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Page 1
With the help of such a canal, ships in going to the western coast of
North or South America will not need to make the long and dangerous voyage
around Cape Horn.
Cape Horn, you will see if you look on your map, is the extreme southerly
point of South America.
=Copyrighted 1897, By WILLIAM BEVERLEY HARISON.=
There are so many storms and fogs there, that the Horn, as it is called,
is much dreaded by sailors.
Since the invention of steam, all the steamships go through the Straits of
Magellan, and save the passage round the Horn; but there is not enough
wind for sailing vessels in the rocky and narrow straits, so they still
have to take the outside passage.
The Straits of Magellan divide the main continent of South America from a
group of islands, called Tierra del Fuego, and Cape Horn is the most
southerly point of this archipelago.
The journey down the coast of South America on the east, and up again on
the west, takes such a long time, that the desire for a canal across the
narrow neck of land which joins North and South America has been in men's
minds for many years.
A railway was built across the Isthmus of Panama to shorten the distance,
and save taking the passage round the Horn. Travellers left their ship at
one side of the Isthmus, and took the train over to the other, where they
went on board another ship, which would take them the rest of their
journey.
This plan greatly increased the expense of the journey, and the canal was
still so much wanted, that at last the Panama Canal was begun.
You have all heard about the Panama Canal, which was to do the same work
that the Nicaragua Canal is to do, that is, to connect the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans. You have probably heard how much time, labor, and human
life was wasted over it, and how much trouble its failure caused in
France.
This Canal was to cut across the Isthmus at its very narrowest point. It
was worked on for years, every one believing that it would be opened to
ships before very long. Many of the maps and geographies that were printed
in the eighties said that the Panama Canal would be opened in 1888, or at
latest in 1889.
No one expected what afterward happened. In 1889 the works were stopped
for want of money; the affairs of the Canal were looked into; it was found
that there had been dishonesty and fraud, and in 1892 the great Count
Ferdinand de Lesseps, who built the Suez Canal, and a number of other
prominent Frenchmen, were arrested for dealing dishonestly with the money
subscribed for the Canal.
There was a dreadful scandal; many of the high French officials had to
give up their positions, and run away for fear of arrest.
When the whole matter was understood, it was found that, for months before
the work was stopped, the men who had charge of the Canal had decided that
the work would cost such an enormous sum of money that it would be almost
an impossibility to complete it.
They did not have the honesty to let this be known, but allowed people to
go on subscribing money, a part of which they put in their own pockets,
and spent the rest in bribing the French newspapers not to tell the truth
about the Canal.
The worst of it was, that the money which had been subscribed was not from
rich people, who would feel its loss very little, but from poor people,
who put their savings, and the money they were storing away for their old
age, into the Canal; and when they lost it, it meant misery and poverty to
them.
So the Panama Canal failed.
But the project of making a canal was not given up. Two years before the
idea of digging at Panama had been thought of, the ground where the
Nicaragua Canal is being built had been surveyed, and thought better
suited to the purpose than Panama.
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