Panama and the Canal

The library's exhibition of bicentennial gifts displayed a number of recent acquisitions of books relating to the development of a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, including two items from the Endicott Collection donated by Frederick B. Scheetz and Nicholas B. Scheetz; Martin de La Bastide's very rare 1791 proposal for a "Nicaragua Canal" to be built by Spain, the gift of William S. Abell; and a gift provided by funds donated by members of the Lauinger staff, Pitman's 1825 proposal for a canal to be built by English venture capital.

Also shown in the exhibit was the typescript of Captain Miles P. DuVal's unpublished third volume on the history of the Panama Canal, a continuation of his two earlier accounts of the canal's intellectual and political gestation and its construction. On funds provided by an endowment created by Captain DuVal the library has recently acquired two significant manuscript additions to its Panama holdings: papers of Panama Railway Company director Edward A. Drake and an anonymous account of an informal expedition along the Panama rail line in the early 1850s. The Drake Papers include correspondence from most of the men important to the Canal's building, both Americn and Panamanian, and shed light on the involvement of the Panama Railway Company in the process of the Canal's construction. The anonymous account, cast in the form of an incomplete but lengthy letter, shows better than any history the "real" side of travel in Panama in the 1850s, as two gentlemen out for an extended walk end by being trapped--literally--between a reptile-infested swamp and an oncoming locomotive.