History
Vasco Núñez de Balboa heard of the South Sea from the natives while sailing along the Caribbean coast. On 25 September 1513 he saw the Pacific. In 1519 the town of Panamá was founded near a small indigenous settlement on the Pacific coast. After the discovery of Peru it developed into an important port of trade and became an administrative centre. 1671 the Welsh pirate Henry Morgan crossed the Isthmus of Panamá coming from the Caribbean and destroyed the city. Afterwards the town was relocated some kilometers to the west at a small peninsula. The ruins of the old town Panamá la Vieja are preserved, and were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.
Silver and gold from the viceroyalty of Peru were transported overland across the isthmus to Porto Bello where Spanish treasure fleets shipped them to Seville and Cádiz from 1707.
Lionel Wafer spent four years between 1680 and 1684 among the Cuna Indians.
Scotland tried to establish a settlement in 1698 through the Darien scheme.
The California Gold Rush, starting in 1849, brought a large increase in the transportation of people from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Steamships brought gold seekers from eastern US ports who trekked across the Isthmus by foot, horse and later rail. On the Pacific side, they boarded Pacific Mail Steamship Company vessels headed for San Francisco.
Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man behind the Suez Canal, started a Panama Canal Company in 1880 that went bankrupt in 1889 in a scandal.
In 1902–04 the United States forced Colombia to grant independence to the department of the Isthmus, bought the remaining assets of the PCC and finished the canal in 1914.
Read more about this topic: Isthmus Of Panama
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“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)