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Neighbor to Nombre de Dios upon the Spanish Main is Puerto Bello, which afterward became the anchorage of the Treasure Fleet. But Puerto Bello also was destroyed and also by one of Albion's hateful isle, though he was by no means a true hero of romance—Henry Morgan the pirate. He blew it up; he marched with his crew, cutlass in hand, across the Isthmus, and fired Panama too, or caused the Spaniards in defense to fire it, thus wrecking the fairest city of its time in America, a city of seven thousand cedar-wood houses, two hundred treasure houses, and three score churches with golden altars, a city already of thirty thousand souls. That was in 1671. He was rewarded by his King, after he had bought a knighthood, and was made Governor of Jamaica; he had, in fact, quite a modern career. They point his grave out to you as you sail along the shore, and every half savage in Panama knows more of him than of Drake or Balboa. And at Puerto Bello there has remained untouched for two centuries the spectacular ruin which he wrought.
The rusty guns lie where they lay "the morning after," beside the massive stone fortifications. Spiked, useless, and yet impressive in idleness, it is surprising that they have not been taken away for use as ornaments of some new city square, or at least for the value of the metal that is in them.
Puerto Bello has a mixed Negroid population and many bamboo huts. But it has also stone houses. It was once well laid out, and has beautiful little stone bridges and pleasure seats. The fortified part is extensive, and as one walked the ramparts, the only European, indeed the only person about at all, once more Time as it were stopped in the mind and one realized the night when the pirates came, and drunk and idle the Spanish soldiers and dire the fate they met.
But I left behind me the thought of Morgan at the old portal of the city where, scarcely molded over, stand the three crosses which mark the place where for nearly two hundred years the treasure caravans came regularly and made an end of their long, arduous, jungle journey, and the priests gave blessing whilst enslaved Indian coolies toiled and soldiers and sailors swore.
And the old, disused, cobbled roadway plunges through sedges under the marsh and into the vegetation and darkness which has long since swallowed it up.
From Puerto Bello Morgan crossed the isthmus; from Nombre de Dios Drake crossed it and from "a goodlie and great high tree" looked on the waters of the South Seas for the first time. Where exactly Balboa crossed it no one knows. For no one has come that way again. But it was certainly in what is now called the Forbidden Country, which the Indians have long since recaptured and now hold by force of arms, to the total exclusion of all who are not Indians.