Balbo'a, Vasco Nunez
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Vasco Nunez (1745-1517), a Spanish adventurer. Little is known of his youth, save that he was well born and poor. In 1510 he was a debt-burdened planter in Haiti. In order to escape his creditors and join an expedition in which he was not wanted, he had himself concealed in a cask supposed to contain provisions, and was thus conveyed aboard a vessel about to sail for the American mainland. After various adventures, we find this soldier of fortune setting out from the Caribbean coast with a force of 190 men, 1,000 natives, and a pack of bloodhounds, in search of a great sea and a land of gold of which the Indians told him. September 25, 1513, he gained the summit of the mountains, and the Pacific Ocean was seen for the first time by white men. Five days later he reached the coast and, wading out into the water, he held aloft the flag of his country and took possession of these "seas and lands in the name of the king and queen of Castile." Balboa found the sea of which he was in search, but the discovery of Peru, the land of gold, was reserved for another. Shortly after his return to the Spanish settlement he was thrown into prison by a jealous rival and was beheaded on a charge of treason. Balboa's passage of the isthmus occupied twenty-nine days. The trip now requires but a few hours. When with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien. --Keats.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The facts Aiton's set down in 1910 still stand, apart from dates: Balboa was born about 1475 (the entry's "1745" is a printer's slip) and was beheaded at Acla in January 1519, not 1517, on the orders of his father-in-law and successor as governor, Pedrarias Dávila. What has moved is the framing. Modern historians no longer write of the Pacific being "seen for the first time by white men" — the peoples of Panama had lived on both coasts for millennia — and they give far more weight to what the "pack of bloodhounds" was for, since Balboa's march involved the enslavement of villagers and the setting of dogs on captives. The line about the crossing now taking "but a few hours" was written just after the Panama Canal opened in 1914; the republic went on to name its currency the balboa, and the Pacific-end port beside the canal is Balboa still. (Keats, incidentally, wrote "stout Cortez" in that sonnet, an error the encyclopedia quietly tidied to "he".)
Written for this edition, 2026.