Panama, past and present/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
HOW PEDRARIAS THE CRUEL BUILT OLD PANAMA
ENCISO'S complaints had decided the king to appoint a new governor, who should call Balboa to account. As usual, he picked a court favorite, Pedro Arias de Avila, called for short, Pedrarias Davila. He had served bravely as a colonel of infantry, and as he was now seventy years old, the king thought he could be counted on to attend strictly to the royal business, without having time to become dangerously powerful. But Pedrarias lived long enough to do more evil than any other man who ever came to the New World, before or since.
The news of Balboa's first successes brought in recruits, who were particularly attracted by the tale of a river so full of gold that the Indians strained it out with nets. Fully fifteen hundred crowded into the ships, instead of the twelve hundred sought for. Light wooden shields and quilted cotton jackets took the place of the steel armor that must have killed more men with sunstroke than it saved from the Indians' arrows. A Spanish historian of the time calls this expedition "the best equipped company that ever left Spain."
When the fleet reached Darien, the silk-clad messengers, sent on shore to seek Balboa, found him sitting in his underclothes and slippers, overseeing some Indians who were thatching a house. Even greater was the contrast when the new governor entered the town next day, with his wife, Dona Isabel, on one hand, and on the other a bishop in robes and miter, with friars chanting the Te Deum, and a train of gaily dressed cavaliers smiling scornfully at the tattered, sunburned colonists.
But not many weeks later, one of these same men in lace and satin staggered through the streets of Antigua, begging in vain for a morsel of food, and finally dropped dead in the sight of all. There was not enough food for such a multitude, and besides, the newcomers died by hundreds of the fevers. This is probably why Pedrarias did not at once put Balboa to death, under the pretext of what he had done to Nicuesa and Enciso. For although he was bitterly jealous of Balboa's success, Pedrarias realized that the other's men were seasoned veterans, and his own were sickly recruits. Besides, the bishop and some of the other officials befriended Balboa. So he was merely fined, imprisoned a few days, and then released. If he had been a wiser man, Balboa would have returned to Spain, where he was now a great hero, but instead, he stayed to watch Pedrarias at his work.
And dreadful work it was. Balboa had killed like a soldier, but Pedrarias tortured like a fiend. He had been instructed to establish a line of posts between the two oceans, and sent his lieutenant, Juan de Ayora, to locate the first fort at a place on the Atlantic coast called Santa Cruz. A chief who spread a feast for him, thinking to welcome his old friend Balboa, was tortured until he gave up all his gold, and then burned alive because it was not enough. As for the other chiefs Ayora caught, "some he roasted alive, some were thrown living to the dogs, some were hanged, and for others were devised new forms of torture." After several months of this, Ayora sneaked back to Antigua, stole a ship, and sailed away with all the gold so infernally won.
Another force crossed to the Pacific side and ravaged there, but were glad to fight their way back again, as all the tribes were rising. They were met by Indians waving the bloody shirts of the garrison of Santa Cruz. The blockhouse there had been stormed, and molten gold poured down the Spaniards' throats, while the Indians cried, "Eat the gold, Christians! Take your fill of gold!"
A hundred and eighty Spaniards, with three field-pieces, wandered into poisoned-arrow country, fell into an ambush, and were shot down to a man. An expedition
PIECES OF EIGHT.
was sent up the Atrato to find the Golden Temple of Dabaiba, but here too the Indians had the advantage. Being naked and good swimmers, they easily dived under and upset the canoes. Half the Spaniards were drowned, and Balboa, who was second in command, brought the rest back to Antigua. And though many other expeditions were later sent up the Atrato, none has ever reached Dabaiba, so the golden temple must be there to-day—if it ever was there at all.
Pedrarias, filled with fury at these defeats, took the field himself, but soon came down with a fever. Finally his alcalde, Espinosa, hurled himself with a sufficiently large force on the exhausted tribes and, by the beginning of 1517, established a Roman peace.
In the meanwhile, Balboa had been sent a royal commission as Adelantado of the South Seas, and Viceroy of the Pacific side of the Isthmus, but the jealous Pedrarias had held it up. Now Fonseca, the bishop, patched up a truce between the two. Balboa agreed to put away his Indian wife, and became engaged to the daughter of Pedrarias.
There was a place on the Atlantic shore, between Antigua and abandoned Santa Cruz, called by the Indians Acla, or "the Bones of Men," because two warlike chiefs of long ago had caused a great slaughter of their subjects there. Here Balboa cut down and shaped the timbers of four brigantines. These were carried by hundreds of Indians and a few negroes, over a rough trail to the headwaters of the Savannah River, down which they were rafted to the Gulf of San Miguel. It was an incredible piece of labor for the time, and none could have accomplished it but Nuñez de Balboa. When they came to set up the vessels, half the wood was found to be worm-eaten, and high tides and floods swept away much of the rest. But he persevered, until at last four fully equipped brigantines floated at anchor on the South Sea.
Then came word of a new governor sent from Spain to take the place of Pedrarias. Balboa confided to a friend that it might be wise for him to sail at once for Peru, "if this newcomer meant aught of ill to his lord Pedrarias." Now this false friend had been his rival for the love of the Indian girl, and revenged himself by denouncing Balboa to Pedrarias as a traitor. Francisco Pizarro was at once sent to arrest him, and, after a mockery of a trial, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, Adelantado of the South Sea, and noblest of the conquistadores, died on the scaffold in the plaza of Acla.
Fearing the wrath of the new governor, Pedrarias crossed the Isthmus, and in 1519, founded a city on the site of a little fishing village called Panama. This name signifies, in the Indian language, "a place abounding in fish," and one reason the Spaniards settled here was to escape the famines they had suffered at Antigua. Both that town and Acla were soon abandoned to the Indians, who even now forbid white men to stay overnight in that region under penalty of death, so well do they still remember the cruelties of Pedrarias.
I wish I could add that vengeance overtook that wicked old man, but he lived to rule and do evil, both in Panama and in Nicaragua, until he was ninety years old. The new governor died suddenly, and several in authority that came after him, including one bishop of Panama, were poisoned by Pedrarias. As for the Indians he caused to be killed, the historian Oviedo declares them to have been more than two million.
The only consolation we have is the knowledge that Pedrarias, who was even fonder of gold than of bloodshed, was at first a partner of Pizarro's, when the man who had arrested Balboa sailed on his ships to the conquest of Peru; but later, Pedrarias lost his courage, and sold his quarter-share in the adventure for a miserable thousand crowns. How it must have wrung the cruel old miser's heart to see the ship loads of silver and gold that came up from the mines of Peru, to be carried across the Isthmus on the way to Spain. For it was this treasure-trade with Peru that made the wealth and glory of Old Panama.