unattractive man, almost unknown before his election—the first “black horse” in American presidential politics—he was an outspoken expansionist. He restated the Monroe Doctrine but in much stronger terms, and it did not take him long to get his country into a war with Mexico. That war ended February 2, 1848, but the peace treaty, signed in the field, did not contain one of the provisions President Polk had demanded—the right of the United States to survey and, if it saw fit, to build a canal or a road or both in the isthmus of Tehuantepec. Polk did get for his country the vast sprawling southwest territory, including all of California. It was a breathtaking land grab, and it frightened the Latin-American nations, many of whom thereafter, given a choice of evils, were inclined to favor the protection of Great Britain rather than that of El Coloso del Norte.
Polk was succeeded by General Zachary Taylor, “Old Rough and Ready” to the troops, who had no use for expansion; but the Situation in Nicaragua remained grave.
An American Company of private interests had been granted a charter to build a canal across Nicaragua, but it could scarcely be expected even to start digging as long as Great Britain was holding San Juan del Norte—or Greytown, as the British themselves called it—in the name of the Mosquito kingdom; for this palm-thatch hovel guarded the mouth of the San Juan River. To make the prospect even more glum, a Royal Navy captain in the Pacific seized an is-land in the Gulf of Fonseca, raising the Union Jack there and claiming the place for his country, his given reason being that Honduras, which owned the island, had failed to pay Great Britain some money she owed, though his real reason, as everybody knew, was that the island controlled what was then thought of as the logical western end of the proposed canal. After this, on the other side of the isthmus, an American naval commander bombarded San Juan del Norte, smashing many huts, but killing nobody since he had first warned the inhabitants to get out of town. Both of these actions were to be disavowed by superiors, and apologies were to be made and reparations agreed upon; but either could have led to war.
Something had to be done.
Sir Henry Bulwer was sent as special envoy to Washington, and he conferred many times with the secretary of state, John M. Clayton. What they finally came up with was not a victory for either side, but a compromise.
The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty mentioned “the Mosquito Coast” several times in connection with other parts of Central America, but never named the tribe of Indians or their chief, and it did not disclaim the British protectorate. It would have permitted either party to build a canal across any part of Central America, but it pledged each to forego “any exclusive control over the said Ship-Canal,” to abstain from any manner of fortifications intended to protect such a canal, and never to “occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or any part of Central America.” In the event of war between the two signatories, the treaty provided, and no matter which had built it, the canal was to remain strictly neutral, open to the vessels of all nations; and it was never to be blockaded, in any circumstances.13
This was not a good treaty, and it was to cause trouble later, but perhaps it was the best thing that could be done at the time. It met with much bitter Opposition in the United States Senate, but eventually squeaked through. It was promulgated July 5, 1850.
“And there,” many men muttered, “goes the Monroe Doctrine.”
They were mistaken.
Chapter
4
The Rush for the Gold
Virtually neglected for more than two hundred years, the idea of an interoceanic canal came back strong early in the nineteenth Century after the American colonies, Spanish and English, had won their independence. Great men with great minds at least toyed with the idea from time to time—Dewitt Clinton, Alexander Humboldt, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin. Many others, men who actually made plans, who applied for Charters, might best be described as overly imaginative, a trifle too enthusiastic.
Locks were by no means unknown, but some of those proposed for the waterway between the Atlantic and the Pacific were new to this world.
There was the self-styled engineer who submitted to the Mexican authorities a plan for a canal at the Tehuantepec “waist.” This canal would be elevated, placed upon stone stilts somewhat after the manner of an ancient Roman aqueduct, only much larger. The ships at either end would be hoisted—cargo, passengers, and all—into this contraption by means of a hydraulic apparatus, and floated gracefully across the land, over the mountains, which were notably low at this point. The plan was not accepted.
There was the man who would have pierced the Panama mountains with a tunnel, to be entered by means of a series of locks on either side. The tunnel was to be 3.3 miles long. It was never dug.
There was the ineffable Felix Belly, a French newspaperman who could talk his way into almost anything, and who, for several years, had Nicaraguan government circles agog with his gorgeous canal plans while American and British diplomats watched and listened aghast. Belly was not an engineer, not a diplomat, not a financier, but he had a most wonderfully persuasive tongue. His plans, entirely impractical, got nowhere; and he went back to France and wrote a book about it, like a general after a war blaming everybody but himself.
Another who wrote about the canal possibilities of Nicaragua was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of the Corsican and in the eyes of many the rightful Emperor Napoleon III of France. He was visited by a Nicaraguan statesman, who poured facts over him. The prince was impressed; but since he was in jail at the time, as a result of an ill-advised attempt to seize the throne, he could do little about raising funds. The visitor even proposed to name the project after the prisoner, Canale Napoleone de Nicaragua, in exchange for the use of his name on a prospectus. The prince agreed. He even wrote the prospectus itself, extolling the Nicaraguan route over that of Panama, though he had never visited either place. Once he had escaped, however, fleeing to England, he forgot about the matter.
There was Commander Bedford Clapperton Pim, R.N., a fanatical empire builder who hated the United States, and who on nothing and with no authority started to lay out plans for a combined railroad and canal across Nicaragua, ignoring the fact that an American Company already held the concession. Pim’s strange behavior was stopped short by his superiors, who sent him home.
There was Charles, Baron de Thierry, who talked the Colombian government into giving him an exclusive charter to build either a railroad or a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. There were those who doubted Thierry’s right to the title of baron, but everybody doubted his title of king of Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas, as well as the title of king of the Maoris. He cut quite a swathe at Bogotá for some time, but he never did do anything about his charter, and soon he was off to New Zealand to rule over some of his subjects, who had never heard of him. He faded out, after a while, in a haze of bankruptcy.
Thierry s charter, when it lapsed, was taken up by three New Yorkers—William Henry Aspinwall and Henry Chauncey, financiers, and John Lloyd Stephens, a lawyer by profession but distinguised also as an archaeologist and travel writer. Stephens was the president.
These men meant business. They hired a couple of first-rate engineers and sent them to the isthmus to make a survey, and they floated stock to raise a million dollars, more or less, in the money market.
A curious thing had happened, just before they got their concession, a thing that would change history and most emphatically change the fate of the Panama Railroad Company. A casual contractor, a carpenter named James W. Marshall, who was building a sawmill for that eccentric Swiss John Augustus Sutter on the south branch of the American River in California, one evening thought he saw something that might be gold glitter in the tailrace of the almost completed mill, and he picked
