The surveys and plans made by this company during the following years were characteristically optimistic and included a claim to have discovered a route which at no point would reach a higher altitude than thirty-seven feet above the mean level of the Pacific Ocean. Such was the interest aroused in France by this alleged discovery, that M. Guizot, at that time Minister of Foreign Affairs, despatched Napoleon Garella to verify the company’s statements by an independent survey. His survey and report thereon were so much at variance with the statements of the Salomon Company, and his inability to discover the pass through the divide (which they asserted to exist) had such an effect on the prospects of the company as led to its dissolution. Garella, however, agreed largely with Lloyd’s conclusions, particularly as to the desirability of making Limon Bay the Atlantic terminus of a canal; and his proposition was for a summit level waterway, reached on either side by a series of locks. Lloyd’s observations had also been proved reliable by the confirmation of Mr. Wheelwright, whose survey was made on behalf of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company trading between Panama and the ports on the Pacific coast. At this time the Atlantic port of the isthmus was Chagres, at the mouth of the river of the same name, to and from which the trade was conducted by the vessels of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, who reopened a line of communication which had been practically abandoned since the Spanish occupation of the isthmus. Anxious to improve their route and add security to the transit of merchandise across the isthmus, this company instructed their colonial superintendent, Captain Liot, R.N., “to obtain such information as might be useful in guiding the directors to a sound opinion as to the practicability of influencing the transit of passengers, specie, etc., between Europe, North America, and the Pacific, making the same pass through the Isthmus of Panama instead of by the route round Cape Horn.”