Panama and the Canal in Picture and Prose

by Willis J. Abbot

But Vasco Nunez de Balboa now approached the unhappy and undeserved close of a glorious career. As his letter went slowly across the seas in a clumsy galleon to Spain, one Pedrarias with a commission to govern Balboa’s province and to deal out summary justice to Balboa, who had been represented to the King as a treacherous villain, was on the Atlantic making for the New World. When Ferdinand received Balboa’s letter he would have given much to recall his hasty commission to Pedrarias, but there was no wireless in those days, and the new governor, with power of life and death over Balboa, was now well out at sea.

The blow did not fall at once. On arrival at Santa Maria de la Antigua in June, 1514, Pedrarias sent a courier to Balboa to announce his coming and his authority. The devoted followers of Vasco Nunez were for resisting the latter, assuring him that the King could not have received the report of his notable discovery, else he would not thus have been supplanted. Balboa however submitted gracefully, promising the newcomer implicit obedience. Pedrarias, though charged to try Balboa for treason, concealed his orders until he had gathered all the useful information that the old chieftain could impart and won many of his followers to his own personal support. Then he arrested Balboa and put him on trial, only to have him triumphantly acquitted. Pedrarias was disgusted. He hated Balboa and feared his influence in the colony. For his own part he was tearing down the little kingdom his predecessor had erected.

WHAT THEY STILL CALL A ROAD IN PANAMA

Balboa had fought the Indian tribes to their knees, then placated them, freed them without torture and made them his allies. Pedrarias applied the methods of the slave trader to the native population. Never was such misery heaped upon an almost helpless foe, save when later his apt pupil Pizarro invaded Peru. The natives were murdered, enslaved, robbed, starved. As Bancroft says, “in addition to gold there were always women for baptism, lust and slavery.” The whole Isthmus blazed with war, and where Balboa had conquered without losing a man Pedrarias lost 70 in one campaign. One of these raids was into the territory now known as the Canal Zone. On one raid Balboa complained to the King there “was perpetrated the greatest cruelty ever heard of in Arabian or Christian country in any generation. And it is this. The captain and the surviving Christians, while on this journey, took nearly 100 Indians of both sexes, mostly women and children, fastened them with chains and afterwards ordered them to be decapitated and scalped.”

OUTDOOR LIFE OF THE NATIVES
The tree is a mango so loaded with fruit that the boughs droop. The fruit is seldom liked by others than natives

Ill feeling rapidly increased between Pedrarias and Balboa. The former with the jealousy and timidity of an old man continually suspected Balboa of plotting against him. His suspicion was not allayed when royal orders arrived from Spain creating Balboa adelantado and governor of the newly discovered Pacific coast. The title sounded well but he would have to fight to establish his government over the Indians and even then Pedrarias would be his superior. But he determined to make the effort, though with the whole Isthmus in war-paint because of the cruelties of Pedrarias he would have to fight every inch of his way. Moreover he tried to carry across the isthmus the hulls of four brigantines, constructed on the Atlantic coast and designed to be put together on the Pacific. Just why he attempted this exploit is perplexing, for there were as good timber and better harbors for shipyards on the Pacific side. Nearly 2000 Indian lives were sacrificed in the heart-rending task of carrying these heavy burdens through the jungle, and when the task was ended it was found that the timbers of two of the ships were useless, having been honeycombed by worms. Two however were seaworthy and with them he put forth into the Pacific, but a great school of whales encountered near the Pearl Islands, where even today they are frequently seen, affrighted his men who made him turn back.

In his party was a man who had fallen in love with Balboa’s beautiful mistress, the daughter of the Indian cacique Careta. She had been annoyed by his advances and complained to Vasco Nunez, who warned the man to desist, accompanying the warning with remarks natural to the situation. This man overheard a conversation, really concerning some pitch and iron for the ships but which might be distorted to convey the impression that Balboa was plotting the overthrow of Pedrarias. By an unlucky chance the eavesdropper was chosen as one of a party to carry dispatches to Pedrarias, and had no sooner reached the presence of that bloodthirsty old conquistadore than he denounced Balboa as a traitor. Moreover he roused the old man’s vanity by telling him that Balboa was so infatuated with his mistress that he would never marry the governor’s daughter—a marriage which had been arranged and announced as an affair of state.

In a rage Pedrarias determined to put an end to Balboa. Accordingly he wrote a pleasant letter, beseeching him to come to Santa Maria for a conference. That Balboa came willingly is evidence enough that he had no guilty knowledge of any plot. Before he reached his destination however he was met by Pizarro with an armed guard who arrested him. No word of his could change the prearranged program. He was tried but even the servile court which convicted him recommended mercy, which the malignant Pedrarias refused. Straightway, upon the verdict the great explorer, with four of his men condemned with him, was marched to the scaffold in the Plaza, where stood the block. In a neighboring hut, pulling apart the wattled canes of which it was built that he might peer out while himself unseen Pedrarias gloated at the sight of the blood of the man whom he hated with the insane hatred of a base and malignant soul. There the heads of the four were stricken off, and with the stroke died Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the man whose name more than any other man’s deserves to be linked with that of Columbus in the history of the Isthmus of Panama. It was in 1517, and Balboa was but forty-two years old.