stones, some ten or twelve feet high, which seemed to have been loosely thrown together without much design. On the crest of this was an old iron cross, half consumed by rust. On one side of the rock pile (for it was little else), opening from the ground, was a rude doorway, barely large enough to admit a man's body on hands and knees. This led back to an inner cavern (it could hardly be called a room), wherein lighted tapers were burning. In this and beneath a rustic altar, was a quantity of human bones, collected in a sort of stone urn. The attendant friar, getting his dates a little mixed, told me these were the mortal remains of some early Christian missionaries who had died on this identical spot early in the sixteenth century. I asked him how he knew this. "Ah, señor mio," said he, "such is the tradition of holy men, and I accept it." If he entertained any doubts as to its truth, others of the faithful did not; for the place was visited regularly at intervals during the year by simple-minded Indians from a distance who deposited their pesetas,1 and renewed their vows over the bones of the saintly dead.2

The so-called "State" of Panama is coextensive with the isthmus of that name, and comprises an area of about 30,000 square miles. Its present population is perhaps 400,000, including an independent tribe of Indians who are said to number about 8,000. It is the most northern of the nine constituent commonwealths of the present

1 A peseta is a native silver coin, corresponding to the franc, worth

about sixteen cents.

2 Paracelsus stated what is now an admitted scientific fact when he uttered these remarkable words: "Whether the object of your faith be real or false, you will nevertheless obtain the same effects. Thus, if I believe in Saint Peter's statue as I have believed in Saint Peter himself, I shall obtain the same effects that I should have obtained from Saint Peter. But that is superstition. Faith, however, produces miracles; and whether it is a true or a false faith, it will always produce the same wonders."

Colombian union, and to most foreigners is better known than the Republic itself. The result is that one of the most beautiful and interesting countries on the continent is habitually misjudged by what little is here seen of it. And yet, strange to say, this is precisely the section of which Colombians seem to feel most proud. Like a deformed and useless member of a family, it is a sort of pet of the household, humored and spoiled and habitually deferred to by all the others. It has already cost the central Government, in the way of reclamations growing out of local disorders, more than the entire "State" would bring if put up at auction; and yet if you would touch the pride of the average Colombian at the most sensitive point, just intimate that his Government might be induced to part with the sovereignty of the isthmus! He believes Panama to be "the navel of the world," and that at some time or other, and in some manner, not very clear even to his own mind, it will be the source of fabulous wealth. Stranger still, he seems to have the impression that this particular spot is especially coveted by all the nations of the world, and that "the United States of the North" (as he persistently miscalls the title of our Government), is merely awaiting some favorable pretext to take forcible possession of it. Nevertheless, every time the federal Government at Bogotá gets into some serious trouble with its "revolutionists" on the isthmus, it importunes the Washington authorities to intervene for the preservation of order there.

The general topography of the isthmus may be described as a succession of hills and valleys with intervening swamps and rapidly-running streams. The great central range of hills, often rising to the dignity of mountains, which separates the Atlantic and Pacific watersheds, is merely the extension of the great western cordillera of the Andes, which, under a different name,

continues through Central America, Mexico, and the United States, and is finally lost in the icy slopes of Alaska. The Atlantic side is drained by the Atrato and the Chagres; the Pacific side by the Tuya and its confluents. The head-waters of the Atrato and of the Tuya are not a great way apart, with a sort of table-land swamp intervening; and there is an Indian tradition that some of the early buccaneers once passed from one to the other in light canoes and pirated a small settlement on the Pacific coast near Darien.

It is interesting to note how persistently this shadowy tradition of a natural water-pass across the isthmus hangs about the early literature of the country. We find frequent allusions to it, not only in the Spanish poems and romances of the seventeenth century, but likewise in the colonial state papers and official correspondence of a much later date. The most remarkable instance occurs, however, in an official communication by the Governor of Panama (one Don Dionicio Alceda) which bears the date of 1743. In that communication, speaking of the River Mandingua (the former name of the Atrato), the Governor says:

"It rises in the mountains of Chepo and runs eastward some four and a half leagues, to the Atlantic. The navigation of this river is very properly prohibited under the pain of death, owing to the facility it affords for passing from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. This passage was effected in the year 1679 by the arch pirates Juan Guartem, Eduardo Blomar, and Bartolomé Charpes. These freebooters," the Governor goes on to say, were tried for their crimes by audience of the viceroyalty, and as they could not be had in person to suffer the just punishment, they were burned in effigy at Santa Fé (de Bogotá), while they were yet ravaging the settlement on both sides the isthmus."

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A most remarkable judicial proceeding, certainly, and viewed at this distance of time it challenges credulity; yet we are obliged to admit that it is not out of relation with those strange times, nor incongruous with much that is of record amongst the old Spanish colonial archives at Seville and Madrid.

Even as late as 1874 this misty tradition of a natural pass between the two oceans had a curious revival in official circles at the Colombian capital. The national Congress of the Republic had appointed a special committee to investigate and report upon the feasibility of an inter-oceanic ship canal by the then much-talked-of Atrato route. The chairman of this committee, a civil engineer by profession, but more of a poet than a man of affairs, prepared and submitted an elaborate paper in which he undertook to prove by citations of old Spanish archives (which he claimed to have personally examined in Seville and Madrid) that there was a natural water-pass somewhere on the isthmus, from ocean to ocean, as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Some months later there appeared at Bogotá a sort of cosmopolitan crank of the name of Gorgoza, who represented himself as the agent of a syndicate formed in Paris, "for the exploration of the isthmus of Panama with a view of opening a ship canal across it." In an address delivered before a joint committee of both houses of Congress, Gorgoza stated positively that he had himself traversed this natural pass as late as 1868. When asked why he did not report this fact to the United States Naval Commission, then engaged in making a survey of the isthmus in that vicinity, he said he did report the fact to Captain Selfridge, but was " merely laughed at!" When asked who were his attendants at the time, he replied that he was accompanied by two

men, one of whom had since died, and that he had forgotten the name of the other!

Nevertheless, there were not wanting people who gave credence to this very absurd story; and Gorgoza was secretly encouraged, as I afterwards learned, by more than one of the European representatives at the Colombian capital. There was also, at that time, a feeling of uneasiness among Colombian statesmen about the survey then being made of the Nicaragua route by the United States Naval Commission; and it was probably thought that the consideration shown to Gorgoza might again direct the attention of the United States to the old Atrato route. At any rate, Gorgoza finally obtained his concession, which he carried to Paris in November, 1876. In the following February, the Paris and London newspapers began to publish a series of notices of an "International Geographical Congress," which was proposed to be held in Paris under the auspices of the Paris Geographical Society, of which count Ferdinand de Lesseps was then president. This was preliminary to the farcical "Canal Congress," held in Paris some months later, at which delegates from the United States consented to become mere spectators. The outcome of it all was the Bonaparte-Wyse Expedition of 1878, sent out ostensibly to survey the isthmus under the Gorgoza concession, but really for the purpose of obtaining what afterwards became known as "the SalgarWyse Contract" of that year, under which M. de Lesseps and his associates began operations.

Such was the curious origin of what a French lawyer has characterized as "one of the most daring and gigantic swindles of modern times," of which, however, more will be said in a succeeding chapter.