Page:Panama-past-present-Bishop.djvu/14

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
x
Preface

him most: fighting and machinery. Limitation of space has forced the omission of many interesting details: how Balboa's bloodhound, Leoncillo or the "little lion," could tell a hostile from a friendly Indian, and was entered on the muster-roll as a man-at-arms; how the aged Spanish admiral leapt into the sea to save his sailors who had been blown overboard by the explosion of a jar of gunpowder, in the fight with Ringrose's bucaneers; how a fleet of smugglers bombarded Porto Bello, to be revenged on the custom-house officers; how a Scotch soldier of fortune captured the city of Colon with a railroad train; or how an officer of the United States Navy arranged and refereed a battle between Panamanians and Colombians across the tracks of the Panama Railroad, in 1901. It would take a book many times the size of this to tell a tenth of the wonderful story of Panama.

Farnham Bishop.