太平洋的故事（中文导读英文版）
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作者： （美）房龙原著，刘乃亚，纪飞编译
出 版 社： 清华大学出版社
出版时间： 2008-5-1字数：版次： 1页数： 224印刷时间：开本： 16开印次：纸张：I S B N ： 9787302170273包装： 平装编辑推荐
这是一个机遇与挑战、辉煌成就与骇人灾难、小本赌注与惊天回报、英雄与恶棍并存的时代，但更重要的是，这是一个光荣冒险的时代。
太平洋是世界上最浩瀚、辽阔的大洋，它给予人类的不仅是湛蓝的、深不可测的景观或者具有摧毁性威力的风暴，而且还有无数宝藏和资源。房龙以其深厚的学养和语言功底，将几百年来航海家们的伟大功绩娓娓道来，告诉我们太平洋的一个又一个奥秘是怎样被发现的，不但充满了绮丽的异国情调，而且蕴涵着丰富的人生哲理。
内容简介
太平洋是世界上最浩瀚、辽阔的大洋，它给予人类的不仅是湛蓝的、深不可测的景观或者具有摧毁性威力的风暴，而且还有无数宝藏和资源。房龙以其深厚的学养和语言功底，将几百年来航海家们的伟大功绩娓娓道来，告诉我们太平洋的一个又一个奥秘是怎样被发现的，不但充满了绮丽的异国情调，而且蕴涵着丰富的人生哲理。
本书中，作者以新的视野讲述了发现太平洋的历史过程：从巴拿马地峡到静静的达连山，从波利尼西亚人对太平洋最早发现到麦哲伦等人的航海之旅，从新大陆探险的狂热到由此引发的造成数万欧洲人破产的大骗局，从复活节岛上的奇迹到《鲁滨逊漂流记》主人公原型的真实生活……。简洁优美的文字，再配上房龙亲手绘制的插图，将给你的阅读带来无穷乐趣。
作者简介
亨德里克威廉房龙，荷裔美国著名人文主义作家和历史学家。1903年就读于美国康奈尔大学，1911年获德国慕尼黑大学博士学位。房龙多才多艺，有二十多部作品在全世界出版，并畅销不衰。代表作包括《荷兰共和国衰亡史》、《人类的故事》、《房龙地理》、《发明的故事》等。他的著作文笔优美，知识广博，深入浅出。其智慧的妙语和真知灼见更是让人获益匪浅。
目录
1．巴拿马运河/The Panama Canal1
2．静静的达连山/Silent on A Bench in Darien19
3．史前太平洋/The Prehistoric Pacific37
4．更多的猜测/More Guesswork48
5．波利尼西亚的早期历史/The Earliest History of Polynesia66
6．第二次发现太平洋/The Second Discovery of the Pacific95
7．探寻未知的南方大陆/The Quest of the Great Unknown
Continent of the South121
8．新荷兰出现在地图上/Abel Tasman Puts New Holland
on the Map140
9．雅各布罗格文/Jacob Roggeveen183
10．库克船长/Captain James Cook, R.N.196
书摘插图
1．巴拿马运河
The Panama Canal
法兰西最早引起我注意的是在我六七岁的时候，那时家里来了几个黑眼睛黑头发的女孩儿，由于她们过人的美丽在镇上所引起的轰动使得她们不得不逃向巴黎和里维埃拉去了，但是，在那里姑娘们引以为自豪的长辫子却遭到了当时的假发制造商的偷窃——她们长长的、引以为自豪的辫子在拥挤的公交车上被人剪去了。
这件事在我的心中留下了非常深刻的印象，也引起了我对于法兰西民族的注意，可是当时周围关于法兰西的一切——埃菲尔铁塔和到处都有的埃菲尔铁塔的影子都使我最终变成了一个亲法分子，也使得我对于难学的法语的学习比我的母语荷兰语的学习都要用心，凭借着自己对法语的一点了解最终知道了很多有关费迪南德雷塞布的事情，也知道了关于“巴拿马丑闻”的一些细节，这块狭长的地带将大西洋和太平洋分开，有着一些不易接近的山脉和深谷，住着野蛮的土著和鳄鱼，而且在将近50年之后他还是保留着往日的模样。当游船进入克里斯托巴尔（巴拿马第二大城市科隆的外港）的时候，我们会看到这里的景色丝毫不亚于马斯河或者斯凯尔特河，这里平坦还有一些矮山，和久负盛名的鹿特丹港比较相像，而19世纪中叶，海港科隆瘟疫盛行，美国人在这里建港就避免了与其接触。
现在，威廉姆亚斯平沃尔创建的科隆成为穿越地峡的通道，完全没有了老城的痕迹。
发现太平洋
1513年9月的一天开始，瓦斯克德巴尔沃亚负责主持南方海洋的探险，找寻从大西洋到太平洋的捷径成为大家的愿望。但是由于小人耍小把戏捏造罪名逮捕了巴尔沃亚，因此老实可怜的巴尔沃亚最后还是被砍 了头。
在运河区域的开凿过程中，戈瑟尔斯负责开凿，而戈格斯为戈瑟尔斯扫清障碍，他们的待遇都非常丰厚。在他们的眼中，连美国医疗服务队里的少校和工程队里的陆军上校挣的只是一点烟钱罢了。尽管在有些人眼中，那些安纳波利斯军校和西点军校里的毕业生似乎经常是被嘲笑的对象，他们的操作毫无意义，课程僵化，连陆军部队经验规则也被认为阻碍个人心智发展。可是我仍然觉得军校毕业生比普通大学的毕业生更有礼貌，简单直接，从不抱怨他们可能接受的任何任务，也不企求什么恩惠，就算是他们冒着生命危险圆满完成了任务，他们赢得的掌声仍然少得可怜，而如果任务失败，他们总能受到过多的指责。他们的工资很低，但是却很稳定。
虽然晋升很慢，但是却是按部就班的。尽管存在上述种种不好的结果，但他们被要求做的大部分人都乐意去做，而且带着极大的热情和忠诚。
也许很多人都会像我一样地惊讶，虽然他们知道自己得不到什么可是许多聪明能干的年轻人都加入其中。现在，我想我明白了一些，这里没有竞争，他们不能适应竞争下的生存方式——现代生活的特点和终极目标。
这个世界上存在着两种人，一种是似乎可以从卖一些东西给别人中获得乐趣，而另一种人是宁愿饿死也不会去劝别人买他们既不想要也不需要的东西。在最坏的情况下，他们会把自己卖掉。
军人就是这样，他们可以完成分配的任务而避免这样做。他们的工作永远在一些看不见的眼睛的监视下进行着，他们的习惯、性格、风速礼节都为彼此所熟知，他们中的好多人都是正直可敬的人，虽然他们才能卓越，竞争下他们会得到更大的经济回报，但是，他们就喜欢没有竞争的这种日子。这就是那些开凿运河的人，我们先说到这里。
许多人对于巴拿马运河都有一个十分模糊的概念，巴拿马运河并不是运河，它甚至没有开掘泥土，只是将水引向高处，只有靠近大西洋和太平洋延伸地带，它是在海平面之下流过的。在加通湖地区，甚至达到85英尺（译者注：1英尺=0.3048米）高。
运河经过一段美国领土，两边延伸5英里（译者注：1英里=1609.344米），是西奥多罗斯福建立的傀儡政府，归巴拿马民主共和国管理。这个地区都被政府而不是私人企业所拥有，被管理得井井有条。
在这里，船会被一种小电车引入船闸。周围的卫生环境使得每一个来到这里的人都感到十分的优雅舒适。很多高科技机器确保了运河的稳定和畅通。长长的船队正是通过这一捷径从欧洲去往亚洲，高额的通行费保障了快速精确的服务，河道疏通是唯一会影响安全的因素。
通过大西洋进入运河，经过永利蒙湾，到达科隆城。随后，在船被提升，到达加通船闸运河段，船开始向上。在这个过程中，船被举起了40英尺，以至于你还没有反应过来就已经在加通湖上面航行了。如果恰巧你通过运河时在下雨，那么你就能够很幸运的（我认为是幸运的）感受到地面从眼前漫漫的消失的感觉，四面看去，你可以觉得正在穿过被水淹没的荒野，濒临灭顶的树梢伸出水面。在树的周围密布着本地土著的茅屋。
在到达几内亚湾之前，你可以看到许多形象要差得多的本地土著，对他们来说，生命好像是在一种毫无征兆的情况下压在他们瘦弱的肩膀上的一个重负，在他们悲惨的生活中异常快乐的日子似乎并不多，当华盛顿的政府开凿运河要征用他们的聚居地时，他们也很乐意的用自己的村庄换来了白人很多的比索，然后来斗鸡，买白人的政府发行的彩票，给妻子购置廉价的首饰，买难以消化的糖果给孩子们，当他们再一周的时间里花光了所有的钱时，他们会期待着华盛顿那帮愚蠢的人再挖一条运河，而这条运河刚好经过他们现在生活的地方。
巴拿马运河是一个很神奇的现代文明的产物，它将大自然尽力要分开的东西连接了起来，曾经当我们的祖先想从大西洋海岸到达太平洋海岸的时候，他们得乘船绕上几千英里，通常，他们得花上好几个月的时间绕过合恩角，几个世纪过去了，人们都是小心翼翼地遵守着大自然的规则，直到运河的出现。在此之前，汽船的使用和好望角航线安全性的提高大大缩短了中国和欧洲之间的距离，但是西奈沙漠和达连山脉仍然阻碍直接交通，一直到铁路公司在落基山铺上了铁路。
HY is it that the truly great experiences of one’s life are apt to be so exceedingly simple?
As a child I had heard all about the Panama Canal. Early in the fifties a brother of my grandmother had moved to Brazil. He had survived yellow fever and revolutions and had amassed a considerable fortune. When I was six or seven years old he had come back to Holland, bringing his family—his wondrous family of dark-eyed, dark-haired daughters. They had made such a stir in our little Dutch town that soon they had felt obliged to escape to the delights of Paris and the Riviera, which were much more to their rather exuberant Latin tastes than the simple pleasures of an evening at home with some unknown cousin, who in his Spartan simplicity had felt rather awkward before this overgenerous display of feminine beauty and charm.
I am afraid that these French peregrinations were not an unlimited success. For one day they had suffered a humiliation from which they never fully recovered. They were mighty proud of their jetblack hair and wore it in long braids that almost reached to their feet. Well, one fine morning they had climbed to the top of a bus to proceed to Fontainebleau. The bus was crowded and they had been pushed hither and yon, and when they reached their destination—oh, ghastly discovery!—their hair was gone!
It was of course quite a common occurrence during the late eighties of the previous century to have one’s hair stolen. It was needed for the manufacture of those chignons which were then highly popular and were contraptions of human hair meant to be worn underneath those crazy little hats which now, after an absence of almost fifty years, have once more made their appearance. The supply of false hair being necessarily limited (for no living Chinaman would then have dreamed of divesting himself of his queue), a class of professional hair-stealers was then successfully operating not only in Paris but in every large city of the continent. The poor Brazilians had been easy victims and the labor of twenty painful years of brushing and combing had been rapidly undone by the quick clip of a sharp pair of scissors.
Somehow or other, that event made a very deep impression upon my youthful mind and it made me conscious of the existence of a people called the French. The Eiffel Tower, coming to me at about the same time (it was the year of the great Paris exhibition) in the form of an inkstand, a watch charm and a paperweight, also helped the good work along, and finally the Indian suits which generous uncles and aunts brought back to me from Buffalo Bill’s contribution to the Grande Exposition turned me into an ardent Francophile.
Alas, the only way in which I could give evidence of my feelings at that time (I was all of seven years old) was by a close application to my studies of the noble French tongue. I bravely struggled with j’ai, tu as, j’eusse, je fusse and all the other perplexing problems of a language so infinitely more complicated than my native Dutch, in which, as all of us knew, the good Lord had originally written the Major Catechism of our Reformed Church, and soon I had acquired a sufficient facility in this queer idiom to fish the Paris Illustration out of that cardboard “portfolio” which the bookstore used to send us once a week and to be able to translate the simpler captions of its fascinating and intriguing pictures. And in that way I learned a good deal about a gentleman by the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps, who having dug the Suez Canal had now set bravely out to repeat his success on the Isthmus of Panama but who, in some mysterious way, had got no further than the door of a French jail.
The details of the “Panama scandal” did not become clear to me until many years later but at least I learned a lot about the geographical aspects of that narrow strip of land which separates the Atlantic from the Pacific and which appeared to be a region of inaccessible mountains and deep ravines, all of them inhabited by wild natives and wilder crocodiles.
You know how it goes with such childish recollections. They are as persistent as the weeds in the grass of your garden. You can plow them up, poison them, burn them down, and a few days later, behold! there they are again as if nothing had happened. As a result, for almost half a century, the Isthmus of Panama remained to me just that a region of high mountain peaks, dense forests, wild natives and even wilder crocodiles.
Therefore, when at an ungodly hour, the steward knocked on the door and said, “In a few moments we will be in Cristobal, Sir,” I quickly slipped into a dressing-gown, put on a pair of sandals and hastened to the deck, to hear me say to myself, “Lord help us all! the Captain took the wrong course! We are going into the Hook of Holland!” For the distant landscape was about as exciting as the coast of my native land and what I supposed to be the entrance to the canal looked as impressive as the mouth of the river Maas or the Scheldt.
Of course, when we came a little closer, I noticed certain differences. Everything was not entirely flat. There were a few low hills, but for the rest, I would not have been in the least surprised if the vessel had landed me in Rotterdam instead of the city which the ever-courteous and obliging American Government so generously called after the great Italian discoverer when it erected its own harbor at the northern entrance of the proposed canal to avoid any direct contact with the plague-hole which since the middle of the last century had been known as Colon.
Of that old Colon very little seems to remain. William Aspinwall had founded it as a terminal for his railroad across the Isthmus and during the hopeful days of that enterprise (A. D. 1850) it had been known as Aspinwall. This name being a little too complicated for the contemporary Panamanians (then in full possession of this tract of land), it had shortly afterwards been changed into the much simpler and easier Spanish name of Colon (Columbus to us). It had also been most magnificently neglected. Soon its streets had become marshes, ideally suited for the purpose of breeding yellow fever mosquitoes, and when in the year 1903 our government, after a most efficiently stage-managed one-night revolution, had acquired the right to a narrow strip of land leading from the Pacific to the Atlantic, one of the stipulations of the famous treaty of peace had granted the United States full sanitary control over the big cities of the newly established Republic of Panama.
The rest of the story can best be summed up in one single word—Gorgas. For without the thoroughgoing ministrations of this modern miracle-man, there never would have been any canal. There would have been (as there had been in the days of poor de Lesseps) a vast variety of cemeteries, hiding the pathetic remains of those faithful Spaniards and Frenchmen and Cubans who had so valiantly struggled to dig this little trench in this Godforsaken land of malaria and yellow fever while it was still under control of the French Canal Company.
Whereas today, the canal region is a health resort, where a mosquito has no more chance to survive than the proverbial snowball in Hades. In less than two years, this quietspoken Southern gentleman had performed his herculean task and could thereupon leave it to another officer of the United States Army to do the actual digging and to give us that short cut from the Atlantic to the Pacific which had been one of man’s most cherished dreams ever since that evening of the twenty-fifth of September of the year 1513, when Vasco de Ballboa, from his silent “peak in Darien” had solved the problem of the Great South Sea, of which shortly afterwards he was to become the “Grand Admiral and Commander-in-Chief?”.
Alas for poor Balboa! poor, serious, hard-working and incompetent Balboa! Restlessly he had crossed and recrossed his isthmus, founding cities, erecting forts, sending glowing descriptions of his conquest to His Most Catholic Majesty in far-off Spain. Others, less delicate in their methods (to indulge in a slight understatement), had wanted his job. And one of them had got it. He had got it by the simple expedient of having Balboa arrested on trumped-up charges. A packed tribunal had thereupon done the rest and less than four years after he had first climbed his famous peak and had shouted his triumphant “There it is!” the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean had been decapitated as a traitor and an enemy to the crown.
One often hears it said that republics are ungrateful. Within the domain of the Canal (as I shall hereafter call it), this statement is not borne out by the facts. Both Goethals, who did the digging, and Gorgas, who made the digging possible, were duly honored by the governments they served so faithfully and so efficiently and at an annual salary which must have horrified all believers in “private enterprise”. For these sound businessmen regarded the income of a major of the Medical Corps, U.S.A., and of a colonel of the Engineering Corps, U.S.A., as mere cigarette money and made no bones about saying as much. I am not enough of an economist to know whether they were right or wrong, but I would like to stop here for a moment and say something that has been on my mind for a considerable number of years.
I have, during a fairly long life as a newspaperman, come in contact with a great many officers of both our army and our navy. I am, of course, familiar with the objection of so many of our modern and enlightened minds whose personal dislike for physical exertion (or lack of courage or anything you like to call it) is rather apt to make them scoff at the products of both Annapolis and West Point. They talk about the uselessness of so much meaningless drilling. They complain of the rigidity of the curriculum and denounce the mental restrictions imposed upon those who live by the rule of thumb of the War Department. I have come to a quite different conclusion. Except perhaps for the fact that as a rule these graduates of our two military institutions have much better manners than their academic colleagues, I have invariably found them to be much like the professors in our better-class universities, simple and direct, gentlemen who uncomplainingly accept whatever task is wished upon them and ask for no mercy.
Today they may be called upon to administer a couple of islands in the Pacific. Tomorrow they may be told to dig a trench through twenty miles of mountains or to fish an aviator out of the sea or to prevent Japanese poachers from putting a complete end to the race of the nimble seal without at the same time provoking the wrath of the very sensitive gentlemen who are now in control in Tokyo. The applause they receive in case they are successful is usually a little less than nothing at all. On the other hand, the blame they get in case they fail is almost always much more than they deserve. Yet there never seems to be any lack of candidates for this sort of a career. Those who do not like the “military idea”, explain this by pointing to the ease and the regularity of the officer’s existence. It is true, the profession gets scandalously underpaid, but it promises a regular income to all those who care to observe a few very elementary rules connected with the idea of “being a gentleman”. And—come good times, come bad times—the check is there on the dot and unless Uncle Sam himself should go bankrupt, there is no danger that any of our gold-striped officials will ever be told that the firm cannot meet its obligations.
Furthermore, promotion, although slow, is completely automatic and the most ambitious of young men will not proceed much more rapidly than some mediocre pen-pusher in an obscure office somewhere on the top floor of the Navy Department, whose only claim to fame rests in his proud boast that he has never made a mistake.
That is what we are apt to hear when we listen to our pacifists and many of our intellectuals. But my own recollections of the sort of men who wear the United States uniform (a recollection now covering a period of some thirty years) do not quite bear this out. On the contrary, I found most of these men quite eager to do whatever they had been told to do, with that extra touch of devotion and loyalty which constitutes the difference between just another job and a piece of craftsmanship.
I have often wondered why it should be that way and why so many exceedingly bright and capable young men should be perfectly willing to forego the possible rewards inherent in business and in the professions when they must have known that, financially speaking they could never get anywhere at all. I think that I have found the answer. They preferred that sort of career because they felt themselves to be unfit for the competitive form of existence which is the beginning and end of our modern economic form of life.
I am not going to hold a brief for either that attitude or the opposite. It all depends, I think, on the way you were born. For example, there are a large number of people who seem to derive a positive pleasure from selling something to someone else. But there are others who would rather starve to death than try to persuade a stranger to buy something he neither wants nor needs. And these poor fellows are at their very worst whenever they are obliged to try and sell themselves.
The army man and the naval officer belong to the category which is under no obligation to do this in order to go about their allotted tasks. Their work is forever being observed and scrutinized by invisible eyes. Their character is well known to all their superiors, who for years have lived with them in close harmony in some army post or on board a battleship. Their habits and customs and manners are known to all their colleagues. There may of course be a certain amount of favoritism in the services, for personal likes and dislikes are unavoidable as long as we are men and not angels. But that evil, too, seems to have been reduced to a minimum by an elaborate set of checks and counterchecks. In short, once a military man has made up his mind to eschew the fleshpots of our present competitive system and has ordered his tailor to provide him with a uniform and brass buttons displaying an eagle or an anchor, he knows that his future will depend almost entirely upon his own efforts and that he will not be forced to enter into that rather disheartening (not to say disgusting) pushing and crowding and kicking-the-other-fellow-in-the-pants which is an inevitable part of life in the market place.
A few timeservers and a few lazy and careless brethren may occasionally slip by and enjoy a few years of comparative leisure at the expense of the taxpayers, but their number is very small. The others are honorable and decent fellows, often of outstanding ability, who happen to prefer a non-competitive existence to one that would undoubtedly offer much greater financial rewards but at the risk of their being obliged to sacrifice part of their personal integrity.
So much for the men who built the Canal, and now let me give you a few facts for the benefit of those who like a few statistics with their geography.
Most people of course are vaguely familiar with the fact that the Panama Canal is not really a canal in the accepted sense of the word, as a canna or reed or tube through which water can freely pass, as it does through the pipes in the bathroom. It has not even been dug into the soil, as most ordinary canals have been. On the contrary, it has been made to run through the attic, for with the exception of short stretches near the Atlantic and the Pacific, the Panama Canal runs well above sea level and in the region of the Gatun Lake it reaches the respectable height of eighty-five feet.
The famous Culebra Cut (now called the Gaillard Cut in honor of the man responsible for this difficult engineering feat)is forty-five feet deep but its bottom is situated forty feet above sea level. Incidentally, the width of the Canal itself now makes it possible for every ship, with the exception of the Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary and the Normandie, to sail through this narrow gap. As some 29 000 000 tons are moved through the Canal every year (which is only 7 000 000 less than pass through the Suez Canal) we need not for the moment worry about these three aquatic monsters, who may well have been the last of their kind, for unless all present indications are entirely misleading, the days of the super-super-luxury greyhounds are numbered. They will disappear together with the civilization which mistook quantity for quality and considered the dinosaur as the proudest product of all creation.
The Canal runs through a strip of United States territory which is five miles wide on both sides of the centre of the waterway itself, but which fails to include the cities of Panama and Colon, which have remained in the possession of the sovereign republic of Panama ever since Theodore Roosevelt established that puppet state. None of this land can belong to private owners. It is government domain and a silent but highly eloquent argument in favor of government ownership. For nothing strikes the visitor to this part of the world quite as much as the excellent way in which the whole of this region is administered by government officials rather than by private enterprise.
The very air seems filled with a quiet efficiency which extends from the little electric cars, which pull your ship into the locks with a minimum of fuss and a minimum loss of time, to the sanitary measures which make you feel as if every one of the forty thousand people who inhabit this earthly paradise should live to be at least a hundred years old. Yet a great deal of highly technical and intricate engineering work must be done both during the day and during the night to keep the Canal in constant and perfect running order for that endless procession of ships which use this short cut from Europe to Asia and whose owners insist upon speed and accuracy in return for the high tolls they are obliged to pay. For this is no Suez Canal—a wide trough running through a flat desert where eternal dredging is the only price you have to pay for safety. This third-story canal offers entirely different problems, as I shall try and make clear by drawing you a picture.
Should you enter the Canal from the Atlantic side, you would first of all pass through the Limon Bay, on which the city of Colon is situated. Soon the shores begin to approach each other and you enter a canal which leads you up to the famous Gatun locks. There the interesting part of the voyage begins, for there your ship starts upon its skyward career. By the way, I would like to give all prospective travelers fair warning that unless they most carefully watch every moment of the hoisting operation, they will miss the whole thing, for all the operations necessary to drag your vessel into the locks and to lift it some forty feet up in the air are performed with such skill and ease that you will find yourself peacefully sailing across Gatun Lake while you are still waiting for the show to begin.
Take first of all this matter of going up in your watery elevator. Little electric cars, running on rails parallel with the Canal itself, have quietly pulled the ship into the first lock. At once invisible hands have closed the gates behind you and your vessel begins its upward course. This experience is repeated twice more and before you realize how the thing is done, you are on the top floor, eighty-five feet above sea level.
On the day I passed through the Canal, we were very fortunate in having a perfect day. I can, however, imagine what it must look like when it rains. Soon afterwards I was to learn all about tropical showers, rains, deluges and cloudbursts, but on that particular morning, the sun was shining brightly and I was grateful, for once you have arrived in the actual lake, the scene becomes very depressing. Indeed, you will then begin to understand how Noah must have felt when on the thirty-ninth day of his voyage the earth had practically disappeared from view. On all sides you have evidence of steaming merrily across an inundated wilderness. Here and there the top of a tree , deader than any tree one has ever seen before, sticks out from the surface of the waters, looking like something one remembers from Doré’s illustrations of the Deluge. Once upon a time, and not so very long ago either, those trees were enjoying life, liberty and an arboreal pursuit of happiness, fighting no doubt a million plagues and perils but nevertheless deriving considerable contentment from the fact that they existed. And around their bases there clustered the huts of happy little natives, dancing the rumba and the tarantella and the fandango to the merry strumming of their guitars, living on luscious tropical fruit and dying like flies—they, their loving wives and their loving children—dying like flies from every form and variety of preventable disease from leprosy to psoriasis and from typhoid to phthisis. Nevertheless, like the trees which they were too lazy to cut down, they too were exercising their constitutional rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I add this for the benefit of those sentimental citizens who are always able to weep bitter tears upon the fate of their poor little brown brethren who lived lives of unsoiled innocence until the wicked White Man broke rudely into their beautiful paradise and forced them to wear pants and made them brush their teeth and send their children to the Red Cross to be inoculated against typhoid fever.
We shall see a great many of those natives before we reach the shores of New Guinea, and no use to disillusion the reader right now, but the specimens of the natives one saw (rather sketchily, I confess) along the shores of Limon Bay failed miserably to come up to the beautiful specifications of those who are continually comparing the Brown Man’s noble status before the arrival of the white despoiler and afterwards. Most of them looked as if they thought the business of existing much too much of a burden for their slender shoulders. The gift of life had been bestowed upon them without they themselves having been in any way consulted. There was nothing therefore they could do about their miserable and unhappy existence, just as there was nothing their hideous, mangy and flea-bitten dogs could do about being hideous, mangy and flea-bitten.
However, there had been one completely and perfectly happy day in their miserable lives. It had come to them almost a generation before, as they counted time, for old age was not a very common luxury among these poor natives. One free morning an emissary had come to them from the absurd White Men who now seemed to be in control of their country and he had told them that they would have to move, as their villages were in the way of Progress (whatever that might mean) and that they would be paid a handful of pesos for what really was not worth more than a couple of centavos. Of course, they had taken the money—none too gratefully, for the whole transaction had seemed too preposterous to them to be real—and they had spent it on cockfights and tickets in the government lottery and on cheap jewelry for their women and indigestible sweets for their children and of course they had lost every penny of it again in less than a week and had moved to a cluster of ramshackle shanties in some nearby valley, praying ardently to their favorite saints that some day soon the foolish government in Washington would decide to dig still another canal and find it necessary to flood a few hundred more square miles, right where they were now living.
I am making all this up as I go along. I may be entirely wrong. They may have felt just as unhappy as the Pilgrims leaving Scrooby but I doubt it, for few natives are of the Puritan breed. If they were, they would be digging their own canals and they would be traveling in solid comfort on the steamers that sail from New York to San Francisco. Instead of which, they live horrible lives, full of that constant irritation which is the result of never being quite well and of dying much too young and of being forever filled with a dread of the unknown, for although most of them are now supposed to have been converted to Christianity, their poor souls dwell in a constant twilight zone of horror and to the fear of Hell has now been added those dreadful instruments of torture with which the White Man pricks them in the arm to make them immune from typhoid and all those other plagues, which used to settle their problem of over-population without the interference of any systematic effort at birth control.
Come to think of it, this whole outburst is really due to the sight of those ghastly trees which still lift their whitened arms to high Heaven, for there are few things quite as sad to behold as the death throes of a tree. From my mountaineering days (long, long ago) I retain a deep admiration for the courage of the members of the arboreal tribe. Their will to live makes them overcome difficulties which even the bravest of men would hesitate to face. They will catch a feeble hold upon a mere handful of earth in some little slit between two rocks and there they will establish and maintain themselves in spite of blizzards, gales and hurricanes and in an atmosphere so rarefied that except for a few members of the insect family (who, if they must, will make themselves comfortable in a barrel of gasoline) no other living being is able to share their exile. Provided they survive the first ten years, they are apt to do fairly well and to reach a proud manhood, but with the first signs of advancing age, they are doomed. For the merciless winds know that these lonely intruders are now at their mercy and they will attack them with the fury of so many howling maniacs.
First they will make them sway and quiver and shake until they are bent like a gladiator beset by too many enemies. Next, with shrewd cunning, they will deprive them of their arms and fingers and finally they will twist their backs and break their legs, but the trees, like the heroes in some long-for-gotten Carolingian saga, will continue to fight back, resting on the stumps of their strong old limbs, and when those too are worn away, a few defiant sprouts each spring will tell the world that even then the hopeless struggle has not yet been given up.
I had better move on or I will get stuck right here in the Canal. Bridges, canals and tunnels have always had a special fascination for me. They seem to be one of man’s most successful attempts at beating Nature within her own domain. Nature makes herself a beautiful landscape and digs a dozen deep rivers across the surface of the land and says, “There, my good children, now go and live among these lovely fields but remember, each one of you must stay on his own little lot, for that is the way I have arranged things and that is the way I want them to be run.”
In the beginning, of course, Man is obedient enough, for what else can he do? But as soon as he has learned to fill a goatskin with air or cover a basket with clay, he will propel himself and his insatiable curiosity across that current to find out what secrets may lie hidden along the other shore. A little later he will discard his makeshift rafts for a boat and finally he will bid farewell to all these undependable modes of conveyance and build himself a bridge; after which, that river ceases to exist as a further impediment to progress.
It is the same with the tunnels which treat a mountain as if it were non-existent and unite countries which Nature for thousands of years had tried to keep separated from each other. And then there are the canals, the sort of canals like those of Suez and Panama, and these I like best of all. For they boldly thumb their noses at all of Nature’s bestlaid plans.
Nature constructed a granite barrier which was intended to divide the eastern and western parts of the American continent for all time and when our ancestors wanted to move from the coast of the Atlantic to that of the Pacific, they had to board a ship and make a detour of several thousand miles and often were obliged to spend several months trying to get round the Horn. And for one century —two centuries—three centuries—these little men on their little ships patiently obeyed Nature’s dictates and even the riches from the Orient must first of all be taken from Manila to Panama, must thereupon be loaded on the backs of mules and Indians (I give preference to the mules as they were the more expensive of the two and therefore the more valuable), and must then be carried painfully across the mountain ridges of the isthmus, to be dumped into other galleons and sailed across another ocean to the storehouses of Seville.
The steamer and the increasing safety of the route by way of the Cape of Good Hope greatly reduced the distance between China and Europe, but the desert of Sinai and the peaks of Darien still made direct communications impossible. Then in the sixties of the last century, the Rockies were pierced by the iron tracks of the railway companies and on the fifteenth of August of the year 1914, the ships of all the world were invited to come and avail themselves of an aquatic short cut which allowed them to bid a definite and grateful farewell to the horrors of all Patagonian blizzards and which today allows the whole of the United States battle fleet to move from the Atlantic into the Pacific and vice versa in less than a day and a half.
By the way, the idea of connecting the two oceans with each other by means of a canal at this particular spot is almost as old as the first trail the White Man blazed across the Isthmus. Most of those early plans were of course considered completely fantastic. But many years ago, in looking for something quite different in the Dutch archives, I came across a carefully worked-out plan for a canal in this part of the world. It was made by a commission of Dutch engineers during the early quarter of the nineteenth century. I am sorry but I have forgotten the details of this project. But I mention it because prospective Ph.D.’s are always looking for suitable subjects to display their industry and erudition and this would be a most suitable subject. For the thing might have worked, the Dutch being fairly good at this business of digging canals, and it would have completely changed the course of history in the Pacific.
Unfortunately, there was the problem of yellow fever and malaria—the same difficulty which contributed so distressingly to the collapse of de Lesseps’grandiose project in the year 1888. In the case of poor de Lesseps, the microbes of the Paris Exchange proved even more fatal than little Anopheles. With old King William, there would have been little danger of such an inside attack, for His Majesty, was one of the cleverest financiers of the House of Orange, and that is no small praise. But even he, apparently, was baffled by the difficulties of so gigantic an enterprise and so nothing came of the idea except perhaps a footnote in one of the preliminary studies of one of our own numerous Canal commissions. And it really does not matter very much. A thousand years from now, when the flying machine shall have completely superseded the steam-propelled vessel, Theodore Roosevelt, who gave us the present “ditch” , will also have been relegated to a footnote together with Goethals and Gorgas and all his other mighty contributors. For that is the way it goes in this world and perhaps it is the only sensible way. We live and we die and that seems about all that is of any importance.
The Story of the Pacific
The Panama Canal
