273. Panama’s Brutish Conquistador Who Found The Pacific and Lost His Head (Part 1)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William de Rimpel. Now, inadvertently, Donald Trump has given us a theme for quite a few of these mini-series. How grateful we are to our great leader. Podcast thanks him. But we decided that we would work down his shopping list. You know he's been expressing interest in buying all sorts of things. And, you know, we started with Greenland, we moved on to Canada, and now we are heading south to Panama in Central America. and we want to really try and understand why this former Spanish colony has made it onto his list. And we've got that brilliant man with us again.

1:07You love him. We love him. Brilliant maritime historical archaeologist Mark Horton, who has given us some absolute jaw-dropping scoops on this podcast, let me tell you. Do you know, the last time you were on, Mark, Willie and I just had to pinch ourselves because we thought we knew his story and then you kept dropping new facts on that basically left us shook, shook down to our little shoes, it did. So you will remember from Mark's wonderful appearance on the Roanoke episode that Mark has a habit of falling on major archaeological sites in rather nice parts of the world where he can go on holiday.

1:47You're making it sound like he trips over stuff in sunny climes. This man is meticulous and finds things that nobody else can find. As someone who's worked in the field with Mark with my trowel, I know how Mark likes to. A lot of his work was centered around the lovely Kenyan beach resort of Lamu for a long time. Yeah, that's right. He's taking me to the Bahamas, aren't you, Mark? That was the agreement, Mark. That was the agreement. You and me and a trowel going to the Bahamas. Now, look, let's talk about this oldest Spanish colony in mainland America. How did you come to be digging around with your trowel over there?

2:25It ties into the Scots. So we were doing a big expedition looking for the abandoned Scottish colony, the famous Darian colony. Exactly. Which, of course, Empire listeners who plugged into our Scottish Empire episodes last year will know all about. But just give us a quick sketch of that before we move on, Mark. The Scottish colony was an attempt to create an entrepot on the Atlantic coast. Scotland was financially bankrupt. And the idea, and this is the theme that's going to come through all this, about crossing the isthmus. And a financier, brilliant economist, but practically useless man called William Patterson, managed to persuade most of Scotland to invest in a madcap colony on the coast of Darien.

3:10And between 1698 and 1700, about 2 ,500 Scotsmen died, bankrupting Scotland. and some would say forcing Scotland into a union with England in 1707. I think that's very much the case. But what we're talking about today, Mark, is the earlier period. Take us before then. What's happening in the area where the Scots landed before they ever got there? And take us way back. Take us to the pre-colonial history. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because I can't say where the Spanish alighted upon this bit of land sort of by mistake. This is the first area that the Spanish attempted to colonise on the mainland.

3:53This was a massive mistake on the Spanish. This is the first area of the mainland of the New World that the Spanish colonised. They'd previously set up settlements and towns on the islands, particularly in Hispaniola, which is now Haiti, the Dominican Republic. But they hadn't ventured onto the mainland. And for some rather odd reason that has never really become clear, they light upon the coast of Darien, which is about the most unpleasant place that you could possibly want to settle. It's the kind of armpit of the world. It rains steroids for nine months of the year. It's infested with every form of disease that you could possibly want.

4:35Or not. To try and have that as your foothold for, as it were, colonization of the new world was a very odd choice. Now, when we're talking about Panama, we should sort of drop people on a map. Kindly, gently, with love. So we're talking about a place that's between Costa Rica to the north, Colombia in the south. And actually, I just want to clarify one thing. I was telling one of my sons that we were talking about this isthmus, and he completely misheard me and thought I was talking about Christmas and Christmas Island. And it all got so confusing and pointless. But just for those like my son listening, an isthmus is a strip of land that lies between.

5:12So it's like a little finger of fudge. It's a finger of land. And this particular isthmus lies between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. So in effect, you've got a bridge, a land bridge linking North and South America. And that is the bit that we're interested in. Can I just add a critical thing that we have to remember as a geography? At this point, the isthmus is not running North-South, but actually West-East. So the coastline that we're talking about is the north coast of Panama, which is the Caribbean side. And the south coast, which faces the Pacific, is, of course, the South Seas.

5:49Good. OK, we got it. It is a crossroads of land. But it is one, therefore, that is crucial for anyone wanting to make long journeys and avoid going the circuitous way that takes so many more days and possibly into hostile waters. Via Argentina and Chile and Terra del Fuego and all that sort of stuff. Absolutely. Or via the Northwest Passage, which hadn't been discovered. The imperative was to try and get to the east. But that's a little bit further on. I think that we should go to Columbus first and his fourth voyage. Take us there, Mark. So Columbus, to his dying day, thought there was a way through to reach China.

6:26And he believed that by coasting along the coast, This was the last throw of his dice. In 1501, he sailed along the coast of Panama looking for a gulf that he could sail into. And unfortunately, he didn't find it. He lost several ships. The whole thing was a massive disaster. But he did encounter native populations. The really interesting thing is that in this area, we're not talking about great civilizations. We're not talking about Mayas or Aztecs or Incas. We're talking about chieftainship. So every five, ten miles is a separate political entity, probably defined by the rivers as a draining into the Caribbean Sea.

7:09These chieftains were heavily decorated with gold. They were clearly incredibly rich, but always fighting each other the whole time. Those are internecine battles between the two. It was possible, therefore, to get a foothold by aligning with one against another. Exactly. So if you're a colonist, this is good news. A, they're covered in gold, which implies there's some gold mines. Yes. And B, they're all squabbling with each other, which means that in the old British manner, you can divide and rule and find a way in there. Not just the British manner, every colonization. We talked about this when Cartier went to America, you know, when he went to Canada, what we now know as Canada, he was very happy to exploit the differences there.

7:52So, okay, so you've got glittering jewelry and you've got sort of tribal interests. What does Columbus actually do? I mean, is this a case of taking beads and smallpox infested blankets and forging allies? How does he work this out? No, Columbus goes home, basically a disappointed man because he's never found the way to China and that's all that he's interested in. And after Columbus's voyage, the Spanish sort of forget about this set of coastline for another five or six years. That's really interesting. Same thing happened in Canada as well. You know, they didn't see any kind of interest in colonisation at the time.

8:29It was all about the passage. And it was all about the belief that just beyond that waterfall is China. And they would write these sort of letters home, say, we are just inches away from China. But Mark, as I understand it, Columbus has this idea that there is a hidden strait. He's looking through every bay, hoping to find the way through to China, that if only he could find this hidden strait, that he could finally, after three failed voyages, find what he's actually after rather than an entirely new continent that he wasn't looking for in the first place. One of the most magnificent of these bays that he sailed into, which plays a part in the second part of this story, is a place called Portobello, that he called Portobello, the most beautiful port, which is on the north coast of Panama.

9:15After he goes back, and this is still, so this is 1502. If my histories and memories write all that stuff with Cortes and the Aztecs isn't until the 1520s. Between Columbus going home and Cortes storming the pyramids of Mexico, we have two other conquistadors turning up. 1509, is that right? That's correct. Tell us about these guys. In 1508, 1509, the Spanish decide to create a new colony, make a deliberate attempt. A place called Terra Firma is the title. The whole thing is a horrible internal conflict of different conquistadors fighting amongst themselves. They try initially to set up a colony of what's now the north coast of Colombia, but then abandon that and move into what's actually just on the Panamanian-Colombian border.

10:13It's actually in modern Colombia. And they found a town up a river called Santa Maria L 'Antigua de Darien. And this is the first permanent settlement on the mainland of the New World. And Darien is one of these guys, isn't he? Darien is the Indian term for the location. Oh, I see. It's an indigenous term. Yes. So it's a battle between two conquistadors, Vasco Nunes de Barboa, who we'll meet extensively, Martin Fernandez and Ciso, who was a wealthy lawyer from Hispaniola. And these two people fight like dogs against each other. And the early story of colonization is the battle between these two colorful historical figures.

11:01We love a pen portrait on this programme. You said we'll talk about who and what they're like. It's Martin Fernandez Enciso. What did people say about him at the time? What did they think about him at the time? And did he have a loyal following? Let's talk about those he gathered around him thought of him. We actually know very little about him. I mean, history has recounted Balboa, but it was Inisco who was really the key figure in all this. He was a lawyer, made a great deal of money settling disputes in Hispaniola and was really interested in seeing a new career on the main. He basically stopped the settlers stealing gold from the Indians, for example, and that created a huge amount of resentment among the Spanish settlers that came to settle this new town.

11:48Balboa took the opportunity of then siding with these annoyed settlers. So the one we remember, Balboa, the guy who we're going to be talking about, is actually the rogue. That's interesting. He is completely the rogue. And we know that he was particularly keen on looting and terrorising the local Indians. He had a pack of dogs that he set upon the Indians. Bloodhounds. Bloodhounds, indeed. And there's a wonderful illustration a bit later of these dogs destroying, killing and disembowelling 40 natives because Balboa thought that they were associated with some sort of sodomy or homosexuality. He just sets his dogs onto them.

12:30Onto them. No, but then it's captured in portraiture, for God's sake. That was the holiday snap they decided to do. It's just, that's insane. And of course, the Indians that are living here were known as the Quaver. So brutal was the Spanish intervention that none survived today. In other areas of the New World, we have descendants. We have descendants of the Asset. We have descendants of the Maya. Maya language is still spoken today. But in this era of Panama, the Quaver were exterminated in the course of 30 or 40 years. Just, I mean, you mentioned that gruesome portrait of the bloodhounds doing terrible things to indigenous people.

13:09But when you look at their portraits, I mean, I always like looking at portraits of people, the way that they prefer to be presented is also interesting. So, you know, you've got one of Barbeau who's dressed pretty much in armour, you know, the warrior. He very much looks like a warrior. And CISO, he looks like a scholar. You know, he's got the felt hat and feather and the high collar. So the way they even project themselves, one is saying, I am learned, I am a poet. and the other one, you know, I'm going to set my dogs on you. Balboa was a pig farmer on Hispaniola, a failed pig farmer. And he arrived uninvited, stowed away on a ship with his dog.

13:44And then because by sheer force of personality, became the de facto leader of Santa Maria. He has this idea quite early on of trying to cross the isthmus. Isn't he one of the first that actually thinks that you can make some money and make your name by crossing to what the Indians have told him is the other ocean on the other side. So from his base at Santa Maria, he goes and travels up and down the coast, negotiating with the different Indian chieftains, siding with some, having battles with others, and getting to know the coastline as it extends to the west. In part of that travels, he learns about the South Seas.

14:29One of the Indians tells him there is a route across the Isthmus that he can take. And in 1513, he takes that route and is the first person to, as it were, sight on a Pekindarian, the South Seas. So Keats got it wrong. It was nothing to do with Stout Cortez, no. Indeed not. But it was Vasco de Dunez de Barber who basically climbed a tree and looked out and saw the South Sea, the Southern Ocean. And from that point, the whole notion of what the Spanish were doing in Panama changed from, as it were, this godforsaken tropical swamp to somewhere that one could exploit as a crossing point to reach the Southern Seas and eventually reach China and so forth.

15:19Mark, may I just circle back though to that awful massacre by Balboa, who by the second I hope people are going to hate more and more. But what he described as sodomy, there is a cultural aspect to the tribe upon which he unleashed this hell that he did not understand. I think I understand that they have assigned gender identities for males, but I'm not quite sure I get exactly what that means. Can you talk us through that? Yes, we have some contemporary accounts, particularly a friar called Orviedo, who actually leaves an extensive description of these Quaver people living on the north coast of Panama.

16:00And clearly, gender is a lot more fluid than Europeans of the time would have accepted. And while he's a friar who doesn't describe sodomy as such, he clearly shows that they cross-dress in various ways and acquire female gender at times. So there was an ambiguity in these northern tribes, the Quaver, which Babur must have misinterpreted. They were basically trans. Many native peoples are trans. And Babur obviously misinterpreted this as sodomy. How interesting. In India, we have the third sex, we have the hijras. And even in colonial passports, you were offered hijra as an option for sex. There were three boxes to tick.

16:49It's always far more plural than we think of things. Mark, before we come to the break and set off with Balboa on his expedition, just one question. You described him letting off his dogs and being this brute. Is disease already breaking out among the Indians or is that something that happens over 150 years? I mean, are we seeing Indians dying of smallpox and all these important diseases immediately he arrives? As far as we can see, yes. Everyone's dying on both sides. The mortality amongst the Spanish settlers is also extreme. So the life expectancy there was very small, but they obviously introduced European diseases, many of which we don't know exactly what they were, because some of these 16th century diseases don't actually have proper medical counterparts today.

17:36The bacillus has died or developed. There's a huge debate actually how many Indians were here on the Ispels of Panama. I mean, some would argue it might be one or two million. I think modern scholarship suggests it was about 200 ,000 or so. So the population collapse wasn't quite as extreme, but within 50 years, they'd all gone. What's so interesting, though, is this picture you paint, Mark, of the floundering of these initial attempts. I'd always had the impression that, you know, just there's Columbus and then Cortez just walks in and conquers everything. There is this moment rather like the Scots later, where the Spanish just don't understand how to do it and are dying of disease and are fumbling around, making a mess of things.

18:20Yes, and I think it's worth pointing out that this is the training school for the most famous conquistadors. So Pizarro is there, Cortes is there, and they're learning how to do it from Balboa. That's amazing. Gosh, so he's kind of the teacher, the big daddy of all these conquistadors who were coming. So look, we're going to take a break, but what we have here, we have a man in the shape of Balboa who is ruthless, who doesn't think much of the local population, who doesn't try or care to understand the ways of the local population, thinks nothing of slaughtering and massacring them. But he has his eye on gold and nothing, particularly not the natives, are going to get in his way.

19:10Welcome back. So we last saw Balboa shinning up a tree and spotting the ocean from the top of it. In 1512, he secures enough money and backing to launch an expedition, an exploratory probing inland through territory controlled by several chieftains. One of these, Comagre, is subdued and baptized, but his son is reportedly so exasperated by the Spanish complaints of the lack of gold that he tells them to head further south, where they'd find not only the vast wealth, but the other sea. So that's the moment that we're taking up. Mark, tell us what happens on this expedition. How many are they? How big an event is this?

19:56Is this just a few men stumbling through the jungle? Or is this a sort of rather like my favourite film, Aguirre, Wrath of God, with conquistadors hauling cannon up the sides of Machu Picchu and all the rest of it? Well, at this point, no, it wasn't. It was a relatively small expedition. We don't know exactly how many people involved. And obviously, they had their Indians, the ones that were on their side, to guide them through. I mean, today, that landscape is primary rainforest, virtually impenetrable, incredibly difficult to move through. So crossing over was a massive achievement. However, we don't know whether in the 16th century it was so forested, because the Indians there living and cultivating up the mountainside.

20:42So it might have been much more savannah, open grassland than the forest that's covering the isthmus today. Which, of course, is easier for you and your conquistadors and your bloodhounds to find your way through. Find your way through. That's right. So he then went all the way through and went down to the Chucanacque River and then took probably canoes down the Chucanacque and stood at the mouth of Chucanacque in the Gulf de San Miguel and placed the standard in here for Spain. I always, from movies like Aguirre, have this picture of conquistadors on these expeditions covered in sort of breastplates and helmets and thick leather breeches and boots up to their thighs.

21:24It's going to be really hot, isn't it? Aren't they going to get very hot? Are they clanking in all this stuff? Or do they have a lightweight sort of camping kit, which they get into when they go off? The summer wardrobe. He's asking about the summer wardrobe. I think they're clanking over. I mean, maybe not in full armor, but certainly breastplates and things, because they're worried at any time they might be ambushed by unfriendly Indians. This is dangerous territory. And so, indeed, they're clanking through with armor and muskets. It must have been incredibly horrible. And they've got slaves with them carrying their stuff.

21:58Is that right? Well, not at this stage, probably. They're probably, again, they're using the natives. Slaves come in a little bit later. So he comes and puts canoes in the river at the Chucanacque and takes it all to the entrance to the sea, the Pacific Ocean, the Gulf of San Muguel. And he literally puts the Spanish standard in the Pacific Ocean, the South Sea, because, of course, he's traveled from the north to the south and claims this great ocean for Spain. And this is 29 days after he sets off. So it's quite an expedition. It's a month of jungle clanking. Jungle clanking where he loses a lot of men.

22:36I mean, to the heat stroke that is obviously going to follow clanking through the jungle in intense heat with breastplates and leather stockings. But there he is claiming an entire ocean for Spain. There is John Keats' poem, which I'll just read to you. It could be about him or someone like him. On first looking into Chapman's Homer, and he writes, Like stout Cortez when the eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. I remember where I was when I read that poem for the first time. It's such a great, great line. But of course, you know, Balboa doesn't rhyme like Cortez does.

23:15No, but I mean, would Keats have known, in all seriousness, would Keats have known about Balboa? I mean, Cortez is a name that clearly was legendary in the schoolrooms. I mean, what about Balboa's name? Not only does Keats know about Balboa, Sir Thomas Brown gets a copy of his diary. And on the Norfolk, because those of you who've read The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald, will know all about Sir Thomas Brown sitting in somewhere in East Anglia. Well, who is he for those who have not read that venerable tome? So Thomas Brown is a wonderful sort of Elizabethan alchemist and thinker and geographer and botanist and sort of man of letters and learning who writes wonderful, complicated poems.

23:55He does write a journal about this that appears in England. So he is a known quantity. So then Keats is a screw up rather than ignorance. I mean, you were saying, Mark, that actually not many people did know about Barbaros. So I'm confused now. So it was sort of like a handful of intelligentsia who write clever books who know about him. But Keats was one such. So how did he come to say it was Cortez rather than Balboa? I mean, do we know how that happened? Just a screw-up? A screw-up, I think. Okay, even great men can screw up. There we are. I feel better about myself. Keats is about sort of 18 when he writes it.

24:30He's not much older than your boys, Anita. So he's allowed to... Well, then screw-ups are likely, let me say. Okay, in that case. Okay, so he's discovered the Pacific in 1513, parries back to Santa Maria with the news that all this is discovered. But meanwhile, a very nasty piece of work arrives as the new governor of Santa Maria, a man called Pedrarias Davila. And he has a royal warrant to dispose Baba as the governor. And what's more, Ciso is there in the ship with Davila and they together conspire to take revenge on Balboa, who he had deposed a few years earlier. So this was a powder keg for internecine war between the two.

25:23And Balboa decides to get the hell out. And in 1514, 1515, he moves along the coast and found his own new city called Akla, the second city on the mainland of the New World. And this is a very, as it were, significant place. It's probably the first place that's actually laid out on the colonial grid system in the mainland. And great, as it were, hope is made that this is going to be a really significant new settlement. Mark, just to put this in the wider history of colonialism, what other colonies are there of Europe at this time, other than the Crusader states, which have been and gone by this time in the 15th century?

26:08Is this the first colonial grid plan ever built? There's a possibility that they might have built them on Hispaniola. Some of the earliest early towns there, Santo Domingo might be on the grid pattern. But certainly on the actual mainland of America, this is probably the first, as it were, colonially planned city. I said this before, but we have this image of everything kicking off with Cortes and Mexico. There's this whole history I had no knowledge of. Archaeologically speaking, how much of the lost city can you find at all? Have you found any of it at all? So in 1979, I found Akla. That's a very clever review, Mark.

26:48Were you the first to find Akla? Yeah, people had speculated roughly where it was. But we found the ceramic evidence, the smoking gun evidence, that this was Barboura City. So what did you find? Like, I mean, describe. So we found ceramics and I stumbled across a whole lot of pottery called illabella polychrome, which is a type of pottery that goes out of use by around 1520. That was a really good bit of evidence. We found brick buildings, remains of various structures, a brick tower possibly in the midst. We didn't have time to clear the site and do extensive excavations, but we were pretty certain that this is the place.

27:30We could put it on the map. I have many questions because I'm just fascinated with you, completely besotted with you, yes, but also fascinated with the work that you do. So when you go to a place like that, is it completely overgrown, a place where you suspect there is a lost city? Or is there some kind of urban life that's going along and you have to wind in? What are you walking into? What is it that you see? And what is it that makes your heart beat faster going, you know what, I think here, this is where we put the trench. Well, the problem is you go in and basically it's coconuts along the beach, probably, but you go in a few yards inland and it's pretty impenetrable.