Vasco Núñez de Balboa (born 1475, Jerez de los Caballeros, or Badajoz, Extremadura province, Castile—died January 12, 1519, Acla, near Darién, Panama) was a Spanish conquistador and explorer, who was head of the first stable settlement on the South American continent (1511) and who was the first European to sight the eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean (on September 25 [or 27], 1513, from “a peak in Darién”).

Career in the New World

Balboa came from the ranks of that lower nobility whose sons—“men of good family who were not reared behind the plow,” in the words of the chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés—often sought their fortunes in the Indies. In 1500 he sailed with Rodrigo de Bastidas on a voyage of exploration along the coast of present-day Colombia. Later he settled in Hispaniola (Haiti), but he did not prosper as a pioneer farmer and had to escape his creditors by embarking as a stowaway on an expedition organized by Martín Fernández de Enciso (1510) to bring aid and reinforcements to a colony founded by Alonso de Ojeda on the coast of Urabá, in modern Colombia. The expedition found the survivors of the colony, led by Francisco Pizarro, but Ojeda had departed. On the advice of Balboa the settlers moved across the Gulf of Urabá to Darién, on the less hostile coast of the Isthmus of Panama, where they founded the town of Santa María de la Antigua, the first stable settlement on the continent, and began to acquire gold by barter or war with the local Indians. The colonists soon deposed Enciso, Ojeda’s second in command, and elected a town council; one of its two alcaldes, or magistrates, was Balboa. With the subsequent departure of Enciso for Hispaniola, Balboa became the undisputed head of the colony. In December 1511 King Ferdinand II sent orders that named Balboa interim governor and captain general of Darién.

Balboa meanwhile had organized a series of gold- and slave-hunting expeditions into the Indian chiefdoms of the area. His Indian policy combined the use of barter, every kind of force, including torture, to extract information, and the tactic of divide and conquer by forming alliances with certain tribes against others. The Indians of Darién, less warlike than their neighbours of Urabá and without poisoned arrows, were not formidable foes and often fled at the approach of the Spaniards. The Spanish arsenal included their terrible war dogs, sometimes used by Balboa as executioners to tear Indian victims to pieces.

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Exploration and Discovery

The Spaniards were told by Indians that to the south lay a sea and a province infinitely rich in gold—a reference to the Pacific and perhaps to the Inca empire. The conquest of that land, their informants declared, would require 1,000 men. Balboa hastened to send emissaries to Spain to request reinforcements; the news they brought created much excitement, and a large expedition was promptly organized. But Balboa was not given command. Charges brought against him by his enemies had turned King Ferdinand against him, and, as commander of the armada and governor of Darién, the king sent out the elderly, powerful nobleman Pedro Arias Dávila (usually called Pedrarias). The expedition, numbering 2,000 persons, left Spain in April 1514.

Sighting of the Pacific

Meanwhile, Balboa, without waiting for reinforcements, had sailed on September 1, 1513, from Santa María for Acla, at the narrowest part of the isthmus. Accompanied by 190 Spaniards and hundreds of Indian porters, he marched south across the isthmus through dense jungles, rivers, and swamps and ascended the cordillera; on September 25 (or 27), 1513, standing “silent, upon a peak in Darién,” he sighted the Pacific. Some days later he reached the shore of the Gulf of San Miguel and took possession of the Mar del Sur (South Sea) and the adjacent lands for the king of Castile. Storms prevented a crossing to the Pearl Islands, and, turning inland, Balboa penetrated almost to the site of present-day Panama City before returning across the isthmus to Santa María in January 1514. His letters and those of a royal agent who had been sent to Darién to prepare the ground for the coming of Pedrarias, announcing the discovery of the “South Sea,” restored Balboa to royal favour; he was named adelantado (governor) of the Mar del Sur and of the provinces of Panamá and Coiba but remained subject to the authority of Pedrarias, who arrived in Darién, now a crown colony and renamed Castilla del Oro, in June 1514.

Relations between the two men were, from the first, troubled by the distrust and jealousy of the ailing, ill-natured Pedrarias toward the younger man. The first bishop of Darién, Juan de Quevedo, sought to act as peacemaker and arranged a temporary reconciliation; in a turnabout Pedrarias by proxy betrothed his daughter María in Spain to Balboa. But the underlying causes of friction remained. The suspicious Pedrarias pursued a tortuous policy designed to frustrate Balboa at every turn, but he at last gave Balboa grudging permission to explore the South Sea. By dint of enormous efforts Balboa had a fleet of ships built and transported in pieces across the mountains to the Pacific shore, where he explored the Gulf of San Miguel (1517–18). Meantime, the stream of charges of misconduct and incapacity levelled against Pedrarias by Balboa and others had finally convinced the crown of Pedrarias’s unfitness to govern; news arrived in Darién of his imminent replacement by a new governor who would subject Pedrarias to a residencia (judicial review of his conduct in office). Pedrarias doubtless feared that Balboa’s presence and testimony would contribute to his total ruin and decided to get rid of his rival. Summoned home on the pretext that Pedrarias wished to discuss matters of common concern, Balboa was seized and charged with rebellion, high treason, and mistreatment of Indians, among other misdeeds. After a farcical trial presided over by Gaspar de Espinosa, Pedrarias’s chief justice, Balboa was found guilty, condemned to death, and beheaded with four alleged accomplices in January 1519.