Gabriel Lafond and Ambrose W. Thompson: Neglected Isthmian Promoters
LYING ROUGHLY between Alniirante Bay and the Chiriqui Lagoon on the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Chiriqui and Golfo Dulce on the Pacific Ocean is the Chiriqui region of the Americanl Isthmus. The international boundary which divides it was not established definitively until 1941, a fact that helped to complicate the affairs of citizens of third states who attemnpted to exploit the region. Today Golfo Dulce and the land surrounding it are in Costa Rica 's Province of Puntarenas, while Almirante Bay and Chiriqui Lagoon are in Panama 's Province of Bocas del Toro. This de jtre arrangement is nearly the same as the de facto arrangement that existed, although niot without protest, during the nineteenth century. As late as 1947 there was no definitive map of the entire region.1 Here was the locale, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, of iiiteroceanic transit and colonization projects under the lead, first of Gabriel Lafond and then of Ambrose W. Thompson, the former a Freleh promoter and the latter a North American. Their efforts, though obscured by more spectacular and in some cases more successful enterprises, of which nlote will be taken, deserve more attention from historians than they have received up to the present. It was in Chiriqui Lagoon that Columbus gave up his search for