U. S. S. _Louisiana_, At Sea, November 20, 1906.

DEAR KERMIT:

Our visit to Panama was most successful as well as most interesting. We
were there three days and we worked from morning till night. The second
day I was up at a quarter to six and got to bed at a quarter of twelve,
and I do not believe that in the intervening time, save when I was
dressing, there were ten consecutive minutes when I was not busily at
work in some shape or form. For two days there were uninterrupted tropic
rains without a glimpse of the sun, and the Chagres River rose in a
flood, higher than any for fifteen years; so that we saw the climate at
its worst. It was just what I desired to do.

It certainly adds to one's pleasure to have read history and to
appreciate the picturesque. When on Wednesday we approached the coast,
and the jungle-covered mountains looked clearer and clearer until we
could see the surf beating on the shores, while there was hardly a sign
of human habitation, I kept thinking of the four centuries of wild and
bloody romance, mixed with abject squalor and suffering, which had made
up the history of the Isthmus until three years ago. I could see Balboa
crossing at Darien, and the wars between the Spaniards and the Indians,
and the settlement and the building up of the quaint walled Spanish
towns; and the trade, across the seas by galleon, and over land by
pack-train and river canoe, in gold and silver, in precious stones; and
then the advent of the buccaneers, and of the English seamen, of
Drake and Frobisher and Morgan, and many, many others, and the wild
destruction they wrought. Then I thought of the rebellion against the
Spanish dominion, and the uninterrupted and bloody wars that followed,
the last occurring when I became President; wars, the victorious heroes
of which have their pictures frescoed on the quaint rooms of the palace
at Panama city, and in similar palaces in all capitals of these strange,
turbulent little half-caste civilizations. Meanwhile the Panama railroad
had been built by Americans over a half century ago, with appalling loss
of life, so that it is said, of course with exaggeration, that every
sleeper laid represented the death of a man. Then the French canal
company started work, and for two or three years did a good deal, until
it became evident that the task far exceeded its powers; and then
to miscalculation and inefficiency was added the hideous greed of
adventurers, trying each to save some