Word: dari
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When the ships were a few hours at sea, Balboa emerged from his barrel and presented himself to the commander of the expedition. How he rose from his cramped beginnings to the glory of a peak in Darién,* where he discovered and claimed for God and Castile the Pacific Ocean and all the lands adjoining, is a fascinating story; it is told in fine detail in a solidly researched new book, Balboa of Darién, by Kathleen Romoli...
Worthwhile Friends. Balboa, who knew the mainland from an earlier expedition, persuaded his new commander that a better site than Urabá for a settlement would be Darién, just across the gulf in what is now Colombia. There the expeditionaries founded a town, Santa Maria del Antigua, and set up the first European colony on the American mainland...
...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...
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...