Panama - First Contact
Rodrigo de Bastidas, a wealthy notary public from Seville, was the first of many Spanish explorers to reach the isthmus. Sailing westward from Venezuela in 1501 in search of gold, he explored some 150 kilometers of the coastal area before heading for the West Indies. A year later, Christopher Columbus, on his fourth voyage to the New World, touched several points on the isthmus. One was a horseshoe-shaped harbor that he named Puerto Bello (beautiful port), later renamed Portobelo.
Vasco Nunez de Balboa, a member of Bastidas's crew, had settled in Hispaniola (the island encompassing present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) but stowed away on a voyage to Panama in 1510 to escape his creditors. At that time, about 800 Spaniards lived on the isthmus, but soon the many jungle perils, doubtless including malaria and yellow fever, had killed all but 60 of them.
Finally, the settlers at Antigua del Darien (Antigua), the first city to be duly constituted by the Spanish crown, deposed the crown's representative and elected Balboa and Martin Zamudio co-mayors. Balboa proved to be a good administrator. He insisted that the settlers plant crops rather than depend solely on supply ships, and Antigua became a prosperous community. Like other conquistadors, Balboa led raids on Indian settlements, but unlike most, he proceeded to befriend the conquered tribes. He took the daughter of a chief as his lifelong mistress.
On September 1, 1513, Balboa set out with 190 Spaniards — among them Francisco Pizarro, who later conquered the Inca Empire in Peru — a pack of dogs, and 1,000 Indian slaves. After twenty-five days of hacking their way through the jungle, the party gazed on the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Balboa, clad in full armor, waded into the water and claimed the sea and all the shores on which it washed for his God and his king.
Balboa returned to Antigua in January 1514 with all 190 soldiers and with cotton cloth, pearls, and 40,000 pesos in gold. Meanwhile, Balboa's enemies had denounced him in the Spanish court, and King Ferdinand appointed a new governor for the colony, then known as Castilla del Oro. The new governor, Pedro Arias de Avila, who became known as "Pedrarias the Cruel," charged Balboa with treason. In 1517 Balboa was arrested, brought to the court of Pedrarias, and executed.
He was brought from his prison, the crier announcing before him, that he was doomed to this punishment as a traitor, and a usurper of the lands of the crown. On hearing himself proclaimed traitor, he raised his eyes to heaven, and protested that he had never harboured any other thought, than that of augmenting the kingdoms and possessions of his king. Nor, indeed, was such a protestation deemed necessary by the spectators, who, full of horror and compassion, beheld the sentence executed, and the bleeding head afterwards stuck ignominiously upon a pole.
It will be asked, what motive could have operated this unlooked for reverse. All that can be discovered from the various relations which have reached modern times, with regard to this miserable affair, is, that the enemies of Balboa had once more revived the ill-smothered suspicions and rancours of Pedrarias, making him believe that his son-in-law, in so zealously preparing his expedition, meditated to separate himself, by its means, forever from his obedience. Balboa, at the period of his death, was 42 years of age. His property was confiscated, and, with all his papers, taken possession of as a deposit, by the historian Oviedo, in virtue of a commission which he held to that effect from the Emperor.
No explanation has been given with regard to Pedrarias, either in the public despatches, or in private relations. In all of them, he is described as hard, avaricious, and cruel; in all, we see him totally incapable of any thing great; in all, he is depicted as the depopulator and destroyer of the country, whither he was sent to be the preserver and bulwark; so that neither indulgence or doubt, however they may be warped for his justification and exculpation, can ever wash his abhorred name from the stain and opprobrium which has obscured it for ever.
For Balboa, on the contrary, no sooner were the mean and miserable passions, excited by his merit and his talents to pursue him to his ruin, silenced, than the records of office, private memoirs, and the voice of posterity, unanimously proclaim him one of the greatest Spaniards that ever explored the regions of America.
In 1519 Pedrarias moved his capital away from the debilitating climate and unfriendly Indians of the Darien to a fishing village on the Pacific coast (about four kilometers east of the present-day capital). The Indians called the village Panama, meaning "plenty of fish." In the same year, Nombre de Dios, a deserted early settlement, was resettled and until the end of the sixteenth century served as the Caribbean port for trans-isthmian traffic. A trail known as the Camino Real, or royal road, linked Panama and Nombre de Dios. Along this trail, traces of which can still be followed, gold from Peru was carried by muleback to Spanish galleons waiting on the Atlantic coast.
The increasing importance of the isthmus for transporting treasure and the delay and difficulties posed by the Camino Real inspired surveys ordered by the Spanish crown in the 1520s and 1530s to ascertain the feasibility of constructing a canal. The idea was finally abandoned in mid-century by King Philip II (1556-98), who concluded that if God had wanted a canal there, He would have built one.
Pedrarias's governorship proved to be disastrous. Hundreds of Spaniards died of disease and starvation in their brocaded silk clothing; thousands of Indians were robbed, enslaved, and massacred. Thousands more of the Indians succumbed to European diseases to which they had no natural immunity. After the atrocities of Pedrarias, most of the Indians fled to remote areas to avoid the Spaniards.
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