“Berlin, January 27, 1856. “Frederick M. Kelley, Esq. Sir, —It is with the deepest satisfaction that I made myself acquainted, during your short stay in Berlin, with the sound and extensive series of measurements and levels which, by your direction, have been executed since the beginning of January, 1855, upon the course of the great Rio Atrato and its affluents on the West, by an able engineer, Mr. William Kennish. This survey and those previously undertaken by your orders, and to which my learned friend, Mr. Alexander Bache, Superintendent of the Coast Survey of the United States, had already drawn my attention, are so much the more deserving of regard, since you purpose to have examined with the same precision the pass from the port of Cupica to the Rio Naîpi (Napipi), and the points situated above the mouth of the Truando, which are all very important in the solution of the vast problem of an oceanic canal. “The great number of charts and sections on a large scale in your possession furnish all the elements necessary for judging of the possibility of establishing a communication between the two oceans by the mouths of the Atrato, the Rio Truando, and a canal leading to the Pacific Ocean. It was on account of his not having made so thorough an examination of the mountainous country between the Gulf of San Miguel and Caledonia Bay that Mr. Lionel Gisborne’s plan of 1852 could not be carried out. The ignorance he was in as to the localities, and the absence of measurements of altitude, led to the unfortunate issue of the courageous expedition of Lieutenant Isaac Strain. “The great object to be attained is, in my opinion, a canal which would unite the two oceans without locks and without tunnels. When the plans and sections can be placed before the public, a free and open discussion will elucidate the advantages and disadvantages of each locality, and the execution of this important work, which interests the civilized nations of the two continents, will be intrusted to engineers who have successfully distinguished themselves in similar enterprises. The Junction Company will find subscribers among those governments and citizens who, yielding to a noble impulse, will take pride in the idea of having contributed toward the execution of a work worthy of the intellectual progress of the nineteenth century. More than fifty years ago I earnestly expressed the same opinion, and I have incessantly labored in the propagation of those geographical views, which tend to prove the practicability of establishing commercial communications, either by canals (with or without either stop-gates or locks) or by means of railroads uniting opposite coasts and rivers flowing in contrary directions. “I was the means of obtaining through General Bolivar the exact geodesic survey of the Isthmus of Panama; and I was the first, from information found in the Archives of the Viceroyalty of Mexico, to lay down in my Mexican Atlas the course of the two rivers, the Huasacualco and the Chimalapa. I pointed out the proximity of the almost unknown port of Cupica to the sources of the Rio Naîpi, and to the waters of the Atrato, and also the existence, with which Europe was unacquainted, of a very small navigable canal ‘excavated’ in 1788, under the superintendence of a monk, the Priest of Novita, by the Indians of his parish, in order to unite the waters of the Rio de la Raspadura, an affluent of the Rio de Quito (Quibdo), to the waters of the Rio de San Juan de Chirambira. “I think nothing more dangerous to the extension of commerce and to the freedom of international relations than to inspire an aversion to all future investigation by an absolute and imperious declaration that all hope of an oceanic canal must now be abandoned. I expressly described in my ‘Political Essay on New Spain’ (compare vol. i., p. 202-248, with vol. ii., p. 95-145, 2d edition) the immense work of cutting through the mountains an open channel for the Desague Huehuetoca, which was executed by the Spanish government at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and I have too much faith in the powerful means afforded by the present state of civilization to be yet discouraged. “The important communications for which I am indebted to the courtesy of Colonel Augustus Codazzi and to the exceeding kindness of M. Pastor Ospina, Minister of the Interior at Bogota, have made me fully aware that the line from Cupica to the Rio Naîpi presents a series of elevations; in directing this passage to be leveled you will, therefore, be rendering a farther service to geography. Captain Robert Fitzroy, R.N., whose name is justly renowned among navigators, in his ‘Memoir on the Isthmus of Central America,’ says: ‘Of all the comparatively well-known routes, it has been shown that the Atrato and Cupica line seems the most suitable for a canal, and the Panama route for a railway. The officer who recently surveyed Cupica (Lieutenant Wood, R.N.) states, with respect to the land between it and the Naîpi, that he set out one morning from Cupica at eight o’clock, walked with native guides to the Naîpi, bathed in the stream, and reached his ship (the Pandora) at noon.’ The most elevated ground was, in his judgment, 300-400 feet.—Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, vol. xx., 1850, part ii., p. 178. “Receive, my dear sir, etc., “(Signed), Alexander von Humboldt.”