a process which re- quired the drawing in of billions of gallons of water. This was accomphshed in due time, how- ever, and then 16 tons of dynamite was placed in the no longer useful dike. An electric spark did the rest. The distinguishing features of the ends of the canal are the big breakwaters at Toro Point, at the Atlantic end, and Naos Island, at the Pacific end. The former extends from the shore out into the sea for a distance of 2 miles and has a large lighthouse at the seaward end. It was built by dumping stone from the shore out into the sea, this process being followed by driving piles into the dumped stone and building a railroad on the crest, over which the stone was hauled for its further extension. The top of the breakwater is covered with huge stones weighing from 8 to 20 tons each, these to make sure that it will stand against the pounding of the waves. Two minor breakwaters were also built at the Atlantic end to protect the terminal basin. The big dike at Naos Island in the Pacific is more than 17,000 feet long and transforms the island into the cape of a small peninsula. There was a threefold purpose in its construction — to cut out the cross currents that brought thousands 88 THE PANAMA CANAL of yards of sand and silt into the canal channel, to afford a dumping place for a large quantity of the spoil from Culebra Cut, and to make a connection with the mainland for the fortifications on Naos, Flamenco, and Perico Islands. In building it the engineers were under the necessity of first building a trestle on which the spoil trains could be backed and dumped. The piles had to be driven in soft, blue mud, and as the rock was dumped, it sank down and down until, at places, ten times as much stone was required as would have been necessary if the ocean bottom had been firm. In addition to this thousands of trainloads of material were dumped in the landward end of the dike, some 20,000,000 cubic yards of material being thus dis- posed of. The last part of the canal work to be completed will be the terminal facilities at the ends of the big waterway. At the time this book went to press they were something more than a year from com- pletion, but the indications were that they would be finished within the time limit originally set for the completion of the canal itself. These ter- minal facilities consist of dry docks, wharfage space, storehouses, and everything else necessary to perform any service that might ordinarily be required for passing ships, whether they be those of commerce or of war. The main coalmg station is to be established at the Atlantic end. The storehouses, the laundry, the bakery, and the other equipment of the Isthmian Canal Com- mission and the Panama Railroad also will he made a part of the permanent terminal plant on that side of the Isthmus. ENDS OF THE CANAL 89 A large dry dock is being built at the Pacific end having the same usable dimensions as the canal locks, capable of accommodating any vessel that can pass through the canal. The principal machine shops will also be erected there, and a coal- ing plant of half the capacity of the one at the Atlantic end will be provided. A little to the east of the Pacific terminal works will be stationed the capital of the Canal Zone, where the adminis- trative oflBces, the governor's residence, and two new towns will be built. The administration building, which is to be a three-story structure of concrete, hollow tile, and structural steel, is to occupy an eminence on the side of Ancon Hill, which will afford a splendid view of the Pacific fortifications, the entrance to the canal channel, a part of the port works, and of the canal itself from the great continental divide to the Pacific. There one may sit and see ships coming into the canal, tying up at the docks, sailing up the big ditch, and passing through the locks at Mira- flores and Pedro Miguel. Near by will be the permanent home of the marines who will be sta- tioned on the Isthmus, their barracks and grounds occupying the broad plateau on the side of Ancon Hill made by taking out the millions of cubic yards of stone required for the concrete works on the Pacific side of the Isthmus. Two permanent towns will be built at Balboa, one for the Americans and the other for the common laborers. The American town will be built under the capitol hill on a broad plain that was made by pumping hy- draulic material into a swamp and by dumping spoil from Culebra Cut. 90 THE PANAMA CANAL When the terminal plant at Balboa is completed it will represent probably the most extensive and adequate port works in the New World. In addition to the main dry dock it will have a second one which will be smaller, but which will be large enough to accommodate a majority of the ships that will pass through the canal. The existing dry dock at the Atlantic end will be continued in service. It is certain that none of these port works will ever fail by reason of insecure foundations. Wher- ever unusual loads were to be carried great piers of reinforced concrete were sent down to solid rock, often a distance of 60 feet below the surface. They consisted of a hollow shell of reinforced con- crete which was allowed to sink to hardpan of its own accord or under heavy weight. These shells were built in sections 6 feet high. The bottom section was 10 feet in diameter, and the lower end was equipped with a sharp steel shoe. As the section cut down into the earth of its own weight and that above it, laborers on the inside removed the material under the shoe and as they did so it sank further down. The sections above were only 8 feet in diameter, and did not quite fill up the hole made by the bottom of the section, thus overcoming all skin friction, and permitting the full weight of the series of sections to fall on the lower one. A jet of water was forced around the sinking pier all the time it was going down, and this made its progress the more easy. At times the weight of the superimposed sections was sufficient to force the pier down through the soft mud, while at other times the material became so ENDS OF THE CANAL 91 heavy that even a 25-ton weight on top of the pier scarcely moved it. At one place a stratum of material was struck about 25 feet below the surface which yielded sulphuretted hydrogen gas. This affected the laborers' eyes, and some of them had to go to the hospital for treatment. The work of digging out the material was continued until the lower section reached bed rock, where it was anchored. The sections themselves were tied together with heavy iron rods. After they were firmly in place the interior was filled up with con- crete, itself reinforced, so that the fpimdations became, in reality, a series of huge concrete piles, 8 feet iu diameter, anchored to bed rock. The coaling plants at the two terminals will be the crowning features of the terminal facilities. With an immense storage capacity, and with every possible facility for the rapid handling of coal, both in shipping and unshipping it, no other canal in the world will be so well equipped. The coal storage basin at the Atlantic end will hold nearly 300,000 tons. This basin will be built of rein- forced concrete, and will permit the flooding of the coal pile so that one-haK of it will be stored under water for war purposes. It is said that deteriora- tion in coal is not as great in subaqueous storage, and at the same time the pile is less subject to fire. The plant will be able to discharge a thousand tons of coal an hour and to load 2,000 tons an hour. Ships will not go alongside the wharves to be coaled, but will lie out iu the ship basin and be coaled from barges with reloader outfits. Spe- cial efforts have been made to provide for the quick loading of colliers in case of war. The coal 92 THE PANAMA CANAL handling plant at the Pacific entrance will have a normal capacity of 135,000 tons and will be able to handle half as much coal in a given time as the one at the Atlantic end. There will be big supply depots where ships can get any kind of stores they need from a few buckets of White lead to an anchor or a hawser; a laundry in which a ship's wash can be accepted at the hour it begins its transit of the canal, for delivery by railroad at the other end before it is ready to resume its ocean journey; an ice plant which will replenish the cold storage compart- ments of ships lacking such facilities. In short, it is proposed to attempt to do everything that may be done to make more attractive the bid of the canal for its share of business. CHAPTER VIII THE PANAMA RAILEOAD WHEN the United States acquired the prop- erties of the new French Canal Company it found itself in the possession of a rail- road for which it had allowed the canal company $7,000,000. This road, in the high tide of its history, had proved a bonanza for its stockholders, and during the 43 years between 1855 and 1898 it showed net profits five times as great as the original cost of its construction. When the United States took over the road someone described it as being merely "two streaks of rust and a right of way." While the Panama road as acquired by the United States in its pur- chase of the assets of the new French Canal Com- pany might have been all that this phrase implies, it was none the less as great a bargain as was ever bought by any Government, and probably the greatest bargain ever sold in the shape of a rail- road. It was not the rolling stock that was valuable, nor yet the road itself; the real value was to be found in the possibilities of the conces- sion. Not only was this road destined to render to the United States a service in the building of the Panama Canal, worth to Uncle Sam a great many times more than its cost, but it was also destined to yield a net profit from its commercial 94 THE PANAMA CANAL operations which in 10 y^'rs would amount to double the price paid for it. Since the Americans took it over it has been yielding net returns ranging from a million and a quarter to a million and three- quarters dollars a year. In these 10 years it has brought an aggregate profit of some $15,000,000 into the cojBfers of the United States. While $7,000,000 may have been a high price, judged from the standpoint of the physical value of the road, it was a very reasonable one, indeed, as compared with the price paid for it by the new French Canal Company. This company, which sold it to the United States for $7,000,000, paid the Panama Railroad Company $18,000,000 for it 23 years before. When the French Canal Com- pany decided to undertake the building of the canal, it found that the Panama Railroad Com- pany held concessions that were absolutely nec- essary to the construction of the canal. The Colombian Government had granted the company the concession to complete the road in 1849, and had agreed that no other interoceanic communica- tion should be opened without the consent of the railroad. This gave to the railroad company the whip hand in trading with the canal company and it was able to name its own price. When the United States wanted to buy the rights and properties of the new French Canal Company the shoe was on the other foot. There was only one buyer — the United States; and it could choose between the Panama and Nicaragua routes. If the United States did not buy the property its principal value would have been what it was worth as an uncertain prospect that at THE PANAMA RAILROAD 95 some future time a second Isthmian canal might be built. That is why the United States was able to buy from the French for $7,000,000 property that they had bought for $18,000,000. After the United States acquired possession of the railroad, one change after another took place — now in the location, now in the rolling stock, now in directorate, and again in location — until almost all that remained of the original road was its name. It is now built almost every foot of the distance on a new location and the permanent Panama Railroad is a thoroughly modern, well- ballasted, heavy-railed, block-signal operated Une of railway, built along the east bank of the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Nearly half of the old right of way lies on the, bottom of Lake Gatun, while the new line skirts that artificial body of water along its eastern shore, at places crossing its outlying arms over big bridges and heavy trestles. The construction of this new line was attended with much diflSculty and probably no other road in the world has such a great percentage of fills and embankments in proportion to its length. One embankment, a mile and a quarter long and 82 feet high, required upward of 2,500,000 yards of material for its con- struction. The road is built about 10 feet above the water's edge, and more than 12,000,000 cubic yards of material was required to make the fills necessary to carry the road bed at this elevation. When the United States took over the French property it was decided that the canal work and the railroad operations should be maintained as distinct activities. It was agreed that the Canal 96 THE PANAMA CANAL Commission should have the right to haul its dirt trains over the Panama Railroad, and in compensation therefor the commission undertook to build a new road to take the place of the old line, which was in the way of the completion of the canal. The work of relocating the road was undertaken early in the construction of the canal in order that it might be completed by the time the old road had to be abandoned. It was built at a cost of approximately $9,000,000, or close to $170,000 a mile. It is interesting to note that the cost of this thoroughly modern railroad was only about a million dollars more than the cost of the first Panama road which has been built with rather less than usual attention to grades, and with small rails and hght bridges. The relocated Panama Rail- road was turned over to the railroad company in 1912. How good a bargain the United States secured when it acquired the Panama Railroad is shown by the fact that during the 10 years of canal work the net earnings of the railroad company have reimbursed the United States for the cost of the old road and the construction of the new one, to say nothing of th« invaluable aid rendered in the building of the canal. The relations existing between the Isthmian Canal Commission and the Panama Railroad Company during the years of the construction of the canal were somewhat peculiar. The Panama Railroad Company is as much the property of the United States as the canal itself, yet the books of the two organizations were kept as carefully sep- THE PANAMA RAILROAD 97 arate and distinct as thougli they were under entirely diflFerent ownership. The Panama Rail- road Company, being a chartered corporation, mider the terms of its ownership could engage in commercial business with all of the facility of a private corporation. Money received by the Isthmian Canal Commission from outside sources had to be covered into the treasury and reappro- priated for distinct and special purposes. On the other hand, the railroad company could use its money over and over again without turning it back into the treasury. This advantage of opera- tion was a useful one in conducting the road itself, and also in the construction of the canal. There was another reason which led the canal authorities to advocate the maintenance of the two organizations as separate entities. This had to do with the concession rights. Under the terms of the concession of the railroad company the property was to revert to the Republic of Colombia in 1967, or at any earlier date should the company cease to exist as such. While most authorities agree that with the secession of Panama and the setting up of the new Government all of Colombia's rights in the railroad company passed with the territory, and while the treaty between the United States and the Republic of Panama expressly provides that the United States shall have "absolute title — free from every present or reversionary interest or claim" in the railroad, the Republic of Colombia contends that it pos- sesses some rights with reference to the railroad and, not desiring to complicate matters, the canal authorities thought it best to live up to' the letter 98 THE PANAMA CANAL of the treaty, in spite of PaTnama's express grant of title free from reversionary interest or claim. While it was deemed desirable to have the Panama Railroad operated as a separate organi- zation, it was equally important that it should be operated in a way that its interests always would be subordinate to those of the canal. It was decided that the best way to accomplish this was to make the chairman and chief engineer of the Canal Commission the president of the railroad company, and the members of the commission its directors. The stock of the company is held in the name of the Secretary of War, with the exception of a few shares held by the directors to entitle them to membership on the board. There are also a few directors chosen from other parts of the Government service, but their activities are purely perfunctory. In addition to the railroad, the Panama Railroad Company also operates a steamship Une between New York and Colon. This Hne was acquired with other properties of the new French Canal Company as a part of the Panama Railroad's holdings. There were only a few years during the construction period when this steamship line did not show a loss. But the advantages of having a steamship line for carrying the supplies of the canal were so great, because of the special faciUties that could be provided, that the loss was more than compensated by them. During the year 1912 the cost of operating this steamship line was $305,000 greater than the revenues derived from its operation. But, at the same time there was a retiirn of iiet earnings by the Panama Railroad THE PANAMA RAILROAD 99 of over $2,000,000, at least a part of which was made possible by the operation of the steamship line. Even after deducting the losses sustained in the operation of the steamship company there was a net profit of more than $1,700,000, which for a railroad of less than 50 miles in length is no small item. As a matter of fact, Government ownership of railways as applied at Panama is remarkably successful from the standpoint of the Government, and partially so to the patrons of the railroad. Probably no railroad in the United States could show net earnings per mile of line anywhere com- parable with those of the Panama Railroad. The rates for passengers and baggage across the Isthmus were rather high for first-class passengers, the fare for the 48-mile trip being $2.40, or 5 cents a mile. The second-class rate was only half as much. On the handhng of freight the railroad had to divide the through rate with the steamship companies of the Atlantic and the Pacific, but, while the rates were high, judged by American standards, and the percentages of profits very large, the service maintained was so superior to that encountered on the privately owned railroads of the Tropics that no one ever seriously complained of the charges. One of the most important services rendered by the Panama Railroad Company in the construction of the canal was in connection with the commis- sary. It had more to do with the maintenance of a reasonable standard of living cost on the Isthmus than anything else. When the canal was nearing completion it be- 100 THE PANAMA CANAL came advisable to determine what role the Panama Railroad should play after the permanent organi- zation went into effect. Should it be continued as a separate entity distinct from the canal but controlled by the canal authorities? Or should it be merged into the Canal Government and oper- ated purely as an auxiliary of the canal with no separate existence? This matter was carefully weighed by the canal authorities and the Govern- ment at Washington, and it was finally decided that the best plan would be to operate them as separate entities, but to have all the work done by single organization. Another question that arose was whether the Panama Railroad Steam- ship Line should be operated as a Government line after the completion of the canal. Recalling the fact that the line never had been a profitable one, and that there was no further reason why it should be continued in operation with an annual deficit, the recommendation was made by the chairman and the chief engineer that the ships should be disposed of and the line discontinued. As the tide of tourist travel set toward Panama, the serious problem of taking care of thousands of visitors confronted the canal authorities. There were times when every available facility for taking care of lodgers was called into requisition, and still hundreds of American tourists had to find quar- ters in cheap, vermin-infested native hotels at Colon. Believing that the situation demanded a modern hotel at the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, and having in mind the success of the Government in the construction and maintenance of the Tivoli Hotel at the Pacific side, it was decided by the THE PANAMA RAILROAD 101 Secretary of War that the Panama Railroad Com- pany should build a new hotel at Colon, to be operated by that company for the Government. The result was the beautiful Washington Hotel, in whose architecture one finds the world's best example of northern standards of hotel construc- tion adapted to tropical needs. Built of concrete and cement blocks, it is con- structed in a modified Spanish Mission style that makes it cool and comfortable at all times. Its public rooms, from the main lobby to the dining- rooms, from the ladies' parlor to the telephone and cable rooms, from the barber shop to the billiard room, are large, airy, and most attractively fur- nished. Its ball room, opening on three sides to the breezes borne in from the Caribbean is a delight to the disciples of Terpsichore, while its open-air swimming pool, said to be the largest hotel swim- ming pool in the world, affords ideal facilities for those ,\rho otherwise would sigh for the surf. Persons who have visited every leading hotel in the New World, from the Rio Grande southward to the Strait of Magellan, say that it is without a superior in all that region and, perhaps, without an equal except for one in Buenos Aires. Here one may find accommodations to suit his taste and largely to meet the necessities of his pocketbook. The best rooms with bath cost $5 a day for one, or $6 for two. Table d'hote meals are served at $1 each, while those who prefer it may secure club breakfasts and a la carte serv- ice. Anyone who has visited the Hotel Washing- ton, situated as it is on Colon Beach, where the breakers sweep in from the Caribbean Sea, feels 102 THE PANAMA CANAL that Uncle Sam is no less successful as a hotel keeper than as a builder of canals. The Panama Railroad, under the American regime, has always looked well after the comfort of its patrons. The coaches are of the standard American type, and enough of them are run on every train to make it certain that no patron need stand for lack of a seat. The most popular trains carry from 8 to 12 cars. These trains are run on convenient schedules, permitting a person to go and come from any point on the road in any forenoon or afternoon. All coaches are supplied with hygienic drinking cups, and in every way the Panama Railroad shows that Uncle Sam is solicitous for the welfare of his patrons. All the rolling stock on the Isthmus is built on a 5-foot gauge, this having been the gauge of the original Panama Railroad. As the rolling stock of the Canal Commission had to run over the lines of the Panama Railroad, it also was built on the gauge. When this rolling stock is disposed of it will be necessary to readjust the gauge to meet the ordinary American standard which is 2| inches narrower. It has been estimated that the engine axles can be shortened for $750 per locomotive and those of cars at prices ranging from $27 to $31 per car. The first attempt to build the Panama Railroad was made in 1847, when a French company se- cured a charter from the Government of Colombia for a building of a road across the Isthmus, This company was unable to finance the project and the concession lapsed. In 1849 William H. Aspinwall, John L. Stevens, THE PANAMA RAILROAD 103 and Henry Chauncey, New York capitalists, undertook the construction of the road. The terms of the concession provided that the road would be purchased by the Government at the expiration of 20 years after its completion for $5,000,000. The loss of life in the construction of this road, serious as it was, has been monumen- tally exaggerated. It is an oft-repeated statement that a man died for every tie laid on the road. This would mean that there were 150,000 deaths in its construction. As a matter of fact, the total number of persons employed during the six years the line was being built did not exceed 6,000. But among these the death rate was very high. Several thousand Chinese were brought over and they died almost like flies. Malaria and yellow fever were the great scourges they had to encoun- ter, although smallpox and other diseases carried away hundreds. The road was completed in January, 1855. Before the last rail was laid more than $2,000,000 had been taken in for hauling passengers as far as the road extended. The way in which the original 50-cent per mile rate across the Isthmus was established is interesting. The chief engineer encountered much trouble from people who wanted to use the road as far inland as it went from Colon, so he suggested that a 50-cent rate be established, thinking to make it prohibitory. But the people who wanted to cross the Isthmus were willing to pay even 50 cents a mile. Hence for years after the completion of the road the passenger rate continued at $25 for the one-way trip across the Isthmus. 104 THE PANAMA CANAL The railroad proved to be such an unexpectedly- good investment that the Republic of Colombia began to establish its claim to acquire ownership of the road at the expiration of the 2-year term, which would take place in 1875. It was necessary ' therefore, that the railroad company should take steps to save the railroad from a forced sale with $5,000,000 as the consideration. Representatives were dispatched to Bogota with instructions to get an extension of the concession under the. most favorable terms possible. As it was realized that the Republic of Colombia held the whip hand in the negotiations, the railroad company understood that if it wished to escape selling its great revenue producing road for $5,000,000 it would have to meet any terms Colombia might dictate. The result of this mission was an agreement by the railroad that in consideration of an extension of the concession for a term of 99 years it would pay to the Colombian Government $1,000,000 spot cash and $250,000 a year during the life of the .concession. That annual payment was continued as long as the Isthmus remained a part of the Republic of Colombia. Under the terms of the treaty between the United States and the Repub- lic of Panama it was resumed again in 1913, to be paid by the United States to the Republic of Panama throughout all the years that the United States maintains and operates the Panama Canal. CHAPTER IX SANITATION PRIMARILY, the conquest of the Isthmian barrier was the conquest of the mosquito. Not mountains to be leveled, nor wild rivers to be tamed, nor yet titanic machinery to be installed, presented the gravest obstacles to the canal builders. Their most feared enemies were none of these, but the swarms of mosquitoes that bred in myriads in every lake, in every tiny pool, in every clump of weeds on the rain-soaked, steaming, tropical land. For these mosquitoes were the bearers of the dread germs of yellow fever and of malaria; and the conditions that encouraged their multiplication bred also typhoid and all manner of filthy disease. Each mos- quito was a potential messenger of death. The buzzing, biting pests had defeated the French in Panama without the French ever having recog- nized the source of the attack. It was because the Americans, thanks to Great Britain and to Cuba, knew the deadly qualities of the mosquitoes that they were able to plan, under the leadership of Col. W. C. Gorgas, a sanitary campaign of unprecedented success. It achieved two vic- tories. One was that it made of the Canal Zone the most healthful strip of land under tropic skies. The other is the Panama Canal. 105 106 THE PANAMA CANAL When one looks about in an effort to place the credit for these great sanitary achievements he must go back to Cuba, where the yellow fever commission, consisting of Reed, Carroll, Lazear, and Agrimpnte, made the remarkable investiga- tions proving that yellow fever is transmissible only through the bite of a mosquito. He must go still further back to Maj. Roland Ross of the British Army, and his epoch-making discovery that malaria is conveyed only by the bite of another kind of mosquito. And, if he is just to all who have contributed to the establishment of the insect-bearing theory of disease, he must not forget Sir Patrick Manson who first proved that any disease could be transmitted by insect bites. It was he who discovered that filariasis is transmissible by this method alone. It was from him that Ross gathered the inspiration that is releasing humanity from one of the most insidious of all the diseases to which mortal flesh is heir. And it was from Ross's malaria discoveries, in turn, that Reed carried forward to successful proof the theory which had persisted in some quar- ters for generations that yellow fever was trans- missible through mosquitoes; a theory abeady partially proved by Dr. Carlos Finley, of Havana, 20 years earlier. But all of the surmises and theories -came short of the truth until Reed, Carroll, Lazear, and Agrimonte (Lazear at the cost of his life and Carroll at the cost of a nearly fatal attack of yellow fever) took up the work of proving that there was only one way in which yellow fever could be transmitted; namely, by the bite of the mosquito. Iz; o o CO o O M m O » LIEUT. FEEDEEIC MEAES THE OLD PANAMA EAILEOAD SANITATION 107 Sleeping with patients who had yellow fever, wearing the clothes of those who had died from it, eating from utensils from which yellow fever victims had eaten — in short, putting to the most rigid test every other possible method of infection, they proved by every negative test that yellow fever could not be produced in any way other than by the bite of a mosquito. The next step was to give affirmative proof that yellow fever was caused by the bite of the female "stegomyia" — she of the striped stock- ings and the shrill song. This meant that someone had to have enough love for humanity to risk his Hfe by inviting one of the worst forms of death to which human flesh is heir. Those doc- tors knew that they could not as brave men ask others to undergo the risks that they themselves might not accept, so in a little council chamber in Havana the three Americans — Reed, Carroll, and Lazear' — entered into a compact that they themselves would permit infected mosquitoes to bite them. Reed was called home, but Carroll and Lazear stood with the keen and cold eyes of scientists and saw the mosquitoes inject the fateful poison into their blood. Later, after Lazear had died and Carroll had stood in the jaws of death, soldiers of the American army in Cuba volunteered in the interest of humanity to undergo these same risks. And it was thus, at this price, that the world came to know how yellow fever is caused, and that the United States was to be able to build the Panama Canal. After the guilt of the female "stegomyia" mosquito was firmly estabUshed the next problem 108 THE PANAMA CANAL was to find a method of combating her work. Dr, Reed and his associates thought that it might be done through a process of immunization, using the mosquito to bite patients with very mild cases and, after the necessary period of incubation, to transmit the disease to those who were to be rendered immune. It was soon found, however, that there was no method of transmit- ting a mild infection, and the next problem was to combat the work of the mosquito by isolation of yellow fever patients, and by the extermina- tion of the mosquitoes themselves. In Havana at this time there was another army surgeon who was destined to write his name high upon the pages of medical achievement. He was Dr. William C. Gorgas. Under the patronage of Gen. Leonard Wood, himself a physician and alive to the lessons of the yellow fever com- mission's investigations, Maj. Gorgas undertook to apply the doctrine of yellow fever prevention promulgated by the commission, and his efforts were attended with brilliant success. The result was that Havana, in particular, and Cuba, in general, were freed from this great terror of the Tropics. When President Roosevelt came to provide for the building of the Panama Canal one of his early acts was to appoint Dr. Gorgas the chief sanitary oflSicer of the Canal Zone. At first there was difiiculty in establishing practical sanitation at Panama. The chief sani- tary officer was then a subordinate of the com- mission, and, along with all of the other men who were trying to do things on the Isthmus, he found SANITATION 109 himself hindered by unsatisfactory conditions both as to supplies and as to force; consequently, his work was no more satisfactory to himself than it was to the commission or to the American people. Under these conditions an epidemic of yellow fever broke out in Panama in 1905, and it was not long before the yellow fever mosquito had seemingly established an alibi and had secured a reopening of her case before the jury of public sentiment. People, to emphasize their disbelief in the mosquito theory of the transmission of the disease, tore the screens from their doors and win- dows, and otherwise proclaimed their contempt for the doctors and their doctrines. This matter went so far that the Isthmian Canal Commission proposed not only a change in method but a change in personnel as well. At this juncture Charles E. Magoon became governor of the Canal Zone, and he declared that Dr. Gorgas should have adequate financial and moral support. He was determined that the panic which the yellow fever outbreak had engendered should be halted — ^^ and a panic it was, for men rushed madly to Colon and defied the efforts of the commission, and of the captains and crews of the Panama Railroad steamships, to prevent them from returning to the States without other trans- portation arrangements than a determination to get aboard and stay there until the Statue of Liberty had been passed in New York Harbor. So great was this panic that Chief Engineer Stevens declared that there were three diseases at Panama: Yellow fever, malaria, and cold feet; and that the greatest of these was cold feet. The news- 110 THE PANAMA CANAL papers of the United States at that time quoted the poetry of such writers as Gilbert, who said: "Beyond the Chagres River 'Tis said (the story's old) Are paths that lead to mountains Of purest virgin gold; But 'tis my firm conviction What e'er the tales they tell. That beyond the Chagres River All paths lead straight to hell." It did not matter that in four months there were only 47 deaths on the Isthmus from yellow fever as compared with 108 from malaria in the same period — men do not stop to study mortality tables and to compare the relative fatali- ties of diseases when yellow fever stares them in the face. But after all, the yellow fever panic of 1905 served a good purpose, for if the mosquito thereby secured a reopening of its case, it stirred the United States Government to give to the sanitary oflScers of the Canal Zone the powers they needed, and the means required to prove finally and forever in the court of last resort, the guilt of the mosquito, and to establish for once and all the method of combating its stealthy work. The whole world recognizes the remarkable results in sanitary work that have been achieved at Panama. While it must be remembered^that the population of the Canal Zone is made up largely of able-bodied men, and that, therefore, the death rate naturally would be lower than under like SANITATION 111 conditions with a normal population of infancy and old age, the fact remains that sanitary science has converted the Zone from a mosquito paradise of swamp and jungle into a region where mosquitoes have all but disappeared, and where men are as free from danger of epidemic diseases as in the United States itself. The sanitary statistics of the Canal Zone, and of the cities of Panama and Colon, were based for several years upon an erroneous assumption of population. The Department of Sanitation estimated the population of the Canal Zone by deducting the recorded emigrants from the re- corded immigrants and assumed that the diflFerence represented a permanent addition to the Zone's population. Under this method of estimating population a serious error crept in, since hundreds of people came into Panama from the Panaman outports and were recorded as arrivals, but who, departing in small sailing vessels and launches at night after the port officers had gone home, were not recorded as having departed. In this way the sanitary department estimates of population in the Canal Zone reached a total of 93,000 in 1912. The census taken that year showed only 62,000 population in the Zone. This served to make the death rate given out by the Department of Sanitation 50 per cent lower than was justified by actual population conditions. But one does not need to consider figures to realize what has been accomplished at Panama. Anyone who goes there and sees the remarkable evidence of the success of the efiForts to conquer the disease of the tropical jungles, finds a lesson 112 THE PANAMA CANAL taught that is too impressive to need the confirma- tion of medical statistics. The United States, after the yellow fever out- break of 1905, never counted the cost when the health of the canal army was at stake. Not only was Uncle Sam successful in his efforts to make the Canal Zone and the terminal cities of Panama and Colon healthful places of abode, but no worker on the canal was denied the privilege of the best medical care. An average of $2,000,000 a year was expended in the prevention of sickness and the care of those who were sick. At Ancon and at Colon large hospitals were maintained where the white American and the West Indian negro had their respective wards. At Taboga a large sanitarium wa^ maintained to assist the recupera- tion of those who had recovered sufficiently to leave the hospital. Besides this there were rest camps along the line for those not ill enough to be removed to the hospitals, and dispensaries where those who felt they were not in need of other medical attention could consult with the physicians and get the necessary medicines. All medical services to the employees of the Canal Commission and the Panama Railroad were free, and only nominal charges were made for members of their \ families. No passenger train crossed the Isth- mus of Panama without carrying a hospital car for taking patients to or from the hospitals. No way station was without its waiting shed bearing the inscription: "For Hospital Patients Only." Each community had its dispensary, its doctor, and its sanitary inspector. During the year 1912 there were 48,000 cases SANITATION 113 of sickness in the Canal Zone, of which 26,000 were white and 22,000 colored. During the same year 633,000 trips to the dispensaries were made by employees and nonemployees, divided almost evenly between white and colored. The average number of employees constantly sick in Ancon Hospital was 712; in Colon Hospital 209; and in Taboga Sanitarium 54. An average of 119 were in the sick camps all the time and 50 in the quar- ters. The average number of days' treatment per employee in the hospitals was a little over 14; in the sick camps a little under 3; and in quarters 2|. It cost $160,000 a year to feed the patients in the hospitals and $739,000 a year to operate the hospitals. The work of sanitation proper cost some $400,- 000 a year. This includes many items. During one year about 16,000,000 square yards of brush were cut and burned; a million square yards of swamp were drained; 30,000,000 square yards of grass were cut; 250,000 feet of ditches were dug; and some 2,000,000 linear feet of old ditches were cleaned. During the same year nearly a million garbage cans and over 300,000 refuse cans were emptied. In addition to looking after the health of the Canal Zone itself, it was necessary to care for that of the cities of Panama and Colon. In the city of Panama 11,000 loads of sweepings and 25,000 loads of garbagewere removed inoneyear; 3,000,000 gallons of water were sprinkled on the streets and as much more distributed to the poor of the city. During one year the quarantine service, which keeps a strict lookout for yellow fever, bubonic plague, and other epidemic diseases, inspected 114 THE PANAMA CANAL over 100,000 passengers coming into the Zone. It required about 150,000 gallons of mosquito oil a year to keep down the mosquitoes. There are 50 known breeds of these insects on the Isthmus and perhaps some 20 species more which have not been identified. Of the 50 or more species of mosquitoes 11 belonged to the malaria-producing family ■ — anopheles. Their cousins of the yellow- fever-producing family — the stegomyias — boast of only two species. What the other 40 or more kinds are doing besides annoying suffering humanity has not been determined. The mos- quito is comparatively easy to exterminate. Its life habits are such that a terrific mortality may be produced among them during infancy. The average young mosquito, during its "wriggler" state of development, Uves under the water and has to make about 8,000 trips to the surface for air Ibefore it can spread its wings and fly. If oil is poured upon the water it can get no air and death by asphyxiation follows. Two classes of larvaecide are used on the waters to exterminate the baby mosquitoes: One is an oil used to make a scum over the surfa,ce; the other a carbolic solution which poisons the water. At the head of every little rivulet and tiny, trickling stream one sees a barrel out of which comes an endless drip! drip! drip! These drops of oil or poison are carried down the stream and make inhospit- able all of the mosquito nurseries of the marshes through which the waters flow. In addition to these barrels, men go about with tanks on their backs, spraying the marshy ground and the small, isolated pools of water with larvaecides. a M O o H B c CO O 09 a »:] o o EH M P a OQ O O I?; M Iz; < EH M Iz;