ed time,
indeed waited longer, until enough people died to enable the brigantine
that had been left with them to carry the survivors, and then sailed
away. He was a member of Encisco's expedition to Darien, in which he
fell in with the youthful and {56} romantic Vasco Nunez de Balboa.
With Balboa he marched across the Isthmus, and was the second white man
to look upon the Great South Sea in 1513. Subsequently, he was an
officer under that American Nero, Pedro Arias de Avila, commonly called
Pedrarias, the founder and Governor of Panama, the conqueror of
Nicaragua and parts adjacent. Oviedo says that between his seventieth
year, which was his age when he came to America, and his eighty-sixth
year, when he died, the infamous Pedrarias caused more than two million
Indians to be put to death, besides a numerous lot of his own
countrymen. If we lop off two ciphers, the record is still bad enough.

In 1515, Pizarro and Morales, by direction of Pedrarias, made an
expedition to the south of the Gulf of San Miguel, into the territory
of a chieftain named Biru, from whom they early got into the habit of
calling the vague land believed to exist in the South Sea, the "Land of
Biru," or Peru. It was on this expedition that the Spaniards, hotly
pursued by the natives, stabbed their captives one by one and left them
dying at intervals in the pathway to check pursuit. The practice was
effective enough and the action throws an interesting light on the
Spanish conquistador in general and Pizarro in particular.

It fell to the lot of Pizarro also to arrest his old captain, Balboa,
just as the latter was about to sail on a voyage of discovery to the
fabulous gold country of Peru in 1517.[1] When Balboa and Pizarro had
crossed the Isthmus six years before, the son of the Cacique Comagre,
observing their avidity for gold, told them {57} that it abounded in a
mysterious land far toward the south, and the young Indian made a
little clay image of a llama further to describe the country.

To conquer that El Dorado had been Balboa's cherished dream. Well
would it have been for the country had not the jealousy of Pedrarias
cut short Balboa's career by taking off his head, thus forcing the
enterprise to be undertaken by men of coarser mould and meaner clay.
It does not appear that Pizarro had any hand in the judicial murder of
Balboa, and no reflection can be made on his conduct for the arrest,
which was simply a matter of military duty,