CHAPTER X
HOW THE FRENCH TRIED TO DIG THE CANAL
THERE is a large, iron steam-launch, used by our government to carry sick canal-workers to the sanatorium on Taboga Island, that was brought to the Isthmus by the French, but for a very different purpose. With two oceans to float it in, they stuck this launch high and dry at the bottom of the unfinished Gaillard Cut, to the great astonishment of the Americans who found it there in 1904. It had been placed there, explained an old employee of the French company, and a trench dug round it, so that when the floods of the rainy season filled the trench, a clever photographer could take a picture showing "navigation through the Cut." Such a picture, when exhibited in Paris, would make people think the work was nearly finished, and that the money they had invested in it was well spent. It is a good illustration of how the French tried to dig the Canal.
From the beginning, the French Canal Company (known in full as "La Société International du Canal Interoceanique") sailed a great many boats on dry land and made people believe they were afloat. They sent Lieutenant Lucien Napoleon Bonaparte Wyse of the French Navy, to make a survey of the Isthmus in 1877, and, though he never went more than two-thirds of the distance from Panama to Colon, he brought back com-
