FOUR CENTURIES OF THE PANAMA CANAL CHAPTER I THE QUEST OF COLUMBUS THE design of Spanish adventurers in the fifteenth century is being fulfilled by American engineers in the twentieth century. That, in epitome, is the story of the Panama Canal, as it came vividly to mind during a recent visit to the Isthmus. There were present on that historic ground the associates and agents of President Roosevelt, and there were also those whose family names were on the rolls of Columbus's and Balboa's companies, and some whose ancestors probably came to the American shores with those discover ers. Such meeting of the representatives of the new and the old was suggestive, and it recalled the fact that Columbus was the practical founder of the Panama Canal enterprise, which, after four centuries of delay, President Roosevelt has undertaken to complete. Columbus was the first to propose a water highway from Europe to Asia, westward, by way of the Atlantic. It was such a highway that he sought, and not the new world which he actually found. The preColumbian voyages and explorations of the Northmen had given Europe no knowledge of America, and down to the time of the illustrious Genoese, Europe stood, figuratively, with its face toward Asia, and with its back turned toward the "Sea of Darkness," as the Atlantic was often called. So Columbus had no thought of finding a new continent, and no notion that one existed; nor indeed did he ever fully realise that he had found one. The lands which he dis covered he regarded to the end of his life as merely some outlying islands or fringes of the Asian continent, and as impediments or obstacles to be passed by in some way, in order to reach the mainland empire of Cathay. His theory was not that such a land as America existed, but that by crossing the Atlantic Ocean he would come directly to the shores of China and Japan; for he clung to the old fallacy that whatever was not Europe or Africa must be Asia. (Isidore of Seville had taught more than eight centuries before, concerning the globe: "Divisus est autem trifarie; e quibus una pars Asia, altera Europa, tertia Africa.") It is true that his theory had been held by others, long before. Aristotle, Seneca, and Pliny had written the belief that one might reach the Indies of Asia in a few days by sailing westward from Spain. Strabo had put upon record the same theory, adding that Menelaus, after the fall of Troy, sailed past the Pillars of Hercules, around Africa, and so reached India. It is not impossible that some adventurous navigators in those early days had actually crossed the Atlantic, and, like Columbus, had mistaken America for Asia. Hanno of Carthage is, not incredibly, declared by Pliny to have sailed around Africa to Arabia, thus anticipating the plans of Henry the Navigator and the achievements of Vasco da Gama. Antonio Galvano, the Portuguese historian, citing Berosius, Gonsalvo Ferdinand de Oviedo, and Pliny, tells us that "in the six hundred and fiftieth year after the Flood there was a king in Spain named Hesperus, who in his time, as it is reported, went and discovered as far as Cape Verde, and the Island of St. Thomas, whereof he was Prince; and Gonsalvo Ferdinand de Oviedo affirmeth that in his time the Islands of the West Indies were discovered, and called somewhat after his name, Hesperides; and he allegeth many reasons to prove it, reporting particularly that in forty days they sailed from Cape Verde unto those Islands." Again, upon the authority of Aristotle ("Lib. de Mirandis in Natura Auditis"), Galvano relates: |