Better days; or, A Millionaire of To-morrow by Anna M. Fitch and Thomas Fitch - HTML preview

PLEASE NOTE: This is an HTML preview only and some elements such as links or page numbers may be incorrect.
Download the book in PDF, ePub, Kindle for a complete version.

 

CHAPTER XXV.
 
“No more shall nation against nation rise.”

The Congress of 1892 builded even better than it knew, when it dropped partisan prejudices, and arose superior to local fetterings, and, in a truly national spirit, secured for the United States of America dominion of the seas and control of the commerce of the world.

The Act of Congress which guaranteed the payment of five per cent bonds of the Nicaragua Canal Company to the extent of $100,000,000, and which provided that the canal tolls upon American ships should never be more than two-thirds the amount charged the vessels of other nations, enabled the company to construct the canal with unexpected rapidity, without calling upon the United States for a dollar of the guaranty, while, more than any subsidy or favorable mail contract, it aided to place the Stars and Stripes at the mastheads of the vast fleet of ships and steamers which, upon the completion of the canal in the autumn of 1895, began to pass between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The local traffic developed by the canal proved something phenomenal. Early in the history of its construction it became generally known that the country, for hundreds of miles about Lake Nicaragua, was not an unhealthy tropical jungle, but an elevated, breezy table-land, environed and divided by snow-clad mountains, with an average temperature only a few degrees warmer than that of California, and with a much more even distribution of rainfall.

A knowledge of these advantages was followed by a large incursion of American settlers. There is perhaps no product of field or forest more profitable than the coffee plant. Steadily the demand for the fragrant berry is upon the increase, while, beside having few enemies in the insect world, the area within which coffee can be advantageously grown is very limited. While the coffee plant does not require an exceptionally hot climate, it will not thrive where frost is a possibility. The hill slopes and table-lands of Nicaragua were found to be peculiarly adapted for its growth, and thousands of acres of young plantations were already thriving where for centuries only wild grasses had waved. Short lines of railroad, centering on Lake Nicaragua, and running in every direction, had made accessible a large extent of country. The scream of the gang saw was heard amid forests of dyewoods, rosewood, and mahogany. Mines of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal were opened. Cotton, sugar, and indigo plantations were developed, and Millerville, on Lake Nicaragua, when the war ships passed through the canal to attend David Morning’s dynamic exposition, was already a city of fifty thousand people, provided with electric lights and cable roads.

The advantages to the people of the United States of the completed Nicaragua Ship Canal were almost incalculable. The freight-carrying business of the world between the east coast of Asia and Europe was rapidly transferred to American bottoms. The iron manufacturers of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia were given an opportunity, previously denied them, of marketing the product of their furnaces and foundries on the Pacific Coast of North America. The dwellers in the Mississippi Valley could now send their cotton, meats, and manufactures to trans-Pacific and Antipodean markets, and California redwood and Puget Sound fir and cedar lumber could be sent over all the Northwest.

On the Pacific Coast the canal added twenty-five per cent to the productive value of every acre of grain and timber land. The cost of sacking, and half the cost of transporting wheat was saved to the farmer, and the freight upon all machinery and heavy goods brought from the East was greatly lessened.

On Puget Sound the construction of a ship canal, costing less than $2,000,000, connecting the fresh waters of Lake Washington with the salt water in Elliott Bay, gave to Seattle such facilities for warehousing, loading, and dry-docking, and such independence of tides and teredos, that a commercial rival of San Francisco was spreading over the hills of the fir-fringed Queen of the New Mediterranean, while at the extreme southwestern corner of the republic the city of bay and climate—San Diego—was rapidly regaining the population and prestige which temporarily slipped from her grasp at the subsiding of the boom which, during 1886 and 1887, enkindled the imagination, and beguiled the judgment, and encrazed with the fever of speculation, the people of Southern California.

Even during the dull times which annihilated so many promising fortunes in Southern California, the attractions of Coronado Beach were sufficient to secure for it exemption from the dire distress which overtook other localities.

The company owning this enterprise successfully defied not only a bursted boom but the very forces of nature, for they riprapped the beach in front of their hotel, and baffled the Pacific Ocean, which, after gnawing up the lawn and shrubbery which fronted its restless waters, had set its foam-capped legions at work to undermine the foundations of the great ballroom.

Parks, avenues, and streets were improved, museums and gardens developed, and races and hops and fishing and boating parties encouraged. Excursions from neighboring cities were organized, the East was flooded with pamphlets praising Coronado, and the pleasure-loving and health-seeking world was in every way reminded that in this land of rare delights it could pick ripe oranges and enjoy surf bathing in midwinter, while Boston was shivering and New York swept with blizzards.

The band at the hotel was kept playing every day at luncheon and dinner, and it discoursed sweet music in the ballroom regularly upon hop nights to auditors, who found—as all people can find—more of the physical comforts and delights of life at Coronado Beach than anywhere else in the world, for nowhere else is there such music in the sea, such balm in the air, such sunshine, and fragrance, and healing, and rest.

The faith and patience of the owner of the great hotel were, in the end, rewarded. Month by month and year by year did the numbers of his guests increase, until, in 1895, the capacity of the house was more than doubled, by the addition of a building something over a quarter of a mile in length, and the great hotel could now accommodate quite two thousand guests.

David Morning selected Coronado Beach for his dynamic experiments, and, with some difficulty, chartered the entire hotel for one month, during which time it was reserved exclusively for his guests. He also leased the northerly end of the Coronado Beach peninsula for the construction and equipment of his air ship, and for a laboratory for the manufacture of potentite.

The real Coronado Islands are within the territorial jurisdiction of Mexico, situated about sixteen miles south and west from San Diego Bay, and were, except in cloudy weather, distinctly visible from Coronado Beach. Irregular and ragged masses of red sandstone a few thousand acres in extent towered to a height of several hundred feet above the ocean, faintly staining the horizon with patches of blue, resembling an unfinished sky in water color.

These islands were destitute of water and vegetation, and never inhabited save by a few laborers who were engaged in quarrying rock there, and Morning found no difficulty in purchasing them from their owners, and removing all the occupants.

On the northern end of the Coronado Beach peninsula, Morning caused to be erected a laboratory for the manufacture of potentite, with which to load the steel shells to be carried by the air ship. This new dynamic force, or, rather, storehouse of force, consisted of a combination of explosive gelatine with fulminate of mercury, and possessed a power equal to thirteen hundred tons to the square inch, or sixty times that of common blasting gunpowder, and nine times that of dynamite, and fifty pounds of it properly directed would sink any ironclad afloat. It is quite safe for manipulation, because it is unexplosive, except when brought in contact with a chemical substance—also non-explosive except by contact—which is only added immediately before using.

The Petrel, the air ship used at the dynamic exposition, was built by the Mount Carmel Aeronautic Company at their works in Chicago, and sent by rail in sections to Coronado Beach, where she was put together. She was cigar-shaped, one hundred feet in length and twenty feet in diameter, and was built of butternut—the toughest of the light woods. Her engines, with their fans and propellers, as well as the gas generator and tank for benzine, were all constructed of tempered aluminum, made by the new Kentucky process, at a cost of only eight cents per pound. Being stronger and tougher than the finest steel, and only one-third the weight of that metal, aluminum was especially adapted for the construction of air ships.

The machinery of the Petrel was propelled by a gas generated from benzine. The fluid was carried in an air-tight aluminum tank, from which it passed, drop by drop, to the generator. This gas, almost as powerful as the vibratory ether discovered by Mr. Keely, was much safer because more certainly controlled.

The Petrel, with all her machinery in place, with two tons of benzine in her tanks, and ten men on board of her supplied with sufficient water and food for use for fifteen days, weighed but ten tons, and the force generated from two tons of benzine was sufficient to lift her, with a freight of ten tons more, to a height of five thousand or even ten thousand feet, and, without any aid from her folding aluminum parachute, was able to maintain her there for a fortnight, at a speed—in a still atmosphere—of fifty miles per hour. No balloon was attached to the Petrel, as she relied entirely upon her paddles and wings both for propulsion and as a means of maintaining herself in the air.

She was constructed upon the principle of aerial navigation furnished by the wild goose. That bird maintains himself in the ether during a flight of hundreds of miles without a rest, simply because his strength, or muscular power, is greater, in proportion to his weight, than that of creatures who walk upon the ground. Man could always have constructed wings of silk and bamboo which would have enabled him to fly if he had only possessed the strength to flap his wings.

Aerial navigation never presented any other problem than that of procuring power without weight. Once able to obtain the power of a ten-horse engine, with a weight, including machinery, of less than one ton, one might fly all over the world, and, by taking advantage of the air currents, a knowledge of which will soon be gained, fly at a speed of fifty or even one hundred miles an hour. The recent discovery of the immense power of a gas which it is possible to generate from benzine without the use of fuel, has made the air as available for the purposes of rapid transit by man as the ocean or the land. The great cost of locomotion by this means will doubtless prevent its use for the transportation of freight, or, indeed, of passengers, except for those who can afford the luxury, and for them it will supplant all other methods.

The Petrel was provided with the new patent condensed fuel, one pound of which for cooking and heating purposes is equal to ten pounds of coal. She was furnished with parachutes made of thin sheets of aluminum closely folded one above the other. These, when not in use, formed an awning or canopy over her deck, while, in case of accident, they could, by pulling a convenient lever, be instantly spread over an area large enough to insure her a gradual and safe descent, and should such descent be into the water, she was so constructed as to float as buoyantly as a cork upon its surface, while, by lessening the number of revolutions per minute of her aluminum propellers, they could be used as paddles for her propulsion through the water.

The freight of the Petrel consisted of two hundred shells of potentite, weighing one hundred pounds each, and the result to the Coronodo Islands of their falling upon it from a height of a mile or more, was predicted long in advance of the experiment. “If,” it was said, “fifty pounds of this explosive will destroy an ironclad, what will twenty thousand pounds of it do to an island of rock? What would a dozen Petrels accomplish, hurling two hundred and forty thousand pounds of it upon an army, a city, or an enemy’s fortress?”

They could level Gibraltar with the sea; they could extirpate an army of a million men; they could obliterate London or Berlin or New York from the face of the earth. A fleet of a hundred Petrels could ascend from New York, cross the Atlantic in three days, destroy every city in the United Kingdom in six hours, and, leaving England a mass of ruins, with two-thirds of her people slain, return in three days to New York, with unused power enough to go to San Francisco and back without descending.

England, or any other nation, could likewise destroy America, for neither aerial navigation nor the manufacture of potentite are secrets locked in any one man’s brain.

“If Mr. Morning’s dynamic exposition,” it was said, “shall fulfill its promise, he can, if he chooses, as the possessor of so complete an air ship and so powerful an explosive, be the ruler of the world. Emperors and Parliaments must, for the time, be the subjects of the man who can destroy cities and camps, and who can make such changes in the map of the world as he may choose.”

“If the experiment this day to be made at Coronado,” said the President of the United States, “shall be successful, armies may as well be disbanded, for there can be no more war, and governments all over the world must, henceforth, rest upon the consent of the governed.”

Before sending the Petrel upon her mission, an examination of the territory to be devastated was in order, and the Hotel del Coronado was nearly emptied of its guests, for the Charleston, the Warspite, and the Wilhelm II., steamed away to the Coronado Islands, where the American, British, German, French, Russian, Italian, Mexican, and Brazilian engineers, with their assistants, landed, took measurements and altitudes, and a number of photographic views, and examined the islands thoroughly, verifying the accuracy of the topographical maps and profile models in clay previously made by engineers employed by Morning. It was projected to make another survey and set of maps after the potentite had done its work, so as to preserve an accurate and unimpeachable record of the result of what our hero modestly called his “experiment.”

The vessels returned to their moorings about three o’clock in the afternoon of the first day of the exposition, in ample time for their passengers and officers to attend the dinner given by Morning that evening to his royal and imperial majesty Edward the Seventh, king of Great Britain and emperor of India. This sagacious prince, rightly conceiving that the dynamic exposition of citizen David Morning was likely to be the preliminary of an entire change in the methods of government, if not in the governments themselves, of the civilized world, determined to head in person the British delegation, which was brought on the Warspite from Vancouver to San Diego.

The manner in which King Edward has impressed the American people may be deduced from a remark made at the dinner by a shrewd observer and leading citizen of San Diego.

“That king,” said he, “is a dandy. He is credited with being the cleverest and most adroit politician in England, and I believe it, or he could never have steered his canoe out of that baccarat whirlpool. If Dave Morning’s dynamics should sort of blow him out of a job at home, let him come over here, and in one year I will back him at long odds to get the nomination for the best office in the county from either the Democratic or Republican convention, and, maybe, from both. What a roaring team he and Jack Dodge and Sam Davis would make for a county canvass! Jack to do the fiddling and dancing, Sam the all-around lying, and Edward the hand shaking and the setting ’em up for the boys!”

The ample gardens of San Diego, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara were stripped for the decoration of the banquet hall. All day flowers were arriving by the train load, and several hundred floral artists were at work in the great dining room. The effect was surpassingly beautiful. Suspended from the great dome by ropes of smilax was a gigantic figure of Peace, wrought in white calla lilies, bearing in her right hand a branch from an olive tree, while her left held to her lips a trumpet of yellow jasmine. On the walls the arms of all nations were wrought in camellias, carnations, fleur-de-lis, and roses of every hue. The music and the menu were both incomparable, and, in accordance with the later and better practice of great dinners, formal speech making was altogether dispensed with.

The next morning the shores of Coronado Beach were black with people, and in the great hotel every piazza and window facing southward or westward was occupied. There was a light breeze blowing from the north as the Petrel left her berth and rapidly mounted in the air to a height of seven thousand feet, which altitude she achieved with her fans in seven minutes’ time. She then put her propellers in motion and was soon a mere speck against the cloudless sky, scarcely discernible by the most powerful glasses.

But though out of sight she soon made her existence and her work known to the multitude. In thirty-five minutes from the time she left her berth, she had compassed a mile and a half in height and sixteen miles of distance and was hovering over Coronado Islands. In twenty minutes more six men on board of her had thrown over the two hundred potentite shells, and in half an hour thereafter the aerial wonder was again resting quietly on the peninsula.

It was a clear day, and the islands were distinctly visible. Sight travels more swiftly than sound, and before any noise was heard, the immense mass of rock, crown shaped, from which the islands take their name, was seen by the gazers on the beach to leap from its place and fall into the sea. Other masses in swift succession followed; then came roars of sound, as if heaven and earth were coming together; roars of sound which rattled the doors and casements of the hotel as if shaken with a high wind. For twenty minutes this awe-inspiring exhibition continued, and when the tremendous cannonading ceased, the Coronada Islands—in the form in which they had previously existed—were no more.

The work of resurveying and making new topographical maps was subsequently performed, as a part of the duty of those connected with the dynamic exposition, but it needed no measurements to demonstrate the awful power of the potentite. An area of solid rock a mile square was rent into fragments for a depth of one hundred feet.

Many improvements in machinery and management were suggested to the officers of the Petrel, but the experiment was conceded by all the great engineers who witnessed it, to be so completely successful as to practically eliminate land warfare from the future of nations.

“It is fortunate,” said the Marquis of Salisbury, who was one of the British delegation—“it is fortunate that the manufacture of even a small quantity of potentite requires months of time, great skill, and a costly and extensive laboratory, so that it will be not impracticable to prevent its preparation by private persons. But given a piece of land anywhere in the civilized world large enough to permit of the building of air ships and the manufacture of potentite, and sufficiently defended to afford to its garrison three months’ time in which to perfect the making of that explosive, and any power, however insignificant, could, with a hundred air ships, destroy in three days all the great cities in Europe.”

“As it now appears,” continued the Marquis, “this method of warfare would not be so available against a moving object on the sea, such as a war ship. But if the submarine torpedo boat, whose operations we are to witness to-morrow, shall be anything nearly as effective as Mr. Morning’s air ship, it seems to me that a convention of civilized powers to adjust international relations and provide for a Congress and Court of Nations, to which all international differences must be submitted, will be an absolute necessity in the future,”

“And how would the decrees of such a court be enforced, your lordship,” inquired Prince Bismarck, who was listening.

“By the only aerial war vessels equipped with potentite which the allied nations would suffer to exist, your highness, and which vessels would be subject to the orders of the Court of Nations. If any nation refused to obey such decree, it could be disciplined, and if any nation attempted to put a potentite air ship under way, it would be necessary, in self-defense, for the allied powers, after adequate warning, to extirpate the offending parties.”

“Might not a potentite air ship be secretly fitted out, your lordship?” asked the prince.

“Hardly,” replied the Marquis, “for, with the aid of a corps of observation air ships, and of international detectives in every center of population, the world, both savage and civilized, could be adequately policed at a very small cost.”

“And what, in your lordship’s opinion, will be the condition in or before the Congress of Nations, of a people who desire separate government and who have been unable to obtain it?” said Mr. Michael Davitt, who was standing by.

The Marquis looked the Irishman squarely in the eye and replied slowly: “I think it will be quite out of the power of any government to retain by force under its rule any considerable number of people, who, with or without, a grievance, are practically unanimous for a separate government. The Congress of Nations will, or at least ought to, require that any people seeking separation shall be nearly unanimous. But do you think, Mr. Davitt, to be candid, that the people of Ulster and the people of Galway would ever be brought to agree to any proposition on earth?”

“Begorra, your lordship, if you don’t mind me takin’ the answer to your question out of the mouth of Misther Davitt,” said the Honorable Bellew McCafferty, Home Rule member from Mayo—“begorra, there’s one great principle upon which Oireland is, and ever will be, united. Catholic and Protestant, Fardowner and Corkonian, Priest and Peeler are all heart and soul agreed”—

“To do what?” queried his lordship.

“Never,” replied the McCafferty, “never to pay any rint.”