Peak of Glory

BALBOA OF DARIEN (431 pp.)--Kathleen Romoli--Doubleday ($5).

On a September day in 1510, two ships put out into the Caribbean from Santo Domingo (now Ciudad Trujillo), capital of the Spanish empire in the New World. They were headed for Uraba, on the South American mainland, with 150 settlers eager for land and gold. On one ship was a stowaway: Vasco Nunez de Balboa, an adventurer who came aboard in a provisions barrel to escape his creditors.

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 Darien,* 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 Darien, by Kathleen Romoli.

Worthwhile Friends. Balboa, who knew the mainland from an earlier expedition, persuaded his new commander that a better site than Uraba for a settlement would be Darien, 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.

In a little more than a year, Balboa, a wise, courageous and likable conquistador in Mrs. Romoli's version of history, had been confirmed as governor of the colony. He set out to explore, and to make friends with the Cueva Indians. That the Cuevans may have been worth making friends with is suggested in contemporary descriptions of them. An affable, cigar-smoking race, the Cuevans were also uncommonly handsome, and their women "displayed unexpected aspects of sophistication. Smallish, large-eyed with thick and often wavy hair, they had beautiful narrow bodies of which they were inordinately proud . . . They took extraordinary care of their admirable breasts."

Balboa's approach to the Indians was based much more on kindness than that of some of his compatriots, whose favorite sport was throwing native chieftains to fierce dogs. Balboa, by wining and dining the native rulers (and taking their sisters and daughters as concubines), won over every chieftain within range.

The settlement in Darien 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 companeros, he set out on Sept. 1, 1513 "for the Pacific and immortality."

Austral Seas. Three weeks later, the expedition reached the Pacific. Chronicler Andres de Valdarrabanos 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 to the sea's edge, stood knee-deep in the salt water, and took "possession corporal and present of these austral seas and lands and coasts and islands with everything annexed to them or which might pertain to them ... in times past, present or to come."

With all his command of water and of words, Balboa was not able to stave off a rival conquistador named Pedro Arias Davila. Pedrarias, as he was better known, displaced him as governor of Darien, 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 Darien. 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 Darien 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."

*Where, in a famed sonnet and famed historical boner, Poet John Keats got him confused with the conqueror of Mexico, and gave "stout Cortes" the credit for discovering the Pacific.

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