Panama, past and present/Chapter 2

by Farnham Bishop

CHAPTER II

HOW COLUMBUS SOUGHT FOR THE STRAIT

IF you go to Panama by ship from one of our Atlantic ports, the first land you will see is Watling's Island, or San Salvador, where Columbus caught his first glimpse of the New World in 1492. We know that this is one of the Bahamas, but Columbus died in the belief that it was an island off the coast of Asia. For though he rightly supposed the world to be round so that by sailing long enough to the west you could reach the east, neither he nor any one else in Europe at the time realized how long a voyage that would be. And the last thing Columbus imagined was that he should find a whole New World.

According to his calculations, Japan must lie just about where he found Cuba, and so Columbus told his crew, and made them all take oath that Cuba was Japan. Now, he reasoned, it could be only a little distance further to the rich cities and kingdoms of the Far East. Wonderful stories of their wealth and luxury had been brought back to Europe by Marco Polo, the Venetian, and other travelers, who had made the long difficult journey overland from Europe to India, or even China. And for countless centuries the silks and spices, the gold and jewels, of the East had been carried to the West over caravan-trails that were trodden deep before the first Pharaoh ruled in Egypt. Do you know why they have the same fairy stories and folk-lore in Ireland that they have in Japan? Because they passed from lip to lip, from camp-fire to camp-fire along this old trade-route, no one knows how many thousand years ago.

STATUE OF COLUMBUS AT MADRID.

But in the fifteenth century the Turks captured Constantinople and closed the overland road. This threw the whole world out of gear. The Portuguese were the first to look for a new way to India, by sailing round Africa. And in 1487, the brave captain, Bartholomew Diaz, succeeded in rounding the "Cape of Storms," and came back with the news that he had entered the Indian Ocean, and that there was good hope of reaching India by that route. So the King of Portugal commanded the "Cape of Storms" to be rechristened the "Cape of Good Hope," and so it is called to this day.

Bartholomew Columbus was on this voyage and talked it over with his brother Christopher, who pointed out how much easier and shorter it would be to sail twenty-five hundred or perhaps three thousand miles straight across the Atlantic to Asia, than to make the long trip of more than twelve thousand miles round Africa. The idea was not new, but the king of Portugal would have none of it; and you know what a bitter, weary time Columbus had at the court of Spain. All these black memories must have seemed to fade like small clouds far astern, as he sailed back to Palos with the glad news that he had discovered the outposts of Asia, and that another voyage or two would surely open the direct passage to the East Indies. But more than four hundred and twenty years were to pass before that passage was to be opened.

Columbus discovered more islands on his second voyage, and on the third came to the mainland of South America, at the mouth of the Orinoco. So great a body of fresh water as here poured into the ocean could flow from no mere island but from a continent, "a Terra Firma, of vast extent, of which until this day nothing has been known."

This made one mainland, or "firm land," as the Spaniards called it, from some idea that a continent must be made of solider stuff than an island; and north of it, Cuba must make another. For at this time no one had sailed round, and this island Cuba or "Japan" was supposed to be part of the mainland of Asia. Somewhere between these two bodies of land, thought Columbus, must be a strait through which flowed the waters of the Atlantic into the Indian Ocean, causing the strong current to the west that was felt as far north as Santo Domingo. Once through the strait, instead of tamely retracing his course, he would sail round the world, and home to Spain by way of the Cape of Good Hope. By this he hoped to eclipse the success of Vasco de Gama,

CHORRERA, A TYPICAL TOWN IN THE INTERIOR OF THE REPUBLIC OF PANAMA.

who had at last realized the "good hope" of reaching India by way of the Cape, and returned to Portugal, laden with glory and riches in 1499.

It was now 1502, ten years after the discovery of America, when Columbus sailed on his fourth and last voyage. He had four ships, the Capitana, Santiago de Palos, Gallego, and Biscaina. The largest of these was but of seventy tons burden, the smallest of fifty, and all were worn and old. The crews numbered a hundred and fifty men and boys, there were provisions for two years, and both cannon and trinkets for winning gold from the Indians. Bartholomew Columbus was captain of one of the caravels, with the title of Adelantado, and with his father on the flagship was Christopher Columbus's thirteen-year-old son, Ferdinand. When he grew up, Ferdinand Columbus wrote a biography of his father, containing the best account we have of this voyage.

They sailed from Cadiz on the ninth of May, 1502, took on wood and water at the Canaries, and put in at Santo Domingo, to exchange one of the ships for another, "because it was a bad sailer, and, besides, could carry no sail, but the side would lie almost under water." But Ovando, the governor of the Spanish colony there, was an enemy of Columbus, and refused to let him have a new ship, or even to take refuge in the harbor from a threatening storm. Ovando himself was just setting forth for Spain, in a great fleet of his own, laden with much gold that had been cruelly wrung from the poor Indians, including one nugget so large that the Spaniards had used it for a table. Columbus warned Ovando that a storm was coming, and was laughed at for his pains. But scarcely had the governor's fleet set sail, when down upon it swooped a terrible West Indian hurricane, and sent most of the ships to the bottom, big nugget and all. One ship, the poorest of the fleet, reached Spain, with some of Columbus's own goods on board. On one of the few vessels that struggled back to Santo Domingo was Rodrigo de Bastidas, of whom we shall hear more presently.

Columbus's own little squadron weathered the storm, thanks to the admiral's seamanship, which to the Spanish sailors appeared "art magic." Steering once more in the direction of the supposed strait, they were carried by the currents to the south of Cuba. There they fell in near the Isle of Pines, with a great canoe "of eight feet beam, and as long as a Spanish galley." Its owner, a

CARAVEL.

cacique of Yucatan, was on a trading voyage, with a cargo of copper hatchets and cups, cloaks and tunics of dyed cotton, daggers and wooden swords edged with obsidian glass, and, strangest of all to the eyes of the Spaniards, a supply of cacao (chocolate) beans. Here was evidence of something far superior to the naked savagery of the islands. It began to look as if Columbus would have some use for the Arabic interpreters he had brought with him, together with letters to the Great Khan of Tartary.

And indeed, if the old Indian that the admiral took on board for a guide had piloted the Spaniards to his own country, they would have found there great cities and stone temples and hoards of gold to their hearts' content. But when they had come to Cape Honduras, where the shore of Central America runs east and west, they asked the old Indian which way the gold came from. He pointed to the east, away from his own country, and so Yucatan and Mexico were left to be conquered by Cortez in 1517.

Fighting against head winds—once they made but sixty leagues in seventy days—the little fleet struggled on down the coast. The first Indians they met with had such large holes bored in their ears that the Spaniards called that region "the Coast of the Ear." Better weather came after rounding Cape Gracias à Dios, or "Thanks to God," and the Indians offered to trade with guanin, a mixture of gold and copper. Pure gold, they said, was to be found further down the coast. So Columbus kept on, past what are now Nicaragua and Costa Rica, until he came to the great Chiriqui Lagoon. Here were plenty of gold ornaments, in the form of eagles, frogs, or other creatures, such as are dug up to-day from the ancient Indian graves in the Province of Chiriqui. Among them we often find little bells of pure gold, shaped exactly like our sleigh bells, but Columbus does not mention them. Ferdinand Columbus does speak of finding something a little further down the coast that seems even stranger: the ruins of a stone wall, a piece of which they brought away "as a memorial of that antiquity."

The strait was now reported to be near at hand, so the interpreters declared; just beyond a country called Veragua, rich in gold. Eagerly they sped on, passing Veragua with a fair wind that carried them by Limon Bay, where we are now digging the Atlantic entrance of the strait they sought.^[1]

The admiral put in at a land-locked, natural harbor, so beautiful that he called it Porto Bello, by which name it has been known ever since. After a week's rest here he pushed on to a number of islands full of wild corn, which he called the Port of Provisions. Finally, on the twenty-fourth of November, he made his furthest harbor, a forgotten little cove named El Retrete, or the Closet.

Here the search for the strait ended. Another white man had been over the ground beyond this, Bastidas, who had escaped from the hurricane at Santo Domingo, and almost certainly met Columbus there. From the Orinoco to Cape Honduras no break had been found in the barrier between the two oceans. So they turned back, battered by storms and terrified by a great waterspout, which, says Ferdinand Columbus, they dissolved by reciting the Gospel of St. John. In Veragua they tried gold-hunting, and attempted to found a colony, but the Indians, under a crafty cacique, rose against them. After hard fighting, and an Odyssey of misfortunes, the Spaniards were forced to flee. They left the hulk of the Gallego, behind them and the Biscaina at Porto Bello. The two remaining caravels, bored through and through by the teredo worm,

RUINS AT PORTO BELLO

Probably old Spanish custom house

staggered as far as the coast of Jamaica, to be beached there, side by side. Two rotting wrecks, and the barren title of "Duke of Veragua," by which his descendants are known to this day, were all that Christopher Columbus brought back from the Isthmus of Panama.

1. See Appendix.