CANAL COMMISSION STONE CRUSHER, PORTO BELLO
And finally the United States government has acted wisely and justly when in decreeing a great port, lined with massive docks, the stopping place for all the argosies of trade entering or leaving the Canal at its Pacific end, they conferred upon it the name Balboa. It will stand a fitting monument to the great soldier and explorer whose murder affected for the worse all Central America and Peru.
But to return to Porto Bello. Balboa’s own association with that settlement was of the very briefest, but the influence of his discovery was to it all important. For the discovery of the Pacific led to the conquest of Peru under Pizarro, the founding of Old Panama and the development at Porto Bello of the port through which all the wealth wrung from that hapless land of the Incas found its Atlantic outlet.
NATIVE HUTS NEAR PORTO BELLO
The Indians of this region are fishermen and famous navigators. They ship on vessels leaving Colon for far distant ports
AN INDIAN FAMILY OF THE DARIEN
The story of Old Panama may be reserved for a later [chapter], even though the rise and fall of both Nombre de Dios and Porto Bello were chiefly dependent upon the chief Spanish city of the Pacific coast. For great as was the store of gold, silver and jewels torn from the Isthmian Indians and sent from these Spanish ports back to Spain, it was a mere rivulet compared to the flood of gold that poured through the narrow trails across the Isthmus after Pizarro began his ravishment of Peru. With the conquest of the Land of the Incas, and the plunder thereof that made of the Isthmus a mighty treasure house attracting all the vampires and vultures of a predatory day, we have little to do here. Enough to point out that all that was extorted from the Peruvians was sent by ship to Panama and thence by mule carriage either across the trail to Nombre de Dios or Porto Bello, or else by land carriage to some point on the Chagres River, usually Venta Cruces, and thence by the river to San Lorenzo and down the coast to Porto Bello. Nor did the mules return with empty packs. The Peruvians bought from the bandits who robbed them, and goods were brought from Spain to be shipped from Panama to South America and even to the Philippines.
It seems odd to us today with “the Philippine problem” engaging political attention, and with American merchants hoping that the canal may stimulate a profitable Philippine trade, that three hundred years ago Spanish merchants found profit in sending goods by galleons to Porto Bello, by mule-pack across the Isthmus and by sailing vessel again to Manila. Perhaps to the “efficiency experts” of whom we are hearing so much these days, it might be worth while to add some experts in enterprise.
