The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-09-09
THE RECKLESS DAYS
 IN TIE CANAL ZONE Romance of Costly Expend- itures on the Great
 Ditch. HEAPS OF LOST MONEY The Work Begun Twenty Five Years Ago to
 Be Done Now.
HEAPS OF LOST MONEY

QoHe. The canal Will De DullC Salu President Roosevelt the other day, after inspecting the work of the Pan anna Canal, which the United States have undertaken to complete. Thus it seems that we have reached the last stage of one of the greatest engineer ing enterprises in human history, and one the story of which, though much of it is now forgotten, is about the most remarkable ever told of any un- dertaking.
 A quarter of century has gone since this gigantic task of cutting waterway through the isthmus which connects North and South America was first begun. De Lesseps' engineering commission estimated its cost at 843,- O00,000 francs; De Lesseps himself placed the figure at 6OOSOOO,0OO francs or 24,0O0,0OO pounds, and began the stupendous work with the ligntest and most confident of hearts. Less than eight years later his company was bankrupt with 7OOOOOOO of debts, and only a quarter of the work was completed.
 Probably never was q greater fiascO brought about by such reckless ex- travagance. "I had no idea," wrote an engineer who visited Panama few years after the~~companys col
 lapse, until I went and saw for my self, what reckless, fabulous extrava- gance there was on the isthmus from 1881 to 1889. The sum of $26S, ,000,-
 900 was spent in building about one fourth of the Panama Canal Com potent engineers say that the same work, barring the accidents from the rising of the Chagres River, could be done to-day for about $35, 100000. To
 be exact, the DeLesseps company spent about $250, ,000O00, and ex- cavated less than 7o,O00,O0O cubic yards of earth and gravel
 "The Californans talk about the palmy days when extrayagance was the rule in San Francisco and at Vir- ginia City, but these were not compar-
 able with the days in 1883 and 1894, when men made 1,000,O ,O00 francs pro- fit month at Panama and Colon, I met ono man there who sold mules and donkeys to- the Panama Canal company in 1882, and made $300,000
 clear between June and September from an invested capital of $20,000. He told me of a man from New Or leans who brought down a stock of rubber boots Unnecessary in working | in the swamps and streams) worth about $6,000 and who sold the whole lot to @ contractor for the canal com
 pany for $50,00O cash down."
 Strange tales, too are told of high salaried officials who gave grand balls at which champagne was drunk by the gobletful and men and women amused themselves by throwing handfuls of ! b0ld and silver coins out of the win
 dows to see the natives fight and scramble on the ground for it. They tell of the orchestra of twenty Pari-
 sian musicians that was kept at Colon for three years at large expense, sole ly to furnish music for the canal of ficials and their friends of an evening" They tell, too, of the equipages of
 the canal company at Colon in those
 days, and of the women and men
 who played night after night baccarat with one hand and roulette with tho
 other. These are but samples of the prodigal wasting of money by the company which undertook to con- struct the canal and whose failure hra,,rrl+ ,,,i,0 c., tane of 4l,o,,ea,,Je Of investors in France And equally re- markable is the description of the state of things after work had ceased.
 Machinery and apparatus that had cost millions of dollars were left to rot in the swamp and forests. There
 were hundreds of dredges brought from France and Belgium at a cost of 5000 pounds each, enormous steam cranes from Birmingham worth 1,- 500 apiece, wagons, thousands of steel Tails, heaps of railway tools and steel cables-all abandoned and buried in dirt and rust Machinery
 which had cost 100000 pounds was strewn along the line of the canal for
 a distance of about forty miles. Ten steam pumps and reservoirs, which had cost not less than 10000 pounds, I were lying in a heap just as they had been dumped from the cars, the crat- ing not even having been removed, while at q place near Almazilla, elev-
 en miles from Panama, there was a pile of rusted rails, which had never been used which could not have been bought under 10000 pounds.
 Rusting in sheds were a hundred
 and twenty locomotives-English, French, Belgian and American; at the
 canals mouth a dozen large tugboats
 were lying rotten and useless while on
 a grass grown, decaying spur of the
 construction railroad, few miles
 southwest of the Culebra cut, were a ] Philadelphia locomotive and a train
 of seventeen cars standing just
 where the engineer shut off steam
 when the financial bubble burst and
 he and the crew left their work. The
 soil was soft and spongy, and the weight of the locomotive and cars had borne so heavily on the track that the
 train had sunk a yard deep in the
 ooze
 In the mud and made ground about
 the harbor at Colon were tons upon
 tons of costly machinery which had
 been dumped into the sea without even having been taken from the cas-
 es. Engines. with wrong gauges. i'm
 ported from Belgium at enormous ex-
 pense, were disposed Of in this way An outer wall to break the dash of
 the waves was made of gigantic