Balboa Crosses Darién and Sights the Pacific
Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and saw the Pacific on 25 September 1513, the first European to see it from the Americas. He had reached the New World as a crewman in 1500, failed as a farmer on Hispaniola, and escaped his creditors by stowing away in a barrel on a ship to the mainland — which is how he arrived at a struggling colony whose leadership he then displaced. He governed Darién by a mixture of alliance and force, marrying the daughter of a local chief and hearing repeatedly of a great water to the south and of a kingdom rich in gold beyond it. He set out in September 1513 with about 190 Spaniards, a number of dogs, and several hundred indigenous porters and guides without whom the crossing would have been impossible. The isthmus is under fifty miles wide and took twenty-five days of swamp, jungle and hostile villages. He climbed the final ridge alone, by his own arrangement, so that he would be the first to see it. Four days later he waded into the surf in armour with a banner and claimed the ocean and all its shores for the crown of Castile. He called it the South Sea, since from Panama it lies to the south. He brought back pearls and gold, and news of Peru. A new governor, Pedrarias Dávila, was sent out and had him tried for treason and beheaded in 1519. Pedrarias was his own father-in-law by betrothal. The city of Panama was founded on the far coast in 1519, and the ocean he claimed took its present name from Magellan seven years later.
- Year: 1513 CE
- Category: Political
