Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

able features of this great undertaking. To guard against the recurrence of the trouble which had baffled the French engineers, it was decided to make a dam at the Colon end of the Canal at a place called Gatun, in which are also incorporated the spillway and locks, six in number, with a total rise of 85 feet. This dam is the largest in the world. It impounds the water over an area of 164 square miles, with a greatest depth of 90 feet. The width of the base is half a mile, its height is 115 feet above sea-level, its width at top is a quarter of a mile. It has been constructed by first tipping two rock embankments side by side, leaving a space of about 100 yards, and then pumping in mud and clay to form a water seal. The hydraulic dredges suck up the mud from the bottom of the old rivers with a considerable quantity of water. It is then forced through pipes about 18 inches in diameter over a mile in distance, and thus delivered into the centre of the dam, forming a puddle-trench impervious to water. The amount of earth and rock used in this dam is over 21 million cubic yards. In the centre of the dam is the spillway or overflow. This is built of reinforced concrete, and is 300 feet wide, and connected directly with the bed of the old Chagres river, thus keeping any overflow water from finding its way into the lower reach of the Canal seawards. It is impossible actually to realize the quantity of water running to waste from a river which it is wide of the mark to estimate as twice the size of the Thames: 306 billion cubic feet per year is about the yearly average of water to be controlled. The annual rainfall of about 220 inches occurs chiefly during the period from March to October. It is estimated that the water impounded in the artificial lake of 164 square miles will be enough for working the locks during the dry season, and also for the

turbines which will supply all the electric current required for manipulating the lock gates, shuttles, etc. This latter plant is, however, to be augmented by a steam plant in case of shortage of water in the large lake, which it is estimated can be lowered some five to six feet without interfering with the passage of the largest steamer.

All the locks are alike and are constructed of concrete. A solid hill of rock known as Ancorn provides the necessary material, and excellent sand is found in the estuary at Panama. This is sucked up by hydraulic dredges and loaded into barges, from which it is transferred by grab buckets into hoppers which in turn discharge into railway wagons. There are about 4,200,000 cubic yards of concrete in the locks, and a similar number of barrels of cement will also be required. Ancorn Hill is blasted with powder and the stone then loaded up into dump wagons by means of steam shovels. These wagons are emptied direct into a stone-crusher, which is the largest in the world. It will seize and crack over 3000 cubic yards of rock per day, and will admit stones about four feet square. A terrible number of fatal accidents due to blasting have taken place right through the Canal area, chiefly owing to carelessness on the part of the native laborers. The steam shovels and locos throw out sparks which are wafted in all directions, and one of these sparks falling into a powder tin or a hole partially charged has resulted in the loss of numerous lives. Again, an unexplored charge of dynamite may be dug out by the steam shovel, causing it to explode and destroy all the men employed round the digger. The powder bill runs to about £8000 per month. There are about 560 drills worked mechanically, chiefly driven by black labor derived from the West Indies. The men obtained from islands in British posses

sions are well educated and infinitely superior to the native black of the Southern States. They are used as clerks and typists, and are amenable to the strict discipline which is very rigidly enforced throughout the whole of the undertaking. The head man, Colonel Goethals, and his assistant, Colonel Hodges, are men who have had large and varied experience, and the system of strict discipline they have instituted and maintain is most remarkable. One never hears an order questioned; it is obeyed at once and with a smiling face. Any laxity in obedience is known to mean instant dismissal.

Telephones are installed all over the Canal zone. Messages are written down in triplicate, as are all orders to officials. Nine hours a-day for every one (with the exception of the loco drivers) is the time worked on the Canal. The loco men work ten hours, half an hour extra being given for taking out and bringing back their locos from their respective sheds each way. There are nearly 700 locos of all sizes, but as a rule only some 380 are at work. The water is splendid. Many of the engines run for five years without having their boilers cleaned. These engines, of standard American type, are very large, having 20" cylinders, 26" stroke, 6-wheeled, coupled, with 54" drivers carrying 180 pounds of steam. They haul twenty wagons of the double bogie type and carry about 400 tons a trip. The flat dump wagons number 1800. They have only one side, the ends and other side being left off. The intervening space between the adjacent wagon is bridged over by a loose steel plate. They are all fitted with air brakes and centre buffers. The gauge of the railway is five feet,-an unusual gauge, which will make all the plant of little value at the termination of the work. The steam shovels are of various sizes,

many of them take as much as eight tons of rock at a lift. The drivers of engines of all classes are white men, with black firemen. Engine-drivers get about £2 a-day. In addition to this they have a free house or room and as much ice and coal as they want free.

Stringent rules are enforced about housing and sanitation. The houses are all of wood and protected with gauze screens round them. The entrance is through a swing-door, and woe betide any one who props or leaves a door open. Flies and vermin of all sorts have war to the death waged continually against them by the doctors and sanitary inspectors. All ditches and gutters as far as possible are made of concrete and kept swept and cleaned. The houses are raised about four feet above ground-level, and beneath the house-floor no refuse is allowed to accumulate. The roads are coated with a mixture of tar, carbolic, and paraffin: all house refuse is instantly swept up and the streets watered two or three times a-day with carbolic and water. The Canal administration can house about 5000 whites, and in addition there are about 35,000 blacks. Every morning ice and provision trains start out and supply all signal-boxes and offices with ice and pure water. The sanitary inspectors examine all houses as often as possible, and any old tins or cooking utensils which they deem unfit for use are collected and dumped on the tips. The natives are personally dirty, but they are made to keep their houses clean and in order, or else they are expelled from the country. Other amenities of life are provided on the works. The Government runs stores where all kinds of commodities can be obtained at the lowest possible cost, but only employees are allowed to trade with these stores. The employees purchase a book of paper money with which they pay for all goods. No actual

money is taken at any of the stores. In addition, at the large centres diningrooms have been installed where the single men get their meals if they are disposed to do so. There are also a number of Y.M.C.A. rooms open to any one, and this society is doing magnificent work on the Canal by providing healthy recreation for the young folk. High-grade schools have been installed at various centres, and special trains run backwards and forwards with the children living away from the school area. The high wages earned allow parents to equip their children in plain and simple white dresses, though now and again you find other costumes bordering on vulgarity. Most of the white population are down there to make money for a few years, and then their ambition is to return to their old home, buy a piece of ground, and settle down for life.

The army of the Panama Republic is a sight to delight the heart of a Gilbert and Sullivan Major-General. On parade it numbers about one hundred men. The uniform consists of white duck trousers, button boots, blue serge tunic heavily frogged, square top yachting cap of blue with a great tortoiseshell peak. An old Brown Bess rifle, without a bayonet, completes the equipment. The colors are on a jointed bamboo pole some fifteen feet high, gorgeous in silk and tied up with bows and streamers. The national band are dressed in white, and have little ear for time or music. They, however, play in the Plaza or market-place on Sunday, when the whole town turns out to hear the music and parade their smartest clothes. The native girl in a flowing flowered muslin dress, an enormous hat with feathers, and a big red silk bow at the back of her head, is a feature of the scene. White shoes and stockings, yellow kid gloves, and a parasol about the size of a soup-plate, completes her attire. Her

beau is resplendent in patent-leather boots, white striped trousers, straw hat, and a bright blue coat with gilt buttons. A red necktie with a diamond pin about the size of a pigeon's egg, yellow kid gloves (with a ring outside the glove), cane and cigar, give a finishing touch of magnificence to his appearance. The natives have to keep themselves strictly apart from the white population, nor are whites allowed to live in the black quarters. Special carriages are set apart for them on the regular trains and likewise on the paddy mails, and woe betide any native who attempts to enter a white man's carriage. The white police are chiefly drawn from the Frontiersmen of Canada, and are of very high standing. The native police are chiefly recruited from the West Indian possessions of this country.

Throughout the whole length of the Canal one sees the reckless waste of machinery ordered by the French Company-machinery which has never been set to work. If anything broke down it was never repaired, but a complete new machine ordered. One thus sees hundreds of old locos in sidings short of a rod or some important item; tip wagons made of steel thrown about and left to rust away. At one placeChristobal-there are about twenty huge dredgers, which have sunk in the mud owing to their hulls having rotted away; barges in sections, never used; thousands of tons of girders never put together; thousands of tons of scrap dumped anywhere and everywhere. This wanton and wicked waste is an everlasting disgrace to the French Company. The Americans have put a certain amount of this old machinery to work again, and found many engines, etc., buried in the jungle, which grows very quickly; and it is not unusual to see a tree as thick as a man's body growing through an engine or an old wagon.

The vegetation is perfectly extraordinary. The thermometer never, even at night, goes below 85° Fahr., and in the daytime the sun is intensely hot. Being so close to the Equator, your shadow is very small-practically just the ground you stand on. Cocoanuttrees thrive; rubber, palms, and all kinds of most beautiful tropical plants grow in every watercourse. The grass is kept burnt down to the water's edge, and along the railway the bush is cut back for a hundred yards on each side. Wherever there is any stagnant water, a barrel of paraffin and tar is installed which has a tap in it, allowing so many drops an hour to fall. The mosquito lays its eggs in the water, and it has been proved that the eggs are rendered unfertile by the slightest contamination with oil and paraffin. These barrels have a numerous staff, whose daily work it is to replenish them and keep the bush fired. Banana-trees thrive when once the ground has been cleared, and a very considerable trade is now being done with this popular fruit. A bunch must weigh not less than fifty pounds. When the stem has once grown a bunch, it must be cut down to the ground, as otherwise they will not bear again to a profit. The cocoanut-trees should not have less than a hundred nuts a-year on them. Copra is being made; and the natives are also cultivating all kinds of fruit, for which they find a ready market amongst the white inhabitants-including sweet potatoes, yams, Indian corn, mangoes, and a whole host of tropical fruits which are unknown to us in England on account of the difficulty in transportation.

At the present time the Canal is well on the way to completion, with the exception of the work at Culebra-the most gigantic engineering task ever attempted, being a cutting through a hill nine miles long. The crux of the Panama Canal lies in the power of the

American engineers successfully to overcome the vast natural obstacles with which they are confronted at this point. The difficulties of carrying a canal through a hilly district of this length are stupendous. It is impossible too highly to praise the skill and intrepid courage with which obstacle after obstacle has been surmounted. Το appreciate the task of the American engineers the reader must first try and form some conception of the country through which the great water-way passes at this point. The country at the Atlantic end of the Canal has a curious resemblance to the Matoppos, the sugar-loaf peaks rising in many cases upwards of a thousand feet in height. Unlike the bare South African hills, however, they are covered right up to the top with palms and tropical vegetation, forming what is practically an impenetrable jungle. Numerous deer and wild hog, however, manage to move about with comparative ease. There are a number of old gold workings about forty miles south of the Canal, and there are also one or two excellent seams of coal as yet unexploited. Culebra Cut pierces these mountains, which extend for about fourteen miles inland from the Atlantic seaboard. From this point onwards the Canal route is constructed in the river-bed of the Chagres river, which has been dredged and the water-level raised by the construction of the Gatun Dam. To give some comparative idea of the magnitude of this engineering feat it may be stated that the dome of St. Paul's is 364 feet in height from the pavement to the top of the cross. The cutting at Culebra is more than half as much again, having a depth of 587 feet.

[blocks in formation]

cona, there is little or no solid rock to be met with. The measures are hard, and require a tremendous amount of blasting and drilling, but as soon as the rock is exposed to the atmosphere it crumbles away to dust, and in a few weeks' time trees and shrubs spring up on land which had previously been buried 400 or 500 feet deep. In the bottom of this huge chasm countless numbers of men are at work. The scene is an amazing one: great steam shovels by the score, drills by the hundred, miles of railway trains whistling and snorting, dynamite exploding. Perched up in crows'-nests are the overmen who direct the movements of all trains and supplies as they arrive. These crows'-nests are connected by telephones with the main administråtion buildings, and again with lower signal-boxes which keep check of the number of wagons filled by each shovel and of the number of trips made daily by each engine to the dump nine miles away. At the present time they are excavating about 75,000 cubic yards aday. The total amount of excavation in the whole of the Canal is something like 182 million cubic yards. Of this huge amount only 30 million out of the 78 million excavated by the French Company is of service to the new route.

It is estimated that about 52 million yards still remain to be moved, and the whole of the energies of the staff are now being devoted to this particular point at Culebra. With a depth of cutting so vast, it will be readily understood that difficulties would be experienced with the slopes. The deeper the cutting the more accentuated does this become, because great slips are continually pouring down into the bottom, and the ground is developing deep cracks a mile away, showing that the whole of the hills are on the slide. How deep these may go or how far back is a matter of conjecture, but all are terribly afraid of the serious nature

of the trouble that lies at this point. Steam shovels are now taking off the tops of the hills so as to relieve the pressure as far as possible in the bottom, but so far with little or no useful effect. There are several soft layers of clay which allow the rock to slide. There are also one or two huge faults which break up and disintegrate the measures. Time will prove the truth or falsehood of the numerous theories abroad, but for many years it is extremely doubtful if this canal can be kept open without constant dredging and expense, and it is very probable that the cutting will be nearly five miles across at the top before the sides cease to run in, if ever they do, for the rock in the bottom cut of all turns to mud in a short time when in contact with water, and the wash of the propellers will suck this mud away. These slides take place without any warning, and often a train of wagons, shovels, &c., are swept down the cutting; but, so far, few lives have been actually lost, though many narrow escapes have been experienced. To deal with accidents of all kinds, two breakdown trains are always under steam, one with a crane of 100-ton capacity and another of 75, capable of lifting an engine up off her side in a few minutes, and quickly getting any wreck straightened out and the line running again. The divisional engineers are provided with petrol loco-cars, and are continually running up and down their sections, receiving reports and consulting with their foremen. Most of these men are officers in the U.S. army, but one finds many officials who have worked in England, and, for that matter, all over the world,-men of the highest capability and experience. Any workman who can put forward a scheme whereby a few minutes' time or labor car. be saved is at once recognized and his salary increased Every one is strung up to concert pitch, and

« VorigeDoorgaan »