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the British protectorate. It would have permitted either party to build a canal across any part of Central America, but it pledged each to forego “any exclusive control over the said Ship-Canal,” to abstain from any manner of fortifications intended to protect such a canal, and never to “occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or any part of Central America.” In the event of war between the two signatories, the treaty provided, and no matter which had built it, the canal was to remain strictly neutral, open to the vessels of all nations; and it was never to be blockaded, in any circumstances.13

      This was not a good treaty, and it was to cause trouble later, but perhaps it was the best thing that could be done at the time. It met with much bitter Opposition in the United States Senate, but eventually squeaked through. It was promulgated July 5, 1850.

      “And there,” many men muttered, “goes the Monroe Doctrine.”

      They were mistaken.

      Chapter

      4

      The Rush for the Gold

      Virtually neglected for more than two hundred years, the idea of an interoceanic canal came back strong early in the nineteenth Century after the American colonies, Spanish and English, had won their independence. Great men with great minds at least toyed with the idea from time to time—Dewitt Clinton, Alexander Humboldt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. Many others, men who actually made plans, who applied for Charters, might best be described as overly imaginative, a trifle too enthusiastic.

      Locks were by no means unknown, but some of those proposed for the waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific were new to this world.

      There was the self-styled engineer who submitted to the Mexican authorities a plan for a canal at the Tehuantepec “waist.” This canal would be elevated, placed upon stone stilts somewhat after the manner of an ancient Roman aqueduct, only much larger. The ships at either end would be hoisted—cargo, passengers, and all—into this contraption by means of a hydraulic apparatus, and floated gracefully across the land, over the mountains, which were notably low at this point. The plan was not accepted.

      There was the man who would have pierced the Panama mountains with a tunnel, to be entered by means of a series of locks on either side. The tunnel was to be 3.3 miles long. It was never dug.

      There was the ineffable Felix Belly, a French newspaperman who could talk his way into almost anything, and who, for several years, had Nicaraguan government circles agog with his gorgeous canal plans while American and British diplomats watched and listened aghast. Belly was not an engineer, not a diplomat, not a financier, but he had a most wonderfully persuasive tongue. His plans, entirely impractical, got nowhere; and he went back to France and wrote a book about it, like a general after a war blaming everybody but himself.

      Another who wrote about the canal possibilities of Nicaragua was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the Corsican and in the eyes of many the rightful Emperor Napoleon III of France. He was visited by a Nicaraguan statesman, who poured facts over him. The prince was impressed; but since he was in jail at the time, as a result of an ill-advised attempt to seize the throne, he could do little about raising funds. The visitor even proposed to name the project after the prisoner, Canale Napoleone de Nicaragua, in exchange for the use of his name on a prospectus. The prince agreed. He even wrote the prospectus itself, extolling the Nicaraguan route over that of Panama, though he had never visited either place. Once he had escaped, however, fleeing to England, he forgot about the matter.

      There was Commander Bedford Clapperton Pim, R.N., a fanatical empire builder who hated the United States, and who on nothing and with no authority started to lay out plans for a combined railroad and canal across Nicaragua, ignoring the fact that an American Company already held the concession. Pim’s strange behavior was stopped short by his superiors, who sent him home.

      There was Charles, Baron de Thierry, who talked the Colombian government into giving him an exclusive charter to build either a railroad or a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. There were those who doubted Thierry’s right to the title of baron, but everybody doubted his title of king of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas, as well as the title of king of the Maoris. He cut quite a swathe at Bogotá for some time, but he never did do anything about his charter, and soon he was off to New Zealand to rule over some of his subjects, who had never heard of him. He faded out, after a while, in a haze of bankruptcy.

      Thierry s charter, when it lapsed, was taken up by three New Yorkers—William Henry Aspinwall and Henry Chauncey, financiers, and John Lloyd Stephens, a lawyer by profession but distinguised also as an archaeologist and travel writer. Stephens was the president.

      These men meant business. They hired a couple of first-rate engineers and sent them to the isthmus to make a survey, and they floated stock to raise a million dollars, more or less, in the money market.

      A curious thing had happened, just before they got their concession, a thing that would change history and most emphatically change the fate of the Panama Railroad Company. A casual contractor, a carpenter named James W. Marshall, who was building a sawmill for that eccentric Swiss John Augustus Sutter on the south branch of the American River in California, one evening thought he saw something that might be gold glitter in the tailrace of the almost completed mill, and he picked it out, and tested it, and sure enough it was. Just at first there was a notable lack of excitement about this find, the public being ill informed as to its importance and weary of false alarms, but late in that same year of 1848, as though at a signal, the gold rush suddenly began. Everybody wanted, by hook or by crook, to get to those hills back of San Francisco. They dropped what they were doing, they dug up their life savings, and with a pick or two, sometimes a shovel, occasionally a pan, they made for California. The whole feeling of the movement, a mass feeling, a mania, was that those who got there first would become millionaires overnight, so that the argonauts were surcharged with impatience and the need for haste. They would put up with anything if only they thought that they could get there fast.

      There were various routes. The railroad did not go west of, roughly, St. Louis, and the overland routes from there to California were dusty and dangerous and took a long time. For middle westerners this was all right, but a great majority of the argonauts, especially in the beginning, were from the eastern states, particularly New England. They could go by ship to Vera Cruz, Mexico, and by land the rest of the way—which some of them, veterans of the Mexican War, reckoned would save money even if it did not save much time. They could sail to Greytown in Nicaragua and get across the country somehow to the Pacific, where they might at least hope to pick up a northbound steamer or schooner. They could go around Cape Horn, a trip that took, or certainly seemed to take, forever. Or they could go across Panama.

      At the end of the Mexican War the government in Washington found itself called upon to deal with the faraway territory of California, where it maintained various army posts and naval stations, besides its federal offices. There was also the matter of the mails, for the Pony Express, an experiment, had proved a costly failure. So the federal government subsidized two steamship lines, one from New York to Chagres, a village at the mouth of the Panamanian river of that name; the other, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, from San Francisco to the city of Panama. Chaucey and Aspinwall were directors of the Atlantic Company.

      This had been done, or at least started, before James Marshall noted that gleam in the tailrace of the mill and set the world on fire.

      Neither Company provided any transportation across the isthmus. That was up to the travelers themselves, to make whatever deal they could with the natives.

      The Panama Railroad Company men at first found the gold rush interesting enough but no real affair of theirs. They could not hope to get any passengers by rail across the isthmus until their job was finished, and they believed that by that time the rush would be over. They were to be proved wrong on both counts.

      The engineers made a survey, and they found a pass through the mountains only 337 feet above sea level, the lowest yet, and soon after that they found another pass of only 275 feet.14 None of the previous would-be canal or road builders had noticed these gaps in the wall of mountain.

      The

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