Then we may say with the poet Keats:
Oft have I travelled in the Land of Gold
... Or like stout Cortes ... and all his men
Gazed on the Pacific ... silent upon a peak in Darien.
Keats, however, was in error. It was not Cortes, but another who gazed from the peak, as presently we shall see.
[CHAPTER III]
CENTRAL AMERICA
GUATEMALA, HONDURAS, BRITISH HONDURAS, NICARAGUA, SALVADOR, COSTA RICA, PANAMA
On Michaelmas Day, in the year 1513, a Spanish adventurer, surrounded by his followers—they had sailed from Hispaniola, or Santo Domingo, on an expedition of discovery—found himself on the high ridge of the land called Darien. His eyes, seeking the horizon, fell, not on an endless expanse of mountain and forest, such as here might have been expected to stretch away into the unknown solitudes, but upon the sheen of waters. A smothered exclamation fell from his lips. "El Mar!" ("the Sea!") he cried, and he and his followers remained a space in the silence of astonishment.
The Spaniard was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. It was one of the most dramatic of geographical discoveries. They had but traversed an isthmus, where they had expected a continent—to-day the Isthmus of Panama. They had discovered an ocean; they realized in that moment much that before had been a mystery.