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ragua and Darien routes. Messrs. Lull and Menocal were sent to San Blas, and confirmed Selfridge's unfavourable report. Lieutenant Frederick Collins was detailed to examine the Atrato-Napipi route, and reported that a canal there would cost more than fifty per cent. more than Selfridge had estimated. At last, at the end of 1875, the Commission had secured all available data, and on February 7, 1876, it made a unanimous report to President Grant in favour of the Nicaragua route, from Greytown to the San Juan River, to Lake Nicaragua, through the Rio del Medio and Rio Grande valleys, to Brito, on the Pacific Coast.

This report was received as practically conclusive. It was evident, however, that if it was to be adopted and a canal was to be built at Nicaragua according to President Grant's policy of exclusive American control, the ClaytonBulwer treaty must be modified or abrogated. The Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, therefore began tentative negotiations with Great Britain to that end, and at the same time he opened negotiations with Nicaragua for a canal treaty. In neither case was anything practical effected, and President Grant's administration closed with the canal project apparently as far from realisation as ever. It left, however, to the succeeding administration of President Hayes an invaluable legacy of plans and sound policy.

Meantime the French were at work again. In the winter of 1874-75 an adventurer named Gorgoza appeared at Bogotá, representing himself as the agent of a French company which was ready to undertake the construction of a canal. In that capacity he secured a hearing before the Colombian Congress, which was quite ready to listen to any scheme that promised to put money into its treasury. M. Gorgoza positively asserted that in 1868 he had himself solved the "Secret of the Strait" by making the passage from sea to sea in a boat, by way of the Atrato River. This achievement, he said, he had reported to Commander Selfridge, when the latter was surveying that region for the United States Government, but Selfridge had simply laughed

at him for his pains. It is quite possible, indeed probable, that this latter story was true. There is little doubt that if Gorgoza did tell the story of his marvellous voyage, Selfridge laughed at him; for Gorgoza solemnly declared that he had been accompanied on the trip by two other men, one of whom had since died, while he really could not remember who the other was.

On the strength of this cock-and-bull story, however, Gorgoza secured a concession for a canal, which he took back to Paris in triumph in the fall of 1876. This moved a lot of "Old Imperialists," who still hoped to effect a Bonapartist restoration, to organise a speculative corporation called "La Société Civile Internationale du Canal Interocéanique," for the promotion of canal schemes on the lower Isthmus. At the head of it were Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse, and his brother-in-law, General Étienne Turr. Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, was also interested in it, and on his advice Lieutenant Wyse went to the Isthmus and explored Gorgoza's Atrato-Tuyra route, which he found impracticable. A modification of it, however, from the Tuyra River to Acanti Bay, commended itself to him and he reported in its favour. De Lesseps was not pleased with it, and on his urging Wyse again, in 1877, went to the Isthmus, with Lieutenant Armand Reclus-a member of the famous family of that name, of geographers and scientists. They first examined the San Blas route, and found it impracticable, and then Wyse's Acanti route, which seemed no better, Wyse himself confessing it to be quite hopeless.

As a last resort, therefore, they proceeded to Panama. There Reclus undertook a survey of the route, while Wyse hastened to Bogotá, and persuaded the Government to give him a concession for a canal anywhere on the Isthmus, provided he or his company could make satisfactory terms with the Panama Railroad Company. Wyse, on his part, covenanted to organise a construction company within two years, and to complete the canal within twelve years thereafter.

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From Bogotá he went to Nicaragua and devoted his attention to defeating in the Legislature of that country a bill giving a concession there to a rival French company. Thence he came to New York, and made a bargain with the Panama Railroad Company. Finally he returned to Paris, in August, 1878, and laid his plans before De Lesseps and the Société Civile. Reclus, meantime, had done little more at Panama than to walk across the Isthmus along the line of the railroad, but on the strength of that achievement he too returned to Paris in 1878, and made an authoritative and favourable report upon the Panama route. Thereupon the Société Civile decided to adopt that route, the canal to be cut at sea level, with a tunnel four and a half miles long. The Atrato-Tuyra, the Acanti, and the San Blas routes were still talked about, but only as foils to that at Panama. Finally, announcement was made that an International Engineering Congress would be held in Paris in 1879, under the presidency of De Lesseps, to consider and definitely pass upon the whole question. It is interesting to observe that the "Old Imperialists" thus promoted and committed themselves to a canal at Panama, of which Louis Napoleon had written in 1848 that it "could cross only a country which was marshy, unwholesome, desolate, and uninhabitable, which would afford a passage of thirty miles through stagnant waters and barren rocks, yielding no spot of ground fitted for the growth of a trading community, for sheltering fleets, or for the development and interchange of the produce of the soil."

CHAPTER VI

"CONSULE LESSEPS"

THE International Engineering Congress, or International Scientific Congress, as it has been variously called, was assembled at the call of Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, in Paris, on May 15, 1879. It consisted of 136 delegates, official and unofficial. The majority of them-seventy-fourwere Frenchmen, as was not unnatural, and were friends and supporters of De Lesseps. Indeed, the whole body was most favourably disposed toward that distinguished man, who had at Suez achieved in the face of enormous difficulties a success beyond even the loftiest flights of his own imagination. Eleven members were from the United States. Of these, only two were officially commissioned by the American Government, to wit, Rear-Admiral Ammen and Lieutenant Menocal, and they were carefully instructed not to commit the United States in any way to support or approval of the decisions of the Congress. Other American members, who attended in an unofficial capacity, on De Lesseps's invitation, were Nathan Appleton, of Boston, a close friend of De Lesseps; Cyrus W. Field, and Commander Selfridge.

Whether the Congress was or was not a "packed" body, with a predetermined programme, is a question which probably never can be satisfactorily answered. De Lesseps and his friends earnestly protested that it was not. Many American and British observers with equal positiveness declared that it was, and the latter opinion probably prevails and will continue to prevail the more widely. One thing is certain, from the record, that it was a great misnomer to call it an "Engineering" or a "Scientific" congress. It was nothing of the sort. It was a speculative gathering. Of the 136

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members, only forty-two were engineers or geographers. The majority were politicians, financiers, speculators, and "promoters." That fact gave much colour to the charge that it was a "packed" body, and the proceedings of the Congress did not dispel that impression.

Ferdinand de Lesseps himself presided, and appointed a number of committees, the most important of which, and the only one which we need consider, was that on the choice of route. It consisted of fifty-four members, and was believed to have been chosen by De Lesseps to ratify his own judgment in favour of the Panama route. Its American members were Commander Selfridge and Lieutenant Menocal. It spent some time in consideration of the various routes. De Lesseps was outspoken in favour of the WyseReclus route, at Panama, which was, as he said, to go up the Chagres River, then "under the Cordillera by means of an immense tunnel," afterward abandoned in favour of a cut, and then down the Rio Grande to the Pacific; at sea level all the way. Mr. Appleton still clung to the San Blas route, as the shortest, despite its forbidding length of tunnel. Commander Selfridge advocated his Atrato route, at Darien.

If this committee was "packed," the fact did not at once appear. In fact, at first it seemed decidedly hostile to the Panama route, on the ground that it was much more costly than that at Nicaragua. To meet and dispose of this objection, Lieutenant Wyse modified his plans so as to provide for a canal with locks, which would be cheaper than one at sea level. This, however, would deprive the Panama route of its one great advantage over all others, and it was argued that if there must be locks, a lock canal at Nicaragua was preferable to one at Panama. The partisans of De Lesseps began, however, to make it clear that despite their apparent hesitation at first, they were resolved to report in favour of Panama. A number of the committee, including the Americans, the English, and some French engineers, withdrew from the proceedings in disgust. Then the remainder of the committee quickly adopted a resolution in