Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/877

 of human industry constitute one of the most powerful of all agencies of social amelioration and the improvement of the condition of mankind. The discovery of America, the greatest of all discoveries, may be said to have doubled the habitable world, and to have opened a new destiny for man upon earth; yet it was but an incident in the progress of commerce. The blind passion for wealth was the impulse that drove men to the exploration of the unknown globe; and, as often occurs in investigation, the search for one thing led to another of far more value and importance. To increase Oriental trade by finding a new and shorter route to the Indies was the object of Columbus; he discovered a new land, and died in the conviction that it was Asiatic, and that he had brought "the fabulous wealth of Ind" within the immediate grasp of Europe.

Yet, seven years after the death of Columbus, Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Darien and discovered the Pacific Ocean. So it was not India that had been reached, but a new world that had been found. The old problem, therefore, still remained, how to get to the Indies by a western route; but the question was now how to find a passage through. All navigators were alert in quest of a strait that should lead into the Indian Ocean, and the incentive that inspired the enterprise of Columbus animated his successors during half a century later. Prescott says that the discovery of a new and shorter route to the Indies "is the true key to the maritime movements of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries."

But, failing to find "the secret of the strait," men of enterprise began to think of cutting the knot by opening an artificial waterway for ships across the American Isthmus. The Spaniards led in this project of uniting the opposite harbors by a canal; and Galvao, in 1528, proposed to Charles V. to open a ship communication between the oceans at Panama. Plans and surveys were afterward made for this purpose. In 1534 Charles V. gave instructions to Cortez to seek such a route. In 1551 Gomara, author of the "History of the Indies," proposed three routes, including Nicaragua. In 1567 Antonelli was sent by Philip II. to explore with reference to a ship-canal. In 1795 William Patterson, founder of the Bank of England, and a man of comprehensive views, who had possessed himself of an extensive and minute knowledge respecting the institutions and commerce of foreign countries, obtained the royal sanction to a project for colonizing Darien, one of the objects of the enterprise being to cut a canal through the isthmus. The expedition was attempted, but proved a disastrous failure. During the next hundred years various projects were suggested, and explorations made by citizens of different countries with a view of overcoming this barrier to navigation; and in 1804 Humboldt gave a new interest and impulse to the subject by publishing a careful discussion of the relative merits of several routes for an interoceanic canal. As the commerce of the world increased in the early part of this century, the problem became still more urgent, and projects for solving it multiplied—Spain, France, Holland, England—all the leading maritime nations contributing schemes and projectors for the undertaking.

Thus, for three centuries and a half the question of piercing the American Isthmus has been universally recognized as a world's question, as the common interest of all nations, and as open to anybody who had the ability and the perseverance to accomplish it. For two hundred years before our nation came into existence this was the broad view taken of the enterprise in all countries; and, when the United States first became interested in the subject, it was also as a project concerning alike the whole civilized world.

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