» Solomon and The Baby
  September 25th, 2006

There's a story I recall hearing in Sunday school when I was a kid about King Solomon and a baby. In the story, a baby is being claimed by two mothers as their own. King Solomon, being a wise king, is asked to solve the problem and decide the fate of the child. After much thought, he asks for a sword to be brought forth, deciding that there is but only one fair solution: the child must be cut in two, each woman receiving half of the child. "Please, My Lord, give her the live child - do not kill him!" cried the true mother of the child. However, the liar, filled with jealousy, exclaims, "It shall be neither mine nor yours - divide it!" Solomon instantly gives the baby to the real mother, realizing that the true mother's instincts were to protect her child, while the liar revealed that her only motivation was jealousy.

This story came to me while reading about the history of Nicaragua. It was striking on how the story could be an allegory for the prospective canal route through Nicaragua. An allegory, that is, with a twist: In reality, both "mothers" in this story wanted to have the "baby" cut in half.

After it was announced that gold had been discovered on the American River in California in March of 1848, "gold fever" spread like a wild fire. Thousands migrated from the Eastern Seaboard to California to try to strike it rich, making one of the largest migrations in modern history. It is said that in 1849, close to 800 ships departed from Atlantic ports for San Francisco taking the route around the tip of South America, a journey that took more than six months to make. Others took a much-slower overland route, crossing the 2,000 miles of America by wagon or foot. But these weren't the only routes to California from the east. "Thirty-five days to the gold regions!" exclaimed a handbill distributed in New York. It announced that "The Quickest, Safest, and Cheapest!!" way to California was on board the California Steamship Navigation Company's first dispatch to the west through Nicaragua.

Indeed Latin America had been a popular shortcut for decades before the California Gold Rush. According to David McCullough in his book The Path Between the Seas, "traffic in both directions across Panama was in the neighborhood of twenty-seven thousand people [in 1853]; that same year probably twenty thousand others took the Nicaragua route, going from ocean to ocean on an improvised hop-skip-and-jump system of shallow-draft steamers on the San Juan, large lake steamers [on Lake Nicaragua], and sky-blue stagecoaches between the lake and the Pacific." Crossing Panama was shorter and faster because the land was much narrower there, but it was shorter and faster route overall to go through Nicaragua. It was two days and five hundred miles shorter via Nicaragua than Panama.

At the beginning of the gold rush, Great Britain was worried that the US would take control of a transisthmian route to California through Nicaragua. To extinguish such an action, in 1848 they sent a gunboat to the Caribbean and took control of the town at the mouth of the San Juan River, San Juan del Norte, renaming it Greytown. The US was now upset, for Britain was on the verge of taking control of the entire route, claiming it as their own. If the baby was to be cut in half, which mother was to wield the sword?

Enter Solomon in the form of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850. The treaty, named after American Secretary of State John Clayton and Britain's Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer, was an agreement that both nations were not to colonize or control any Central American republic. The purpose was to prevent one country from building a canal across Central America that the other would not be able to use. If a canal were built, it would be protected by both nations for neutrality and security. In other words, both mothers would care for the baby.

War was averted and the route was reopened. It would stay popular until the Transcontinental Railroad and the Panama Canal were completed in 1869 and 1914 respectively. How Panama became the decided upon route - even though the Nicaragua route seemed better - is another story.

So what was this route like through Nicaragua? Most accounts are in books long out of print, including Mark Twain's Travels with Mr Brown. Last printed in 1940, this collection of travel-related stories includes his account of the route taken in 1866 on his way from San Francisco to New York, a year before he became famous. Searching for other reading material on the Nicaragua route, I found an old issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine from October 1855. In it is an article entitled Nicaragua: An Exploration From Ocean to Ocean by Ephraim George Squier. I did a little research on E.G. Squier and found that he had quite an adventurous life. Although he studied civil engineering, he became a journalist with a passion for archaeology. This passion lead him to one of his most important discoveries at the age of 25: the Serpent Mound in Ohio in 1846. He wrote a couple books on the subject of archaeology and became the editor of the Whig Daily Journal in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1849, he was able to use his resume as a journalist and a scholar of antiquities to convince the US government to appoint him as a diplomat as a means of traveling to Central America to study the great ancient civilizations and their ruins. (It didn't hurt that Zachary Taylor, the incoming president that year, was also a Whig.) So at 28, he became the United States Chargé d'affaires to Central America. At 31, he wrote Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments, published in 1852. My guess is that the article in Harper's is a excerpt from this long out-of-print book. I've scanned the piece in it's entirety for your reading enjoyment:

As always, thanks for reading.
~K