Cortez answered the command of the King by saying that if he could not find the natural water-way he would proceed to make one. The brave old soldier, all his life trained in the habit of surmounting great difficulties, declared that if there were obstacles and mountains, there were also men with brains and hands, and that if he could not find the water-way as commanded by the King, he would carry out the order by constructing a canal to connect the two oceans. And so, the idea of Columbus being to find a short water-route between Europe and the East Indies and coasts of Asia, by the completion of the Panama Canal, the United States is carrying out the original purpose of efforts of the discoverer of America and the orders of the King of Spain to Cortez, to make an artificial water-way which will shorten the lines of trade and commerce around the globe. Between those early days and the present time every great maritime nation of the world has been interested in isthmian canal construction--Spain, Portugal, Holland, Germany, France, Great Britain and Italy have all, at one time or another in the intervening years, considered the advisability and feasibility of constructing a canal somewhere across the narrow territory between the Atlantic and Pacific. Nine Different Routes Proposed In all, nine routes have been surveyed or considered by some nation or some company. The first route to the north is known as the Tehuantepec route, which extends across Mexico from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, a distance of nearly 200 miles, and over which route an English syndicate, headed by the Pearsons, is now operating a splendid railroad system. Captain Eads, one of the most prominent of American engineers of his time, advocated the building of a ship railway over this route, a railway so constructed that cars could be let down into the water under the bottoms of ships, drawing them out of the water and across the land to the ocean on the other side. Of course, this project might have been feasible with the smaller sized merchant ships of forty years ago, but it would hardly be so for transporting the gigantic freighters and passenger vessels that now traverse the seas. The second route, towards the south, was called the Honduras Bay route, a route across the Republic of Honduras from Honduras Bay on the east to the Pacific.