NATIVE HUT AND OPEN-AIR KITCHEN
Had the bungling and cruel Pedrarias never been sent to the Isthmus that part of the country known as the Darien might by now be as civilized as the Chiriqui province. As it was, the thriving settlements of Acla and Antigua languished and disappeared, and the legacy of hatred left by the Indians of that day is so persistent that the white man has never been able to establish himself on the eastern end of the Isthmus.
COCOANUT GROVE ON THE CARIBBEAN COAST
Fate has dealt harshly with the memory of Balboa. Keats, in his best known and most quoted sonnet, gives credit for his discovery to Cortez. Local tradition has bestowed his name on a hill he never saw, and Panamanian financial legislation has given his name to a coin which is never coined—existing as a fictitious unit like our mill. He did not himself realize the vastness of his discovery, and gave the misleading name of the South Sea to what was the Pacific Ocean. But time is making its amends. History will accord with the verdict of John Fiske who said of him:
“Thus perished in the forty-second year of his age the man who, but for that trifle of iron and pitch, would probably have been the conqueror of Peru. It was a pity that such work should not have fallen into his hands, for when at length it was done, it was by men far inferior to him in character and caliber. One cannot but wish that he might have gone on his way like Cortez, and worked out the rest of his contemplated career in accordance with the genius that was in him. That bright attractive figure and its sad fate can never fail to arrest the attention and detain the steps of the historian as he passes by. Quite possibly the romantic character of the story may have thrown something of a glamour about the person of the victim, so that unconsciously we tend to emphasize his merits while we touch lightly upon his faults. But after all, this effect is no more than that which his personality wrought upon the minds of contemporary witnesses, who were unanimous in their expressions of esteem for Balboa, and of condemnation for the manner of his taking off.”
Ramsay, Photo
CANAL COMMISSION STONE CRUSHER, PORTO BELLO