Abstract
THREE years ago the work of cutting through the Panama isthmus had barely commenced. The equatorial forests on the neck of land, 73 kilometres long, which marked the axis of the future interoceanic canal, had hardly been laid bare. The traveller who followed the primitive road met here and there some groups of cabins, with roofs of branches on poles, marking the site of a sounding or the improvised dwellings of a portion of the operators. Culebra, Emperador, Corosita, and Garnboa, which are now full of activity, were then almost desert, and on the coast of Colon alone the excavator traced in the marshy plains of Gatun his great track. The contrast to-day is great: a long file of workshops covers the space between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Twenty thousand workmen toil on the Cordillera, making the deep cutting for the canal. Side by side with this army, another more powerful army of colossal machines, excavators, dredges, locomotives, waggons, all the materials for transport, thousands of pairs of wheels, hundreds of kilometres of rails, mountains of coal, and shiploads of dynamite. Among the twenty-five workshops of the peninsula the attention is chiefly attracted to two points: the great rocky cutting at Culebra, which is to penetrate to a depth of 120 metres into the Cordillera, and the dam of the Chagres at Gam-boa. At Culebra the previsions of M. de Lesseps have been realised: the mountainous mass which the canal will traverse is, for the most part, composed of rocks which are not very hard; repeated soundings by means of diamond perforators have shown that down to a considerable depth the rock takes the form of schists in horizontal strata. There is no doubt that it can be cut through with rapidity; it is a matter of perforation, either by mining and ordinary explosives, or by shafts with larger quantities of some explosive to displace great masses. Here 30,000 cubic metres of rock have been displaced by an explosion of dynamite; and unquestionably this colossal channel connecting two seas may be executed by simple methods and with economy.
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Piercing the Isthmus of Panama 1 . Nature 32, 370–374 (1885). https://doi.org/10.1038/032370a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/032370a0