THE PANAMA CANAL 
199 
HANDLING SUPPLIES 
It is the hope of the canal authorities 
that Congress will enact a law permitting 
the canal to furnish coal, ship-chandlery 
stores, and everything else that is needed 
by ships which would use the canal. 
They would not make it a government 
monopoly, but would leave others free 
to compete. The present laundry would 
be maintained, receiving a ship's laundry 
as soon as the vessel reached the canal, 
and delivering it back by the time the 
transit of the canal was finished. If 
authority is forthcoming, a commercial 
drydock will be maintained and large 
repair shops kept open. 
One advantage vessels will have in 
passing through the Panama Canal is the 
fact that the 32-mile section between 
Gatun and Pedro Miguel will be filled 
entirely with fresh water, and that this 
will serve to remove the barnacles from 
the ships. Colonel Goethals says he ex- 
pects the entire bottom of the canal to 
be paved with ships' barnacles in the 
years to come. 
It is believed that the best possible 
way to encourage vessels to choose the 
Panama route is to have there at fair 
prices and in sufficient quantities every- 
thing that a ship thousands of knots from 
home may need. With the knowledge 
that such things may always be had and 
that prices will not be put up on any 
pleas of scarcity, the ships of the world 
could sail via Panama with a larger pro- 
portionate load of revenue - producing 
cargo than by any other route. 
WORK AT GATUN 
There is perhaps no other work on 
the whole canal more interesting than 
that at Gatun. Here it is that one gets 
a view of some of the most stupendous 
work on the great waterway. Gatun 
Dam is now taking shape and soon will 
be up to its full height. To the tourist 
it is a most disappointing sight. When 
he approaches Gatun he inquires where 
the dam is, for, be it said, the slope of 
the structure is so gentle that few people 
recognize it as a dam. Take a yard-stick 
and elevate one end three inches above 
the other, and you have about the aver- 
age slope of the down-stream face o£ the 
dam. On the upstream side the slope 
would be represented, so far as the part 
under water is concerned, if you elevated 
the one end of your yard-stick four and 
a half inches higher than the other end. 
The completed dam will cover some 
400 acres of ground and will contain 21 
million cubic yards of material — enough 
to make a wall of earth three feet high 
and three feet thick and reaching nearly 
half way around the world. 
The dam has been full of surprises, 
but very difl^erent kinds of surprises 
from those which the pessimists were 
expecting. The site was for a long time 
called into question. When Colonel Goe- 
thals took charge he immediately put into 
effect a policy of not taking even the 
smallest thing for granted when he could 
prove a thing by actual test. After the 
assertion had been made thousands of 
times that there was an underground 
river flowing beneath the dam site, he 
honeycombed the whole area with bor- 
ings and sunk a big shaft down to solid 
foundation, so that he could see with his 
own eyes. He found almost none of the 
conditions the fearful ones had pictured. 
But, in order to forestall all criticism, he 
planned the dam so as to include triple 
interlocking steel sheet piling across the 
valley, driven down to bed-rock, and a 
dam that should be 135 feet high^ — 50 
feet above the v/ater level. 
Then came the famous "collapse" of 
the dam, wired to the American press by 
a Panama newspaper reporter. People 
did not stop to think that there was as 
yet no dam there to collapse, and Presi- 
dent Roosevelt was alarmed at the wide- 
spread uneasiness. It was this that led 
him to send the board of engineers to 
the Isthmus, accompanied by President- 
elect Taft. 
The net result of the trip was that the 
engineers declared the dam was being 
built needlessly high, and that there was 
no occasion whatever for the use of the 
piling. So it was cut down to 115 feet., 
and the piling was omitted. After all,, 
the story that shook the confidence of 
the American people in the dam bore 
good fruit in the resulting saving in the 
construction of that dam. The only 
