Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/40



where no sign of human habitation or footsteps is to be found; and where a league on foot is a laborious day's journey; the difficulty of conveying provisions; the chances of becoming inextricably involved in marshes, or stricken down by some of the pestilential fevers common in the country; and, finally, the dangers of attack from the jaguars, pumas, or alligators that swarm throughout the wilderness, or of being bitten by some of the venomous reptiles that infest the underwood—all these make even a preliminary survey, or exploration, a very serious undertaking in the uninhabited districts of Central America, and amply account for the little knowledge that has hitherto been obtained of its surface. Nor are the risk and toil involved in making such a survey the only or chief obstacles to the proper exploration of the country; but the amount of information derived from it when made is incomparably less than that furnished by similar works in more temperate regions. The density of the forests renders the cutting of a track through them a mere groping in the dark for the best route; and one may make a dozen such in the width of a league or two, without striking the most practical grade for any proposed work. Neither do previous explorations give much aid to subsequent surveys, as a rainy season or two suffices to cover all traces of them with a fresh growth of jungle, which soon becomes undistinguishable from the rest of the forest. Thus,the military roads, made through Nicaragua by the contending parties during Walker's occupation of the country, have now completely disappeared; and even cuttings made in 1865 had been almost obliterated two years afterward, when work was resumed upon them. In such a country, it is natural to expect that any engineering works, even the smallest, can only be carried out at a large expenditure of capital and labor, and those that are actually un dertaken are proportionately few: so a sketch of the proceedings of one, taken from the diary of one of the engineers engaged on it, may not be devoid of interest.

The cessation of the murderous civil wars which had so long desolated Central America, and the establishment of something like a settled Government in its various States, gave birth, a few years ago, to several schemes for establishing new communications between the Pacific and the Caribbean. Honduras, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua—the three States which possessed ports on both seas— were all anxious to divert a part of the traffic that was then flowing across the Panama Railroad, to their own territory, and each of them organized canal or railroad projects to attain that object. Nicaragua, thanks to the facilities offered by the San Juan for traveling by water through her territory, had always enjoyed a share in the California travel; and as the silting up of that river threatened to deprive her of the advantage she had hitherto enjoyed over her neighbors, the Nicaraguan Government was peculiarly anxious for the construction of a railroad between the Lake of Nicaragua and the Atlantic shore. The distance to be crossed scarcely exceeds a hundred miles; but the nature of the country was utterly unknown, and, indeed, with the exception of a few independent tribes of Indians along the banks of the rivers, it is entirely uninhabited by man. The whole civilized population of the republic, both White and Indian, is collected on the Pacific slope of the country, Greytown being the only settlement of any size on the Caribbean Coast, which, in the days of Spanish rule, was the favorite haunt of, the English, Dutch, and French bucca-neers; and, subsequently to the establishment of independence, was claimed by England in the name of the mock monarch of Mosquito. An exploration