In 1513, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, Governor of Darien, a valiant adventurer who had been prominent in the conquest and colonization of the Isthmus, undertook by means of an expedition by land to ascertain whether such an ocean did really exist. Starting with a company of about a hundred and ninety Spaniards and a few Indians, he skirted the coast of Panama to a point near Cape Tiburon, and there disembarked and headed inland. For twenty days his party persevered over forest-clad swamps, valleys, and mountains, fought a pitched battle with the natives, and finally cut its way through the dense undergrowth to the heights overlooking what is now known as the Gulf of San Miguel, on the Pacific side, and thus resolved all doubt into certainty and completed an event which, declares Dawson, “was second in its far-reaching consequences only to Columbus’ first voyage.” Balboa dubbed it the Southern Sea, little thinking that it was a body of water more vast than the Atlantic that he had found to bar the way to Cathay. “So elated was he over his epoch-making discovery,” says Mozans, quoting from an early chronicler, that— “With no lesse manlye courage than Hannibal of Carthage shewed his souldiers Italye and the promontories of the Alps, he exhorted his men to lyft up theyre hartes and to behoulde the land even now under theyre feete and the sea before theyre eyes, which shoulde bee unto them a full and juste reward of theyre great laboures and trauayles now ouerpassed. When he had sayde these woordes, he commanded them to raise certeine heapes of stones in the steede of altars for a token of possession. Then, descendynge from the toppes of the mountaynes, lest such as might come after hym shoulde argu hym of lyinge and falshod, he wrote the Kyng of Castelles his name here and there on the barkes of the trees, both on the ryght hande and on the lefte, and raysed heapes of stones all the way that he went untyll he came to the region of the nexte Kynge towarde the south, whose name was Chiapes.” “The act of taking possession was so typical of similar formalities of the Conquistadores,” continues Mozans, “that I transcribe from Oviedo his account of the manner in which Balboa and his companions claimed for his sovereign the Sea of the South, all islands in it and all lands bordering on it, in what part of the world soever. Armed with his sword and bearing aloft a banner on which were painted an image of the Blessed Virgin and the Divine Child and the arms of Castile and Leon, Balboa, followed by his associates, entered the water until it rose above his knees, when in a loud voice he said: