Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/384

 Published herewith is a sketch showing the location of the railroad, canal and tributary drainage, and a profile along the axis of the canal.

The first surveys for the railroad were made in 1849, and it was probably the excitement of the California gold fever that brought about its construction at this particular time. Ground was broken in January, 1850, and the last rail was laid in January, 1855.

The length of the road is 47.6 miles and it crosses the dividing summit at an elevation of 263 feet above the mean level of the Atlantic ocean. The maximum grade is 60 feet to the mile. Soon after the road was built accurate levels were run to determine the difference, if any, between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and it was found that the mean levels were about the same, although there are of course variations owing to local causes, and considerable differences of height at times, owing to differences of tides in the Atlantic and Pacific. At Aspinwall the greatest rise is only 1.6 feet, while at Panama there is at times a difference of over 21 feet between high and low water. The cost of the railroad was $75,000,000.

The existence of the railroad was probably the deciding cause that led Lesseps to the adoption of this location of the proposed canal.

Now that the scheme has practically failed it is very easy to see and appreciate the difficulties that lay in the way of building a canal at this particular place; and it certainly seems that if sound engineering principles had been adopted at least some of these difficulties could have been understood and properly combatted. The whole scheme, however, from an engineering standpoint, seems to have been conducted in the most blundering manner.

Lesseps is a diplomat and financier, but in no sense a great engineer. In the construction of the Suez canal, the questions of diplomacy and finance were the most difficult to settle, while the engineering problems were comparatively simple. In Panama the opposite conditions prevailed. Concessions were freely given him by the Colombian government and money freely offered him by the French people, but he never grasped or comprehended the difficulties that nature had planted in his way, and these only seemed to occur to him when they blocked progress in a certain direction. The Paris Conference, controlled by Lesseps, decided