242 SUNSHINE AND SPORT IN 



the next. Brindley, the engineer, was of opinion 

 that rivers were made that they might feed canals, 

 but he did not know the Chagres. It drove the 

 French to despair ; and the Americans have not 

 yet mastered its vagaries. Indeed, they have 

 Nature in her most hostile mood up against them ; 

 a rank luxuriance of vegetation beyond all control, 

 a damp climate that corrodes machinery almost in 

 action and makes man limp, and stubborn rock 

 that taxes even the brutal forces of ninety-ton 

 steam-shovels. 



Yet both scenery and climate will come as an 

 agreeable disappointment to those who have drawn 

 their inspiration from the gloomy descriptions of 

 home-sick employes. To Dampier and his de- 

 voted band, who crossed it on foot that rainy 

 spring of 1681, the Isthmus was "damnably heart- 

 breaking," and so, no doubt, it remains to any 

 footsore tramp without the price of a railway 

 ticket. Seen comfortably through the eyes of 

 what natives of tropical seaports have learnt to 

 call, without discrimination, " damfool Cook," the 

 tropical vegetation and brilliant colouring of land 

 and sky, with traveller's-palm, tree-fern, towering 

 timber festooned with lianas and jewelled with 

 orchids ; picturesque native villages in the fore- 

 ground ; further back, hazy mountains that send 

 down their gathering torrents to feed all this rank 

 verdure of the plains, make a far from unpleasant 

 picture. To those, I say, who have based their 

 anticipations of the country on the accounts posted 

 home by disillusioned exiles, the first impression 

 of the Isthmus will be a revelation, for the gay bird 

 of passage, who has but to flit back to the ship 



