PANAMA AND THE CANAL TO-DAY

CHAPTER I

THE DREAM OF THE STRAIT

WE are on the eve of the consummation of five centuries of effort to find or make a direct westerly route from Europe to the Orient. The task which the oldest kingdoms of Christendom essayed and failed to accomplish, is nearing its completion at the hands of the youngest of nations. When, a few years hence, the Panama Canal shall be opened to the fleets and the merchant marine of the world, the dream of Columbus to sail from Spain to Cathay, with his prow ever pointing into the eye of the setting sun, will have become a possibility.

Among the ancient Greeks the theory was entertained that the shores of Asia might be reached by a comparatively short sail to westward from the mainland of Europe. But it was

not until the fifteenth century that navigators and the sovereigns, upon whom they necessarily depended for the means and permission to make distant expeditions, were sufficiently impressed with the idea to put its truth to the test. Columbus was only one of many who, in his time, believed that the lands visited by Marco Polo could be arrived at by a voyage to the west, and that an open passageway lay between them and the countries of Christendom. Columbus alone, however, among the adventurers of his day, seems to have had the courage of his conviction. His ideas on the subject were very vague and faulty, being derived from the rude maps of the day and from the wild conjectures of others, and often based upon mere imagination. His conception of the size of the world was widely at variance with the truth and, like the ancients, he imagined the distance between Europe and Asia to be several thousand miles less than it actually is. When, after having persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella to support his venture, he embarked on his first voyage to America, it was with the confident expectation of gaining the eastern shores of the Old World in less than two weeks' time. The discovery of one after another of the