With Speaker Cannon through the tropics : a descriptive story of a voyage to the West Indies, Venezuela and Panama: containing views of the Speaker upon our colonial possessions . et, that of the tide, forinstance—at Colon, a sluggish tide in Limon Bay averagingone foot only, and across, at Panama, running up almostdirect from the Pacific Ocean, a tide of eighteen or twentyfeet. Nature had evidently reared Culebra to protect theIsthmus against these extraordinary tidal conditions. Then,the cost of excavation to cut the nine miles of Culebra downto sea-level, and then forty feet below, to say n
With Speaker Cannon through the tropics : a descriptive story of a voyage to the West Indies, Venezuela and Panama: containing views of the Speaker upon our colonial possessions . et, that of the tide, forinstance—at Colon, a sluggish tide in Limon Bay averagingone foot only, and across, at Panama, running up almostdirect from the Pacific Ocean, a tide of eighteen or twentyfeet. Nature had evidently reared Culebra to protect theIsthmus against these extraordinary tidal conditions. Then,the cost of excavation to cut the nine miles of Culebra downto sea-level, and then forty feet below, to say nothing of theadditional forty feet of cut for the remaining length of thecanal! Such a task, in the number of men and years 256 WITH SPE^AKI^R CANNON THROUGH THE^ TROPICS. required to complete it, would throw the work into anothercentury. And then, the question of the troublesome Chagres,paralleling the proposed sea-level on the Colon side, and partof it to be utilized in the sea-level plan for canal purposes,what could be said of its conduct in the torrential period? Now that we stood upon the ground, it seemed thatTawney was right. I had not understood the lock system,. HOUSES IN GATUN, PANAMA. but it began to clear up with the explanations of the looked down upon the little town of Gatun, on the banksof the Chagres, and began to take courage as against thatmuch-maligned stream, for the Chagres is not a mightyriver—it is not even a respectable creek. The native ladies,barefoot, were washing their clothes on the rocks in thegood old-fashioned way. Canoes of the natives, some of COLON AND PANAMA. 257 them aboriginal dugouts, were resting lazily on the bank-approaching the little town, where the water seemed deeperand freer from obstruction than in other places. I have read that the Chagres sometimes rises to such anenormous height that it would imperil the canal, I said toone of the engineers. It does rise in the rainy season, came the reply, butwe have no fear
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