of California was hers. Some emigration from Oregon had taken place, however, and after the question between Texas and Mexico in 1836, the menace of war between the AngloAmerican Republic of the United States and the SpanishAmerican Republic of Mexico ever existed, which some day was destined to be wiped out in blood. Errors on both sides and the question of slavery, which Mexico forbade and the Texans and the Americans upheld, influenced the rupture at length, and, as a result, California was lost to Mexico, as well as the other enormous territories-Texas, New Mexico and other areas in 1848, just before the discovery of gold in California. The loss of this territory was bitterly resented by the Mexicans; and it is to be recollected that under Iturbide (1821) the Empire of Mexico was the third largest in the world, coming after the Russian and Chinese Empire in point of size.

We have seen that Spanish and British influences have been those which have dictated the possession and civilization of these vast territories of the Great Pacific Coast. Yet there was another people engaged in planting the seeds of their own system-religious and social-in the north-west Pacific region. Russia held Alaska, the huge Asia-fronting province verging on the Arctic Circle, by right of Behring's discoveries, and the Greek Church and Russian nomenclature still form salient features of Alaskan towns. But Russia had little ambition to be an American power; and in 1867 she sold Alaska to the United States for one and a half millions sterling, and by so relinquishing her sphere upon that continent earned the regard of the United States. The Behring Sea question which arose between the United States and Great Britain and Canada was a source of irritation and danger for many years, but it was settled by arbitration, in Paris, 1893; the exclusive rights in Behring Sea which had been put forward by the United States being disallowed, as also the monopoly of the fur seal fishing. After this there remained the matter of the boundary between Canada and Alaska to be settled, and this was definitely concluded in 1903, by a joint commission.

Thus the tale of the geographical discovery, distribution and possession of the vast littoral of the Great Pacific Coast

has drawn to its close. Yet stay! there is one item still. Balboa first saw the Pacific in 1513; Magellan rounded the southern end of South America in 1521; Behring and Cook explored its northernmost points in 1740 and 1778; Franklin and others navigated the Arctic in the nineteenth century. But by whom, and when, was this monstrous island of the two Americas to be circumnavigated at the north? We heard the answer in 1908, at the Royal Geographical Society, when a brave Norwegian sailor-Roald Amundsen-and a few companions came back from their journey in a small fishing-boat, having completed "the most interesting voyage there remained to be achieved on this earth."1 Starting in 1903 from the Atlantic side, they had navigated the Northwest Passage in the little Gjoa, sailing westward and emerging into the ocean which washes the Great Pacific Coast. Thus, only yesterday, was the circumnavigation of America completed. In September 1909 the world was startled by the reported discovery of the North Pole by the American explorer, Dr. Cook, who claimed to have arrived thereon earlier in the previous year, and a few days afterwards by that of another American explorer, Commander Peary.

Thus we have informed ourselves, good reader, as wise travellers ever do, of the outline of the history of the region we are going to visit-these sunset-lands where roll twelve thousand miles of ocean surge against the Pacific shores.

1 Royal Geographical Journal.

III

CENTRAL AMERICA: THE LAND OF THE ISTHMUS

If there is one piece of land in the New World, or indeed upon the Globe, which, from its singular structure, forms a centre of topographical interest, that piece of land is the Isthmus of Panama. The Great Pacific Coast is being called upon to yield up its impenetrable continuity. The "secret of the strait," so long dreamed of by voyaging explorers, is finally to be solved; the passage from sea to sea, which nature made æons ago and closed up again in the Tertiary ages before man appeared, is to be opened once more. For man has left his Quaternary caves and savage yesterday, and now, having a mind to pass great war-canoes and mighty rafts of merchandise from one side of America to another, has marshalled an army of human workers and is cutting through the low backbone of the Andes here to make the Panama Canal.

Cogitating thus, I turned aside to view a heap of rusting engines amid riotous vegetation and iron wrack-a corner of the remains of the De Lesseps' régime which had remained untouched by the American engineers; and I observed part of an ancient railway track, whose rusty rails ended in a mosquito-haunted swamp. Whilst I looked at it it seemed to move, or be alive, and I saw a thick stream of tropical ants walking along the rails, to disappear among the vegetation. An hour afterwards I beheld the stream of human ants in the famous Culebra Cut, and the mighty earth-moving engines they manoeuvred-splendid human ants of AngloSaxon race, undaunted before the rocky ribs and dismal swamps upon their line of route.

As I stood upon the shore of the surf-fringed bay of Colon and watched where, beyond its horse-shoe curve and palmclad promontory, the steamer I had left lay anchored, it came

upon me with sudden force that this was indeed the limit of the Atlantic world. And when I had passed over the fifty miles of railway through those tangled woods and fevered swamps and reached the blue Pacific Sea and the verdant isles of Panama, it seemed to be the threshold-as indeed it is of a vast new untramelled world. There was nothing new or original in the thought, but perhaps the beating of surf upon long desolate shores has some peculiar voice of nature in telling of continents beyond. There, somewhere, was that "peak in Darien" where Balboa, nearly four hundred years ago, first saw the sunset in the Pacific, and here must have passed his trail of Indians, bearing ships' timbers under the lash. Here also hurried those enterprising buccaneers from Britain or Amsterdam, who were in too great a hurry to go round Cape Horn or through Magellan's Straits, hot on some predatory cruise adown this Great Pacific Coast, having built or stolen a ship at Panama. But all that belongs to the past; it is with the living present that we are now concerned.

The Panama Canal, according to the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty made between Great Britain and the United States in 1901, is to be open to the vessels of all nations on equal terms, whether in times of peace or war, whether to ships of commerce or of war, an arrangement for which the world has to thank Britain in the main, for she gave up her right for this. The canal, however, is not international in any other sense, as it is to be fortified and defended by the forces of the United States and operated by Americans of that republic alone. This occupation and control is vested in perpetuity in the United States by the republic of Panama, a republic brought to being in 1904; an off-shoot from the republic of Colombia, whose birthright the isthmus was, but lost by pronunciamentos in Panama, ended by machinations emanating from the United States. It was a bitter blow to the Colombians, this deprivation of their valuable topographical heritage, and the United States are by no means free from charges of spoliation which were brought against them.

On the other hand, the Colombians had largely their own folly to thank for its loss: procrastination, lack of enterprise and double-dealing. At the time I first crossed the isthmus,