Columbus died not knowing that he had multiplied the world by two, and many voyagers after him also vainly sought the longed-for western passage. Magellan sought it thousands of leagues to the southward in the cold and stormy seas that encircle the Antarctic Continent. Scores of mariners sought it to the northward, but only one, Amundsen, in the twentieth century, was able to take a ship through the frozen passages of the American north seas. Down the western coast of the new continent from the eternal ice of Alaska through the Tropics to the southern snows of Tierra del Fuego, the mighty Cordilleras stretch a mountain barrier thousands and thousands and thousands of miles. Where that mountain chain is narrowest, and where its peaks are lowest, ships may now go through the Panama Canal. The canal is cut through the narrowest part of the Isthmus but one, and through the Culebra Mountain, the lowest pass but one, in all that longest, mightiest range of mountains. There is a lower place in Nicaragua, and a narrower place on the Isthmus east of the canal, but the engineers agreed that the route from Colon on the Atlantic to Panama on the Pacific through Culebra Mountain was the most practicable. The canal is 50 miles long. Fifteen miles of it is level with the oceans, the rest is higher. Ships are lifted up in giant locks, three steps, to sail for more than 30 miles across the continental divide, 85 feet above the surface of the ocean, then let down by three other locks to sea level again. The channel is 300 feet wide at its narrowest place, and the locks which form the two gigantic water stairways are capable of lifting and lowering the largest ships now afloat. A great part of the higher level of the canal is the largest artificial lake in the world, made by impounding the waters of the Chagres River, thus filling with water the lower levels of the section. Another part of the higher level is Culebra Cut, the channel cut through the backbone of the continent. Almost before Columbus died plans were made for cutting such a channel. With the beginning of the nineteenth century and the introduction of steam navigation, the demand for the canal began to be insistent. Many plans were made, but it remained for the French, on New Year's Day of 1880, actually to begin the work. They failed, but not before they had accomplished much toward the reduction of Culebra Cut. They expended between 1880 and 1904 no less than $300,000,000 in their ill-fated efforts. In 1904 the United States of America undertook the task. In a decade it was completed and the Americans had spent, all told, $375,000,000 in the project.