Matachin

Menocal had designed a colossal stone viaduct 1,900 feet long to carry the canal over the river at a point known as Matachin.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

Menocal had designed a colossal stone viaduct 1,900 feet long to carry the canal over the river at a point known as Matachin.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

Beyond Matachin the train left the Chagres bottom lands and entered the narrow valley of the Rio Obispo, largest tributary of the Chagres.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

At Matachin he watched a force of men drill and blast through solid rock.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

Later in the day, de Lesseps, Wright, and Jacob Dirks–all three of them past seventy–took a train back to Matachin, and for an hour or more, under what de Lesseps benignly categorized as a “rather bright” sun, they drifted down the Chagres in a dugout canoe.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

Everyone who passed through Matachin heard the story.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

Marine guards in white sun helmets were posted at the Barbacoas bridge and at Matachin, but nothing more happened along the line.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

Matachin was best known as the place where Chinese workers, hopelessly lost to “melancholia,” had committed suicide en masse.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

Like Menocal, he had concluded that the Chagres must be bridged, but instead of a stone viaduct at Matachin, he envisioned a bridge of water across most of the Isthmus.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005

Then it swung around a hill to meet the river at Matachin, another cluster of grass huts and the point where Menocal had proposed to build his giant stone viaduct.

The Path Between the Seas DAVID McCULLOUGH. 2005