son, however, imagined that one province, the most
important of all, had been overlooked by the short-sighted cupidity of
vulgar politicians and vulgar traders. The isthmus which joined the
two great continents of the New World remained, according to him,
unappropriated. Great Spanish viceroyalties, he said, lay on the east
and on the west; but the mountains and forests of Darien were abandoned
to rude tribes which followed their own usages and obeyed their own
princes. He had been in that part of the world, in what character was
not quite clear. Some said that he had gone thither to convert the
Indians, and some that he had gone thither to rob the Spaniards. But,
missionary or pirate, he had visited Darien, and had brought away none
but delightful recollections. The havens, he averred, were capacious
and secure; the sea swarmed with turtle; the country was so mountainous
that, within nine degrees of the equator, the climate was temperate;
and yet the inequalities of the ground offered no impediment to the
conveyance of goods. Nothing would be easier than to construct roads
along which a string of mules or a wheeled carriage might in the course
of a single day pass from sea to sea. The soil was, to the depth of
several feet, a rich black mould, on which a profusion of valuable herbs
and fruits grew spontaneously, and on which all the choicest productions
of tropical regions might easily be raised by human industry and art;
and yet the exuberant fertility of the earth had not tainted the purity
of the air. Considered merely as a place of residence, the isthmus was
a paradise. A colony placed there could not fail to prosper, even if it
had no wealth except what was derived from agriculture. But agriculture
was a secondary object in the colonization of Darien. Let but that
precious neck of land be occupied by an intelligent, an enterprising,
a thrifty race; and, in a few years, the whole trade between India and
Europe must be drawn to that point. The tedious and perilous passage
round Africa would soon be abandoned. The merchant would no longer
expose his cargoes to the mountainous billows and capricious gales
of the Antarctic seas. The greater part of the voyage from Europe to
Darien, and the whole voyage from Darien to the richest kingdoms of
Asia, would be a rapid yet easy gliding before the trade winds over blue
and sparkling waters. The voyage back across the Pacific would, in the
latitude of Japan, be almost equally sp