Balboa
Why is it that well-informed people so persistently forget the name of the man who first discovered the Pacific Ocean? Keats, “on looking into a volume of Chapman’s Homer” thought of the oceans and the stars, and sang,—
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He gazed at the Pacific; all his men
Gazed at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent upon a peak in Darien.”
Next came the German Emperor, crediting Sir Francis Drake with, having first seen the “great water.” For the benefit of such as fall into this error, it may be stated that the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the American continent was Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, who beheld it from the eminence now known as Culebra, about half way across the Isthmus of Panama. Neither Cortez nor Sir Francis Drake, had any share in its achievement.