Transport: After Balboa

Last week in Balboa, Canal Zone, local poets competed in a 15-Balboa ($15) prize contest for “the most appropriate poem.” Occasion: the Panama Canal’s 2 5th birthday. The milestones of the canal, stretching over four centuries of history, now include:

1) A day in 1513 when on a peak in Darien, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, after slogging through malarial jungles, emerged in sight of the Pacific. First man to hit upon the idea of an interoceanic canal was Balboa’s companion, Alvaro de Saavedra Ceron.

2) A report made by engineers to Charles V of Spain, Balboa’s royal master. Its gist: such a project was beyond the world’s collective engineering knowledge.

3) The final building in 1848 of the transisthmian railway, used by thousands of U. S. citizens on their way to California’s gold rush in ’49. (For every mile of railroad built 125 men died of disease.)

4) Jan. 20, 1882, when France’s Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, bursting with pride over his new Suez Canal, began excavating Culebra (now Gaillard) Cut.

5) De Lesseps’ conviction for fraud after bubonic plague, smallpox, malaria and yellow jack had decimated some 70,000 laborers, and $400,000,000 of his stockholders’ money had gone down the drain.

6) The beginning in 1893 of another unsuccessful attempt by another French company to build the canal.

7) Many precious weeks spent by the battleship Oregon on the 13,000-mile trip around the Horn during the Spanish-American War—proving to the U. S. the naval necessity of a canal.

8) The synthetic revolution of 1903 when the new Republic of Panama was set up (and instantly recognized by Roosevelt 1) after Colombia, the owner of the Isthmus, refused to grant the U. S. a canal concession. Said T. R.: “I took Panama.”

9) August 15, 1914—the end of eight years’ struggle during which Dr. William Crawford Gorgas licked yellow fever and General George Washington Goethals’ 50,000 ditch diggers licked 200,000,000 cubic yards of dirt and rock—the day the Panama Railroad’s steamship Ancon made the first transit from Atlantic to Pacific.

10) July 25, 1939, when the U. S. ratified a new treaty which gave the Republic of Panama: 1) control of its own resources (no longer can the U. S. obtain land outside the Canal Zone for “maintenance, operation, sanitation and protection” of the Canal merely by asking); 2) a transisthmian highway, hitherto blocked by Panama Railroad’s monopoly; 3) $430,000 instead of $250,000 Canal Zone rent per annum (retroactive to 1934) to compensate for devaluation of the U. S. dollar.

Last week when the Ancon made an anniversary trip through the Canal, 155,131 merchantmen of all nations had made the transit carrying more than 500,000,000 tons of cargo, paying an average of $4,000 each, grossing the U. S. $465,000,000 in tolls on an investment of $366,650,000 in ditch digging.

More significant: before adjourning three weeks ago Congress authorized (although it has yet formally to appropriate) the expenditure of $277,000,000 to build a third set of locks (see map). These will: 1) take care of 45,000-ton battleships, now abuilding, which will be too big for the present locks, 2) provide an alternate route if one set of locks should be wrecked by enemy bombing planes. Meantime, the Army announced a plan to spend $53,000,000 on new defenses in the Canal Zone. For the Canal’s second quarter-century may be as important in war as its first quarter-century was in commerce.