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Rh buckets that can bring up ten thousand tons a day, and dig through soft rock without previous blasting. This vessel was built at Renfrew, Scotland, and made the voyage across the Atlantic and round South America to the Pacific entrance of the Canal under her own steam.

Moored as closely together as possible, the dredges attacked the great mass of soft clay from both sides. Double crews and electric light enabled the work to go on by night as well as by day. The excavated material was loaded into barges, towed away by tugs, and dumped into Gatun or Miraflores Lake, outside the ship channel.

By May, 1914, a channel had been dug through the Cucaracha Slide deep enough to permit barges to be towed through from ocean to ocean. These barges carried freight from steamers of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Line, which company had been prevented from trans-shipping by the Tehuantepec Railroad because of the revolutionary outbreaks in Mexico.

After the dredges had removed 2,767,080 cubic yards—an average of 286,239.78 cubic yards per month—from the Cucaracha Slide, its forward movement ceased and the Way was opened for an ocean-going ship to make the long-looked-forward-to passage from sea to sea. This trip was made by the Cristobal, of the Panama Railroad Steamship Line, on August 3, 1914. Her sister ship, the Ancon, passed through on the fifteenth, carrying a large party of army officers, Panamanian dignitaries, and their wives and families. Again General Goethals was not a passenger, but watched the vessel's passage from the shore, moving from point to point in his railroad motor.

The Panama Canal was now declared open to the