THE END OF THE BIG JOB

Tailpiece - Stella Maris

HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT AND HUMAN NATURE ON THE CANAL ZONE,—INCLUDING A CONVERSATION WITH COLONEL GOETHALS

BY FARNHAM BISHOP

THE chauffeur of the railroad-motor shook his head.

“The observation-platform’s been taken down, sir, and the track leading to it torn up. That part of the bank’s ready to go out any minute. You can get a good view of the cut, though, from the Y. M. C. A. Building.”

When, in 1906, Uncle Sam put up this building in Culebra, and officially christened it an “I. C. C. Club-house,” because it was the Government, and not the Y. M. C. A., that was paying the shot, he placed it at some little distance from the cut. But in August, 1912, the club-house was very near the cut,—nineteen inches nearer than its own concrete foundation-piers,—and if it had not been lifted and braced with heavy timbers, it would long ago have gone tobogganing down the bank. As I walked through the reading-room, it moved and creaked like a wicker basket with the shock of a heavy blast; but the other men in the room did not raise their eyes from their magazines. From the back porch I looked down into the Culebra Cut, a wider, deeper cut that had completely swallowed up the one I knew well in 1910. Then the fifty-odd giant steam-shovels had been scattered over the nine miles from Bas Obispo to Pedro Miguel; now I saw them concentrated in and about the deep gulch between Gold Hill and Contractor’s Hill for the last battle of the long campaign. From here to where the dike at Bas Obispo keeps out the rising waters of Gatun Lake they are taking up the construction tracks, and the rank jungle-grass grows thick on the bottom of the finished, empty canal.

Between Gold Hill, advance-guard of the Andes, and Contractor’s Hill, southernmost point of the Rockies, lies the deepest part of the cut, and the nearer the big steam-shovels dig down to grade, the harder it is to haul away their spoil. Double-engined and coupled together, the dirt trains climb the steep grade in pairs. First come two straining, spouting Moguls, then a string of loaded “Lidgerwood flats,” like a hill on wheels; then a third locomotive, a string of swaying, clanking “Oliver dumps,” their side-chains jingling like artillery-harness; and last a fourth locomotive, detached, which, with the air of an enthusiastic small boy, comes running up behind to help push. The marbled mass of steam and soft-coal smoke takes strange colors in the tropic sunlight, then shreds away, revealing a patch of vividly blue sky, a palm, and a lone steam-shovel eating away the top of a slide on the edge of the opposite bank.

Whenever a fresh slide begins to break down the bank of the Panama Canal, Colonel Goethals, like the Duchess in “Alice in Wonderland,” cries, “Off with its head!” Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of slides, both curable by decapitation. The first is a mass of soft clay, resting on a sloping ledge of rock, made slippery by seeping rain-water. When dug away at the bottom, the whole hillside begins to slip down, usually with the deliberation of a glacier, but often with the rush of an avalanche. The second kind of slide is caused by the collapse of a stratum of rock under the weight resting upon it. Some of the hard volcanic material in the cut, laboriously blasted outwith dynamite, crumbles into dust on exposure to the air. This failure of the foundations causes a lateral pressure against the bottom of the cut, sometimes heaving it up fifteen or twenty feet. In either case, the remedy is to lighten the load on the top of the bank, often aggravated by the presence of an old French dump-heap. Now that the famous Cucaracha (Cockroach) Slide, that began to plague De Lesseps in 1885, and increased until forty-seven acres were in motion, is nearly, or quite, at rest, the two largest slides are the ones that have at last swallowed up the Culebra club-house, and the even larger landslide on the opposite bank. Between them, since 1907, they have involved the movement of nearly seven million cubic yards of earth and rock. A few days after my visit, a notice was posted at the door of the club-house, warning all who entered the building that they did so at their own risk, and workmen began to tear it down, and the bank where the observation-platform used to stand, a few hundred yards away, “went out” with a rush, to the tune of 900,000 cubic yards.

But Colonel Goethals is not worrying about the slides. He said to me:

“Altogether between nineteen and twenty million cubic yards will have been brought into the canal prism by slides before the completion of the work. About 5,915,000 cubic yards of this extra material was taken out during the year ending July, 1912, or more than thirty-three per cent. of the total excavation for that year. Less than 4,000,000 cubic yards of slides remain to be accounted for.”

“Have these slides proved the impossibility of a sea-level canal here?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he replied.

“Will new slides continue to develop after the water has been turned into the cut?”

“Two things will tend to minimize that tendency,” he replied. “First, there will be no more shaking of the ground by blasting; second, the forty-five feet of water in the channel will exert a pressure on the banks of thirty-one tons per running foot of canal. Any earth brought into the cut then could be easily taken out by dredges.

“The last steam-shovel should be taken out of the cut, and all remaining rock broken up by blasting in the dry, by July 1, 1913. Then the dike at Bas Obispo will be blown up, and the water from Gatun Lake will flow into the cut and through Pedro Miguel Lock into Miraflores Lake. The dredgeCorozal, now working at sea-level at the Pacific end of the canal, will then be brought up through the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks, and put to work in the cut.”

Prominent among the few ornaments of Colonel Goethals’s bare, barrack-like office is a framed photograph of theCorozal, the largest ladder-dredge in the world. Each bucket of her endless chain lifts two cubic yards at a time. She was built in Renfrew, Scotland, in 1911, by a firm that thirty years ago made several smaller dredges for the De Lesseps Company. After rusting for a quarter of a century in tropical tidal-swamps, most of these, floated and cleaned, are still doing good work. Their honest craftsmanship impelled the purchase of theCorozal. Virtually like all the floating equipment at the Pacific end of the canal, she was brought round South America under her own steam. Her name is that of the first railroad station out of Panama City, and, literally translated, means “Merry-go-round.”

“There will always remain a certain amount of dredging to be done in the two entrances, at Balboa and in Limon Bay,” the colonel continued.

“And to keep Gatun Lake clear of silt and wreckage brought down by the Chagres River?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “There will be several miles of dead water at the upper end of the lake above Bas Obispo, where it will settle before reaching the channel.”

“The canal will be informally opened, Colonel, in September, 1913?” I asked.

“I expect to put the first ship through then; and if one can go, any number can. The range-lights, buoys, and other aids to navigation will all be placed and in working order. Less than ten per cent. either of the total excavation or of the concrete-laying in the locks remains to be done. At the present rate of speed, both will be finished, and all the gates and machinery for the east locks installed by September, 1912.”

The locks of the Panama Canal are in two sets, side by side, like the two tracks of a railroad, so that ships can cross in both directions simultaneously. As at thispoint the Pacific lies almost due south of the Atlantic,—which is why it was called by the Spaniards the South Sea,—the east locks are those on the left, or South American, side of one going from the Caribbean to the Gulf of Panama.

“When will everything be finished and ready for the formal opening?” I asked.

“I cannot say for certain. If the steelwork and towing-locomotives are delivered when promised, the west gates will be finished by the end of 1914. To operate those on the Pacific side, a transmission-line must be built from the spillway power-plant at Gatun to Miraflores. In the meanwhile one set of gates can be operated by local power-houses. Eventually the power generated by the surplus water running through the spillway of the Gatun Dam will generate enough electricity to run all the lock machinery, the Panama Railroad, and the machine-shops at Balboa, besides illuminating the lighthouses, the employees’ quarters, and the search-lights of the coast defenses.”

“Will the coast defenses be ready for use as soon as the canal?” I asked.

“Yes, if Congress appropriates the money to bring down the guns. We’ll have the emplacements built, and everything else ready for them. Of course a strong garrison should be maintained here. The strength of the details guarding the different locks is a matter to be determined by the General Staff. There is no danger of a lock’s being disabled by a solitary spy with a bomb. All the essential machinery is in duplicate or triplicate.”

“Then the popular idea of the Gatun Dam’s being blown up by one man with a suitcaseful of dynamite is—”

“Absurd. The only way that an enemy could let the water out of Gatun Lake would be to blow up the gates of the spillway, and that would require a large number of men, with plenty of time and explosives.”

“Now that the Canal Bill has passed, Colonel, you can begin to organize the operating-force?”

“Yes,” he replied. “As only one thousand Americans will be needed, and there are six times that many here now in the construction-force, the permanent organization will be a picked body of experienced men. There will also be about fifteen hundred West Indian Negroes to serve as helpers in the machine-shops, pass hawsers, and clean up about the locks. The bulk of the operating-force will be quartered at Balboa, and the lock-tenders at Pedro Miguel and Gatun.”

A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF ONE OF THE NINETY-TWO PANAMA “BULL-WHEELS”This wheel was invented by Mr. Edward Schildhauer of the Isthmian Canal Commission. The wheel revolves horizontally and thrusts out from the side of each lock-wall a long steel arm that opens and closes one of the huge lock-gates. These gates are of the “miter” pattern, so called because, when closed, they make a blunt wedge pointing up-stream, like the slope of a bishop’s miter. Observe the curved and hollowed recesses in the lock-walls into which the open gates fold back, like the blades of a knife into the handle. There are, of course, two “bull-wheels”: one for each of the gates.

A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF ONE OF THE NINETY-TWO PANAMA “BULL-WHEELS”

This wheel was invented by Mr. Edward Schildhauer of the Isthmian Canal Commission. The wheel revolves horizontally and thrusts out from the side of each lock-wall a long steel arm that opens and closes one of the huge lock-gates. These gates are of the “miter” pattern, so called because, when closed, they make a blunt wedge pointing up-stream, like the slope of a bishop’s miter. Observe the curved and hollowed recesses in the lock-walls into which the open gates fold back, like the blades of a knife into the handle. There are, of course, two “bull-wheels”: one for each of the gates.

“Have the lessons learned in building the canal brought about any more useful inventions, like the well-known track-shifting machine?” I asked.

“H-m. One of the cranemen has patented a trip for emptying the bucket of a steam-shovel by steam instead of by hand. We’re using it on all the large shovels. Then there is the new lock-gate machinery; you will find the inventor up-stairs in this building. Remember, if you write anything about it, you must give him full credit.”

That is the colonel’s way, to insist on fair treatment for every man under him. He is not only the boss, but the hero, the big brother, the father confessor, of every man on the job. Stories innumerable are told about him, and even rough sagas are sung in his praise.

Have they canned you on the run?Tell the Colonel;Tell the tale of what they’ve doneTo the Colonel.Is the commissary bad?Tell the Colonel.If you tell him, he’ll be glad,Will the Colonel.Pass your sorrows and your woesTo the Colonel;He will understand, he knows,Does the Colonel.[7]

Have they canned you on the run?Tell the Colonel;Tell the tale of what they’ve doneTo the Colonel.

Have they canned you on the run?

Tell the Colonel;

Tell the tale of what they’ve done

To the Colonel.

Is the commissary bad?Tell the Colonel.If you tell him, he’ll be glad,Will the Colonel.

Is the commissary bad?

Tell the Colonel.

If you tell him, he’ll be glad,

Will the Colonel.

Pass your sorrows and your woesTo the Colonel;He will understand, he knows,Does the Colonel.[7]

Pass your sorrows and your woes

To the Colonel;

He will understand, he knows,

Does the Colonel.[7]

Speak his name among a group of employees, and immediately each will begin to tell of his experience with “Uncle George.”

“I was sittin’ in the cab, waitin’ to pull a string of dirt cars out of the borrow-pit at Gatun, when who comes a-hikin’ along the track but the Old Man. ‘Can you give me a drink of water?’ he says, and I draws him one from the cooler on the engine. He takes a swallow and says, ‘This is pretty warm for ice-water.’

“‘Yes, sir,’ I says, ‘we’re supposed to have ten pounds a day to put in it, but we’re not gettin’ more’n one.’ The colonel just hands back the cup and walks away, but, say, next mornin’ I drew an iceberg.”

A second man broke in:

“Yes, and somebody else got stung for that little graft, you can bet your pants. Remember that foreman at Peter Magill [Orthodox pronunciation of Pedro Miguel] who made his gang of Gallegos come across every pay-day? They picked one of the bunch who could handle the English to go up to Culebra, for a hablar [talk] with Uncle George. Zing! Mr. Foreman’s job dropped out from under him, and he dropped through, and the job swung back, and he wasn’t on it. He’s out making roads now with the rest of the chain-gang.”

“The day after I hit the isthmus in 1907,” put in a third man, “I got a cablegram from home, saying my wife was dead. And they wouldn’t let me go back to look after my babies; turned me down cold when I asked for a passage north, and all I had was my job here, and pay-day a month away. I heard there was a new chief engineer at Culebra, and I put it up to him. The colonel he signed a paper, and said:

“‘I’ve had too many letters from wives in the States whose husbands are down here neglecting their families. I’m glad to meet one of the other kind. Show Mr. Smith this, and he’ll give you a passage. Bring your family down with you, and I’ll give you a married-quarters.’”

Colonel Goethals is no longer the handsome, smooth-faced boy officer in full-dress uniform, shown in the well-known photograph taken when he was “the new chief engineer.” His latest portrait, here published for the first time, shows how the heavy responsibilities of the last five years have left their mark on him. His is a splendidly virile face, strong, kindly, and vigorously intellectual. He is appropriately shown in citizen’s clothes, for, except on the most formal occasions, he never wears his uniform. It was with the greatest difficulty that he was persuaded to sit for this picture, and he absolutely refuses to let himself be photographed at work either in his office or in the field.

“No,” said “Old Bill” May, chief clerk and Cerberus of the outer office, “the colonel isn’t one of those fellows who keep the photographer waiting till they can have a lot of extra papers brought in and dumped all over the desk, so folks can see how busy they are. Nobody’s got a camera into his room yet, and I’d hateto be caught trying it. Maybe you think you’re going to get a snap-shot of him to-morrow when he takes you over the Gatun Dam; but you ain’t.”

From a photograph, copyright, by PachCOLONEL GOETHALS

From a photograph, copyright, by Pach

COLONEL GOETHALS

And Old Bill May was right. When the morning express from Panama City stopped at Culebra, Colonel Goethals swung nimbly aboard and greeted our party as follows:

“Good morning. I’m sorry, but I can’t go to Gatun with you to-day; there’s a dock gone out at Balboa. Colonel Sibert will show you over Gatun. Good morning, good morning!”

Through the car window we saw him spring into a trim little railroad-motor, which slid clanging and whistling through the crowd at the station, and was half a mile down the track to Balboa before our train had started again for Gatun.

We traveled a curiously zigzag path, now on the old line of the Panama Railroad, now on the new. Ever since the first canoe-load of Peruvian gold was floated down from Cruces to the sea, nearly four hundred years ago, the valley of the Chagres has been the pathway of the isthmus. The Panama Railroad ofthe 1850’s, the days of lignum-vitæ ties, wood-burning locomotives, and twenty per cent. dividends, followed the banks and killed the river trade. To-day the rapidly rising waters of Gatun Lake have driven the railroad to higher ground to the east between Gatun and Bas Obispo. From that point the new permanent way was to have been carried through the cut on a berm, or shelf, on the east bank, ten feet above the water’s edge. It was a picturesque plan, but was reluctantly abandoned because of the danger from slides. So that part of the relocation has been built with great labor through the hills to the east of the cut, and is now finished and in use for freight. Not, however, for passengers, for the existing towns in the central division are all on the wrong side of the cut. Our train left Panama City on the old line, switched to the new at Corozal, crossed the cut on a temporary trestle near Pedro Miguel, and ran through Culebra and Empire, where in five years the macadamized and electric-lighted streets will be covered with second-growth jungle, to the busy railroad town of Gorgona, where the lake water will soon be lapping over the floors of the machine-shops. Here a coal-burning locomotive—oil-burners are the rule for passenger-traffic on the Panama Railroad—was attached to the rear of the train, to the disgust of the tourists on the observation-platform of the parlor-car. The train then ran backward up the other arm of the Y, across the dike at Bas Obispo to the new steel bridge across the Chagres at Gamboa, not far below ancient Cruces.

A RELIEF-MAP OF THE PANAMA CANAL FROM THE ATLANTIC TO THE PACIFIC

The rest of the way to Gatun ran through country marked on the map as part of Gatun Lake, but covered to-day with virgin jungle. Only in the channel and the anchorage-basin above the locks has the bottom been cleared of vegetation; elsewhere the finished “lake” will be one tangle of deadwood. Now near at hand, now miles away in the valley, the yellow line against the dark green shows where the rising water is drowning out the jungle. In a remarkably short time the leaves and small branches drop off, leaving the dead trunks gray and bare. The cocoanut-palms hold out the longest. The railroad runs high above the lake, on the solidest kind of stone embankments, containing millions of cubic yards of rock from the Culebra Cut. Probably the best-built fifty miles of road-bed in the Western Hemisphere is the relocated Panama Railroad.

From a photograph by Marine, PanamaONE OF THE OLD CANAL DREDGES BUILT BY THE SCOTCH, LEFT BY THE FRENCH, AND REPAIRED AND USED BY THE AMERICANSA STEAM-SHOVEL LOADING ROCKS IN THE CULEBRA CUT⇒LARGER IMAGE

From a photograph by Marine, Panama

ONE OF THE OLD CANAL DREDGES BUILT BY THE SCOTCH, LEFT BY THE FRENCH, AND REPAIRED AND USED BY THE AMERICANS

A STEAM-SHOVEL LOADING ROCKS IN THE CULEBRA CUT

⇒LARGER IMAGE

Neat little concrete lighthouses, rising incongruously out of the forest, mark the approach to Gatun. Here is the key-point of the canal. From the northwest corner of the veranda round Colonel Sibert’s office, the whole scheme of things leaps to the eye. Four miles to the north lies Limon Bay, with the Caribbean beyond, the long breakwater stretching out from Toro Point on the left, to make the open roadstead a safe harbor, and on the right the new docks of Cristobal, the American-owned port of Colon. What looks like an over-fed dreadnought guarding the entrance is the sea-going suction-dredgeCaribbeanat work on the four miles of canal that run under the bay to deep water. The next four miles of all-but-finishedsea-level canal, up which ships will sail to Gatun; the profile of the three great locks that will lift them eighty-five feet; the beginning of the broad lake, over which they will sail at that level to Bas Obispo and through the cut, and then down through Pedro Miguel and Miraflores locks to sea-level on the Pacific side, can here be seen and comprehended with a turn of the head. From east and west the hills that inclose the valley of the Chagres close in to the gap, little more than a mile wide, now filled by the Gatun Dam.

THE ADMINISTRATION BUILDING AT CULEBRAColonel Goethals’s office is in this building.THE ANCON BASE-BALL PARKFrom a photograph taken on July 4, 1912.

THE ADMINISTRATION BUILDING AT CULEBRA

Colonel Goethals’s office is in this building.

THE ANCON BASE-BALL PARK

From a photograph taken on July 4, 1912.

You must not think of the Gatun Dam as an ordinary dam, a high, thin wall holding back a body of water, but as an artificial continuation of the gently sloping hills it joins together. In cross-section it resembles the most obtuse of triangles. A cow could walk over it anywhere, and find fairly good pasturage by the way; for coarse, thick-stemmed grass springs up wherever the surface is left undisturbed for a few days. By the time the canal is opened, so quickly is bare earth overgrown in the tropics, those seeing the dam for the first time from the deck of a steamer will have the greatest difficulty telling where it begins and the hills end.

We rode in a railroad-motor along one of the several railroad tracks on the broad crest of the dam; its sides sloped down to a quarter of a mile away on each side. Halting the car about a hundred feet from the edge of the spillway, Colonel Sibert pointed directly down at the mass beneath our feet, and said:

“Eighty or so feet below us lies the site of old Gatun. Morgan and his buccaneers spent their first night there on their way up the Chagres to the sack of old Panama, and it was a famous stopping-place for travelers in the days of the Forty-niners. When we began work here in 1907 there was an island in the river, with a village of fifty thatched huts and a church on it. Now the village is over back of us, and big enough to need three separate fire companies; and the island’s gone, and the river’s gone, and there’s where the railroad used to run along its bank.”

The colonel pointed to where the tops of a few old telegraph-poles made a straight line across the surface of the lake.

“And the river, Colonel, where have you put that?” we asked.

“Here.” He led the way to the edge of the spillway, the concrete-lined artificial channel, larger than the original river-bed and hewn through a natural hill of living rock, that carries off the surplus water of Gatun Lake. Last rainy season a certain photographer took a snap-shot of the spillway from down-stream during a flood,and impudently sold it to a magazine as a picture of the finished canal, “with the water turned in!”

“Colonel, could a fish from the Caribbean swim up that mill-race and cross over to the Pacific?”

“I think so, and so does Colonel Goethals. The only question is, Could a saltwater fish live through the thirty-four miles of fresh water in the lakes and the cut?

“As fast as we want the water to back up against the big dam, we keep raising that semicircular concrete dam down there in the spillway. Those openings you see are being fitted with steel gates, and no matter how hard it may rain up in the hills, we’ll always have enough gates to open and let the water through without any danger of its washing over the crest. Now we’ll cross the bridge over the spillway to the other end of the dam, and then run back and go over the locks.”

The elaborate concrete-laying plant at Gatun, which cost over a million dollars to erect here in the wilderness, has nearly finished its mighty task. The tall steel towers, which stand in pairs on each side of the lock-pit and hold aloft the cableways along which traveling-cranes carry the skips of freshly mixed concrete to the forms and return them empty to the little electric cars that go hurrying back to the mixing-house for more, have been moved down to the lower end of the third and lowest lock. By the time this article appears in print they will probably have been taken down and sold for scrap.

RESULTS OF A TYPICAL ROCK SLIDE IN THE CULEBRA CUTBLASTING FORTY FEET BELOW SEA-LEVEL BEHIND A DIKEThe entrance and intersection of the American and French canals.

RESULTS OF A TYPICAL ROCK SLIDE IN THE CULEBRA CUT

BLASTING FORTY FEET BELOW SEA-LEVEL BEHIND A DIKE

The entrance and intersection of the American and French canals.

A concrete and timber bulkhead, the nearest approach to an orthodox-looking dam a layman can find at Gatun, keeps the water of the sea-level canal out of the lock-chambers. Directly in front of it float three or four high-decked craft that look for all the world like old-time Mississippi River packets. All they seem to lack are a few roustabouts and a gilt trotting-horse between the tall smoke-stacks. As a matter of fact, they are dredges, with living-quarters for the crews. Across the channel behind them, shutting them off from the sea, is a solid-looking clay dike.

“Colonel,” we asked, “how did you put those boats into that mud-puddle,—fly them or jump them over?”

“The dipper-dredge cut the way in, and the suction-dredge closed it behind them. That dike keeps them from being disturbed by the rise and fall of the tide. A great part of the canal between here and Limon Bay was excavated in the dry by steam-shovels working behind dikes forty feet below sea-level; but that was in rock. The stuff these dredges are pumping outis prehistoric sea-bottom—soft, black ooze that runs like oil. A big slide of it started due north toward Limon Bay, swung round to the east, and then due south, went three quarters round the compass, and half-way up the lowest lock-pit. We had to force it out by building the permanent lock-walls right into it, section by section—shoved it out by sheer weight.”

A VIEW (LOOKING NORTH) OF THE UPPER GUARD GATES OF THE PEDRO MIGUEL LOCK

“Is there anything like that under the Gatun Dam?” we asked.

“No, this mud is nearly three quarters of a mile north of it. The entire dam rests on the solidest kind of clay, and the locks are built on a ledge of sandstone, except the north approach wall. That will have to be built on piers driven down through the mud to bed-rock. The approach wall is the continuation of the dividing-wall between the two sets of locks, which projects into what we call the forebay, where ships must come to a stop and make fast to the electric locomotives that will tow them through the locks.

“These towing-locomotives,” continued Colonel Sibert, leading us to the top of the nearest lock-wall up a broad, well-proportioned stairway cast in one piece with the rest of the structure, “will be equipped with winches and slip-drums, so that they can tighten or slacken the hawsers, a flexibility that is going to save breaking a lot of line. Four locomotives will take charge of each large ship, two forward and two aft. When they reach those archways carrying the tracks from one level to another, one pair will take the weight of the ship, while the others will climb up to the level above by this rack-rail.”

Between the two ordinary rails of the towing-track, neatly embedded in the concrete top of the lock-wall, was a third rail, broad and strong and indented for the teeth of a mighty cog-wheel. With isthmian thoroughness, these depressions are made self-draining, lest rain-water accumulate and breed fever-carrying mosquitos.There is a tragedy connected with the third, or return-track, of the towing-railroad, which runs down the middle of the center wall. It had to be there, and so did the range-light that will guide ships across the lake into the upper forebay of the locks. So they stuck that dignified lighthouse up on four bandy legs, like a mangrove on its roots; and when the Art Commission come down from Washington and see it, they will say unkind things of the engineers.

They are building the control-house, the nerve center of all the delicate, ponderous machinery at Gatun, at the lower end of the uppermost lock, where half a dozen operators can oversee and control everything. The control-board will be like a flat-topped table desk, with a model of the locks in low relief, the gates, large valves, and all important machinery shown in miniature, and moving in unison with the main machines. The switches which control the different units will be interlocked in such a manner that the operator cannot move the wrong machine. This switch will stretch a chain across the path of a runaway ship; that will open or close a valve in one of the three great culverts (each as large as the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels under the Hudson River), and so empty or fill a lock; a third will swing round and drop into place the emergency dam that would hold the water in the lake were every gate and guard-gate swept away. If the control-house itself were destroyed, the machines could be operated in detail.

PICTURESQUE RUINS IN PANAMA

One man has succeeded in making a true picture of the gates of the Gatun Locks—Mr. Pennell.[8]I shall only ask you to imagine the blind walls of two six-story office-buildings swinging open on hinges, like the front of a doll’s house. This miracle is accomplished by a device called the “Bullwheel,” the invention of an employee of the Isthmian Canal Commission, Mr. Edward Schildhauer. A ponderous wheel, revolving horizontally, thrusts out through the side of the lock-wall a long steel arm that opens and closes one of the massive gates as easily as one could a bedroom door. These gates are of what is known as the “mitering-pattern,” making, when closed, a blunt wedge pointing up-stream, like a beaver dam. Mr. Schildhauer is also the inventor of a “miter-locking machine,” which bears a strong family resemblance to the large purple land-crab of the isthmus. One of these machines squats on the top of every gate, and, grasping a pin on the opposite leaf, holds both tightly together.

The fact that the three locks of the Atlantic division of the Panama Canal are together in one place has attracted the attention of the world to Gatun, to the disadvantage of the equally good work done at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel, and the quiet, efficient civil engineer under whom it has been done. Mr. S. B. Williamson, C.E. Of him they tell a story, one of the few that deal with the pre-isthmian days of Colonel Goethals.

Mr. Williamson was working under the colonel on some irrigation-project in the southwest. One morning his chief discovered him shoveling away a gravel-bank with his own hands among a gang of common laborers. The colonel took his subordinate roundly to task. Mr. Williamson blushed, stammered, and finally admitted:

“There was a bit of a slide, sir, and the men were afraid to go back into the pit until I showed them there was no danger.”

The colonel apologized, and has kept Mr. Williamson by him ever since. It is a good illustration of the spirit of Colonel Goethals and his men—the men who have put through the big job.

[7]“Panama Roughneck Ballads.”[8]See “Building the Panama Canal,”—a group of eight lithographs made by Mr. Pennell for this magazine,—in THECENTURYfor August, 1912.

[7]“Panama Roughneck Ballads.”

[8]See “Building the Panama Canal,”—a group of eight lithographs made by Mr. Pennell for this magazine,—in THECENTURYfor August, 1912.

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