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Vasco de Balboa Biography

Vasco Nuñez de Balboa Image

BALBOA, VASCO NUÑEZ DE (1475-1517). A Spanish explorer, the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from American shores. He was born of a noble but reduced family at Jerez de los Caballeros. After leading a rather dissolute life in his youth he took part in the great mercantile expedition of Rodrigo de Bastidas to the New World. He established himself in Santo Domingo and began to cultivate the soil; but fortune proved adverse, and in order to escape from his creditors he had himself smuggled in a cask on board a ship and joined the expedition to Darien in 1510, commanded by Martin Fernandez de Encisco. An insurrection which took place obtained for Balboa the supreme command in the new colony. Confused accounts which reached him of a great western ocean impelled him, in 1513, to set out in quest of it. On September 25 of that year he obtained the first sight of the Pacific Ocean from a mountain top in the Isthmus of Panama. On the 29th he reached the water at the point which is still known by the name he gave to it, the Gulf of San Miguel, and took formal possession for Spain, naming the ocean the Mar del Sur, or South Sea, the coast at this point trending nearly east and west. His natural enthusiasm at this great discovery was shared by all the educated men of his time, and the descriptions of it by contemporary authors may still be read with much interest.

The governorship of the territories conquered by Balboa, and known as Darien, was obtained in 1514 by Pedro Arias (Pedrarias) Dávila, by means of his intrigues at the Spanish Court. Balboa resigned the command into the hands of the Governor, a narrow-minded and cruel man, and in a subordinate situation undertook many successful expeditions; but these, and all his other merits, only served to increase the hatred of Pedrarias Davila toward him. The King recompensed Vasco Nuñez for his discoveries by appointing him Adelantado del Mar del Sur (the Pacific), and Governor of Panama, Coyba, and the lands he had discovered in the Pacific. The government of the mother country sought in vain to mediate between them, and Balboa even arranged to marry the daughter of Pedrarias. But on the first occasion of dispute which arose, Balboa, having been induced by Pedrarias to deliver himself up, was accused of a design to rebel, and upon evidence furnished by Garabito, the supposed friend to whom Balboa had entrusted his affairs, he was convicted and beheaded at Acla in 1517.