THE NICARAGUAN CANAL. 709 



ENGINEERING. 



THE NICARAGUAN CANAL. 



J. W. MILLER. 



Just at this time, when attention is directed to the Central American war, 

 perhaps the attitude of the national government may be better understood and 

 its importance to us more fully realized after reading the following relating to 

 the proposed Nicaraguan Canal, written by J. W. Miller, superintendent of the 

 St, Louis, Ft. Scott & Wichita Railroad Company. Mr. Miller was in the naval 

 service, and twice made survey of the Nicaraguan and Panama routes, prior to 

 his journey round the world with Gen. Grant. A man of unusual intelligence 

 and culture, with powers of observation that make his notes of special value at 

 this time, from which liberal extracts are taken : 



Few persons seem at all aware how simple an engineering feat the canal 

 problem present ot Nicaragua. The summit level is the lake, only one hundred 

 feet above tide-water. From its southeastern end flows the San Juan River, 

 which can be used for more than sixty miles of its length, leaving only forty-five 

 miles for a canal. This canal runs through a low alluvial land, no excavations 

 are necessary, no tunnels have to be bored, while the last seven miles before 

 reaching the Atlantic is simply ditch work through the swamps and lagoons, 

 where there is already an average of seven feet of water. 



To return to the upper part of the San Juan. Sixty miles are to be utilized 

 by damming the stream. This idea has been ridiculed by various engineers on 

 the score that freshets would wash away the dams — a natural though hasty con- 

 clusion to be reached by any one conversant with the immense destructive force 

 produced by tropical water rainfalls. But note that at Nicaragua alone freshets 

 do not occur, for the lake is in an immense basin, one hundred miles long by 

 thirty broad, into which the old surrounding country is drained, the river San 

 Juan being simply an outlet, never rising more than six feet during the entire 

 year. Contrast this gradual rise with the "cataract" which would be formed in the 

 Chagres River if the Panama Canal were built. Slack water navigation is, there- 

 fore, feasible on the San Juan, and feasible nowhere else upon the Isthmus, for 

 at no other point is there a constant level reservoir. " But," we are told, " the 

 locks win necessCTily be of such size that traffic will be suspended through the 

 time taken to fill and discharge them, and ships endangered by the breaking of 

 flood-gates." Mr. Menocal has gotten over these objections in his ingenious 

 method of admitting and discharging the water of the locks. If not. Captain 

 Eads' railway can be used' in connection with the canal. None of the short 

 canals around the dams are to be more than tv/o miles long, and marine railways 



