structure, as our warships used to be, and when it first came to the Isthmus, the quarantine officer put on his best suit of white duck, and went out to take breakfast on board the "battleship." Many other smaller dredges are dipping up rock into barges or pumping mud through long pipes to the land, all the way to the shore, and up the four miles of sea-level canal to where the Gatun Locks loom in the distance. All this you can see as we cross the bay to the ugly town of Colon, and its pretty suburb of Cristobal, which last is in the American Canal Zone, and the place where the steamers dock.
Now that you have seen what these dredges can do, you will ask me why we do not dig the rest of the Canal that way, instead of bothering with locks and dams, and I can give you the answer in five words: because of the Chagres River. This troublesome stream, as you can see by the map on page 4, comes down from the San Blas hills, strikes the line of the Canal at a place called "Bas Obispo," and zigzags across it to Gatun. And though we can dredge a channel up to Gatun, or scoop out the Gaillard Cut, which is an artificial cañon nine miles long through the hills between Bas Obispo and Pedro Miguel, on the Pacific side of the divide, we could not dig below the bed of the Chagres without having a lot of waterfalls pouring into the Canal, washing down the banks and silting up the channel. And as the Chagres is a sizable river that has been known to rise more than twenty-five feet in a night—for the rainfall at Panama is very severe—you can see that it is no easy problem to control it. But we have solved that problem by means of the Gatun Dam.
