I will conclude this chapter with an interesting little fact which may already have occurred to the reader. From the moment the Panama Canal is opened it will be possible for the first time to sail all round the world from England wholly in the northern hemisphere and without crossing the Equator. Who will be the first circumnavigator along the all-northern trail? FOOTNOTES: [19] Many persons may have expected these countries to be much nearer New York. They do not realize that _nearly all South America lies east of North America_. Washington is on the same meridian as Callao on the coast of Peru. Antofagasta and Iquique, the chief nitrate ports of Chile, have the longitude of Boston. The eastern point of Brazil lies 2,600 miles east of New York, and is _equidistant from New York Bay and the English Channel_. CHAPTER XVII. THE CANAL AND THE AMERICAS. The likely effects of the Panama Canal on international commerce and the development of the world's resources is so big a subject that one can do little more than indicate the larger probabilities. The influence of the canal on the British Empire must be left to another chapter. Here we shall have to consider mainly the case of the United States, the country which stands to gain far more than any other from this new link between East and West. The most obvious result of the new event, as it was the main object of the canal's construction, must be the immensely quickened all-sea communication between the eastern and western coasts of North America. The motive for the building of the canal was military rather than commercial. It was rendered necessary by painful experience during the Spanish-American War of the effects of the 14,000-mile sea journey between the two seaboards of the republic. But the commercial results will not be the less important because they were not foremost in the object and motive of the canal-builders. It is pretty clear that what we may call the main developmental effect of the canal will be felt along that Pacific coast of the Americas which has been so long shut out from the great centres of industrial enterprise in the New World and the Old.