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How the English Failed
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no more from Porto Bello. Both Spain and England turned their attention away from Panama to Nicaragua, and, in 1780, Horatio Nelson, then a post-captain, was sent to take that country for George III. But though he easily defeated the Spaniards, Nelson was driven away by yellow fever, that killed one hundred and ninety out of the two hundred men on his ship.
So, for one reason or another, from the time when the Isthmus lay helpless under the feet of Morgan until the last of the Spanish viceroys drove a band of English filibusters out of the oft-captured town of Porto Bello, in 1819, the English failed to take Panama from Spain. "These doors of the seas and keys of the universe" were not destined to be theirs.
