New Ships Built For Canal Trade.

New York Times 100 years ago today, May 8, 1913:
And there Are More on the Ways in European Yards, Frank Waterhouse Reports.
FOUR LINES ARE PROJECTED
Direct Monthly Service to Pacific Coast from European Ports — Cent-a-Day Health In Zone.
    No man living is competent to predict just what the opening of the Panama Canal will do for the Pacific Coast, according to Frank Waterhouse of Seattle, in charge of the Royal Mall Steam Packet Company's interests on the Pacific Coast, who is staying at the Hotel Wolcott. Mr. Waterhouse has just returned from London.
    "I found a great deal of activity in shipping in England," he said. "There is a great deal of new shipping on the ways in European yards, and a great part of it is destined for the Canal trade. I believe there are going to be four or more lines which will furnish monthly service or better between European and Pacific Coast ports.
    "On the coast, too, there is at present great activity in the shipping line. All the trans-Pacific lines, with one exception, are foreign owned. The three Jap lines offer excellent services and furnish very strong competition for the trans-Pacific carrying business, but the Japanese are excellent people to deal with.
    "It would be a great misfortune, deplorable in the extreme, if any breach should occur in the good relations between the United States and Japan. If an offensive land bill is passed in California it is bound to injure trade. A man naturally does much more business with his friends than with his enemies.
    "To return to the shipping business, more prosperity exists in this line today in England — in fact, all over the world — than in a great many years, and it looks as if this prosperity would continue for some time. And England is holding her own in the shipping world, too. There is a great deal of rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the carrying trade all over the world, but England is not dropping behind in the race."
    It costs only one cent a day for an individual in the Canal Zone to preserve his health, according to Dr. Roswell Park of Buffalo, who returned recently from an unofficial medical inspection of the Panama Canal.
    "It is almost seven years to a day since the last death occurred in the Canal Zone region from yellow fever," he said. "In other words, that plague has been effectually stamped out. It has been stated that the cost of cleaning up the Isthmus and keeping it sanitary amounted to $20,000,000. Even in the expenditure of this sum the cost of the Sanitary Department, as Col. Goethals has stated, is to be separated from what may be called the individual cost of sanitation, the former covering the expenses of a large department and the latter comprising the actual cost to the individual of maintaining his own health. Figured minutely, this latter cost is practically one cent a day per man.
    "Even yet the public has little comprehension of what it means, to bring sanitation to such a degree of perfection in this previously badly infected region. In time past it used to be said that the canal enterprise cost the life of a man every time the Panama Rail Road ran a car. That was exaggeration, of course, but it would have been almost literally true to have said every other time. There was, for instance, a station near the Pacific end of the road called Matarchin, where 1,200 Chinamen died in one camp of yellow fever under the old regime. The very name implies the fact, since 'Matar' in Spanish means 'kill' and 'chin' is short for Chinaman. Matarchin means therefore 'dead Chinaman.'
    "The principal difficulties in the way of sanitation have been in enforcing attention on the part of the ignorant and benighted natives of tropical regions, who have to be practically lifted out of the filth in which they live and separated from environments in which they feel at home. In this sense it becomes almost a matter of veterinary medicine, since left to themselves they would live but little better than do the cattle."