ama and was told
by the Indians that beyond a narrow strip of land was the "Big Water."
He sailed up the Chagres river a distance, failed to find it, and died
believing that they were mistaken. About ten years later Balboa climbed
to the top of a tree not far from where Culebra Cut is located and saw
the "Big Water." Four hundred years later almost to the day the water
was turned into the canal and thus America united the world's greatest
oceans.

After completing the Suez Canal and thus uniting the world's greatest
seas, the French people believed they could dig across the Isthmus of
Panama, but digging through Culebra Cut thousands of miles from home was
much different from digging across the level plain of Suez only a few
hundred miles away. A canal without locks is entirely different from one
where great ocean liners must be lifted eighty-five feet above sea
level.

Then Panama was a jungle, where disease-carrying mosquitoes were
swarming in districts where heat was almost unbearable. True, their
medical skill was the best and their hospitals of the latest design, but
where they cured hundreds thousands died like flies. Added to all these
disadvantages was extravagance and waste, greed and graft, mismanagement
and misappropriation of funds to say nothing of palaces and princely
salaries for officials.

The result was that after spending more than two hundred million dollars
of the people's money, the whole scheme collapsed, and the work stopped.
De Lesseps himself was arrested, disgraced, and imprisoned and died with
a broken heart a little later in an insane asylum. The French had worked
seven years, and now for four years not a wheel turned. Then they
organized a new company and worked at intervals ten years more until
1903, when we bought them out. During these years a half dozen nations
developed projects and made surveys but no digging was done except by
the French until we took charge in 1904.

The Canal Zone is a strip of land ten miles wide across the Isthmus of
Panama, the distance being about forty miles from shore to shore. It is
less than this, however, in a straight line. The canal runs from
northwest to southeast, the Atlantic end at the north being about
twenty-two miles west of the Pacific end at the south. This seems rather
strange but we must remember that the Isthmus is in the shape of the
letter S and it so happens that the shortest point runs in the direction
named.

Of course it would ha