Читать книгу Down Under with the Prince - Everard Cotes - Страница 5

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At dawn, in hot, soft, hazy weather, the Renown, followed by the Calcutta, left the blue, transparent waters of the Caribbean Sea and entered the green, muddy channel, fringed with dense, verdant forest, which is the beginning of the Panama Canal. Three aeroplanes, each bearing the stripes of the American Air Service, droned overhead in noisy welcome. Resonant concussions and white, fleecy puffs of smoke amidst low wharves and jetties where Colon lay in the forest, spread a Royal salute upon the vibrating air. Music arose upon the Renown, while staff-officers arrayed themselves in gold-lace and helmets, ready to receive the Prince's guests. Launches arrived at the ship bringing the British Minister to Panama, Mr. Percy Bennett, accompanied by Captain Blake and Major-General Bethell, respectively naval and military attachés at the British Embassy at Washington. An hour's quiet steaming, thereafter, brought us to the giant Gatun locks, which stand in three black tiers of steel, the gates rising, one above another, in a massive setting of grey, rounded concrete, a severing gash in the high, green hill which is the Gatun dam. Here, Señor Lefevre, President of the Panama Republic, Admiral Johnston and Colonel Kennedy, commanding the American naval and military forces in the Panama Zone, also Engineer Colonel Harding, Governor of the Canal, and Monsieur Simonin, French Chargé d'Affairs, came on board.

The formality attending these official arrivals, so often to be repeated throughout the tour, was practically always the same. The visitor who came up the gangway from the dock or the launch, as the case might be, saluted the quarter-deck—a survival this from the days when it bore a crucifix—and was saluted in turn by the Officer of the Watch, who, with his telescope tucked under his arm, conveyed the stranger past the row of marines drawn up at attention to the Captain and the Equerry in waiting, who brought him up the starboard companion to the mezzanine deck. Here he would be received by the Prince attended by his Staff. The visit seldom exceeded twenty minutes. When H.R.H. left the ship for the shore the Captain awaited him on the quarter-deck and conducted him past the marines presenting arms to the gangway. On these occasions the junior members of the party were the first to step off, finishing with the Admiral and last of all the Prince, both Admiral and Prince being "piped over the side" to the shrill music of the bos'n's whistle. There was as little variation about the arrival on shore. Always the guard-of-honour, the band, the stunting aeroplanes, always six bars of "God Save the King" and the pause at attention, always the hand-shaking with the officer commanding the guard-of-honour, the inspection, and so to the business and pleasure of the visit.

PANAMA CANAL: A SHARP CORNER

SURF-BOARDING AT HONOLULU

On this occasion the guard of American soldiers in white uniforms and the familiar wide-brimmed hats was drawn up upon the lawn beside the topmost lock. Thence, past some thousands of prosperous-looking employees of the Canal, and their families, who had turned out to see the reception, the Prince was taken to the Control House, whence the whole of the operations of the locks are regulated, from the manipulating of the little, black, towing mule-engines, which ran busily, like scarabaeid beetles, up and down rails set in concrete slopes on the top of the lock walls, to the opening and closing of the seventy-foot high gates, and the letting in and letting out of the green sluggish water.

From the veranda of the Control House we got our first striking impression of the dramatic achievement of the Canal. We were on the level of the wide island dotted expanse of the Gatun lake. The enormous Renown and the tiny Calcutta lay, side by side, in thousand-feet-long pools, at our feet, in a turmoil of waves of rushing water, out of which, from time to time, some frightened fish would leap, a silver gleam that disappeared before one had made out its shape or kind. The great design was in action before our eyes. The locks opened and closed with extraordinary speed and almost noiseless efficiency, and by the time the Prince had returned from inspecting the monster spillway and power-house, to which he was carried in a tiny train that was in readiness alongside the locks when we arrived, the Calcutta was already entering the lake, while the Renown had surmounted the locks and was only waiting to take on the Royal party before following in her wake.

The route thereafter lay at first through the green water of the lake, past islands covered with densest jungle. About the middle of the lake, we passed masses of bare tree-trunks, standing erect in the water, on either side of the broad track that is kept clear for the passage of ships. These trees are what remain of a forest that covered the bottom of the valley before the building of the dam which converted it into a lake. The trunks, though standing in some seven fathoms of water, still keep their branches and project many feet above the surface; and have to be avoided by passing ships. This dismal avenue has kept its place for ten years. It must have been green once. Like a forest after a great burning it stands in skeleton and carries no leaf now, a curious reminder that water can be as pitiless as fire.

In the afternoon we entered the Culebra cut. Here man has been at grips with nature in her least amiable mood. The channel becomes a winding gorge through steep, rugged crags and rounded hills. The stupendous cutting shows treacherous alternating layers of red gravel, yellow sand, brown crumpled rock, and soft, slippery blue clay. A number of mammoth floating steam dredgers were here at work, a fresh slip having occurred a few days previously. Progress, therefore, had to be of the slowest. A climax was reached near the end of the cutting, where, at a sharp curve in the channel, a whole hillside, half a mile each way, had commenced to move, the débris extending right into the canal, which was also impeded by a small island, apparently squeezed up from the bottom by the terrific pressure of the slipping hill. The place looked almost impossible, the great length of the Renown making the manœuvring of her in what remained of the channel one of the trickiest pieces of navigation imaginable. Naval officers are not easily put off, however, and by the most delicate handling, the vessel ultimately crawled past the obstruction. The cheerful little red-roofed township of Pedro Miguel was reached soon afterwards. Here the entire population had turned out to see the Prince, the girls in brilliant costumes, amongst which one might sometimes see the black mantilla of Spain; the men in anything, from working overalls and slouch hats, to the leisured fashions of New York. At Pedro Miguel began the slow process of descending to the level of the Pacific. The first lock dropped us some thirty feet into the picturesque lake of Miraflores, surrounded by rounded grass-grown hills, emerald in the setting sun. Two more locks followed at the end of the lake, and we entered a stretch of water at ocean level, which took us to the docks at Balboa, upon the Pacific, close to the city of Panama.