Charles V had been succeeded by his son Philip II, who reigned for a long while. Philip in 1567 sent an Italian engineer, Juan Bautista Antonelli, to Nicaragua for a good look around. Antonelli reported back that the difficulties were too great to make the building of a canal practical; and that was the end of that.
Historians generally have remarked that Philip II was opposed to the idea of an interoceanic canal on the ground that if God had wanted there to be a water route at this place He would have created it Himself, so an artificial passage would be a sacrilege. This is possible, though not an established fact; for Philip was a fanatic. It was he who ruled Spain at the height of the Inquisition, which he encouraged, and he who sent out the Armada that was as much religious in purpose as it was imperialistic.
Yet there were other reasons why he might have abstained. Spain was failing. Her hour of supreme greatness had passed. She sank, slowly. The treasures she was ripping out of Mexico and out of Peru supported the enormous armies with which she was seeking to enslave Europe, but at the same time they constituted a glittering temptation to certain Dutch, French, and English mariners who were not overburdened with scruples and whose motto was “No peace below the line,” by which they meant not the Equator, nor yet the line the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, drew to divide the world between Portugal and Spain, but rather the 30th meridian of west longitude, which was popularly taken to mark the boundary between the Old and the New worlds, and beyond which, in the opinion of these dedicated ruffians, it was always open season for Spaniards.
They were asking in the court at Madrid: Would such a canal, even if it could be built, benefit Spain rather more than Spain’s enemies? Might it not serve to break Spain s grip upon the American colonies, which she was striving so desperately to keep?
Two great treasure fleets sailed to America from Spain every year, and they were heavily guarded by warships. One went to San Juan de Ulloa, the port of Vera Cruz, to fetch away the Mexican riches, chiefly silver, while the other went first to Cartagena, then to Nombre de Dios, a miserable village on the same Bay of Bastimentos that Columbus had discovered, where the treasures from Peru were heaped.
Nombre de Dios marked the Atlantic end, the northern end, of the grandly named Camino Real, or Royal Road. This was a miserably narrow path hacked through the jungle, only partly paved, crisscrossed with liana, swarming with mosquitoes, crawling with snakes. It was about fifty miles long, and the trip took four days.
Another feature of the Camino Real that made it such a dangerous trip was the Cimarrones. These were escaped Negro slaves who had intermingled with the wild Indians to produce an extraordinarily hardy, elusive, bloodthirsty people, people who flitted through the jungle like wraiths to strike like rattlers and then be instantly and mysteriously gone again. The Cimarrones did not like the Spaniards. They were disgusted with the insatiable Spanish thirst for gold; and when they did succeed in capturing a Spaniard alive, they often gave him more gold than he wanted by pouring it, molten, down his throat.
The Camino Real, mucky though it was, was the only piece of land over which the treasure from Peru passed each year on its way to Spain; all the rest of the distance was by sea. Largely because of the Cimarrones (though a little later also because of the French and English pirates and buccaneers), this treasure was moved in recuas, or droves, of 50 to 70 mules each, all heavily laden and guarded by soldiers. There was more money here, in one of those recuas—and a whole treasure drive might consist of six or seven of them—than there was in any other place in the world.6
At the head of navigation of the Chagres River there was established a fleabitten little settlement named Venta de Cruces, and here the soldiers and the mule drivers could rest a bit, the goods they guarded being stored in warehouses to await the arrival of canoes so that the latter part of the trip could be made by water. The treasure trains, however, because of winds over the Atlantic, customarily moved early in the year, and this was the dry season: from January through April there was not enough water in the upper Chagres to float even a small unloaded canoe, and so the treasure mules had to plod the whole distance.
Francis Drake, a whirlwind, after making friends with the Cimarrones, hit this line hard, far across on the Southern shore of the isthmus, outside Panama, from which a recua had just emerged, but he got little for his pains except glory, of which he always had an imperishable portion any-way. Twice he hit Nombre de Dios, once by land and once by sea, each time while the town was waiting for the fleet; but he could not carry off much of his booty.
Warned, the Spaniards shifted their Atlantic terminal of the Camino Real farther westward along the coast, quitting Nombre de Dios, which had a shallow bay and always would have been hard to defend, and establishing a new village at Porto Bello, which they fortified. This made little difference to Henry Morgan, who struck and reduced the two forts of Porto Bello, and then with his raggle-taggle buccaneers crossed the isthmus to take the city of Panama. Morgan controlled a large and very noisy force, and there was no question of employing surprise tactics, as the out-numbered Drake had done. The Panamanians were granted time to hide their valuables, many of them in the surrounding countryside. Morgan and his men had a means of meeting this Situation. They rounded up the inhabitants and used various methods—fastening a linen band around the forehead and tightening this as a tourniquet until the eyes popped out was their favorite—to cause them to divulge their secrets. Large numbers ungratefully died under such questioning. After a few days of ferocious occupation the city was burned to the ground—each side blamed the other for starting the fire, which could have been an accident—and Morgan and his cutthroats, having stripped the town clean anyway, withdrew.
Henry Morgan
The original village of Panama—the name meant “place of fish”—had been no more than that, though the king chartered it as a city. After Morgan’s pestilential horde had departed, it was given up entirely, and a new city, destined to become much larger, was built a few miles down the coast.7
The buccaneers and the pirates did not cease to harass the Camino Real because they suffered a change of heart but only because the pickings came to be so small. Spain indubitably was fading. She would be lucky even to hold on to what she had, as everybody knew. In her trembling, weakening grasp, Panama relapsed into innocuous desuetude, as did Nicaragua and Tehuantepec and all the other possible canal sites.
The next organized effort to do something constructive about the Isthmus of Panama came, unexpectedly, from Scotland.
The Scots usually had too much trouble scraping a living out of their own beautiful but unproductive land even to think of planting colonies elsewhere. There had been such a colony at Cupid’s Cove, Newfoundland, in 1611, but it did not last long. Sir William Alexander (later the Earl of Stirling) tried to settle the land he called Nova Scotia, but only the name stuck—and for many years the French persisted in calling it Acadia, anyway. That had been in 1621, just a year after the Pilgrims, all English, had landed at Plymouth.
William Paterson was a farmer’s son and a financial genius. He is known to have spent some time in the West Indies, probably Jamaica, but he had never visited Panama or any other part of Central America. There was a report that he had at one time been mixed up in the activities of the buccaneers, who made Jamaica their base in the middle of the seventeenth Century, but this is not likely, for he was a man of high moral Standards and a man moreover who did not need to stoop to violence in Order to make money. He is first heard of, for sure, in London, where he organized the Bank of England. He was one of the original directors of that bank.
Almost no description of William Paterson survives, and the only portrait is so formalized as to be useless for any but decorative purposes, but it is clear at least that in many respects he was ahead of his time, a forward-looking man. The Bank of England had been his own idea, and he had
