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Photo by H. Pittier. Courtesy American Geographic Magazine. Washington.

THE SENTINEL TREE

If that country alone is happy whose history is uninteresting, then sorrow must have been the ordained lot of Panama. Visited first by Columbus in 1502, at which time the great navigator put forth every effort to find a strait leading through to the East Indies, it has figured largely in the pages of history ever since. Considerable cities of Spanish foundation rose there while our own Jamestown and Plymouth were still unimagined. The Spaniards were building massive walls, erecting masonry churches, and paving royal roads down there in the jungle long before the palisades and log huts of Plymouth rose on the sandy shores of Cape Cod Bay. If the ruins of the first city of Panama, draped with tropical vines, are all that remain of that once royal city, its successor founded in 1673 still stands with parts of the original walls sturdily resisting the onslaught of time.

It appears there are certain advantages about geographical littleness. If Panama had been big the eyes of the world would never have been fastened upon it. Instinctively Columbus sought in each of its bays, opening from the Caribbean that strait which should lead to far Cathay. Seeking the same mythical passage Balboa there climbed a hill where