For the time being, then, the rivals were busily engaged in staking out claims in opposite directions. Westwards, the twenty years after Columbus's first landfall saw the small beginnings of empire in the Caribbean, based on Española, where after a number of false starts Bartolomé Columbus founded Santo Domingo, now Ciudad Trujillo: this first European city in the New World dates from 1496. The economy of these first colonies had a very narrow basis: range cattle and swine for local subsistence and for provisioning further voyages, cane-sugar and gold- 30 -

gold for export, the latter procured by ruthlessly forcing the helpless natives to work scattered deposits. Depopulation set in with frightful rapidity; the resources, human or mineral, of any one small area were soon used up, and the only answer was slave-raiding and the extension of this literally robber exploitation.^[14]

Apart from this spur to expansion, there were of course the lure of riches just over the horizon, the lure of fame, the continuing lure of a way to the Orient. The outlines of Middle America, on its Atlantic flank, were taking shape: the great embayments of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico could be discerned. There was as yet no real reason to suppose that a continuous land barrier existed, and to Columbus and many others these waters must lead on to not-too-distant Cathay and Cipangu: ‘The problem at this time [c. 1497] was to find the passage to the south of [Ptolemy's Golden] Chersonese—that used by Marco Polo—which led from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean’^[15]; there was as yet no idea that a third ocean was inset between these two.

We need not linger over the details of the voyages by which these shores were revealed, replete as they are with adventure and intrigue, false hopes and golden- 31 -rewards, suffering and daring. In 1498, on his third voyage, Columbus realised that the coast over against Trinidad was continental, though he assumed as a matter of course that it was Asia, if not indeed the Terrestrial Paradise. By the very first years of the new century the South American coast, Tierra Firme, was known from the eastern angle of Brazil to the Gulf of Darien, and valued for its wealth in pearls; Vicente Yañez Pinzon, brother of Columbus's captain, had been at the mouth of the Amazon, or perhaps more probably the Orinoco, and thought it was the Ganges.^[16] The fourth and last voyage of Columbus in 1502–4 is particularly significant, though a sad last act in a life so strangely compounded of obsession and of heroic resolution. By this time not only da Gama but also Cabral had reached India and returned to Lisbon, so that

Hence Columbus should take Arabic interpreters, were they available (they were not), and in case he should actually meet the Portuguese in the Orient he ‘was … provided with a passport addressed not to that shadowy potentate, the Great Khan, but to Vasco da Gama himself.’^[17]

Columbus made the coast of Honduras near the modern Trujillo, meeting with a large canoe carrying a varied cargo of fine textiles and metal goods—the first hint, not understood, of the rich mainland cultures. The coast turned south at the significantly named Cabo Gracias a Dios, and by Christmas Day 1502 Columbus was off the site of the present town of Colon,^[18] at the northern entrance to the Panama Canal. In this region, Veragua, soon known as Castilla del Oro, ‘Golden Castile’, he spent some months; and here he would seem to have heard of a great sea on the other side of the mountains; but the strait or passage which must be there eluded him.… Somehow he managed to convince himself that the unlettered Indians knew they were but ten or twenty days' sail from the Ganges.…

Before and after this voyage, other explorers, coming from the west, reached the Isthmian region; fever-ridden harbours were receiving names destined to figure in the geostrategic projects of the Maritime Powers when Panama should become a great node of Spanish inter-oceanic traffic. So Bastidas and la Cosa in 1500 had named Cartagena and reached the site of Nombre de Dios, itself so named nine years later by Nicuesa, who also built a small fort at Puerto Bello; in 1504 La Cosa and Vespucci had explored the Gulf of Uraba, the southwards continuation of that of Darien, and had found the Atrato River. There was no way through, but there was gold enough to confirm Columbus's thrilling reports of Castilla del Oro.

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Formal settlement of Tierra Firme began in 1509, when Alonso de Ojeda and Diego de Nicuesa were granted rights to colonise from the Gulf of Venezuela to the Atrato and from that river to Cabo Gracias a Dios respectively. The history of these first settlements is one of unmitigated violence and rapine, fear and petty intrigue; poor, nasty, and brutish. The first and only effective joint action of Ojeda and Nicuesa was the burning of an Indian village (and its inhabitants) near Cartagena, where la Cosa was killed by a poisoned arrow. In a few months only some sixty of Ojeda's 300 men, and a similar number of Nicuesa's 785, survived.

The first settlement, San Sebastian, was held for a time by Francisco Pizarro, later of Peruvian fame, Ojeda having returned to Española to bring succours with his partner Fernandez de Enciso, a judge of that island; but food was short and here too arrows were poisoned. In 1510 the survivors founded Santa Maria de la Antigua del Darien, west of the Gulf of Uraba, now lost in the jungle but until its supersession by Panama City in 1519 a sufficient base:^[19] a fort and some tens of hutments, but at least located where food could be found and where the local Indians, unfortunately for them, did not know the use of poisoned arrows. Meanwhile Nicuesa had mismanaged everything; he and his wretched survivors were brought to Darien, where he was ill-advised enough to try to assert an authority already damned by his own incompetence.^[20]

And here Vasco Nuñez de Balboa steps on to the stage of history, traditionally out of a provision barrel and accompanied by his dog Leoncico. It may indeed have been by his advice (he had been with Bastidas in 1500) that the new site was chosen. Balboa had failed to make good in Española, and had stowed away on one of Enciso's ships; probably assisted by the local knowledge gained with Bastidas, he soon came to the fore in the despondent community, riddled with feuds and fevers, of Darien. Resolution, decision, daring were common form among the conquistadores, though lacking in Nicuesa and Enciso; but Balboa had other assets, among them a fundamental fair-mindedness which was not so common among them. He had also the intelligence to see that the utterly indiscriminate terrorism hitherto exercised on the Indians was worse than useless. He was probably not the ‘verray parfit, gentil knight’ of his more romantic admirers—he was not very likely to have long survived had he been such; the case arising, he could be as ruthless as any. But he supplemented acts of ferocity with acts of generosity and even camaraderie. Enciso was too pettily legalistic, Nicuesa too pettily arrogant, to hold sway over the toughened survivors who made up the Darien town's meeting; the former was soon stripped of all authority, the latter sent off ‘home’ in a leaky brigantine, to meet an unknown but doubtless horrible end. Balboa remained in command, by the suffrage of his peers.

A compound of battle, terrorism, gifts, marriage with a chief's daughter, and (reasonably) honest alliances enabled Balboa not only to retain but to expand a tiny empire in the swamps and jungles of Darien. To the new bureaucrats- 33 -of Española, to the Court in Spain (and despite a provisional legitimation by Columbus's son, Diego Colon, as Viceroy of Española) his was a usurped power. Its real base was his hold over the colonists, and in face of royal censure, and sapped by local personal discontents, that might well prove but a sandy foundation. As early as possible—in April 1511—Balboa had taken the essential precaution of sending to the Spanish Court as much gold as he could; but Enciso went with it, and was soon busy in intrigue. In January 1513 Balboa received two letters: one was his royal appointment as temporary captain and governor of Darien; the other, later in date, was news from his own agent that Enciso had so poisoned the royal counsels that his fall was prepared. More gold, and yet more, was the only possible answer; and that meant more forays into the interior.

Already in 1511 there had been the picturesque incident when the son of an Indian chief had scattered, as mere trifles, the golden artefacts the Spaniards had collected and in return for alliance had promised to lead them against his father's enemies across the mountains, where there was much more gold—and a great sea. Early in September 1513 Balboa sailed with some 200 men to the narrowest part of the Isthmus, and set out on the arduous journey from Acla, another of the little lost towns (recently rediscovered) of Darien. On 25 or 27 September, alone, he looked down on the great waters of the ocean. The solemnity of the occasion was recognised—the conquistadores were always self-conscious of their Place in History. So a cairn was built, and the names of all Spaniards present—now, through sickness, no more than 67—were recorded. On the 29th Balboa himself waded into the salt water of the Gulf of San Miguel—he had to wait hours for the tide to come up—banner in hand, and formally took possession of the Mar del Sur, and all its lands.^[21]

The rest is anticlimax. Balboa returned to Darien, laden with gold and pearls—as he himself said, ‘with more gold than health’, but with little or no loss of life—in January 1514; at the end of June arrived his replacement, Pedro Arias de Avila (Pedrarias), one of the few historical figures who has found no historical defender. Balboa remained in the administration, in the subordinate role of Adelantado del Mar del Sur—a title surely of honour to posterity, but of rankling jealousy to Pedrarias. Balboa's vision had immediately envisaged navigation on the South Sea; his energy compelled him to a tremendous effort of organisation which (at great cost in Indian life) transported marine stores, anchors, tackle, even timber, from Acla across the jungles, swampy where not mountainous, of what by his efforts was known and forever known as the Isthmus. He occupied the Pearl Islands in the Bay of Panama, and sailed for a hundred miles or so to the south—already there were rumours, derived from the Indians of San Miguel, of the richer kingdoms which Pizarro was to seize. The four little ships were his undoing: his plans—to golden lands in the south? to the Spice Islands? to Cathay?—were enough to inflame the never-sleeping jealousy, disguised in smooth cordiality, of Pedrarias. Arrested by Francisco Pizarro, a fit instrument- 34 -for such work, Balboa was tried on trumped-up charges, and beheaded at Acla. His achievement, but for the immortal priority of the South Sea,^[22] died with him; under Pedrarias his even-handed good order amongst Spaniards was replaced by legalistic tyranny, his relative humanity amongst Indians by the most savage exploitation and devastation. The humanist Peter Martyr, reporting from Spain to the Pope, summed it up: ‘no other thing was acted saue to kill, and be killed, to slaughter, and be slaughtered.’^[23]

Meanwhile, far away on the other side of the South Sea, these very years of Balboa's agonies and endurances saw the Lusian rival make good his bid. In 1511 the great Afonso de Albuquerque took Malacca; a gallant part in the action was played by a young officer, Fernão de Magalhãis. From his new base Albuquerque sent Antonio de Abreu and Francisco Serrão on the great voyage which first put the true Indies firmly—if as yet somewhat erratically—on the map of the world. The fleet coasted right along the northern coasts of Sumatra, Java, and the lesser islands further east, reaching Ceram and Amboyna. Serrão was wrecked near Banda, but made his way in native craft to Ternate in the Moluccas, the Spice Islands themselves, where he remained to attain a very influential position in local politics. His position was ambiguous: was he a loyal Portuguese subject, or a freelance playing his own hand, the first precursor of the Rajah Brookes of the Orient? Indubitably he was a close friend of Magellan, who had saved his life in a Malay ambuscade at Malacca; and this friendship played some part in the conception of Castile's real countermove to the Portuguese advance, a move which became, probably by accident rather than design, the first circumnavigation of the globe.