CHAPTER XII

CLIMBING A PEAK IN DARIEN

1

Columbus sought first a new way to India and glory for Spain, and then his followers sought gold and gems. Spain made a rapid transit in Time. For, as a young man has visions and the mature seek fame, so the old and disillusioned turn cynically to gold as the only substance which in the end will not disappoint its possessor.

Spain became old suddenly. Was it rapacity bred decay, or decay rapacity? Even the Indians, who admired all else, laughed at the Spanish lust for gold.

It was given to "the most faithful son of the Church" to discover America; given to the conqueror of the Moors to despoil it. In a time of growing heresy, word-of-mouth heresy, mathematical heresy, Spain in action wrought out one of the greatest of heresies, proving by discovery the existence of a new world.

Yet Spain reposed spiritually on a medieval faith, and the spirit of protestantism rising at that time was the negation of that faith, saying "No" to the sword of the Lord and the triumphs of the Saints. And Spain could not partake of the new--for she had not that Teutonic self-questioning about conscience that stirred the North. Scandals did not scandalize Spain. And the pother about Indulgences was merely disloyalty to God's vicegerent. Spain had no quest after Truth. It was enough to apprehend the beautiful and the true. For the rest, she had the blind faith of the Church. Hence the ferocity of the Inquisition; hence, at a later time, the rise of the Jesuits ready to give their undivided wills to St. Peter in charge for God.

New history mocked the old when Spain began to prove that the world was round and that the little old sheepfold and pasture and Mediterranean lake made only a particle of God's creation, and that the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era had been blind to half the world.

Mankind was groping through the medieval forms toward a life more unconfined. On the one hand, was the anchorite in his cell in the wall of the Church; on the other, Columbus sailing to the West. The navigator seemed a daring free thinker to his sailors, an impious man who ought to be restrained. Nevertheless in a spirit of profound religiosity Columbus and his crew found first land and named it San Salvador--the Holy Savior.

Devout wonder, devouring curiosity, fantastic credulity, lust for treasure, quickly followed one another in the Spanish mind. The vision ruled in the heart of Columbus, glory rose in the eyes of the monarch behind him, cupidity itched the fingers of the multitude. But the world wondered; the Old World paused whilst a new idea entered it and a new seed of life was sown.

Four voyages in sailing ships, tempestuous, troublesome, anxious, with ever more credulous and violent crews--but Columbus clung to the last to the hope of a new way East. How mysterious, how haunting and pathetic, and yet visionary, the fumbling and nosing of Columbus's vessels along the coasts of Panama and Darien in that last voyage of his, sensing a place where a passage must be made. It is like the trouble of Nature before sunrise, a thought before dawn.

2

San Salvador is a long strip of low-lying shore, a platform above the sea, and at night a lighthouse beaming over the dark ocean. It is a shore and it is a light. That is what it was then, "the other side," and the light of Salvation.

The story of the first islands, those bits of Paradise vouchsafed to lost mariners, is pitiful and tragic; the story of the mainland, the Spanish Main, is violent and sinful. Adam voluntarily banished himself from Eden a second time. With the banners of the Church and the spirit of Cain the discoverers set foot in the New World.

"In the Name of God let us remain here," cried the tempest-tossed Diego de Nicuesa in 1507, when he found the quiet water of Nombre de Dios Bay--"In the Name of God! In the Name of God! _Nombre de Dios! Nombre de Dios!_" cried his followers. And there they made a colony which endured and in time made the first base for the treasure fleet. Balboa discovered the Pacific in 1513. In 1519, on the shore of the other ocean, the city of Panama was founded. In 1520 Magellan rounded Cape Horn. In 1521 he reached the Philippines where he was killed in battle. But the survivors of his ships sailed on and reached, with no small astonishment, the Cape of Good Hope, and then made Europe, thus circumnavigating the world. Magellan called his ocean the Pacific. In 1521 Cortes got to the Pacific, crossing Mexico to Tehuantepec. In 1524 Pizarro set sail from Panama City to the conquest of Peru.

Then commenced the building of the Royal Road, the _Camino Real_, through the jungle of Darien, for the safe transit of the treasure caravans, and Spaniards enslaved Indians and made them hew a way with knives and carry the blocks of stone, cobbling it a yard wide all the way from Nombre de Dios to Panama itself.

Pearls and gold came from the South Seas, gold and silver ornaments, gems of all kinds, and then gold and silver in massive bars. The pack-trains led by the muleteers and guarded by men in armor toiled through the dank hot jungle. There was built at Nombre de Dios a great stone treasure-house where the spoils were heaped up or stacked to wait the coming of the galleons. The Plate Fleet, bearing to Spain its precious cargoes, became the astonishment of the ocean, firing the thoughts of pirates and adventure-seekers--and, not least, England's Elizabethan sailors. The Plate Fleet was harried; Nombre de Dios was attacked; Nombre de Dios was burned. Nombre de Dios became known as "the Spaniards' grave."

I sailed there in a little boat with a wizened old man, who was owner and skipper and cook and sailor all in one. And as we rode over the curling waves his talk was all of gold. There were a score of tatters in the only pair of trousers he had in the world. I advanced him ten dollars to buy provisions and oil for his little cooker. He wore a twenty-year-old straw hat--he collected newspapers, which he seemed to regard as precious in themselves. But he said "My God"--he was very profane--"when I get some one to put capital into my mines I shall be king." A cross between a German and a Panamanian Negro, he was at once credulous and calculating. I could not convince him that I was not seeking gold, or oil, or at least manganese. The German in him made up his mind about me. I was made to correspond to the description of my type in a Leipzig encyclopedia. The Negro in him was fantastically imaginative regarding the treasures of the Spanish Main. He had sailed for forty years, seeking gold, seeking treasure. Far from its being a pestilential coast, Darien was Paradise. It was a health resort; there were no mosquitoes.

"This land is Aden," he kept saying, filling me with mirth, for he meant Eden all the time.

We passed, or were passed by, many schooners manned by Jamaicans, proudly and superfluously flying British flags; and by San Blas Indians in dugout canoes surmounted by the most rudimentary sails. We came alongside and looked on the mean cargoes of coconuts and bananas and on the Mongolian features of the untamable Indians. The same Indians whom the Spaniards treated so ill have long since recaptured their country and have established a feud with white man and black man. Nearly all Darien to-day is called the "Forbidden Country," and no one who is not an Indian dare remain there after nightfall. But the Indians come down to the shore, or even set off in canoes, to trade fruit and monkeys and parrots for--one thing mostly--powder. The Spanish priests tried to teach them to pray to God. But the other Spaniards brought a more convincing gospel of powder. My skipper evinced great contempt for them, however. "They'll never be no use till put under ground," he averred. "All this," he pointed to the entangled jungle of the shore, "is white man's country. Only white men can do any good here."

We called at tropical islands, all gnarled rocks and upstarting palms, places for pirates, places for loot. We called at inhabited islands, trading islands with great general stores. On these were white men making a fortune by intercepting the schooners and bartering fruit with canned goods, tools, guns, cartridges. But the wild shore of the mainland held the eyes.

Green hands of the jungle reached out from the tangles, as if all the trees and shrubs were also savages locked in some orgy in which the young and slender were being suffocated or trodden under foot. Hands of despair were stretched outward to the sea. But when we came into Nombre de Dios Bay the barbarity of the vegetable kingdom seemed to have receded as age and depravity step back for innocence. The gentlest of waves rippled forward on a fine half-round of sand. And there might well have been many children playing on that long curve of shell-strewn beach. It was peaceful. It was sun-bathed and blue and gleaming--and it was empty. Even the two schooners and the three dugout canoes were hidden from view by the breakwater and dam. A huddled village with thatched roofs looked out from under isolated fringing palms--like gray women with shawls about their ears. In the background, a ruined church of stone.

Time stood still in the mind whilst I turned back the pages of the chronicles and saw this bay of childhood and romance as the "Spaniards' Grave." Here then lived Francis Drake in disguise watching how the Spanish shipped the treasures of Peru on to the Plate Fleet. Nombre de Dios was built in stone then, but you will search in vain for that stone to-day unless it is in the structure of the church or in the road way of the Treasure Trail.

"I have brought you to the mouth of the treasury of the world," cried Drake when in 1592 he captured Nombre de Dios and led his seventy-three English sailors to the stacks of bars of gold and silver there, so heavy no man could take any of it away.

Even at the moment when El Dorado's gold confronted them, the Spaniards rallied and Drake was shot in the thigh and his companions driven off. But the English seaman returned several times and at last destroyed the city so that it never recovered. Drake, after many adventures, returned there to die. He ambushed the treasure-caravans, he waylaid the Plate Fleet. With his little ship the _Golden Hind_ he captured the great galleon called Cacafuego, he burned Santa Domingo, he fought the Armada, he sailed round the world, he singed the King of Spain's beard. He played at bowls in Devonshire part of the time. But it was Nombre de Dios and the Spanish Main that held him at the last. For in a leaden coffin his body lies there somewhere under the quiet sea.

The people who live in Nombre de Dios now are in themselves the ruins of nations--Chinamen married to Negro women who are themselves partly Spanish, partly Indian; Moslem traders from India living with Jamaican girls who are half English; here lives a Polish-American trader with a mulatto. And the children! They swarm, and are just savages. Even the missionaries avoid them. Even the Catholicism to which nominally they belong has no hold. Its church has no roof--and a Padre to brave the mosquitoes is not there.

3

Neighbor to Nombre de Dios upon the Spanish Main is Puerto Bello, which afterward became the anchorage of the Treasure Fleet. But Puerto Bello also was destroyed and also by one of Albion's hateful isle, though he was by no means a true hero of romance--Henry Morgan the pirate. He blew it up; he marched with his crew, cutlass in hand, across the Isthmus, and fired Panama too, or caused the Spaniards in defense to fire it, thus wrecking the fairest city of its time in America, a city of seven thousand cedar-wood houses, two hundred treasure houses, and three score churches with golden altars, a city already of thirty thousand souls. That was in 1671. He was rewarded by his King, after he had bought a knighthood, and was made Governor of Jamaica; he had, in fact, quite a modern career. They point his grave out to you as you sail along the shore, and every half savage in Panama knows more of him than of Drake or Balboa. And at Puerto Bello there has remained untouched for two centuries the spectacular ruin which he wrought.

The rusty guns lie where they lay "the morning after," beside the massive stone fortifications. Spiked, useless, and yet impressive in idleness, it is surprising that they have not been taken away for use as ornaments of some new city square, or at least for the value of the metal that is in them.

Puerto Bello has a mixed Negroid population and many bamboo huts. But it has also stone houses. It was once well laid out, and has beautiful little stone bridges and pleasure seats. The fortified part is extensive, and as one walked the ramparts, the only European, indeed the only person about at all, once more Time as it were stopped in the mind and one realized the night when the pirates came, and drunk and idle the Spanish soldiers and dire the fate they met.

But I left behind me the thought of Morgan at the old portal of the city where, scarcely molded over, stand the three crosses which mark the place where for nearly two hundred years the treasure caravans came regularly and made an end of their long, arduous, jungle journey, and the priests gave blessing whilst enslaved Indian coolies toiled and soldiers and sailors swore.

And the old, disused, cobbled roadway plunges through sedges under the marsh and into the vegetation and darkness which has long since swallowed it up.

From Puerto Bello Morgan crossed the isthmus; from Nombre de Dios Drake crossed it and from "a goodlie and great high tree" looked on the waters of the South Seas for the first time. Where exactly Balboa crossed it no one knows. For no one has come that way again. But it was certainly in what is now called the Forbidden Country, which the Indians have long since recaptured and now hold by force of arms, to the total exclusion of all who are not Indians.

4

It was in the Forbidden Country that William Paterson landed in 1698 with twelve hundred men, gentlemen of Scotland, clansmen, old soldiers, traders, and uncovered on Darien's shore the banner of St. Andrew blessed at Leith at parting. And they mounted fifty guns and called the fort New St. Andrew, and proceeded to organize a trade road through the jungle, a mere fifty miles to the other side, convinced that thereby the trade of the world would begin to pass through their hands.

The expedition failed disastrously. It seems the Scotsmen were greatly discouraged by King William the Third who loathed the Scots and ordered his Governors at Jamaica and elsewhere to refuse them supplies. They were strong enough to keep both Indians and Spanish off, but they lacked adequate food and were soon sorely stricken with fever. Their relief ship foundered off Cartagena. Paterson became temporarily deranged, for which in my opinion he was much to blame, having no right to go out of his mind whilst his responsibility was so great. Apathy (or was it despair?) seized the Scots, and without realizing a doit of their expectations they returned to Scotland. They had been eleven months on the Spanish Main--and some they left behind will lie there forever.

Though many died you will search in vain for Scottish graves. Only the imagination, going back once more, may yield a whisper of the pipes played on that desolate shore. They all sought gold; poet-discoverers, Conquistadores, heroic sailors, dastardly pirates, Scottish shareholders--El Dorado was their common goal. Even Balboa himself, raising human eyes on the Pacific, was accompanied by those who "look nowise but downward with a muck-rake in their hands."

Balboa had settled at Salvatierra in Haiti and sailed across to Santa Maria de la Antigua on a shore of the Gulf of Darien and was joined to a group of men whom he captained, making fantastic expeditions into the interior in quest of a massive gold idol--It, The Golden One, El Dorado--and they fought continuously the warlike Indian chiefs and their retainers, generally making the conquered their allies and seeking out another chief against whom the conquered Indians nursed some grievance.

The Indians wore ornaments of gold, as they still do to-day, but they placed no value on the metal itself until it had been fashioned to some end. But the jewelry of which the Spaniards ravaged the tribes led them to believe in some great source. Comagre gave Balboa four thousand ounces and told him that on the other side of the mountains was a great sea and cities and ships and wealth inexhaustible. And the explorer pondered the matter in his heart and he said, "God has revealed the secrets of this land to me only, and for this I shall never cease to thank Him." An astonishing idea, that God, the spiritual genius behind all creation, should be taking thought to reveal gold to thieves--and yet it was sincerely held.

It was not exactly humor that the Spaniards lacked. When the first jackass made his first hee-haw on American soil, appalling the Indians, who appealed to know what this strange animal was wanting--a Spaniard replied, "He is saying that we need more gold, still more gold; do you understand?"

Material desire and the fever of exploration drove Balboa on, and with a hundred and ninety followers in chain-mail he sailed from Antigua to the lands of the subject chief Careta, whose daughter he espoused. This was at the beginning of September, 1513. He traveled two days along the shore to the domains of Ponca and then after a fortnight they started inward to the heart of the jungle, cutting their way with their swords, sweating under their armor, and in four days of unbelievable difficulties they came to the foot of high, tree-clad slopes. There they encountered Porque and the Indians of Quarequa. Porque they slew; the Indians they dispersed; the gold they took. That was on the 24th September, and on the next morning early, Balboa set off to climb the mountain of the world, with his Spaniards behind him and Indian guides ahead. There was with him also a priest and a lawyer and a dog. The priest was for God, the lawyer for the King of Spain, and the dog for himself. Little Lion, the bloodhound, held military rank and drew rations, it is said. He was alleged to be worth any three men.

Where is Quarequa? No one knows. Perhaps it is even an invented name, and the fight put in by the narrators to give feature to the story. How many hours Balboa's party struggled from the Indian village to the top of the Sierra has not been calculated. Did Balboa look upon the Pacific at noon--or was it in the glamour of a later light. Possibly with his Indians to lead him it was still morning. And it was still morning in the soul--the morning of new life and light, the morning of discovery.

Balboa halted his party and then advanced alone and saw the sea.

5

Religious geography is part of the art of living. To come to each new place on the chart called Earth, not in a spirit of mere jollity but with some reverence, gives a richness to life. Whilst some seek gold, others seek spiritual gold, the soul's possession, which is neither sentimental nor unreal but is indeed the one _substance_ out of which in the beginning all things were made.

The apology of a world traveler that he did not see the Pacific before, from the heights of Tehuantepec, from the Golden Gate of San Francisco, from the stone eminence of the new city of Panama--he preferred to see it with Balboa's eyes, climbing a peak out of the jungle and looking also, and in like manner for the first time, in that way to perform a geographical rite in the world temple.

I traveled with Cecilie Lucarez and Victor Morales. One carried my pack and a gun; the other with his long knife slashed the passage clear of jungle growth. It was icy cold and burning hot at the same time, dank and steaming; perspiration soaked even through the leather of one's knee boots, but small cold airs crept out of the profound green shadow on either hand, chilling for moments the very marrow. Underfoot were innumerable water currents and mud and slime, and the giant trees above us dripped water all the while. A grave-like coldness crept about everywhere, and now and then a draught of air would lift my wet shirt and make it flap against the skin. Yet it was burning hot.

The Spaniards plunged across the isthmus in chain mail; I was in my shirt, my guides were without even a shirt. How the Conquistadores did it in complete armor gives a measure of the physical endurance of these men.

The ground is strewn with rotting yellow plums which have fleshy centers and bittersweet taste; monkeys hang from the trees looking at us, parrots innumerable flutter about the open spaces. And when we come to open spaces, how painful the sun! I am dazzled by the gleaming points of my eyelashes, eyes want to get right in, temples throb.

It is easier to cross the isthmus in January or February, the dry season, but Balboa crossed it in the wet. It is his September, and rains every day, as no doubt it did then. Up to the knees in soft mud, up to the waist in water each day, and the feet all swollen and broken by the treatment. The guides, with their bare feet and legs, seemed able to take the floods more easily, and Morales in mid-stream of a rushing torrent, with my knapsack balanced on his head and his gun on top of that, whilst water foamed against his bare breast--is a sight not easily forgotten. Apprehension of a lost knapsack stamped it on the mind.

We rested in a jungle village. I sat on a clay floor with a wild monkey on a string and noisy children and scarcely less noisy parrots. We were regaled with Kola wine and grated coconut and oil and rice and bits of fat pork and some of the ugliest preserves I have ever encountered. It was the time of the rice crop, and rice in the husk was drying in baskets in every little palm-leaf hut. Every hour the women took the rice baskets and shook them to help dry out the grain. Next day an aged Negro with grizzled wool led me on, and we found in the depths of the thicket that which I could not follow from Nombre de Dios--part of the _Camino Real_, now moss-covered and green, but unmistakable, a massive cobbling of large stones with a lateral, upturned stone along the edge for curb, just room for a panniered ass and no more, but now so overgrown in places that even a monkey could not pass on it. Trees have shot up and split the cobbling, the scrub has met over it, and for many miles it climbs amid the mahogany trees high up into the mountains.

It would be worth while for some one to employ natives and spend a month cutting clear and tracing this great treasure trail all the way from coast to coast. For there must have been resting places and perhaps even taverns upon it, and possibly a chapel half way.

The "Speakities," the colored people of the jungle, all believe in lost treasure and are superstitious regarding the evil spirits which are guarding it. Some have even bits of Spanish gold which have been found. Indeed, true treasure trove is frequent--if the treasure be not great.

We made but slow progress in the jungle. Rainy weather and consequent mud held us. I changed my guides three times. None cared to go far from home. Two nights were spent in the scantiest shelter. Thousands of flaming fireflies lit the floating mists which along the edge of a jungle clearing looked like phantoms living in dark houses. The wraiths were of unstable dimensions, now swelling to a bank of mist, now tailing away to nothingness. But the fireflies lighted their way--myriads of fireflies. I lay in all the clothes I possessed and in my boots and wearing gloves, but still the mosquitoes bit. How combat a foe that you actually take in with your breath!

Tongues of fire among white mists in intense darkness, howling of monkeys, the creaking and wailing and prolonged noise of insects in the trees, mosquitoes as noiseless and attentive as breath, the air not vital, suffocating--of such were the nights. In a hotel you would turn and turn, but something in the jungle constrains you to lie like one dead all the night long, and that something also banishes thought.

There breaks out the throb of a native drum, one only, but you cannot say where it comes from. It is far away, it is close at your ear--it is wandering in the jungle. Who could be beating it, and why? But it is no matter. Your eyes close. You fall into a light slumber and lie dreamlessly--you cannot estimate how long. But suddenly horror breaks upon your soul. You start up; you look around, you fall back in a cold sweat. A roaring as of lions has torn through your consciousness. You think a puma has found you, and then, as suddenly, you laugh and relax. It is a pack of night-howling monkeys, beating their hairy breasts high among the branches and howling like lost souls. A vague thought enters the mind, the lost souls of those who murdered Indians for their gold....

Morning comes and proves that each bad night was but a bad dream, a nightmare and not God's creation. For even over the "white man's grave" it is fresh, with fair rose colors in the sky.

The natives think that I am a _gringo_ surveyor planning a new road, and are quite pleased. They have never heard of Balboa or of Drake, or indeed of any one except Morgan. They think the _Camino Real_ was built about fifty years ago. They know nothing. But I found them extremely dignified and courteous. The women seemed especially modest and discreet, and those stories of the Speakities selling their young girls for a few dollars and of the Indians selling their children are not true except of the people on the coast, those corrupted by traders.

The men and women are not "married," but then there are no priests. Religion is nothing to them, but something of ethics is instinctive. They are said to be poor workers. It is hard to tempt them out of the jungle to do a day's work for pay. They do not want a victrola or a five-foot shelf of books. A few bright cottons for the women and powder for the men is all they ask. Money is scarce. In the depths of the jungle Chinamen keep little stores with a daily turnover of about twenty-five cents. An opened packet is a stock of cigarettes, and they sell them one at a time. They will even sell a half of a cigarette--the only people in the world who would undertake such a trade.

I wondered at the swarm of children of these Chinamen, begotten of their black wives. "What will you do with them when you make your fortune?" I asked one.

"The best boys I take with me to China--the rest I leave behind," he said.

I found that in the native huts I never had to pay for hospitality. It is true, however, that whole families enjoyed my provisions--gloated over tinned milk, drank mug after mug of dense Nombre de Dios coffee, ate chocolate as a wonderful novelty. In return, they would put in the midst of the red mud floor a large pot of rice and pieces of smoked fish and forest berries soaked in brine. They brought down branches of fat, little, cream-colored bananas from the roof. A parrot would lift itself by its beak on to my fingers whilst I ate, and in the same way up my coat to my shoulder, calling and out-calling its mate who was perched on an ox-limbed woman in colored overalls. In such a hut I met Martinez, a man with no arms and only one eye. He had lost his members dynamiting fish. Martinez had hooks tightly corded to the stumps of his wrists, and had learned to do all that most of us can do with hands--thus, he struck a match and lighted a cigarette, he shouldered my knapsack, he lifted down an old gun from the wall, he slung it on his back. Even using hooks for hands he was a good shot with a gun.

Martinez was by temperament a hunter, and was less interested in getting me to the Pacific coast than in following trails of wild beasts. He showed me a treesloth, hanging in the hammock of its own body high up among the branches; showed me a boa coiled like a cable and sleeping like a babe. That did not interest him. But the jaguar and the puma were ever in his thoughts. We came upon the footprints of a tiger, a _grande gato_, a perfect six spot in the mud. With bent back and staring eye Martinez was for following it--and he gave me his long knife. But I said "No."

"No carey?" he inquired, raising his brows. "No quiere?"

"No, Martinez; grande gato make nice meal you and me. Sabe, Martinez?" I made signs to him, pointing down my throat.

"Ah, you no carey?" he rejoined sadly, and set his face toward the sun. He threaded his way to an isolated hut surrounded by bog, where lived a bachelor acquaintance more ready to follow up the trail of the tiger. There we brewed coffee, and as I sat in the doorway sipping it I saw fly past like a flame the most beautiful bird I had seen in the jungle. The sportsmen missed it, but heavy as I was with clinging mud I started up to follow it. I was tired enough of tramping, wet to the waist, mud to the knees. I had fallen down several times. Armless Martinez had offered to carry me across one or two morasses and torrents and had actually raised me on his shoulders once, but I felt him waver under me and took my two hundred pounds down from his back. I was glad when we came once more upon a stretch of the _Camino Real_ and could actually walk upon it. We stepped steadily upward, and I began to meditate climbing that "goodlie and high tree," for there were many such starting out of the marsh and the scrub and going straight to heaven. But then, suddenly and unexpectedly, coming out on the scarp of a commanding ridge, I saw the ocean. I did not need to climb a tree. From this ridge I also saw the Pacific, for the first time, far away, a blue triangle of water beyond the hills and the forests and the ridges. There was a wide and majestic view, and the great trees of the jungle made a framework on either hand like the extended plumage of an eagle.

To my one-eyed guide it meant nothing, and he could not understand why I paused in the way and called him back. But it was a great moment. A warm current ran through my veins and something seemed to lighten heavy boots. Wings came out from my heels and I stood on tiptoe and stared.

That phrase of Keats "a wild surmise" came very near to naming the feeling of rapture. The eyes of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, the eyes of Francis Drake, the eyes of the one of the many! "It was all for this," I whispered.

Martinez restlessly waved his hooks and peered at me one-sidedly. "Grande Oceano," said he reflectively, as we resumed our tramp--and he led me to the sea. It was many hours, but they went easily, and we came out to the shore in the peace of late evening, and there in a little inn we drank _blanco seco_ and toasted Vasco Nuñez de Balboa and Francis Drake, whom certainly the one-eyed man did not know. But I then counted out silver dollars for Martinez and paid him off. And he was pleased.

6

Balboa, it is said, knelt on the mountain alone, and then his comrades came and planted a cross. And the pious chronicler avers that _Te Deum Laudamus_ and _Te Dominum Confitemur_ were sung. The dog Leoncico barked for joy. Balboa in a loud voice claimed all that was visible for the King of Spain, and the lawyer whom they had brought along drew up a deed which was signed by sixty-seven Spaniards--all that was left of the original hundred and ninety.

Balboa then marched to the sea. Pizarro, one of his companions, afterwards conqueror of Peru, was the first to reach the shore, and with two others they entered an abandoned canoe, and were thus the first white men to sail on the Pacific. Next day, Balboa took possession of the Ocean for the King of Spain. He did not throw his ring in the water, like the Doge of Venice taking possession of the Adriatic, but, clad only in his shirt, he marched with twenty-six of his comrades into the waves. In one hand he carried a banner of Castile; in the other a naked sword. They stood around Balboa, Pizarro and the rest, they made crosses of steel, they kissed one another's sword hilts, they lowered the crimson banner to the water. It had been morning on the mountains and was sunset on the sea--the light of vision and then the many colors of glory sinking toward oblivion. With me also there was some of the light of romance, in the glamour of the evening on the shore of the Southern Sea.