serve that course, and therefore they came back again to Molucca very sad, because Saavedra died by the way; who, if he had lived, meant to have opened the land of Castilla del Oro and New Spain from sea to sea. Which might have been done in four places, namely, from the Gulf of San Miguel to Uraba, which is 25 leagues; or from Panama to Nombre de Dios, being 17 leagues distance; or through Xaquator, a river of Nicaragua, which springeth out of a lake three or four leagues from the South Sea and falleth into the North Sea. The other place is from Tehuantepec through a river to Verdadera Cruz, in the Bay of Honduras, which might also be opened in a strait. Which if it were done, then they might sail from the Canaries unto the Moluccas, under the climate of zodiac, in less time and with much less danger than to sail about the Cape of Bona Speranza or by the Strait of Magellan, or by the northwest. And yet if there might be found a strait there, to sail into the Sea of China, as it hath been sought, it would do much good."

Thus, according to Gomara and Galvano, at this early date the four major canal routes, so much discussed and surveyed in our own time, were indicated: Darien, Panama, Nicaragua, and Tehuantepec; and the superiority of one of them over the routes by the Cape of Good Hope, by the Strait of Magellan, and by the problematic North West Passage, was appreciated. Meantime, it is of curious interest to observe, there arose at the very outset the long maintained rivalry between Panama and Nicaragua for the location of the canal. While Saavedra was planning at Panama, Pedrarias turned for a time from the congenial work of torturing and massacring the natives of Nicaragua, and of reducing a population of 2,000,000 to 200,000, and sent his lieutenant Estete to establish an overland traffic route from the lakes to the Pacific, and also to survey a route for a canal. It does not appear, however, that any definite plans for such a canal were at that time made, and happily in 1530 Pedrarias died.

Charles V continued earnestly and urgently in his desire

PHILIP II REVERSES CHARLES V

33

and his efforts for a waterway across the Isthmus, and in 1534 directed Andagoya, the Governor of Costa Firme, as the Panama region was then called, to make surveys in the valley of the Chagres River and elsewhere, to determine the most practicable route. That functionary seems to have been, in that matter at least, an unworthy successor of Balboa and Cortez, for he showed no stomach for the undertaking and soon declared it to be quite impossible. Others were more resolute and optimistic. The historian Gomara, in his official "History of the Indies," dedicated to Charles V, in 1551, unhesitatingly declared a canal to be practicable at any of the four places named by Galvano. He recognised the obstacles, but refused to regard them as insurmountable. "There are mountains," he wrote, "but there are also hands. Give me the resolve, and the task will be accomplished. If determination is not lacking, means will not fail; the Indies, to which the way is to be made, will furnish them. To a King of Spain, seeking the wealth of Indian commerce, that which is possible is also easy." But not even with this eloquent encouragement was Charles V able to effect the enterprise, but he was compelled to leave it as unfinished business to his

successor.

Philip II at first took up the matter hopefully. In 1567 he sent an engineer, Batista Antonelli, to survey the Nicaragua route, but got from him as a result an unfavourable report, of difficulties too great to be overcome. Soon after this, however, he reversed his policy. The difficulties reported by Antonelli discouraged him, the rising power of the English at sea made him fear lest he should not be able to control the canal if one were constructed, and finally the reactionary bigotry which so completely dominated him and dwarfed his statesmanship led him to conclude according to the Jesuit historian, José de Acosta-that it would be contrary to the Divine Will to unite two oceans which the Creator of the world had separated, and that to attempt so impious a deed would surely provoke some appalling catastrophe. Accordingly he not only abandoned all schemes for

a canal, but he forbade the making of them, decreed that no canal should be constructed, and imposed the penalty of death upon any one who should make known, or should attempt to seek, a better route across the Isthmus than the overland trail from Porto Bello to Panama; especially interdicting attempts on the Mandingo or Atrato River. Mr. W. L. Scruggs, in his "History of the Colombian and Venezuelan Republics," quotes an official document, written in 1743, by Dionysius Alceda, Governor of Panama, in which reference was made to this prohibition of navigation of the Atrato River, "owing to the facility it affords for passing from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean," and which positively declared that "this passage was effected in the year 1679 by the arch pirates John Guartem, Edward Blomar, and Bartholomew Charles."

There was indeed cause for Philip to fear the maritime might of England. The Islands and the Peninsula were nominally at peace. But English privateers, freebooters, and buccaneers began to harry the treasure fleets of Spain. About 1570 they became such a terror in the Caribbean that Spanish trade was practically driven from the Isthmus to the roundabout route through the Strait of Magellan. Then in 1579 Francis Drake went to the latter scene and played havoc with the Spanish ships in the South Sea, so that a return to the Isthmian route was deemed advisable; Nicaragua, however, being chosen instead of Panama. In those times there was no thought of canal building, and the task of holding the overland trail against the freebooters was sufficient to tax the power and ingenuity of Spain. For a generation the plan of an Isthmian waterway slumbered and slept; to be revived in 1616, when Philip III directed Diego Ferdinand de Velasco, Governor of Castilla del Oro, to make surveys for a canal by way of the Gulf of Darien and the Atrato River-the very route which Philip II had most forbidden. Velasco's report has been lost to the world, and its nature is unknown, but its results were nothing.

The pernicious activities of the freebooters and buccaneers

FREEBOOTERS ON THE ISTHMUS

35

were meantime maintained, and an actual state of war between England and Spain added to the embarrassments of the latter. In 1655 the English seized the Island of Jamaica, and vigorous efforts were made to establish an English foothold in Central America. Wallace indeed had established himself in Belize, as early as 1638. Other settlements were made on the coasts of Honduras and Nicaragua, and a party of adventurers under Edward David went up the San Juan River, stormed Fort San Carlos, sacked Leon, and explored the shores of Lake Nicaragua. Thus for the first time the English were led to realise the magnitude of that sheet of water and its potential value as part of a transit route from sea to sea. From that time dated the persistent English attempts to get control of Nicaragua.

The Spanish rebuilt Fort San Carlos, only to have it again attacked by a second English expedition. Then, in a desperate effort to baffle the English, a Spanish engineer, Fernando de Escobedo, determined to make the San Juan River more difficult for them to navigate. He accordingly opened the southern branch of that river, the Rio Colorado, through which to divert some of the waters of the main stream. In that mad enterprise he succeeded beyond expectation, and the result in time was the ruin of the good natural harbour at Greytown. The freebooters no longer ventured to go up the river, but they blockaded its mouth, and when, in 1685, L'Olonnais entered the Bay of Fonseca, and thence marched to Granada, and sacked it, the Nicaraguan route as a highway of commerce became for a time a thing of the past.

Nor did the British neglect the lower Isthmus, of Panama and Darien. That worst of all buccaneers, the Welshman Sir Henry Morgan, in 1671 seized and sacked Porto Bello, and then marched across the Isthmus and did the same infernal work at Panama, so effectively that the city was never rebuilt on the old site. In that nameless tragedy Spanish commerce across that Isthmus was all but destroyed, and it received its death blow nine years later, when another British freebooter, Captain Sharpe, landed in Caledonian Bay,

marched over to the Tuyra River, and destroyed the town of Villa Maria. But this latter expedition had a still more important result than such harrying of the Spaniards. One of Sharpe's companions was Lionel Wafer, an ambitious, if not an entirely trustworthy, observer. On his return to England, he reported that in that part of the Isthmus there was no mountain range at all. There were only detached hills, among which were broad, low valleys, extending across the narrow Isthmus from sea to sea.

This report attracted the attention of that extraordinary man, William Paterson, of Scotland, the founder of the Bank of England, and he, about 1694, conceived the grandiose scheme of planting on the Isthmus of Darien a British colony, which should, in his own words, secure for Great Britain "the keys of the universe, enabling their possessors to give laws to both oceans, and to become the arbiters of the commercial world." Thus did this canny Scot repeat the glowing estimates of Cortez and Gomara. He energetically set about the execution of the project. "The Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies" was organised by him, and was incorporated by the Scotch Parliament. A large party of colonists was recruited, and sailed from Leith, 1,200 strong, on July 26, 1698. It arrived at the Isthmus on November 4, and established itself at Puerto Escoces, or Scotch Port, in Caledonian Bay, founding the "cities" of New Edinburgh and New St. Andrews, near the site of Pedrarias's Aclas, where Balboa was put to death. Unfortunately for the enterprise, the situation chosen was a most unhealthful one, the English and Dutch East India Companies were bitterly and effectively opposed to it, and exerted much political and commercial influence against it, the English and Dutch colonists in the West Indies were forbidden to trade with the new company, and the Spaniards and Indians were openly hostile. In June, 1699, the discouraged colonists abandoned the place and departed, but two months later were succeeded by another company. The latter had scarcely got settled on shore when word came that