One of the earliest direct references to the importance of a waterway between the two oceans is that made by Cortez in his letters to Charles V. The great conqueror, however, does not seem to have contemplated the construction of such a waterway. He diligently searched for a natural waterway or strait between the two oceans, and declared that to be “the one thing above all others in the world I am most desirous of meeting with,” on account of its immense utility. Some sixty or seventy years later, there was a project put forward by the Spaniards for uniting the two oceans by a waterway, but it does not appear to have been carried any length. The Spaniards, indeed, were hardly the people to achieve such a distinction. Unlike the ancient Romans, the Italians, and the Chinese, their skill was not very marked in hydraulics. They were, besides, much too superstitious to venture on interference with what many of them believed to be an ordinance having all the fixity of a law of nature.[165] The American Isthmus next claims attention as associated with the ill-starred fortunes of William Paterson and the Darien scheme.[166] The earliest, and in some respects the best, information yet available, relative to the topography of the country adjacent to the Panama Canal, is that furnished by Dampier,[167] who spent some time on the isthmus and noted all its chief physical characteristics. Dampier’s observations, however, were chiefly made in and about the Gulf of St. Michael, which he describes as lying “nearly thirty leagues from Panama, towards the south-east,” and as “a place where a great many rivers, having finished their course, are swallowed up in the sea.” Dampier found the isthmus very low and swampy, “the rivers being so oosy that the stinking mud infects the air.” Lionel Wafer[168] has also made an early and valuable report on the character of the country bordering on the route of the present Panama Canal, describing it “as almost everywhere of an unequal surface, distinguished with hills and valleys of great variety for height, depth, and extent.” He described the river Chagre, or Chagres, as one which “rises from some hills near the South Sea, and runs along in an oblique north-westerly course till it finds itself a passage into the North Sea, though the chain of hills, if I mistake not, is extended much further to the west, even to the Lake of Nicaragua.”