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Vasco Nuñez de Balboa

Chapter 25: FOOTNOTES:
By Frederick A. Ober
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About This Book

A readable biography follows an ambitious explorer who rises from obscure origins to lead a precarious settlement, conducting expeditions into tropical interiors, negotiating and clashing with local chiefs, and pursuing rumors of wealth. His travels culminate in the sighting of a vast ocean beyond the land and in efforts to build ships for further exploration, while his growing authority provokes jealous rivals and political conflict. The account concludes with his arrest and execution, and emphasizes themes of ambition, leadership, and the human costs of early colonial expansion.


THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This was the hurricane predicted by Columbus, as narrated in his Life by the author of this biography, and it occurred in 1502. For the further adventures of La Cosa, see the Life of Amerigo Vespucci, in this series.

[2] Calaboose, from Spanish Calabózo, a dungeon or prison.

[3] Don Manuel Josef Quintana, Vidas de Españoles Célebres.

[4] By a curious lapsus in Keat's otherwise perfect poem, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, is substituted for Balboa, discoverer of the Pacific—

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

Cortés was never at Darien, nor nearer to it than Honduras, or Santo Domingo.