Porto Bello is about twenty miles north of Colon, on the Caribbean Sea, and in our time was accessible to Canal employees only by water. It was the northern terminus of the old royal highway, built by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, and a good road at that time. This road had become entirely overgrown and was impassable even to a man on foot. It was originally well paved and well graded. I spent a great deal of time in trying to cross the Isthmus on this road, and succeeded in getting as far north from Panama as San Juan, a town of about one thousand inhabitants, on the Pequini River, and on the royal road about half-way across the Isthmus. There had been some travel between this town and Panama which had kept the royal highway sufficiently open to be traversed by pack animals. The Alcalde, a man of about seventy years of age, told me that no one in his memory had crossed on the road from San Juan to Porto Bello. Porto Bello has a beautiful landlocked harbor, decidedly the best for hundreds of miles up and down the Caribbean coast. This coast is not subject to hurricanes and severe storms of that kind, but during the winter months the north wind, locally known as a “norther,” blows sharply for several days at a time, and makes it very uncomfortable for vessels lying in the open roadsteads which characterize all the other harbors. Two or three times every winter all the vessels lying at the docks in the harbor of Colon have to get up steam and go to sea on account of the severity of these northers. The harbor of Porto Bello is entirely protected from these northers by a mountain which runs out into the sea. Behind this mountain is a spacious and deep harbor. About the beginning of the seventeenth century Porto Bello enjoyed one of the largest export trades in the then commercial world, though it was never a very populous town in its halcyon days, probably not having more than fourteen or fifteen thousand inhabitants, and this only during the period when the great fair was going on. As soon as the fair was over, the population dropped to a couple of thousands. Professor William R. Shepherd, of Columbia University, estimates that the bullion shipped from Porto Bello amounted to about forty-two million dollars ($42,000,000) per year. If we take into account the value of gold then as compared with the present time, we can see that the export commerce of Porto Bello during the sixteenth century and early seventeenth was very little under two hundred million dollars ($200,000,000) per year.