Читать книгу In the Footprints of the Padres - Charles Warren Stoddard - Страница 13

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

It mattered not to us whether our name was Cortez or Balboa. With any other name we would have been just as jolly; for we were looking for the first time upon a sea that was to us as good as undiscovered, and we were shortly to brave it in a vessel bound for the Golden Gate. At our time of life that smacked a little of circumnavigation.

San Juan del Sur! It was scarcely to be called a village—a mere handful of huts scattered upon the shore of a small bay and almost surrounded by mountains. It had no street, unless the sea sands it fronted upon could be called such. It had no church, no school, no public buildings. Its hotels were barns where the gold-seekers were fed without ceremony on beans and hardtack. Fruits were plentiful, and that was fortunate.

There, as in every settlement in Central America, the eaves of the dwellings were lined with Turkey buzzards. These huge birds are regarded with something akin to veneration. They are never molested; indeed, like the pariah dogs of the Orient, they have the right of way; and they are evidently conscious of the fact, for they are tamer than barnyard fowls. They are the scavengers of the tropics. They sit upon the housetop and among the branches of the trees, awaiting the hour when the refuse of the domestic meal is thrown into the street. There is no drainage in those villages; strange to say, even in the larger cities there is none. Offal of every description is cast forth into the highways and byways; and at that moment, with one accord, down sweep the grim sentinels to devour it. They feast upon carrion and every form of filth. They are polution personified, and yet they are the salvation of the indolent people, who would, but for the timely service of these ravenous birds, soon be wallowing in fetid refuse and putrefaction under the fierce rays of their merciless sun.

In the twilight we wandered by a crescent shore that was thickly strewn with shells. They were not the tribute of northern waters: they were as delicately fashioned and as variously tinted as flowers. All that they lacked was fragrance; and this we realized as we stored them carefully away, resolving that they should become the nucleus of a museum of natural history as soon as we got settled in our California home.

We had crossed the Isthmus in safety. Yonder, in the offing, the ship that was to carry us northward to San Francisco lay at anchor. For three days we had suffered the joys of travel and adventure. On the San Juan river we had again and again touched points along the varying routes proposed, by the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua and the Walker Commission, as being practical for the construction of a great ship canal that shall join the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. We had passed from sea to sea, a distance of about two hundred miles.

The San Juan river, one hundred and twenty miles in length, has a fall of one foot to the mile. This will necessitate the introduction of at least six massive locks between the Atlantic and the lake. Sometimes the river can be utilized, but not without dredging; for it is shallow from beginning to end, and near its mouth is ribbed with sand-bars. For seventy miles the lake is navigable for vessels of the heaviest draught. Beyond the lake there must be a clean-cut over or through the mountains to the Pacific, and here six locks are reckoned sufficient. Cross-cuts from one bend in the river to another can be constructed at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or less, per mile. The canal must be sunk or raised at intervals; there will, therefore, at various points be the need of a wall of great strength and durability, from one hundred and thirty to three hundred feet in height or depth.

The annual rain-fall in the river region between Lake Nicaragua and the Caribbean Sea is twenty feet; annual evaporation, three feet. These points must be considered in the construction and feeding of the canal, even though it is to vary in width. The dimensions of the proposed canal, as recommended by the Walker Government Commission, are as follows: total length, one hundred and eighty-nine miles; minimum depth of water at all stages, thirty feet; width, one hundred feet in rock-cuts, elsewhere varying from one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet—except in Lake Nicaragua, where one end of the channel will be made six hundred feet wide.

Nearly fifty years ago, when a canal was projected, the Childs survey set the cost at thirty-seven million dollars. Now the commissioners differ on the question of total cost, the several estimates ranging from one hundred and eighteen million to one hundred and thirty-five million dollars. The United States Congress at its last session authorized the expenditure of one million by a new commission "to investigate the merits of all suggested locations and develop a project for an Isthmus Canal."

And so we left the land of the lizard. What wonders they are! From an inch to two feet in length, slim, slippery, and of many and changeful colors, they literally inhabit the land, and are as much at home in a house as out of it; indeed, the houses are never free of them. They sailed up the river with us, and crossed the lake in our company, and sat by the mountain wayside awaiting our arrival; for they are curious and sociable little beasts. As for the San Juan river, 'tis like the Ocklawaha of Florida many times multiplied, and with all its original attractions in a state of perfect preservation.

All the way up the coast we literally hugged the shore; only during the hours when we were crossing the yawning mouth of the Gulf of California were we for a single moment out of sight of land. I know not if this was a saving in time and distance, and therefore a saving in fuel and provender; or if our ship, the John L. Stevens, was thought to be overloaded and unsafe, and was kept within easy reach of shore for fear of accident. We steamed for two weeks between a landscape and a seascape that afforded constant diversion. At night we sometimes saw flame-tipped volcanoes; there was ever the undulating outline of the Sierra Nevada Mountains through Central America, Mexico, and California.

Just once did we pause on the way. One evening our ship turned in its course and made directly for the land. It seemed that we must be dashed upon the headlands we were approaching, but as we drew nearer they parted, and we entered the land-locked harbor of Acapulco, the chief Mexican port on the Pacific. It was an amphitheatre dotted with twinkling lights. Our ship was speedily surrounded by small boats of all descriptions, wherein sat merchants noisily calling upon us to purchase their wares. They had abundant fruits, shells, corals, curios. They flashed them in the light of their torches; they baited us to bargain with them. It was a Venetian fete with a vengeance; for the hawkers were sometimes more impertinent than polite. It was a feast of lanterns, and not without the accompaniment of guitars and castanets, and rich, soft voices.

After that we were eager for the end of it all. There was Santa Catalina, off the California coast, then an uninhabited island given over to sunshine and wild goats, now one of the most popular and populous of California summer and winter resorts—for 'tis all the same on the Pacific coast; one season is damper than the other, that is the only difference. The coast grew bare and bleak; the wind freshened and we were glad to put on our wraps. And then at last, after a journey of nearly five thousand miles, we slowed up in a fog so dense it dripped from the scuppers of the ship; we heard the boom of the surf pounding upon the invisible shore, and the hoarse bark of a chorus of sea-lions, and were told we were at the threshold of the Golden Gate, and should enter it as soon as the fog lifted and made room for us.