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SEVENTEENTH CENTURY RUIN AT PORTO BELLO

This edifice, still well preserved, is believed to be the Casa Real, or Custom House

Balboa was a pacifier as well as a fighter and it is recorded of him that even on the warpath he was not unnecessarily brutal. Indeed one cacique whom he overthrew was so impressed with his forbearance that he entered into alliance with the Spaniard and gave him his favorite daughter. Though he never married the girl Balboa “always lov’d and cherish’d her very much”, according to Herrera, which is perhaps more than some wives get with a wedding ceremony.

To anyone who has seen the Isthmian country as it is today, when the stateliest native house is but a hut, and when it would appear that the barest necessities of life are all that are sought by its people, the story told by Herrera, the official historian of the Spanish court, suggests a pitiful deterioration in the standard of native life. Of the home and village of Comagre, the greatest cacique of the Darien region, he writes: