The Panama Canal Part 10

The United States appears, indeed, to be on the verge of tremendous developments. In a paper read before the Royal Colonial Inst.i.tute,[20]

that well-known physical geographer and economist, Dr. F. B. Vrooman, gave us a hint of further American enterprises in civil engineering, after the Panama Ca.n.a.l is opened:--

The isthmian ca.n.a.l is but a part of the greater American waterways project. As soon as this is finished it is possible that the United States will start in a large way with the project of the artificial ca.n.a.lization of the Mississippi with its 16,000 miles of already navigable waters and a drainage basis of 1,280,000 square miles. The cutting-through of an ocean-s.h.i.+p ca.n.a.l to the Great Lakes will make seaport towns of the Canadian cities on the Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Superior. The Saskatchewan and the Red River can be ca.n.a.lized for 1,000 miles, and a short haul from Winnipeg will open the whole Saskatchewan valley from near the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains--downstream, but for this short portage--all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and thence to Panama and the Pacific ports. Every transcontinental freight-rate in Canada and the United States will be reduced, and perhaps some in the middle interior. As this great southern movement starts up the industries of the southern states will receive a new impulse. The Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea will spring into a new life, together with the West Indies and Central America and the vast and fertile interior drained by the Orinoco and the Amazon.

CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN AMERICA.

But there are no countries which will hear the call of the ca.n.a.l so nearly and clearly as those of Central and Southern America. It is astonis.h.i.+ng how that forty-mile wide land barrier between the two oceans has isolated all the western sh.o.r.e of the continent. The Panama Ca.n.a.l Railroad has done very little to modify the situation. The Pacific coast of America has looked westwards over its waste of waters, and has scarcely been reached by the industrial and economic forces at work behind it in the Old and New Worlds. Its trade has been carried on mostly with Europe, and especially England, in sailing vessels that have plodded round the distant Horn. An interesting example of this geographical and commercial detachment of the west coast of Central and South America is furnished by the port of Mazatlan in Western Mexico.

From this place there are considerable exports of logwood and mahogany.

But thirty times as much of this lumber has gone to Europe as to the east of the American continent. On the opposite or eastern side of Mexico is Tampico, where the returns of trade are just the reverse, the United States being the largest customer for its exports. Despite the old Spanish paved roads across the isthmus at Panama, by which the silver and pearls of Peru and the Pacific were conveyed to Nombre de Dios and Porto Bello, for s.h.i.+pment to Spain, despite the sixty years of the little Panama Railway, the American continent even in its narrowest parts has been something like an impenetrable screen between east and west. Four centuries of continued agitation and effort to get the water through show how seriously this physical divorce has been felt, and give an earnest of the large results which are sure to follow the completion of the task.

There have been other reasons for the backward development of western South America. To begin with, the Spanish, not a progressive and pioneering race, laid their hands on these countries four hundred years ago, and have held them politically or racially ever since. This would not in itself have kept out the Anglo-Saxon or the German. But these countries have not yet been greatly needed as an outlet of the surplus populations of Europe. Even the United States is very far from being filled up, and Canada is likely to be giving away farms for many years to come. The Teutonic race, to which above all others the trustees.h.i.+p of Western civilization is committed, has left these Spanish Americas, with their revolutions coming almost as frequently and regularly as the seasons, comparatively unvisited. As yet the North European emigration to the southern continent has been mainly confined to Argentina and Southern Brazil.

In one respect the isthmian breakwater has been profitable to these states of the Pacific coast. It has sheltered them largely from the negro element which has spread so widely over the West Indies and the southern United States. But j.a.pan and China are already there, and the yellow will be laid on more and more thickly unless these countries are brought quickly within the zone of Western ideas and enterprise. And that process is likely to begin with the opening of the ca.n.a.l.

The backwardness of these regions is indeed almost unbelievable. Most people think of them as producing mainly nitrates and revolutions. But their possible resources and products are illimitable, and are only awaiting the organized capital of the West to be made available for human service. As yet these Latin republics are in their middle ages of development. There are few railways, only one continuous transcontinental line having been completed between Valparaiso, through Mendoza, to Buenos Aires. Their internal communications are carried on mainly by the pack mule, as they have been since the days of Pizarro and Valdivia. Each country, of course, has a foreign trade, but the people of the interior, the Indians or mixed breeds, live in isolated communities which are self-sufficing, raise their own food and make their own simple manufactures, knowing little or nothing of the products of foreign countries.

The whole coast and its hinterland is engaged almost solely in what are known as "extractive" industries--that is, in mining or agriculture. The exports consist mainly of foodstuffs and raw materials, nitrate, ores of copper, silver, and gold, grain, sugar, cotton, cocoa, coffee, wool, hides, rubber, and woods. With these the people pay for their manufactured goods, and these come mainly from Europe, and chiefly also from the United Kingdom. The mineral wealth of the northern parts, especially the Andean plateau, is still enormous, though vast quant.i.ties have been extracted. For centuries the Andes furnished the civilized world with most of the bullion used for its current coinage. Between 1630 and 1803 Peru alone sent out 250,000,000 worth of silver. Bolivia has contributed 800,000,000 worth; the famous mines of Potosi alone accounted for 600,000,000 worth of this metal. The nitrate works of Chile are in the hands of Englishmen and Germans, and American and other foreigners hold the sugar plantations of Peru. But, as I have said, the range of production is enormous and only awaits the stimulus of imported capital. To give one example of the variety of products, it is said that the Aconcagua valley in Chile would alone furnish annually from its vineyards 1,000,000 gallons of claret, if the grapes were not used to produce a local drink named "chica." There is no sign of the exhaustion of any of the natural products of these regions. Even the nitrate of soda, that most valuable of fertilizers, though it is being shovelled out at a great rate, covers about 220,000 acres, or about 400 miles from north to south, and is sufficient to last for a very long time to come.

Nitrate, minerals, wheat, barley, wool, hides--these are the main exports of the Pacific west, the returning imports being cotton goods, machinery, steel rails, woollens, coal, and all sorts of miscellaneous manufactures and supplies. But, as I said, the trade has been almost wholly with Europe, England enjoying a very predominant position. The United States have competed with Europe at great disadvantages. The trade has been mostly carried on in sailing vessels. Now such craft, to get from New York to South America, have been obliged to sail eastwards almost as far as the Canaries in order to catch the trade winds and weather Cape St. Roque on the coast of Brazil. The sailing vessel from Europe, on the other hand, sails right past the Canaries, and can give the American s.h.i.+p ten days' start in the journey to any part of South America south or west of the most easterly point of Brazil. If the reader will turn back to the chapter on the new distances he will see how the little streak of blue water at Panama will alter all this. Take one little fact to ill.u.s.trate the change. Callao, on the coast of Peru, is, before the opening of the ca.n.a.l, farther by steam from New York than is the South Pole, but the Panama Ca.n.a.l will bring the city 1,000 miles nearer to New York by steam than San Francisco will then be. The ca.n.a.l will reduce the distance from New York to the Chilean nitrate port of Iquique by 5,139 miles (nautical), to Valparaiso by 3,747, to Coronel (farther south) by 3,296, to Valdivia (about 1,000 miles north of Magellan's Straits, nearly at the farthest southern limit of the commercially important part of western South America) by 2,900. Take Iquique, an important North Chilean nitrate port. By Panama this place is 4,004 miles from New York, but 6,578 from Liverpool. Their respective distances _via_ Magellan were 9,143 and 9,510.

It looks, therefore, as though the United States, with its new advantages, which begin when the first vessel is pa.s.sed through the Panama locks, would have a good chance of securing for the future the main share of the South American trade. Its cotton, iron and steel goods, electrical machinery, etc., will be able to compete on very different terms with those of England and Germany. Cotton manufactures have reached Chile and the other countries of Pacific South America by a rather absurdly roundabout route. The raw cotton has been grown in the southern parts of the United States, carried to Europe for manufacture, and brought back to South America _via_ the Straits of Magellan. These goods will, we may be sure, tend in future to go direct from the American factories _via_ New York, Charleston, or New Orleans, without trans-s.h.i.+pment, thus saving about 7,000 miles of transportation. A very small part of the American trade with these countries has pa.s.sed by the Panama railroad. The rates charged by the steamers which have picked up the goods for the west coast at Panama have been kept so high as to be practically prohibitive. It has actually been cheaper to send goods from the United States by way of England or Germany--that is, a journey of 14,000 miles--than by way of Panama, a journey of three or four thousand. One of the surest results, then, of the Panama Ca.n.a.l opening will be a rapid development of the Pacific coasts of America, especially of South America, and a great expansion of trade between these countries and the United States.

The effect of the ca.n.a.l on the Atlantic coasts and hinterland of South America will naturally be less striking. There has never been much interchange of trade between the two coasts of the southern continent, for the simple reason that their products are not complementary but mostly identical. Most of the trade of the eastern coast states is with the countries of the North Atlantic. But some trade to the more northerly and tropical parts of this coast is certain to flow through the ca.n.a.l. Lumber from the Pacific coasts of North America is used in Atlantic South America, and a part of this trade, which is likely to grow in extent, will be pa.s.sed through the ca.n.a.l. It should be noticed, however, that the temperate reaches of the eastern coast of South America farther to the south will be nearer the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada _via_ the Horn and the Straits of Magellan owing to the big easterly projection of Brazil.

We must leave the probable effects of the Panama Ca.n.a.l on the British possessions in America to another chapter. It has not been possible to deal with prospective commercial developments in great detail. Only some general idea could be given of the vast changes and developments in progress. On the day on which I am writing the Was.h.i.+ngton correspondent of _The Times_ summarizes the meaning and effect of the Panama Ca.n.a.l in three rather formidable words. He says it "symbolizes commercial Pan-Americanism." The ca.n.a.l is going to help America to keep its trade more to itself. It represents in commerce and economics what the Monroe doctrine represents in politics. It will immensely a.s.sist the United States to become the chief industrial supplier of the great continent, with the other states mainly as agricultural or mining annexes. One incident in the furthering of this ambition was the attempt to conclude a treaty of reciprocity with Canada, the effect of which, as Mr. Taft admitted, would have been to make Canada such an "annexe" of the republic. The Canadian people, however, realizing the ulterior political and commercial effects of such a treaty, refused to ratify it. Canada, in fact, belongs to another political and economic system. She gives valuable trade-preference to the manufactures of the mother-country in the Old World, and there is happily no reason to believe that she will abandon the Imperial ideals for the objects of continental Pan-Americanism. After all, the citizens of Canada and the United States are mostly of the same stock, speaking the same language and cheris.h.i.+ng the same great traditions. The two branches of the Anglo-Saxon family ought to be able, while each maintaining its own life and growth, to remain happily side by side, sharing in the new prosperity which the world owes to this latest achievement of the great republic.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] March 19, 1912.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE Ca.n.a.l AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE.

One of the most important results of the Panama Ca.n.a.l, one which is likely to have the largest influence on future political history, seems scarcely to have been noticed by writers on this subject. I have shown how much nearer Australia and New Zealand are brought to New York than to Liverpool, owing to the isthmian pa.s.sage. They are brought of course proportionately nearer to the eastern provinces, which are also the governmental headquarters of Canada. But the moving away, so to speak, of these great countries from England, and their closer approximation to the great and growing branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock in America, has the effect of locating the centre of gravity of the English-speaking races more firmly and permanently than ever in the New World. When Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have grown for another quarter of a century, and the United States have reaped for so long the advantage in wealth and power of the new waterway, the little islands of the United Kingdom may begin to appear as a detached and distant fragment, rather than as the "heart and hearth," of the British Empire and the English-speaking world. In the eighteenth century, when the English plantations in America began to develop their manufactures and had increased rapidly in population, the question was discussed in England how long she could continue to control an oversea empire, likely to be in time more populous and prosperous than the home-country itself, from these far-away islands of the Old World. It was actually suggested at that time that the King of England should carry his crown and throne where the most part of his subjects were congregated. That suggestion is not likely to be repeated. We have found a way of harmonizing local self-government with imperial unity. But the position of England in her empire is sure to be greatly modified as time goes on, and the Panama Ca.n.a.l, by bringing these vast and undeveloped continents and isles of the far south-west so much nearer to North America than to the imperial centre, cannot fail to have some influence in this direction. From a commercial point of view, its effect will be to increase the value and importance of those trade preferences which Australia gives the home country in her markets.

Probably no single country in the world, certainly no portion of the British Empire, stands to gain so tremendously from the opening of the ca.n.a.l as British Columbia. England has not yet realized what enormous resources are locked up in this province of the furthest west, which looks out from a hundred harbours to the Pacific and across to the awakening East. The long haul across the continent, the interminable sea-trail round the Horn, twice crossing the equator, kept British Columbia, until lately, outside the thought and interest, not only of Englishmen, but even of the Canadians of the administrative East. Even with the gradual filling of the empty middle and west, geography would have continued to be against British Columbia. But the Panama Ca.n.a.l makes all the difference. This province will no longer look vaguely and dreamily to the western sea-s.p.a.ces and a still half-slumbering Orient.

She will suddenly find herself at one end of a sea-route which will shorten her distance from New York by 8,415 miles and from Liverpool by 6,046 miles.

Her timber and other produce will no longer toil wearily in the holds of the "windjammer" down the whole length of Northern, Central, and Southern America. There at Balboa, less than halfway down, is the entrance of the long-desired short-cut to the world-centres of progress and enterprise. The electric thrill of this new circuit will be felt not only along the havens and fjords of the British Columbian coast, but nearly a thousand miles inland. We may say that almost the whole western half of Canada, where the golden wheat frontiers are ever advancing, will face about and henceforth look west instead of east. All the corn and produce of Alberta and Western Saskatchewan will flow, not eastwards as heretofore, but to the Pacific sh.o.r.es, there to be s.h.i.+pped for transit _via_ the ca.n.a.l to the southern and eastern United States, to the north and east of South America, and to the Old World over the Atlantic. Even the eastern and western fronts of the Dominion will feel the grip of a new link, which may serve important naval and defensive interests for Canada.

The new Pacific outlet will have many advantages over the eastern. For one thing, it is always ice-free, whereas the eastern route is icebound for five months in the year. Even now, I understand, it is appreciably cheaper in winter to send wheat from Calgary to Liverpool by Vancouver than by St. John's, New Brunswick. The freight-rate between British Columbian and United Kingdom ports should be at least halved when the ca.n.a.l is in operation. Of all cities in any clime or hemisphere, Vancouver seems to stand most surely on the threshold of a new and mighty future. She will have "greatness thrust upon her." Her citizens are preparing for the s.p.a.cious days that are about to set in. A "Great Vancouver" will probably arise from the nine local munic.i.p.alities, to provide an area and administration worthy of the dawning era. Dr. F. B.

Vrooman eloquently voiced the sentiment of the great port and of British Columbia at a recent luncheon of the Progress Club at Vancouver. He said:--

We are on the verge of nothing less than a revolution of the world's commerce, and industry, and finance, which now, as sure as fate, are destined to be transferred to the lands of the Pacific Ocean. It is not only revolution. It is such a revolution as never has been and never again can be foreordained before chaos primeval for this twentieth century of the Christian era, for there are no more hemispheres to cut in two. There are no more oceans, with half the water area on the world and twenty million square miles more than all the land surface of the globe, to be suddenly transferred into the arena of world trade. There are no more continents with the widest reaches, the richest resources, and the densest populations of the world to be awakened and developed after Asia has achieved its resurrection.

Therefore I say to you that there has got to be one port at least in the British Empire big enough to be equal to the greatest opportunity the world ever offered any city since time began. And if that city is not destined to be Vancouver, it will be for one, and for only one, reason--because the men of Vancouver have been too timid and feeble, too shortsighted and too little to take hold of what the good G.o.d has offered them.

I have already alluded to the question of coal in connection with the new ca.n.a.l. All the new routes will have to be cheaply and abundantly "coaled," or they will be at a great disadvantage in the compet.i.tion for traffic with Suez. The Isthmian Ca.n.a.l Commission of 1899-1901 pointed out that the coaling stations at San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver will in the future bear about the same relation to the route _via_ the Panama Ca.n.a.l to the Orient as the coaling stations at or near the Suez Ca.n.a.l bear to the route from Europe _via_ Suez to the Orient. Among the Pacific Islands, at Colon and Panama, and among the West Indies coal will have to be stored in big quant.i.ties for the tramps and liners and wars.h.i.+ps which will soon be drawn along these seaways by the new ca.n.a.l.

British Columbia has coal illimitable, and this interest alone ought to be quickly and mightily developed in the coming years. Happily there are men of imagination and public spirit in this great Pacific province of the empire who understand what the ca.n.a.l means to it in future wealth and welfare, and are preparing its people to take advantage of the new opportunities. Let an eloquent British Columbian, Dr. Vrooman again, open for us the broad and bright prospect:--

New markets will be found on the Atlantic for British Columbia lumber and paper. This new large demand will increase the price. But the saving of freight is an enormous item. The present freight-rates from Vancouver to Liverpool are sixteen dollars per 1,000 feet. The ca.n.a.l will give British Columbia a rate of about eight dollars per 1,000 feet. This difference per 1,000 will add to the value of British Columbia timber destined for Europe. But it is for more reasons than this that British Columbia is destined to be a vast Imperial industrial workshop. While her agricultural and horticultural possibilities are far beyond what is generally supposed, British Columbia is in natural resources and raw materials of industry one of the richest areas on the globe. But above all is she rich in mechanical power--water-power and coal. These are about to be opened up and developed. Their development soon will be beyond computation, for, roughly speaking, there is not an investment in British Columbia to-day which will not be directly increased in value by the new ca.n.a.l; but also much indirectly in the impetus given to development. This one thing--this ca.n.a.l--costing us nothing--will double, quadruple, and quintuple values out there in a few brief years. With easier access will come new trade, and new demands will create new products, and soon the innumerable water-powers of British Columbia will start the wheels of a thousand new industries. The illimitable resources of the province will be opened up, developed, and utilized at home or s.h.i.+pped abroad. The value of every town lot and of every acre of land of the 395,000 square miles of the province will be greatly enhanced; town sites will be hewed out of the forests, and the forests themselves--every stick of wood of their 182,000,000 acres of forest and woodland--will be increased in value directly, by reason of cheaper s.h.i.+pping alone, to the extent of several dollars per 1,000 feet; and in the items of lumber and wood-pulp alone the Panama Ca.n.a.l will make as a free gift to British Columbia considerably more than the United States is spending on the whole ca.n.a.l.

The mines of British Columbia, which have already produced over 70,000,000, will leap forward with renewed prosperity.

Her fisheries, which have produced 21,000,000, will be more extensively developed and, let us hope, be made again a British a.s.set--since they are wholly in the hands of the j.a.panese, who not only send their earnings home to j.a.pan, but are criminally wasteful in their methods. The coal deposits of the province, which promise to be the most extensive in the world, will, with immense deposits of iron, be opened to the world's markets. It is said that the coal-fields of one small district in the Kootenay are capable of yielding 10,000,000 tons of coal a year for over seven thousand years, and a new district has been discovered within a twelvemonth which the provincial mineralogist told me on Christmas Eve was the most important economic discovery ever made in British Columbia, where there are known to be 1,000 square miles of the best of anthracite, and which is probably the richest known anthracite district in the New World west of Pennsylvania.[21]

The references to coal are especially interesting in this pa.s.sage. It is an evidence of the public alertness in this matter that the British Columbian government has just appointed a special commissioner "to investigate and report upon all circ.u.mstances and conditions incident to the production and sale or other disposition of coal in British Columbia."

It may be certain, therefore, that the opening of the ca.n.a.l will be followed by a rapid growth of exports from Canadian ports, serving a thousand miles of hinterland, many of the vessels returning laden with the manufactures of the eastern United States and Europe, both streams of traffic flowing through the isthmian ca.n.a.l. But we must not overlook the growth in pa.s.senger traffic. The sea-pa.s.sage round by the ca.n.a.l from Europe to the Pacific states of North America will be much cheaper and to many people more pleasant than the fatiguing transcontinental railway journey. Fresh brain and muscle will enter Canada by its western portals, new needs will arise, new industries spring up, a new aeon of progress and enterprise begin on the far Pacific slopes when the first vessel mounts and descends the mighty steps of this wonder-working isthmian highway.

THE WEST INDIES.

But there is another region of the British Empire which will benefit only less, if less at all, than the Pacific province of Canada. The West Indies will feel at once the throb of a new life and interest when the ca.n.a.l is thrown open to the world's traffic. These "pearls of ocean,"

the oldest of England's oversea possessions, have lain hitherto in what the Americans call a "dead end." They are thrown across the entrances to a land-girt sea, the Mediterranean of the New World, from which there has. .h.i.therto been no exit to the west or the south, but only a return by the same pa.s.sages to east and north. A glance at a map will show how these islands, the Greater and Lesser Antilles,[22] cl.u.s.ter round the Atlantic end of the ca.n.a.l and beset all the possible sea-routes from east and north and south-east. Every vessel that makes from the Atlantic for the ca.n.a.l entrance or quits the ca.n.a.l for the Atlantic will have to pa.s.s through this star-thick storied archipelago.

The islands naturally fall into two groups, with the names I have just mentioned. The Greater Antilles, lying further to the west and north-west, consist of Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, these last being administered by Jamaica. To this group belongs, geographically and historically, the mainland colony of British Honduras, a territory rather larger than Wales, whose great value England has scarcely begun to appreciate. The Lesser Antilles, stretched like a jewelled coronet round the eastern entrance to the Caribbean, consist, north to south, of the Virgin Islands, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua, Montserrat, Dominica (these forming the Leeward Islands Confederation), St. Lucia, Barbados, St. Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad, and Tobago (the Windward Islands). With this group goes naturally British Guiana, on the continent east of the Spanish Main, a territory much larger than Great Britain, which should also begin to develop its vast resources more adequately when the ca.n.a.l is opened.

These islands, being largely inhabited by black people, cannot be entrusted with complete self-government like purely white communities.

They are under various forms of what is known as crown colony government. For example, Trinidad and the Windward Islands are under the complete control of the British Colonial Office, while Barbados and Jamaica enjoy a large measure of self-rule. But this division into a large number of small governments without any connection with each other is extremely expensive, and proposals have been made for a federation of the British West Indies either in one great system, including them all, with British Honduras and Guiana thrown in, or in two systems embracing respectively the Greater and the Lesser Antilles.

England, it must be confessed, has treated her splendid West Indian empire very badly. In order that she might have sugar "dirt-cheap" at home she allowed the great staple product of the isles and mainland, cane-sugar, to be brought to the verge of ruin by the compet.i.tion of European bounty-fed beet-sugar. Happily there was a statesman of strong imperial sympathies in England, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who arranged the Brussels Sugar Convention with certain Powers of Europe, all of which agreed to suppress their own bounties and to impose countervailing duties on bounty-fed sugar imported from countries outside the convention. This gave the West Indies a fairer chance of compet.i.tion, and they quickly felt the benefit. But the convention was always opposed in England by certain industries in which sugar is used and is therefore wanted as cheap as possible, and notice has recently been given, despite the protests and alarms of the West Indies, that England intends to withdraw from the convention. And this, too, without any sort of compensation for the sugar-islands, which had begun to rely upon the protection against unfair compet.i.tion afforded by that instrument.

England has withdrawn her garrisons and, what is still more serious, almost her entire navy from the West Indies. When the terrible earthquake occurred at Kingston in Jamaica in 1907, there was no English s.h.i.+p-of-war anywhere near to render help and to maintain order, and this duty had to be performed by vessels of the American fleet. Five days after that disaster the correspondent of _The Times_ wrote: "It is difficult to describe the sense of humiliation with which an Englishman surveys Kingston harbour this evening--two American battles.h.i.+ps, three German steamers, a Cuban steamer, and one British s.h.i.+p; she leaves to-night, and the white ensign and the red ensign will be as absent from Kingston harbour as from the military basins of Kiel and Cherbourg." And this is what England calls ruling the waves and being mistress of the seas! Later in the same year she had another lesson. Rioting broke out in St. Lucia, once, but no longer, an important naval base. It was a whole week before an English cruiser arrived, though a Dutch man-of-war, the _Gelderland_, was anch.o.r.ed in the s.p.a.cious harbour of Castries, St.

Lucia's capital.

This, one must allow, is a slovenly way of conducting a great empire. If these methods are pursued after the Panama Ca.n.a.l is opened, the results will be disastrous. A complete change will have to be made in the att.i.tude of England and the Colonial Office to the British West Indian Islands. For these islands, instead of being tucked away in a sort of cul-de-sac, or inland lake, will henceforth be thrown right across or alongside the main highways of the world's ocean-traffic. Look again at the map and see how the most direct sea-route from New York, the eastern states and Canada to Colon and Cristobal comes down through the Windward Pa.s.sage, between Cuba and Haiti, and then right past the eastern end of Jamaica, quite close to the magnificent bay on which Kingston stands.

Look again and see how the routes from Liverpool, Southampton, and the Old World pa.s.s through the Lesser Antilles, either Leeward or Windward, further east. The most direct of these trails pa.s.ses through the Virgin Islands, the most northerly group, and one of these is said to possess a harbour of which a good deal might be made. But this is not by any means the only line of approach to the entrance of the ca.n.a.l. A more southerly route near Barbados or Trinidad might be chosen, and certainly would be chosen by vessels intending to call at ports along the old Spanish Main.

Trinidad will indeed lie right across the direct route from ports on the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada, as well as from the Far East, to Brazil and the Atlantic coast of South America--a trade which may well grow to very large proportions, considering the vast undeveloped resources of the Orinoco and Amazon basins. Valuable deposits of petroleum have also been discovered in Trinidad, and this should add greatly to the wealth and importance of that island as oil replaces coal for fuel. Oil-bunkering stations will be wanted at many points in the West Indies.

Trinidad and Kingston seem likely to benefit most from the traffic to and from Cristobal, the new Atlantic terminal of the ca.n.a.l. Both are splendidly equipped by Nature to act as coaling and repairing stations as well as centres for the distribution of goods. Kingston has a superb harbour, and so also has Port of Spain (the capital of Trinidad) in the Gulf of Paria, a natural landlocked harbour in which the fleets of the whole world could lie in safety--and, it is important to add, outside the hurricane zone. Trinidad lies right athwart the mouths of the Orinoco River. The years that are coming will see a tremendous development of the resources of these rich tropical basins, and Port of Spain is a natural port of exit and entry for the trade of regions where Raleigh sought the fabled Manoa or El Dorado.

It is too soon to try to indicate in detail the effects which the Panama Ca.n.a.l is likely to have on the trade and production of the islands themselves. The sugar industry is reviving under the influence of the Treaty of Reciprocity concluded between a large number of the islands and the Dominion of Canada. Probably the sugar for the tea-tables and apple-tarts of Vancouver, and a good many places far to the north and east, will be brought from the West Indies to Vancouver. But the islands will benefit more directly and immediately through the immense growth of traffic in the Caribbean Sea, the supply of coal and other necessities to this increased s.h.i.+pping, and in general through the publicity the islands will enjoy, which will mean a growing invasion of "globe-trotters," and consequently a big development of agricultural resources and an influx of new capital.

An almost certain and immediate result of the new route, I may say in pa.s.sing, will be a large increase of the tourist traffic to England and Europe from the western coasts of North and South America. When the fares are lowered, and the traveller can do the journey wholly by water, without the trouble of changing from railroad to steamer, we may be sure that a rapidly growing tide of pa.s.sengers will set eastwards as well as westwards through the ca.n.a.l.

But, to return to the West Indies, every nation is preparing to develop or establish in these regions harbours and coaling-stations and other facilities for its trade. For example, a Danish company proposes to establish connection between Copenhagen and San Francisco through the island of St. Thomas, one of the Virgin group. At St. Thomas, by the way, is shown the castle of Edward Teach, or "Blackbeard," the very beau ideal of a skull and crossbones pirate who, according to "Tom Cringle's Log," wore a beard in three plaits a foot long, and a full-dress purple velvet coat, under which bristled many pistols and two naked daggers over eighteen inches long, and who had generally a lighted match in his c.o.c.ked hat with which he lit his pipe or fired a cannon, as the occasion demanded. "One of his favourite amus.e.m.e.nts when he got half-slewed was to adjourn to the hold with his compotators, and, kindling some brimstone matches, to dance and roar as if he had been the devil himself, until his allies were nearly suffocated. At another time he would blow out the candles in the cabin and blaze away with his loaded pistols at random right and left.... He was kind to his fourteen wives as long as he was sober, and never murdered above three of them." This very improper, but picturesque, gentleman was run down at last by H.M.

frigates the _Lime_ and the _Pearl_ to a creek of North Carolina, where, with thirty men in an eight-gun schooner, he made a desperate fight for life, killing and wounding more than the number of his own crew, and dying where he fell, faint with the loss of blood, overcome by superior numbers alone. Whether "Blackbeard" ever inhabited the castle at St.

Thomas may be questioned, but the island ought to benefit from the ca.n.a.l, as it lies right across the main entrance to the Caribbean from the Atlantic.

The German steams.h.i.+p lines are awake to the new opportunities, the Hamburg-Amerika preparing for the new emigrant traffic between Europe and Western America. Germany, it is said, is negotiating for a coaling-station in Hayti, which, with its two negro republics, stands to profit immensely from the new conditions. No one has troubled much about this splendid island of late. It has had a dark and terrible history.

Discovered by Columbus, who called it _Hispaniola_, it was occupied by the Spanish adventurers who found alluvial gold there. Then it became the headquarters of the "buccaneers" who succeeded to the gallant and courtly sea-rovers of the Elizabethan period and became formidable about the year 1630. One of these buccaneers was that Henry Morgan who sacked the old town of Panama in 1671, and then became quite a respectable character, governor of Jamaica, and dubbed knight by Charles II. It was in Hispaniola, or Hayti, that this species of Western viking got their name. The island had been depopulated by the Spaniards, but the cattle and hogs they had introduced became wild and repopulated the land in their own kind. Thus Hispaniola became a splendid provisioning base for the s.h.i.+ps of the buccaneers. They hunted the cattle and preserved the meat, smoke-drying it in the Indian fas.h.i.+on. This industry was called _boucanning_, and from it the buccaneers were named.