The isthmus of central America which connects the two continents is exceedingly fertile, produces coffee, bananas, sugar and whatever else foreign capital is willing to plant there; but the climate is hard on the white man and the volcanoes, which abound in this region, are hard on both the blacks and the whites.
To most people Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica are merely romantic names, for this one rule holds good all over the world:“the emptier the country’s national treasury, the more elaborate its stamps.” But the next country, the Republic of Panama, is of great importance to us. It is a child of our own, though I suppose we had to take ti, as we are the only independent nation which has to guard a Pacific as well as an Atlantic sea-front and if we had waited for Colombia to sell it to us, we would still be haggling with the Colombian senators about the .price they wanted to affix their signature to the deed of surrender.
That this isthmus was only a very narrow strip of land had already been known to the Spaniards after Balboa from his peak in Darien had contemplated both oceans at one and the same moment. And as early as the year 1551 the Spaniards were playing with the idea of digging a canal of their own. Since then every generation was to hear of new plans. Every man of any importance in the realm of science favoured the world with at least one set of blue-prints showing how the puzzle could be best solved. But digging a canal through almost thirty miles of hard rock was a serious problem until Alfred Nobel made his unfortunate invention and gave us that dynamite with which he expected to remove tree-stumps and boulders from a farmer’s fields but which he never intended to be used for the more common purpose of killing one’s neighbours.
Then came the California gold rush when thousands of people hastened to Panama so as not to be obliged to make the long detour via Cape Horn; and for them Ac trans-isthmus railroad was built in 1855. Fifteen years later the world heard of the unexpected success of the Suez canal. Ferdinand de Lesseps, its author, now decided to try his hand at connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic. But the company he founded was scandalously mismanaged and his engineers had made so many errors in their calculations and his workmen died so miserably from malaria and yellow fever, that after eight years of struggle against the forces of Nature and the less direct but even more disastrous forces of the Paris Exchange, the French company went most disreputably out of existence.
Then nothing was done for almost a dozen years and palm trees grew out of the smokestacks of the locomotives left behind by de Lesseps, until finally in the year 1902 the United States government bought the rights of the bankrupt French concern. Thereupon Washington and the Republic of Colombia began to haggle about the price that America would eventually have to pay for a strip of land wide enough for her canal. Until Theodore Roosevelt, tired of the delay, arranged for a private little rebellion of his own in that somewhat out-of-the-way part of the world, recognized the new and independent Republic of Panama in less than twenty-four hours and began to dig. That happened in the year 1903 and in 1914 the job was finished.
This changed the Caribbean Sea from an inland sea to part of the commercial highway between Europe and Asia and it greatly increased the value of the islands which it cut off from the Atlantic Ocean. The Bahamas, which are English and Cuba are a little too far out of the way, as is of course Bermuda, another English possession half-way between New York and Florida. But Jamaica (English) and Haiti and San Domingo (nominally independent but ask Washington!) are in a better position to derive some benefits from the canal. So is Porto Rico and so are all the Lesser Antilles, the small islands to the east and the south, which face the Greater Antilles, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and Porto Rico.
These Lesser Antilles were of much greater value to the European nations of the seventeenth century than the American mainland. For they were hot and sufficiently moist to raise sugarcane and the slaves, once on shore, could not disappear in the jungle. To-day they still raise sugar and cocoa and coffee but most of them would be deeply grateful if they could make a few extra pennies as half-way stations for ships bound from Europe to the Panama canal. In order of their appearance these are first of all the so-called Leeward Islands, St Thomas, Santa Cruz St Martin, Saba, St John, St Eustatius (a small rock, chief port for smuggled supplies during the Revolution), Guadalupe, Dominica and Martinique (very volcanic like most of the others and almost destroyed by Mt Pelée in 1902).
The Windward Islands consist of Blanquilla (which belongs to Venezuela), Bonaire, Cura?ao and Oruba, which are Dutch. All of these islands once upon a time were part of the outer ridge of a mountain chain that connected the Guiana Range of Venezuela with the Sierra Madre of Mexico. That mountain ridge was destroyed but the high individual tops remained behind.
From an industrial point of view, none of these islands is doing any too well. The abolition of slavery has destroyed their former riches and to-day they are best known as winter resorts or coaling stations or ol-distributing centers. Only Trinidad, just off the delta of the Orinoco, retains some of her prosperity, because it volcanoes have favoured her with large asphalt deposits, worked by Hindus, who came to take the place of the old slaves and who now form one-third of the total population.