“The Admiral without making any stay went on till he put into Puerto Bello, giving it that name because it is large, well peopled and encompassed by a well cultivated country. He entered the place on the 2nd of November (1502), passing between two small islands within which ships may lie close to the shore and turn it out (sic) if they have occasion. The country about the harbor, higher up, is not very rough but tilled and full of houses, a stone’s throw or a bow shot one from the other; and it looks like the finest landscape a man can imagine. During seven days we continued there, on account of the rain and ill weather, there came continually canoes from all the country about to trade, for provisions, and bottoms of fine spun cotton which they gave for some trifles such as points and pins.”
Time changes, and things and places change with it. What are “bottoms of fine spun cotton” and “trifles such as points”? As for the people whose houses then so plentifully besprinkled the landscape round about, they have largely vanished. Slain in battle, murdered in cold blood, or enslaved and worked to death by the barbarous Spaniards, they have given place to a mongrel race mainly negro, and of them even there are not enough to give to Porto Bello today the cheery, well populated air which the younger Columbus noticed more than 400 years ago.
The real foundation date of Porto Bello is fixed at 1607, though probably the moving thither of Nombre de Dios began earlier. Its full name in Spanish was San Felipe de Puertovello, for the pious Spaniards were hard put to it to name a city, a mountain, a cape or a carouse without bringing in a saint. Typically enough San Felipe was soon forgotten and the name became Puerto Bello or beautiful harbor. It grew rapidly, for, as already noted, the city of Nombre de Dios was reërected there. By 1618 there were 130 houses in the main town not counting the suburbs, a cathedral, governor’s house, kings’ houses, a monastery, convent of mercy and hospital, a plaza and a quay. The main city was well-built, partly of stone or brick, but the suburbs, one of which was set aside for free negroes, were chiefly of wattled canes with palm thatch. A few plantations and gardens bordered on the city, but mainly the green jungle came down to the very edge as it does with Chagres, Cruces or other native towns today.
It was the Atlantic port of entry for not Panama alone, but for the entire west coast of South America and for merchandise intended for the Philippines. Its great days were of course the times of the annual fairs which lasted from 40 to 60 days, but even at other times there were 40 vessels and numbers of flat boats occupied in the trade of the port. Yet it was but an outpost in the jungle after all. No man alone dared tread the royal road from the city’s gate after nightfall. In the streets snakes, toads and the ugly iguana, which the natives devour eagerly, were frequently to be seen. The native wild cat—called grandiloquently a lion or a tiger—prowled in the suburbs and, besides carrying off fowls and pigs, sometimes attacked human beings. The climate was better than that of Nombre de Dios yet sufficiently unhealthful. Child-birth was so often fatal and the rearing of children attended with so much mortality that all mothers who were able resorted to Panama or Cruces at such a time.
It was for a time a considerable market place and for the privilege of trading there the brokers paid into the public coffer 2,000 ducats a year. Another source of revenue was a tax of two reales on each head of cattle slaughtered in the shambles—a tax still retained in form in the Republic of Panama. He who brought in a negro slave had to pay two pesos for the privilege and from this impost a revenue of some $1,000 a year was obtained, most of which was used in cutting down the jungle and in maintaining roads.
NATIVE FAMILY IN CHORRERA
Before Porto Bello had even the beginnings of a town, before even the settlement at Nombre de Dios had been begun, there landed at the former port a Spaniard to whom the Isthmus gave immortality and a violent death—two gifts of fortune which not uncommonly go hand in hand. Vasco Nunez de Balboa was with Bastides in the visit which preceded that of Columbus. Thereby he gained a knowledge of the coast and a taste for seafaring adventure. Having tried to be a planter at Santo Domingo and failed therein, he gave his creditors the slip by being carried in a barrel aboard a ship about to explore the Panama coast under the Bachelor Encisco. Though they laughed at him for a time as “el hombre de casco”, “the man in a cask”, his new companions in time came to accept his leadership and ultimately discarded that of Encisco, for besides gallantry Balboa possessed a genius for intrigue. Except for his great achievement of the discovery of the Pacific, and his genius in making friends of the tribes he had subdued, Balboa’s career does not differ greatly from that of the leaders of other remorseless Spanish hordes who harried the hapless people of Central America, robbing, enslaving and murdering them with brutal indifference to their rights and totally callous to their sufferings. One can hardly read of the Spaniards in Central America and Peru without sympathizing somewhat with the Indian cacique who, having captured two of the marauders, fastened them to the ground, propped open their jaws and poured molten gold down their throats saying the while: “Here’s gold, Spaniards! Here’s gold. Take a plenty; drink it down! Here’s more gold.”
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY RUIN AT PORTO BELLO
This edifice, still well preserved, is believed to be the Casa Real, or Custom House