Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

Within twenty miles, at the very most, east and west of Colon lie the chief existing memorials of the bygone days of Spanish discovery and colonization, and English adventurous raids and destruction, on the Isthmus. All that is picturesque and enthralling—that is to say, all that is stirring, bloody, and lawless—in the history of the Caribbean shore of the Isthmus lies thus adjacent to the Atlantic entrance of the Canal. To the east are Nombre de Dios and Porto Bello—the oldest European settlements on the North American continent, the one being founded about 1510, almost a century and a half before the landing at Plymouth, and the other in 1607, the very year of the planting of Jamestown, Virginia. To the west is the castle of San Lorenzo at the mouth of the Chagres, the gateway to the Pacific trade, built in the latter years of the sixteenth century and repeatedly destroyed. About these Spanish outposts, once thriving market towns and massive fortresses, but now vine-covered ruins where “the lion and the lizard keep their court” clusters a wealth of historical lore.

Let us for the time turn from the Panama of today, and from speculation as to its future, and look back upon the Panama of the past. It is a past too full of incident, too replete with stories of battle, murder and sudden death for full justice to be done to it in a chapter. Volumes, libraries almost, have been written about it, for Panama is not one of the happy countries without a history. Of that history the survey here is necessarily the most cursory.

MODERN PORTO BELLO PROM ACROSS THE BAY

Twenty miles from Colon to the east is the spacious deep water harbor of Porto Bello, visited and named by Columbus in 1502. Earlier still it had harbored the ships of Roderigo de Bastides who landed there in 1500—probably the first European to touch Panama soil. He sought the strait to the Indies, and gold as well. A few miles east and north of Porto Bello is Nombre de Dios, one of the earliest Spanish settlements but now a mere cluster of huts amidst which the Canal workers were only recently dredging sand for use in construction. Few visit Nombre de Dios for purposes of curiosity and indeed it is little worth visiting, for fires, floods and the shifting sands of the rivers have obliterated all trace of the old town. The native village consisted of about 200 huts when the American invasion occurred, but a spark from one of the engines set off the dry thatch of one of the huts and a general conflagration ensued. The Americans have since repaired the damages, to the sanitary advantage of the place, but at heavy cost to its picturesqueness.

TYPICAL NATIVE HUT IN PORTO BELLO DISTRICT

For that quality you must look to its past, for it figured largely in the bloody life of the Isthmus in the 16th century. It was founded by one Don Diego de Nicuesa, who had held the high office of Royal Carver at Madrid. Tired of supervising the carving of meats for his sovereign he sailed for the Isthmus to carve out a fortune for himself. Hurricanes, treachery, jealousy, hostile Indians, mutinous sailors and all the ills that jolly mariners have to face had somewhat abated his jollity and his spirit as well when he rounded Manzanillo Point and finding himself in a placid bay exclaimed: “Detengamonos aqui, en nombre de Dios” (Let us stop here in the name of God). His crew, superstitious and pious as Spanish sailors were in those days, though piety seldom interfered with their profanity or piracy, seized on the devout invocation and Nombre de Dios became the name of the port.

The town thus named became for a time the principal Spanish port on the Caribbean coast and one of the two terminals of the royal road to Old Panama. But the harbor was poor, the climate sickly, for the town was shut in on the landward side by mountains which excluded the breeze. It came to be called the Spanish Graveyard. Children died in infancy, and Spanish mothers sent theirs to Cruces to be reared. Difficult of defense by either land or sea it was menaced alternately by the Cimmaroons and the English, and in 1572 Sir Francis Drake took it by assault but gained little profit by the adventure, in which he nearly lost his life. Warned by this, and by other attacks, a distinguished Spanish engineer was sent to examine Nombre de Dios with other Caribbean ports.