rush of water might not be too severe. About twenty minutes after the dike was blown up, two daredevil young Americans in a dugout "shot the rapids" from the lake
THE DREDGING FLEET AT CUCARACHA.
into the Cut. One of these young men was a private in the Marine Corps; the other was Lindon Bates, Jr., who was killed while trying to save some children on board the Lusitania.
But after the last man-made dike had been cleared away, the Canal was still closed to navigation by a great natural barrier. This was our old friend, the Cucaracha Slide, which had slid down and almost completely blocked the bottom of the Cut in January, 1913. So little impression had the steam shovels been able to make on it in the next nine months that it was decided to turn in the water and finish the job with floating dredges. A small fleet of ladder- and dipper-dredges were brought up from the Atlantic entrance, while up through Miraflores and Pedro Miguel locks came the most powerful dredge in the world, the Corozal, with her endless chain of
