“His palace was more remarkable and better built than any that had yet been seen either on the Islands, or the little that was known of the Continent, being 150 paces in length and eighty in breadth ... so beautifully wrought that the Spaniards were amaz’d at the sight of it and could not express the Manner and Curiosity of it. There were in it several Chambers and Apartments and one that was like a Buttery was full of such Provisions as the Country afforded, as Bread, Venison, Swine’s Flesh, etc. There was another large Room like a Cellar full of earthen Vessels, containing Several sorts of white and red Liquors made of Indian Wheat, Roots, a kind of Palm-Tree and other Ingredients, the which the Spaniards commended when they drank them!” [Illustration: _Canal Commission Photo._ STREET IN MODERN PORTO BELLO] How ingenuous the historian’s closing line! Doubtless the Spaniards commended as lavishly as they drank. The blood they shed, the gold they stole, the houses they burned, the women they violated and the Indians they foully tortured and murdered form a long count in the indictment of civilization against Spain in Central America and the West Indies. That today the Spanish flag waves over not one foot of the territory ravaged by Pizarro, Nicuesa, Cortez, Balboa, and Pedrarias is but the slenderest of justice--the visitation upon the children of the sins of their fathers. It is fair to say that of all the ruffianly spoliators Vasco Nuñez de Balboa was the least criminal. If he fought savagely to overthrow local caciques, he neither tortured, enslaved nor slew them after his victory, but rather strove to make them his friends. He left the provinces somewhat depleted of gold and pearls after his visits, but one of the evidences of the complete lack of the cultivating grace of civilization among the Indians was that they did not care so much for these gewgaws as they did for their lives, the honor of their women and their liberty. This would of course stamp them as sheer barbarians on Fifth Avenue or the Rue de la Paix. [Illustration: ANCIENT TRAIL FROM PORTO BELLO Over this trail Balboa may have led his men on the march that led to the still unknown Pacific] As a matter of fact the Indian scorn of the Spanish greed for gold was the cause of Balboa’s first hearing of the Pacific Ocean. He had made an alliance with Careta, a cacique of some power, who gave his daughter to Balboa, together with 70 slaves and about 4000 ounces of gold. As usual the Spaniards were quarreling over the plunder, when a son of the cacique, one Panciano, strode amongst them and, kicking the gold out of his way, addressed them in language thus reported by the historian Quintana: