Sublime

“There’s one fellow I know from Amazonas Explorer named Efrain—he’s very, very good. Speaks Quechua and English, knows his history.

In 1892 he had visited the seaside hamlet of Palm Beach in such a manner, and had returned to St. Augustine in a lather. “I have found a veritable Paradise,” he told his managers, instructing them to acquire the necessary land for the “largest hotel in the world” and to begin planning the extension of the line to Palm Beach.

Aspinwall, with the help of a generous government franchise to carry the mail to California, had established steamship lines to and from Panama on both oceans. So except for the land barrier at Panama he could provide through steamer passage from New York to San Francisco. The railroad, then, was to be the vital land link in the system—in a grand,

But retreat—or surrender—was not in Henry Flagler’s nature. He turned to Meredith’s second-in-command, William J. Krome, the strapping young civil engineer who had led the ill-fated mapping expeditions through the wilds near Cape Sable; without hesitation,

Sir Morris Abbot,