Word: balboa
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...biographies tackled subjects from the great age of exploration and produced fresh material and absorbing stories: Bradford Smith's Captain John Smith (no kin) and Kathleen Romoli's Balboa of Darien. Two frequently misunderstood figures were straightened out again: Edwin Stanton, Lincoln's Secretary of War, in Fletcher Pratt's combative Stanton, and a queen of England in H. F. M. Prescott's superb Mary Tudor. Among the remaining literary biographies, some were dull but useful (F. Holmes Dudden's exhaustive Henry Fielding, Leon Edel's first volume of Henry James) ; some were...
...settlement in Darién prospered, but by 1512 intriguers at home were threatening to have the governor recalled. Balboa decided to stake everything on one magnificent gamble: he would cross the mountains and find the "other sea" of which his Indian friends spoke. Taking 190 picked compañeros, he set out on Sept. 1, 1513 "for the Pacific and immortality...
Austral Seas. Three weeks later, the expedition reached the Pacific. Chronicler Andrés de Valdarrábanos tells what happened: "Captain [Balboa], going ahead of all those he was conducting up a bare high hill, saw from its summit the South Sea . . . And immediately he turned toward the troops, very happy, lifting eyes and hands to Heaven, praising Jesus Christ and His glorious Mother." Balboa knelt, commanding his men to do likewise, "and gave thanks to God for the grace He had shown him in allowing him to discover that sea." Later, Balboa and his men scrambled down...
With all his command of water and of words, Balboa was not able to stave off a rival conquistador named Pedro Arias Dávila. Pedrarias, as he was better known, displaced him as governor of Darién, and despite all Balboa's diplomacy (including marriage with Pedrarias' daughter), had his predecessor's head chopped off and stuck on a pole in the village square...
When Pedrarias killed Balboa, he also doomed Darién. Pedrarias was not anxious to have the settlement endure as a monument to his predecessor, and the Indians, provoked to enmity by the new regime's cruelty, made life difficult for the Spaniards. In 1524, Santa Maria del Antigua was abandoned, and today the jungle covers Darién much as it did "four and a half centuries ago, when a few hundred adventurous men from Castile took a corner of it to build a town and shape their arrogant dreams of subjugating half a world...