The story of the first islands, those bits of Paradise vouchsafed to lost mariners, is pitiful and tragic; the story of the mainland, the Spanish Main, is violent and sinful. Adam voluntarily banished himself from Eden a second time. With the banners of the Church and the spirit of Cain the discoverers set foot in the New World.
"In the Name of God let us remain here," cried the tempest-tossed Diego de Nicuesa in 1507, when he found the quiet water of Nombre de Dios Bay—"In the Name of God! In the Name of God! Nombre de Dios! Nombre de Dios!" cried his followers. And there they made a colony which endured and in time made the first base for the treasure fleet. Balboa discovered the Pacific in 1513. In 1519, on the shore of the other ocean, the city of Panama was founded. In 1520 Magellan rounded Cape Horn. In 1521 he reached the Philippines where he was killed in battle. But the survivors of his ships sailed on and reached, with no small astonishment, the Cape of Good Hope, and then made Europe, thus circumnavigating the world. Magellan called his ocean the Pacific. In 1521 Cortes got to the Pacific, crossing Mexico to Tehuantepec. In 1524 Pizarro set sail from Panama City to the conquest of Peru.
Then commenced the building of the Royal Road, the Camino Real, through the jungle of Darien, for the safe transit of the treasure caravans, and Spaniards enslaved Indians and made them hew a way with knives and carry the blocks of stone, cobbling it a yard wide all the way from Nombre de Dios to Panama itself.
Pearls and gold came from the South Seas, gold and silver ornaments, gems of all kinds, and then gold and silver in massive bars. The pack-trains led by the muleteers and guarded by men in armor toiled through the dank hot jungle. There was built at Nombre de Dios a great stone treasure-house where the spoils were heaped up or stacked to wait the coming of the galleons. The Plate Fleet, bearing to Spain its precious cargoes, became the astonishment of the ocean, firing the thoughts of pirates and adventure-seekers—and, not least, England's Elizabethan sailors. The Plate Fleet was harried; Nombre de Dios was attacked; Nombre de Dios was burned. Nombre de Dios became known as "the Spaniards' grave."
I sailed there in a little boat with a wizened old man, who was owner and skipper and cook and sailor all in one. And as we rode over the curling waves his talk was all of gold. There were a score of tatters in the only pair of trousers he had in the world. I advanced him ten dollars to buy provisions and oil for his little cooker. He wore a twenty-year-old straw hat—he collected newspapers, which he seemed to regard as precious in themselves. But he said "My God"—he was very profane—"when I get some one to put capital into my mines I shall be king." A cross between a German and a Panamanian Negro, he was at once credulous and calculating. I could not convince him that I was not seeking gold, or oil, or at least manganese. The German in him made up his mind about me. I was made to correspond to the description of my type in a Leipzig encyclopedia. The Negro in him was fantastically imaginative regarding the treasures of the Spanish Main. He had sailed for forty years, seeking gold, seeking treasure. Far from its being a pestilential coast, Darien was Paradise. It was a health resort; there were no mosquitoes.
"This land is Aden," he kept saying, filling me with mirth, for he meant Eden all the time.
We passed, or were passed by, many schooners manned by Jamaicans, proudly and superfluously flying British flags; and by San Blas Indians in dugout canoes surmounted by the most rudimentary sails. We came alongside and looked on the mean cargoes of coconuts and bananas and on the Mongolian features of the untamable Indians. The same Indians whom the Spaniards treated so ill have long since recaptured their country and have established a feud with white man and black man. Nearly all Darien to-day is called the "Forbidden Country," and no one who is not an Indian dare remain there after nightfall. But the Indians come down to the shore, or even set off in canoes, to trade fruit and monkeys and parrots for—one thing mostly—powder. The Spanish priests tried to teach them to pray to God. But the other Spaniards brought a more convincing gospel of powder. My skipper evinced great contempt for them, however. "They'll never be no use till put under ground," he averred. "All this," he pointed to the entangled jungle of the shore, "is white man's country. Only white men can do any good here."
We called at tropical islands, all gnarled rocks and upstarting palms, places for pirates, places for loot. We called at inhabited islands, trading islands with great general stores. On these were white men making a fortune by intercepting the schooners and bartering fruit with canned goods, tools, guns, cartridges. But the wild shore of the mainland held the eyes.
Green hands of the jungle reached out from the tangles, as if all the trees and shrubs were also savages locked in some orgy in which the young and slender were being suffocated or trodden under foot. Hands of despair were stretched outward to the sea. But when we came into Nombre de Dios Bay the barbarity of the vegetable kingdom seemed to have receded as age and depravity step back for innocence. The gentlest of waves rippled forward on a fine half-round of sand. And there might well have been many children playing on that long curve of shell-strewn beach. It was peaceful. It was sun-bathed and blue and gleaming—and it was empty. Even the two schooners and the three dugout canoes were hidden from view by the breakwater and dam. A huddled village with thatched roofs looked out from under isolated fringing palms—like gray women with shawls about their ears. In the background, a ruined church of stone.
Time stood still in the mind whilst I turned back the pages of the chronicles and saw this bay of childhood and romance as the "Spaniards' Grave." Here then lived Francis Drake in disguise watching how the Spanish shipped the treasures of Peru on to the Plate Fleet. Nombre de Dios was built in stone then, but you will search in vain for that stone to-day unless it is in the structure of the church or in the road way of the Treasure Trail.