Panama, past and present/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
THE OPENING OF THE CANAL
WATER was first turned into the Gatun Locks on September 26, 1913. Several thousand canal employees lined the lock walls to watch the muddy fountains spurt up out of the round openings in the dusty concrete floors of the lock chambers. With the water came hundreds of big bull-frogs, sucked down through the sluices from the lake above, who swam round and round in comic bewilderment as the water-line rose higher and higher. When the water in the lowest lock was even with the surface of the sea-level canal outside, the gates were opened and the sea-going tug Gatun steamed in under her own power, for the electric towing-locomotives were not yet ready for service. General Goethals was not a passenger on the tug; but walked up and down the lock wall, receiving reports on how the valves and bull-wheels were working, and watching the Gatun as she was locked through to the lake
Two weeks later, on October 10, President Wilson pressed a button in the White House, and started an electric impulse which was relayed southward from cable-station to cable-station till it reached and exploded eight tons of dynamite, blowing up the Gamboa Dike and admitting the water of Gatun Lake into the Gaillard Cut. The Cut had already been partially flooded, that the inrush of water might not be too severe. About twenty minutes after the dike was blown up, two daredevil young Americans in a dugout "shot the rapids" from the lake
THE DREDGING FLEET AT CUCARACHA.
into the Cut. One of these young men was a private in the Marine Corps; the other was Lindon Bates, Jr., who was killed while trying to save some children on board the Lusitania.
But after the last man-made dike had been cleared away, the Canal was still closed to navigation by a great natural barrier. This was our old friend, the Cucaracha Slide, which had slid down and almost completely blocked the bottom of the Cut in January, 1913. So little impression had the steam shovels been able to make on it in the next nine months that it was decided to turn in the water and finish the job with floating dredges. A small fleet of ladder- and dipper-dredges were brought up from the Atlantic entrance, while up through Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks came the most powerful dredge in the world, the Corozal, with her endless chain of buckets that can bring up ten thousand tons a day, and dig through soft rock without previous blasting. This vessel was built at Renfrew, Scotland, and made the voyage across the Atlantic and round South America to the Pacific entrance of the Canal under her own steam.
Moored as closely together as possible, the dredges attacked the great mass of soft clay from both sides. Double crews and electric light enabled the work to go on by night as well as by day. The excavated material was loaded into barges, towed away by tugs, and dumped into Gatun or Miraflores Lake, outside the ship channel.
By May, 1914, a channel had been dug through the Cucaracha Slide deep enough to permit barges to be towed through from ocean to ocean. These barges carried freight from steamers of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Line, which company had been prevented from trans-shipping by the Tehuantepec Railroad because of the revolutionary outbreaks in Mexico.
After the dredges had removed 2,767,080 cubic yards—an average of 286,239.78 cubic yards per month—from the Cucaracha Slide, its forward movement ceased and the Way was opened for an ocean-going ship to make the long-looked-forward-to passage from sea to sea. This trip was made by the Cristobal, of the Panama Railroad Steamship Line, on August 3, 1914. Her sister ship, the Ancon, passed through on the fifteenth, carrying a large party of army officers, Panamanian dignitaries, and their wives and families. Again General Goethals was not a passenger, but watched the vessel's passage from the shore, moving from point to point in his railroad motor.
The Panama Canal was now declared open to the commerce of the world. During the first twelve months there passed through it 1258 vessels, carrying 5,675,261 tons of cargo, the tolls on which amounted to $4,909,150.96.
U.S.S. OHIO PASSING CUCARACHA SLIDE, JULY 16, 1915.
The Isthmian Canal Commission was abolished on January 27, 1914. Two days later, President Wilson nominated Colonel Goethals first Governor of the Panama Canal. This appointment was speedily and unanimously confirmed by the Senate, and on March 4, 1915, the Governor was promoted to his present rank of Major-General.
But his work was not yet done at Panama. In October, 1915, the Canal was completely blocked by two formidable slides directly opposite each other on the banks of the Cut, a little distance north of Gold Hill. Both of these slides were of the type known as "breaks," where 
PEDRO MIGUEL LOCKS.
Vessel in East Chamber going north, and one in West Chamber going south.
the weight of the bank causes the underlying material to snap off and give way like an overloaded floor-beam. In each of these cases, about eighty acres of ground sank almost straight down to an average depth of twenty feet. Squeezed between its sinking banks, the bottom of the Canal naturally rose up, forming first an island, then a peninsula, and finally a complete barrier. As fast as the dredges dug this away, more material came down from each side, in regular waves. The tops of these slides were too broken to permit of their being lightened by steam-shovels, nor could anything be done by washing the earth down the side of the slope away from the Cut, with powerful hydraulic nozzles, as was possible at Cucaracha. The only course was to keep the dredges digging away, till there was nothing more left for them to dig. It was not until April, 1916, that the Canal was reopened to commerce.
Because of these slides and also because of the great war in Europe, which made impossible the assembling of an international fleet, there was no formal opening of the Panama Canal by the President of the United States. In somewhat the same way, the elaborate festivities in celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal were cut short forty-five years earlier, by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.