The year 1519 was indeed a year of destiny for the Pacific. A month before Magellan sailed from San Lucar, the city of Panama had been founded; three weeks before he sighted Brazil, Cortes and his men were gazing at the Aztec palaces ‘rising from the water … like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis.…’^[1] Although there were still hankerings after el estrecho duvidoso, ‘the doubtful strait’, by the time the Victoria returned to Seville (September 1522) probes north from Panama and south from Mexico were narrowing the gap within which it might yet be hoped for; and puny little shipyards were beginning to secure the Spanish grip on the eastern shores of the Pacific, a hold which in a territorial sense was not seriously challenged (despite Drake's Nova Albion and the Russians in the far north) until the Nootka crisis of 1790.

The Mar del Sur, however, was still only an exciting potentiality, not yet an exploitable maritime space, even though it would without doubt contain ‘many islands rich in gold, pearls, precious stones, spices, and other unknown and admirable things.’^[2] Balboa had revealed that the barrier, even were it to prove continuous, was in at least one area very narrow, and the first step was to tie in the new Sea with the already dominated Caribbean. In effect, this was secured by the founding of Panama City; ‘In its origins, Panama belongs to the West Indies; in its later role, historically, to Peru and New Granada.…’^[3] This at least- 59 -was the achievement of Pedrarias, who was as tough—he died at ninety—and realistic as he was unscrupulous.

He had arrived at Darien in June 1514 with some 1500 men, mostly gentlemen adventurers, carpet knights and their hangers-on, eager for easy pickings in Castilla del Oro, a name by now little better than a promoter's trick. The little settlement was in no case to cope with this influx; tension with Balboa's toughened veterans was inevitable and immediate, and something like half of the newcomers were soon dead of disease or hunger. Pedrarias's instructions stressed the importance of securing the Pacific slopes; his first action was to send a lieutenant on a savage foray against Balboa's Indian allies on the Atlantic side. It seems likely that Balboa's enterprise of 1517, the hauling of needless timber across the divide to build bergantins, was wished on him by Pedrarias to get him out of the way. The Governor was expecting a successor from Spain, and this meant a residencia, an official enquiry into his acts, at which Balboa would surely have stressed the ruin of his careful pattern of alliances by the new régime's atrocious mistreatment of the Indians. Despite sickening setbacks, Balboa did build ships, occupy the Pearl Islands, and carry out some coastal exploration before being trapped and judicially murdered by Pedrarias, who had the greatly undeserved good luck that the new governor arrived and died forthwith. A residencia was formally held and informally rigged; in such things Pedrarias was a master.^[4]

Despite the penetration of 1512 of some 250km up the Rio Atrato south of Darien—the first foray into South America—interest shifted from this promising but extremely difficult and hostile region to the west, where in 1511 Balboa had gathered the first news of the South Sea.^[5] His trans-isthmian journey had begun from Careta, renamed Acla by Pedrarias when he built a fort there; for some years this became the main base for penetration, superseding Santa Maria del Darien. A direct route from Santa Maria to the Gulf of San Miguel was indeed pioneered as early as 1514, but its name—Trepadera, ‘the clambering’—indicates its limitations. The easiest way across, only some 65km through fairly open country with a summit under 300 metres, was from the Gulf of San Blas to the mouth of the Rio Bayano or Chepo, where the estuary afforded a fairly good harbour. Balboa had intended to settle this place, Chepabar; but his recommendation of course ensured rejection by Pedrarias, and no more rational explanation of the latter's choice of a tiny Indian fishing village as the site of Old Panama can be found.

The site was indeed very central on the shores of the Gulf of Panama, but that is about all that could be said in its favour. The harbour was very poor, and much use had to be made of the tiny outport of Perico some 10 or 12km to the west, to which neighbourhood the city was moved after Morgan's sack of 1671. The hinterland, although suitable for stockrearing, was of very little use for agriculture; flour had always to be imported, and was difficult to keep in the near-equatorial humidity.^[6] Chaunu stresses not only the pearls of the Pearl Islands (still, by exception, a source of wealth), but that the islands ‘guard’ the- 60 -Bay; but this cut both ways, as they became on occasion a handy temporary base for buccaneers.^[7] Nevertheless, given the geostrategical pattern, somewhere on this short stretch of coast there had to be a great base; and just as in the case of Madras on the Coromandel coast, a chance initial selection pre-empted the options.^[8] To begin with, Panama was a gateway leading nowhere very much, and in the next phase only to Nicaragua; but that was soon to change dramatically as the Conquista moved southwards to the riches of Peru and Potosi.

It is not very likely that so early as 1519 security was, as Chaunu implies, an important factor in the choice of the Pacific side of the Isthmus for the main base: rather that the unknown but surely great opportunities of the Mar del Sur could not be so readily exploited from across the land-barrier. But a northern port of entry was obviously essential, and pre-emption on the south carried with it pre-emption on the north. The Gulf of San Blas was thus set aside in favour of the nearer ports of Nombre de Dios and Puerto Bello, though these, and especially the former, were most miserable places, except during the seasonal fairs when the galeones came in from Seville; then they became miserably over-crowded. Communication across the Isthmus was by a land route for passengers and high-value goods, or more slowly and with more risk to health (it took a week in the best conditions but often two) by canoe up the Rio Chagres to Cruces, thence by mule-train to Panama.

Only the vaguest rumours of great wealth to the south were afloat when Panama was founded; there was still hope that the doubtful strait might be found to the north. Already in 1517 Gaspar de Espinosa had explored the Azuero Peninsula beyond Nata, west of Panama, devastating a rich maize-producing country; by 1522 Gil Gonzalez Davila had reached the Gulf of Nicoya and his colleague Andrés Niño that of Fonseca, in modern Costa Rica and Honduras respectively. From the former Gonzalez crossed the neck of land to Lake Nicaragua: there might not be a strait, but he was told that there was a navigable outlet to the Atlantic, the Desaguadero or Rio San Juan. He reported that from the Mar del Sur to the Lake was only three leagues, two of which could be crossed by waggons: ‘It is narrow enough to permit the transport of spices …’—so early, as Mack says, began the Isthmian rivalry between Panamanian and Nicaraguan sponsors.^[9] But when the Desaguadero was explored, in 1529, it proved an outlet indeed, but disappointingly full of rapids and shoals and without even a proper anchorage at its mouth.

Forewarned again that a new governor of Castilla del Oro was on his way, Pedrarias determined to ensconce himself in this new land. In 1524 two of his lieutenants founded Granada and Leon on Lakes Nicaragua and Managua; but by this time there were competitors from the north. Gonzalez, eluding Pedrarias and obtaining from the authorities of Española a commission to discover the outlet of his lake, entered from the north coast of Honduras; Cortes's lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado, a notable swashbuckler even by conquistador standards, was- 61 -in control of Guatemala; another of Cortes's men, Cristobal de Olid, had been sent to find the by now more than doubtful strait, but was playing his own hand; and there were others. The struggle was confused and treacherous even beyond the normal annals of the Conquista; when it was over, Alvarado was in control of his own Captain-Generalcy of Guatemala, Pedrarias had in effect managed to exchange Castilla del Oro for Nicaragua. But, although not without resources, these were only marchlands.^[10] The weight of Spanish power had shifted north, to the ‘New Spain of the Ocean Sea’ so swiftly built up by Hernan Cortes who, almost alone of the conquistadores, had a genius for polity as well as for conquest.