About a year later, however, he surprised and captured a treasure train on the royal highway coming across from Panama to Nombre de Dios. The fight took place just about where the royal highway to Porto Bello branches off from that to Nombre de Dios. Drake’s men after the capture were some fifty or sixty miles from their ships. There was no trail nor road of any kind leading in that direction, so that they could not take the pack mules. Drake therefore directed that the gold and most valuable treasure should be divided up among the men as much as each could carry, and that the silver and least valuable part of the treasure should be buried and concealed as well as it could be in the immediate neighborhood. Drake and his men succeeded in getting to their ships safely with the treasure they had captured, and this was enough to pay the expense of their whole trip and besides make each one of them rich for life, according to the standards of that day. The Spanish garrison from Nombre de Dios was on the ground within a few hours after the capture of the pack train, and spent several days in searching for hidden buried treasure. They found a great deal, and thought they had found all that was left. About two weeks afterwards Drake and his men returned and dug up enough to give again to each man all that he could carry, but as this was principally silver, it was not so valuable as had been their previous load. In 1598, Nombre de Dios, by order of the Spanish king, was abandoned and everything moved to Porto Bello. As I before remarked, our men were located right among the ruins of the old city of Nombre do Dios, and our sand-digging operations were carried on near the shore line right in front of the town. In the three hundred years since Nombre de Dios had been abandoned the harbor had silted up and filled in to a considerable extent. In excavating for sand our men found the frame of an old ship of considerable size ten or fifteen feet under the surface of the ground, and some two hundred yards from the present coast line. She was evidently an old Spanish ship that had been abandoned at the then shore line of the city of Nombre de Dios, and had gradually been covered by the action of the water with sand and silt. The Spanish officers and soldiers of 1650 seemed to have lost the initiative and energy which they had so wonderfully exhibited two generations before in this same country under Balboa, Pizarro, Almargo, and other leaders of that stamp. But they did not lack bravery and dogged determination, when it came to the defensive, as was illustrated in the case of the Spanish Governor at Nombre de Dios, when summoned by Drake to surrender, although his condition was apparently hopeless. His courage and devotion were most unexpectedly rewarded by success, which he had not the slightest right to expect, due to purely accidental conditions.