An Atlantic-to-Pacific waterway across Nicaragua

An explorer claims to have found evidence of another, more ancient, water route between the oceans — one that existed hundreds of years before the Panama Canal was conceived.

Several hundred miles to the north-west, in Nicaragua, the route — which involves rivers, a lake and flood plains — was discovered by Colonel John Blashford-Snell, who has just returned from an expedition there...

He is now planning another expedition to discover whether it is really possible to take a boat from one coast to the other without touching land... If so, it will prove something remarkable: that the ancient maps which show a passage between the two oceans — and which have long been dismissed as fanciful — had a greater claim to accuracy than was realised...

No records of such a canal exist, although there were plans for a Nicaragua canal before the argument for Panama won the day.

Whether Colonel Blashford-Snell found evidence of ancient canals is arguable — he does not push the point himself — but the case for a natural water passage is strong, according to the explorer...

Parts of the passage are well known, if not obviously navigable. Lake Nicaragua, which is 100ft (32m) above sea level, occupies the central part of the isthmus, and from there the San Juan River runs east to the Caribbean...

Colonel Blashford-Snell, who spent two weeks in Nicaragua last month with a team of four, said he found places where the head waters of different river systems — one flowing east into the lake, another flowing west into the Pacific — were only a few hundred yards apart. The seemingly unanswerable question, however, was how to get from one river to the other.

Then, by chance, he met a local fisherman who helped him to unlock the puzzle. Mariano Hernandez told them he had made the journey from the centre of the isthmus between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific down to the lake to go fishing — a journey made possible during the rainy season when the land turns into a lake up to 2m deep.

The rest of the story is at The Times.