Why did ships want to get from one ocean to the other, anyway? Why shouldn’t those on one side stay on that side, and those on the other side stay on the other side? Well—your mother goes downtown shopping for things to wear and things to eat and furniture for the house; so ships go shopping—shipping, shopping—around the World. Ships from the countries around the At-lantic Ocean go shopping to countries around the Pacific Ocean for tea and China dishes and silk stockings. And ships from countries around the Pacific Ocean go shopping to the countries around the Atlantic Ocean for things they want and haven’t got. That’s one reason why ships wanted to get from one ocean to the other, and they didn’t want to go the long way round, ten thousand miles out of the way, if they could possibly help it. So at last a company of men from France on the other side of the ocean, who knew how to dig canals—for they had already dug a long canal—started to dig a canal across the Isthmus.

Now the Isthmus of Panama used to be the most un healthful place The Indians and black men who lived there didn’t seem to mind it, but with white men it was different. One out of every three white men who went there died of fever. The company of men from France set to work and worked for several years on the canal, but so many of their men died and so much money was spent and so little canal was dug that at last they gave it up, stopped digging.

Later the United States rented from the little country of Panama a piece of land forever, a piece of land ten miles wide like a belt right across the Isthmus. This belt of land is called the Canal Zone. But before the United States started to dig the canal they said, “We must make the Canal Zone a healthful and fit place for white people to work so that they won’t die as soon as we send them down there.” So they sent a famous doctor down to the Canal Zone to see if he could make the Zone a more healthful place for white men to live in.