Vasco Nunez de Balboa

Anyone asking who was Vasco Nunez de Balboa has to begin in Extremadura, the harsh western region of Castile that produced a remarkable share of the men who conquered the Americas. Balboa was born about 1475 in the fortified hill town of Jerez de los Caballeros, near the Portuguese frontier ^[1]. His father, Nuno Arias de Balboa, held the rank of hidalgo, a member of the minor nobility, but the family had little money to match the title. Vasco was one of several sons, and like many poor gentlemen of his generation he faced a future with more pedigree than prospects ^[2].

As a young man he entered the service of Don Pedro de Portocarrero, lord of Moguer, a port town on the Andalusian coast tied closely to the early Atlantic voyages. Service in a noble household gave him training in arms and some exposure to the maritime world of southern Spain at exactly the moment news of Columbus's discoveries was transforming it ^[1]. Reliable details about his education are scarce, a common problem in any Vasco Nunez de Balboa biography, but his later letters to the crown show a man who could write fluently and argue his own case with force ^[3].

In 1500 or 1501 he crossed the Atlantic for the first time, sailing with the expedition of Rodrigo de Bastidas, a notary from Seville licensed to explore the coast of the mainland. The voyage traced the northern shore of present-day Colombia and reached the Gulf of Uraba before turning back to Hispaniola ^[2]. Balboa saw the Darien coastline on that voyage, knowledge that would later change his life.

The years on Hispaniola went badly. Balboa tried farming and pig raising near Salvatierra de la Sabana and accumulated debts he could not pay ^[1]. Colonial law prevented debtors from leaving the island, so in 1510, when an expedition under Martin Fernandez de Enciso sailed to resupply a struggling colony on the mainland, Balboa smuggled himself aboard. The most repeated of all Vasco Nunez de Balboa facts is that he escaped his creditors hidden in a barrel, or wrapped in a ship's sail, together with his dog Leoncico ^[2]. When he was discovered at sea, Enciso reportedly threatened to maroon him but relented.

The stowaway quickly proved more useful than his commander. The colony of San Sebastian de Uraba, founded by Alonso de Ojeda, had collapsed under Indigenous attacks, and its survivors under Francisco Pizarro were ready to abandon the coast. Balboa proposed moving the settlement west across the Gulf of Uraba to a district he remembered from the Bastidas voyage, where the land was better and the local people did not use poisoned arrows ^[3]. The advice was taken. Late in 1510 the Spaniards defeated the cacique Cemaco and founded Santa Maria la Antigua del Darien, the first permanent European town on the mainland of the Americas ^[1].

Enciso's leadership did not survive the move. The settlers deposed him, arguing that the new site lay outside his legal jurisdiction, and elected Balboa as one of two magistrates. Within a year he had pushed aside his co-magistrate and a rival claimant, Diego de Nicuesa, whom the colonists refused to receive and sent off in an unseaworthy vessel that was never seen again ^[2]. By 1511 the crown recognized Balboa as interim governor and captain general of Darien ^[3].

Among all Vasco Nunez de Balboa achievements, one voyage on foot stands above the rest. As governor he combined raids for gold with a policy, unusual for the period, of turning defeated caciques into allies. He formed a durable partnership with the chief Careta, whose daughter he took as a companion, and with the neighboring ruler Comagre ^[4]. According to accounts derived from the chronicler Peter Martyr, it was Comagre's eldest son who, watching Spaniards squabble over gold, told them of a sea to the south and a land farther on so rich that people ate and drank from vessels of gold, an early rumor of the Inca world ^[4].

Balboa had reason to move quickly. Word reached Darien that Enciso's complaints had found an audience at court and that a new governor might replace him. A great discovery could restore his standing. On September 1, 1513 he left the coast with about 190 Spaniards, among them Francisco Pizarro, and hundreds of Indigenous guides and porters, striking south across the isthmus of Panama ^[1]. The crossing meant hacking through rainforest, fording rivers, climbing the cordillera, and fighting the forces of the cacique Torecha, but allied guides made a route possible that Spaniards alone could never have found ^[3].

On or about September 25, 1513, told by his guides that the ocean was visible from a nearby summit, Balboa went up alone and became the first European to look on the eastern Pacific from American soil ^[1]. Four days later, at the Gulf of San Miguel, he waded into the surf in armor, raised his sword and a banner of the Virgin, and claimed the Mar del Sur, the South Sea, with all lands touching it, for the crown of Castile ^[2]. The expedition returned to Santa Maria in January 1514 loaded with gold and pearls, including tribute from the Pearl Islands region, and Balboa sent a fifth of the treasure to King Ferdinand with news of the discovery ^[3].

News traveled slower than intrigue. Before reports of the South Sea reached Spain, Ferdinand had already appointed a replacement: Pedro Arias de Avila, known as Pedrarias Davila, an elderly and suspicious courtier who arrived at Darien in June 1514 with a fleet of around twenty ships and some 1,500 colonists ^[2]. The huge influx overwhelmed the small colony's food supply, and hundreds of newcomers died of hunger and disease within months. Pedrarias immediately opened judicial proceedings against Balboa over the treatment of Enciso and Nicuesa, and relations between the two men settled into a cycle of hostility and forced reconciliation ^[1].

The crown, once it learned of the Pacific, tried to balance the rivals. Ferdinand named Balboa adelantado of the South Sea and governor of the provinces of Panama and Coiba in 1515, though he remained subordinate to Pedrarias ^[3]. As a gesture of peace, brokered in part by Bishop Juan de Quevedo, Balboa was betrothed in 1516 to Maria de Penalosa, a daughter of Pedrarias who was still in Spain and whom he never met. The marriage was performed by proxy and existed only on paper ^[2].

Balboa's conduct toward Indigenous peoples mixed calculation with the standard brutality of the conquest. He built alliances and was less indiscriminately violent than many contemporaries, yet he also enslaved captives, extracted tribute, and on at least one occasion had a group of men accused of sodomy killed by war dogs, an episode recorded by early chroniclers and engraved by Theodor de Bry ^[4]. Under Pedrarias, raiding across the isthmus grew far harsher, and the cooperative networks Balboa had built largely collapsed ^[5].

Rather than fight his father-in-law at court, Balboa turned back to exploration. From the new town of Acla on the Caribbean coast he organized an astonishing project: the materials for ships were cut, forged, and carried piece by piece across the mountains to the Pacific side, where his men assembled brigantines on the Rio Balsas. The human cost of the portage, borne mostly by Indigenous laborers, was severe ^[3]. By 1518 he had vessels on the South Sea and had cruised the Gulf of San Miguel and the Pearl Islands, planning a voyage south toward the rich country of rumor, the land that would later be called Peru ^[1].

A fleet under an independent-minded son-in-law was exactly what Pedrarias feared, especially with word circulating that a new governor might soon arrive from Spain to replace the old man. Early in 1519 Pedrarias summoned Balboa to Acla for a supposed consultation. On the road he was arrested by a company led by Francisco Pizarro, his former comrade of the 1513 crossing ^[2]. The charge was treason: conspiring to cast off the governor's authority and set up his own jurisdiction on the South Sea.

The trial, conducted by the licentiate Gaspar de Espinosa under pressure from Pedrarias, moved to a foregone conclusion. In January 1519, most sources give the date as January 12 or the days around January 15, Balboa and four companions were beheaded in the plaza of Acla, and his head was displayed on a pole ^[1]. Witnesses recorded that he protested his loyalty to the king to the end. He was about 43 years old, and his property was confiscated ^[3].

The sighting of the Pacific changed the map of the world in European minds. Balboa's South Sea confirmed that the lands Columbus had found were not the edge of Asia but a barrier before another ocean entirely, a fact Magellan's fleet would demonstrate on a planetary scale within a decade ^[1]. The isthmus route he pioneered became the axis of Spanish empire: within twenty years Pizarro, who had marched with him in 1513 and arrested him in 1519, sailed from Panama to destroy the Inca state that Comagre's son had hinted at ^[4].

Modern historians treat him as one of the more capable and complicated figures of the early conquest. Kathleen Romoli's 1953 study presented him as a gifted improviser and comparatively pragmatic in Indigenous relations, while more recent scholarship keeps the violence of the Darien enterprise, including the atrocities committed under his command, firmly in view ^[5]. His rehabilitation in Spanish letters began early: the poet Lope de Vega and the chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, who knew Darien personally, both shaped his posthumous image ^[3].

His name is stamped across the region he crossed. Panama's currency is the balboa, the port district of Panama City at the Pacific mouth of the canal is named Balboa, and monuments to him stand in Panama City and Madrid. A famous slip keeps him in literary trivia as well: John Keats, in the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," gave stout Cortez the silent stare upon the Pacific from a peak in Darien, when the man on that peak was Balboa ^[6].