. In due course the goods were packed on mules, and
driven away down the road to Panama, a distance of some fifteen or
eighteen miles, which the mules would cover in about eight hours. The
town at the time of Drake's raid contained about forty or fifty houses,
some of them handsome stone structures decorated with carven work. The
river-bank was covered with a great many warehouses, and there were
several official buildings, handsome enough, for the Governor and the
King's officers. There was a monastery full of friars, "where we found
above a thousand bulls and pardons, newly sent from Rome." Perhaps there
was also some sort of a barrack for the troops. The only church was the
great church of the monastery. The town was not fortified, but the
houses made a sort of hedge around it; and there were but two
entrances--the one from the forest, by which Drake's party entered; the
other leading over a pontoon bridge towards the hilly woods beyond the
Chagres. Attached to the monastery, and tended by the monks and their
servants, was a sort of sanatorium and lying-in hospital. Nombre de Dios
was so unhealthy, so full of malaria and yellow fever, "that no Spaniard
or white woman" could ever be delivered there without the loss of the
child on the second or third day. It was the custom of the matrons of
Nombre de Dios to proceed to Venta Cruz or to Panama to give birth to
their children. The babes were left in the place where they were born,
in the care of the friars, until they were five or six years old. They
were then brought to Nombre de Dios, where "if they escaped sickness the
first or second month, they commonly lived in it as healthily as in any
other place." Life in Venta Cruz must have been far from pleasant. The
Maroons were a continual menace, but the town was too well guarded, and
too close to Panama, for them to put the place in serious danger. The
inhabitants had to keep within the township; for the forest lay just
beyond the houses, and lonely wanderers were certain to be stabbed by
lurking Maroons or carried off by jaguars. In the season the mule trains
were continually coming and going, either along the swampy track to
Nombre de Dios or from Nombre de Dios to Panama. Boats came sleepily up
the Chagres to drop their anchors by the jetty, with news from the Old
World and the commodities which the New World did not yield. It must,
then, have been one of the most eventful places in the uncomfortable
isthmus; but no pla