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Explorer Finds Evidence Of Early Waterway From Atlantic
To Pacific. Nicaragua Was First?
By
Valentine Low , Timesonline.com
Hailed by some as the eighth wonder of the world, the
Panama Canal is one of the greatest engineering
achievements. It took more than 20 years and cost the
lives of more than 27,000 workers. It was the
culmination of a dream that began more than 400 years
earlier to create a water passage between the Atlantic
and Pacific.
But was it really the first? An explorer claims to have
found evidence of another, more ancient, water route
between the oceans — one that existed hundreds of years
before the Panama Canal was conceived.
Several hundred miles to the north-west, in Nicaragua,
the route — which involves rivers, a lake and flood
plains — was discovered by Colonel John Blashford-Snell,
who has just returned from an expedition there.
“It is tremendously exciting,” said the veteran
explorer. “With effort it is navigable. But it is going
to need more investigation.” He is now planning another
expedition to discover whether it is really possible to
take a boat from one coast to the other without touching
land.
If so, it will prove something remarkable: that the
ancient maps which show a passage between the two oceans
— and which have long been dismissed as fanciful — had a
greater claim to accuracy than was realized.
A 1774 map by Thomas Kitchin, for example, appears to
show a channel that would allow boats to pass between
the oceans.
Colonel Blashford-Snell’s expedition set out to find
evidence that a canal once existed in Nicaragua, part of
a wider — and more far-fetched — theory by the writer
Gavin Menzies that the Chinese landed in America long
before Columbus.
No records of such a canal exist, although there were
plans for a Nicaragua canal before the argument for
Panama won the day.
Whether Colonel Blashford-Snell found evidence of
ancient canals is arguable — he does not push the point
himself — but the case for a natural water passage is
strong, according to the explorer.
Parts of the passage are well known, if not obviously
navigable. Lake Nicaragua, which is 100ft (32m) above
sea level, occupies the central part of the isthmus, and
from there the San Juan River runs east to the
Caribbean.
Rapids make the upper parts of the river hard to
navigate, although in 1780 a young Horatio Nelson
ventured upstream to lead an assault on a Spanish fort
on the river.
“It is said that the pirate Henry Morgan came up from
the Caribbean three times in 12m boats,” said Colonel
Blashford-Snell. “When he got to the rapids, he got
round them by pulling the boats.
“Then they rowed across the lake, sacked the city of
Granada and then retired back to the Caribbean with
their loot.”
Getting from the lake to the Pacific seemed to be a
greater challenge, even though it is a distance of only
12 miles (19km) at its shortest.
Colonel Blashford-Snell, who spent two weeks in
Nicaragua last month with a team of four, said he found
places where the head waters of different river systems
— one flowing east into the lake, another flowing west
into the Pacific — were only a few hundred yards apart.
The seemingly unanswerable question, however, was how to
get from one river to the other.
Then, by chance, he met a local fisherman who helped him
to unlock the puzzle. Mariano Hernandez told them he had
made the journey from the centre of the isthmus between
Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific down to the lake to go
fishing — a journey made possible during the rainy
season when the land turns into a lake up to 2m deep.
“He said he built a 3m canoe out of cedar wood and did
the journey with his brother. They had one nasty capsize
and also had a very nasty shock when a bull shark
appeared alongside. But they did the journey three
times,” said Colonel Blashford-Snell. The fisherman also
said he had made the journey west to the Pacific on
another river. According to the explorer, other
villagers corroborated the fisherman’s story.
“It seems likely that even if early cartographers did
not see this lake, they were told about it by the
indigenous people, and thus drew a channel on their
maps,” said Colonel Blashford-Snell. “I’m sure this is
how the story of the legendary route between the oceans
started.”
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