establishing any communication between her sea of the Antilles and the
South Sea. The mystery enveloping the deliberations of the council of
the Indies has not always remained so profound that we could not know
what was going on in that body. The Spanish government afterward opened
up to Humboldt free access to its archives, and in these he found
several memoirs on the possibility of a union between the two oceans;
but he says that in no one of them did he find the main point, the
height of the elevations on the isthmus, sufficiently cleared up, and
he could not fail to remark that the memoirs were exclusively French or
English. Spain herself gave it no thought. Since the glorious age of
Balbao among the people, indeed, the project of a canal was in every
one's thoughts. In the very wayside talks, in the inns of Spain, when a
traveler from the New World chanced to pass, after making him tell of
the wonders of Lima and Mexico, of the death of the Inca, Atahualpa,
and the bloody defeat of the Aztecs, and after asking his opinion of El
Dorado, the question was always about the two oceans, and what great
things would happen if they could succeed in joining them.

During the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spain
had need of the best mode of conveyance for her treasures across the
isthmus. Yet those from Peru came by the miserable route from Panama to
the deadliest of climates. Porto Bello and her European wares for
her colonies toiled up the Chagres river, while the roughest of
communication farther north connected the Chimalapa and the Guasacoalcos
in Mexico, and the trade there was limited sternly to but one port on
each side. As late as Humboldt's visit, in 1802, when remarking upon the
"unnatural modes of communication" by which, through painful delays, the
immense treasures of the New World passed from Acapulco, Guayaquil,
and Lima, to Spain, he says: "These will soon cease whenever an active
government, willing to protect commerce, shall construct a good road