Vasco Núñez de Balboa, like Cortés and Pizarro, was from the remote Spanish region of Extremadura. Like them...

>Vasco Núñez de Balboa, like Cortés and Pizarro, was from the remote Spanish region of Extremadura. Like them, he was a bold, ruthless, antically ambitious man. Economical with the truth and recklessly impulsive, he was, according to an acquaintance, “tall and well-built, with good, strong limbs and the refined gestures of an educated man.” As the younger son of a down-at-heels noble family, he had prospects bleak enough to encourage him to ship across the ocean in 1500, when he was about twenty-five. He established himself as a farmer in Salvatierra de la Sabana, a remote hamlet in southwestern Hispaniola.

>In retrospect, it was a terrible career choice. “The calm and tranquil life of the farmer wasn’t a match for his great aspirations and adventurous, energetic spirit,” explained one admiring Spanish biographer. Indeed, Núñez de Balboa’s great aspirations and adventurous, energetic spirit led him to pile up debts at such a clip that he fled his creditors by stuffing himself into a barrel and having himself rolled aboard a ship bound with supplies for a new colony on the mainland, Spain’s first attempt to establish a base there. (According to some reports, he stowed away in the barrel with his dog.)

>The settlement, located in what is now Colombia, near the border with Panama, had been established to find gold mines. Labor was to be provided by enslaving local Indians, some of whom would also be sold in Hispaniola. The Indians saw no reason to participate in this scheme and expressed their lack of enthusiasm by riddling the invaders with poisoned arrows. With the colony near collapse, its founder sailed for help in Hispaniola in July 1510. His ship ran aground off the coast of Cuba and he staggered half-starved across the island. After being rescued, he immediately retired from the discovery-and-conquest business. Meanwhile, another ship had left from Santo Domingo in September to aid the settlement. This was the vessel that contained Balboa and his barrel.

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>He was quickly discovered. Charismatic and clever, he managed to talk the irate captain out of stranding him on a desert island. Within weeks Núñez de Balboa was one of the captain’s most valued lieutenants. Within months he had persuaded the captain to relocate the colony to what he thought would be a better location. Within a year he had deposed the captain and was leading an expedition up the coast of Panama, looking for gold.

>In Panama, Núñez de Balboa became the first European to see the Pacific Ocean from the American side, an exploit that won him enduring fame. Today, five centuries later, a cursory online search for “Núñez de Balboa” will find countless pictures of the conquistador standing athwart a crag or striding into the waves, sometimes in full armor, gazing in wonder at the endless sea ahead. But the heroic images have not kept up with his reputation among historians. Núñez de Balboa was unquestionably bold and brave, but he also committed actions that are difficult to justify in any current ethical scheme. And he may well not have been the first person from the other side of the Atlantic to see the Pacific from the American side.

>The newly moved colony, Santa María la Antigua del Darién (Antigua), was legally under the jurisdiction of another conquistador. When this conquistador came to Antigua to demand control, Núñez de Balboa put him onto a leaky brigantine and told him to sail away. He was never seen again. Now feeling more secure about his command, Núñez de Balboa turned his attention to the resident Kuna and Choco peoples, whose penchant for draping themselves with gold jewelry made them fascinating in Spanish eyes. He began asking around for the source of the gold.

Asking for friendly bumb if interested as it gonna be long.

>About fifty miles north of Antigua reigned a man named Comagre, who lived with his many wives and children in what the historian Pietro Martire d’Anghiera described as “a house made of big, interwoven timbers, with a hall 80 paces wide and 150 long and what looked like a coffered ceiling.” His domain—the Spaniards called it a “seigneury”—had about ten thousand inhabitants. When Balboa paid a visit, Comagre plied the expedition with “wine made from grain and fruit,” assigned the visitors seventy slaves for the duration of their visit, and gave them “four thousand ounces of gold in jewelry and finely worked pieces.” The Spaniards whipped out scales and weighed out shares of the booty amid much quarreling. Laughing at their cartoonish greed, Comagre’s son told them of the existence of another seigneury with even more gold, on the shores of “another sea which has never been sailed by your little boats.”

>Another sea! More gold! Balboa was beside himself with excitement. He returned to Antigua, put together an expedition of about eight hundred—two hundred Spaniards and six hundred Indians—and set off on September 1, 1513. (Along for the ride were at least one mixed-race man and an African, both probably bondsmen; the African would later be given his freedom, land in Nicaragua, and 150 Indian slaves.) The journey began in the steep, wet, thickly forested hills of southern Panama, which rise up almost directly from the coast. It was the height of the rainy season—annual precipitation there is as much as sixteen feet. Staggering under the weight of armor, plagued by insects and snakes, covered in mud, the Spaniards soon began falling to illness and injury. Balboa led his increasingly ragged force from one native group to the next, asking questions and seeking food, leaving his weak and sick behind at every stop. The coastal ridges descend vertiginously into the hot, mucky valley of the Chuchunaque River, so close to the Pacific that tides cause daily floods far upstream.

>The coastal ridges descend vertiginously into the hot, mucky valley of the Chuchunaque River, so close to the Pacific that tides cause daily floods far upstream. From the river’s other bank ascend a jumble of craggy low peaks atoss with palms. The exhausted men reached these slopes on September 24, having traveled about forty miles in three weeks.

>Near the summit they encountered Quarequa, lord of a small seigneury of the same name. Backed by hundreds of men with bows and spears, he refused to let the foreigners enter his land. The Indians, who had never seen firearms and swords, confronted the Spaniards in a mass. Without warning, Núñez de Balboa ordered his men to fire at point-blank range. Into the smoke the Spaniards ran with naked swords. Hundreds died, including Quarequa, the bodies piled atop one another. The Spaniards chased the survivors into their main village, where they found all the gold and food stores gone. The next day, September 25, Núñez de Balboa and his tattered band climbed to the summit and saw the dizzying vastness of the Pacific before them. In a gesture that now seems touchingly absurd, he claimed all of the ocean and attendant lands it touched for Spain.2

>Left behind in Quarequa’s village were women, children, and some African slaves—“black men with big bodies and big bellies, and long beards and crooked hair,” as one report described them a year and a half later. The Spaniards had been stunned to see them, and stunned again when they were told that an entire community of escaped African slaves existed just two days’ walk away. Indians and Africans had been fighting for years, each side forcing captives from the other into slavery.

>The Spaniards’ identification of the slaves as Africans is unlikely to be mistaken—they were traveling with at least two. Nor does the story seem to be apocryphal; half a dozen Spanish sources attest to it. Not one of these sources, however, drew out the implications. First, the existence of slaves in the mountains likely meant that Africans, not Europeans, were the first people from across the Atlantic to settle on the mainland—and to see the Pacific from the American side. Second, it meant that the isthmus was a good place for escaped slaves to evade capture. The latter fact would come to preoccupy the Spanish crown.

>Finding a route to the Pacific electrified the Spaniards in Antigua. They soon abandoned the colony, which became a ghost town.3 Most of its former inhabitants went on to found two new settlements: Panamá, on the Pacific side of the isthmus, and Nombre de Dios, on the Atlantic. The idea was that spices from the Maluku Islands, which Spain intended to capture, would be transported to the Americas, carried on a new road between the two towns, then loaded onto ships for Europe. When Spain failed to seize the Malukus, both would-be ports shrank.

>Neither Panamá nor Nombre de Dios had more than forty European residents in 1533, when the unexpected news arrived that Francisco Pizarro, one of Núñez de Balboa’s companions on his journey across the isthmus, had conquered a great Indian empire in the Andes, and was sending gold and silver to Panamá. (Núñez de Balboa did not participate in the subjugation of the Inka. His flagrant machinations had caught up with him, and he had been executed in 1519.) Twelve years later, in 1545, silver was discovered at Potosí. Half or more of the silver—including most of the king’s taxes and fees from the mines and mint—was shipped to Panamá.

>The road between Panamá and Nombre de Dios thus became a critical chokepoint for the empire, a single passage down which flowed much of the monarchy’s financial lifeblood. From an engineering point of view, it was not ideal. Knee-deep in mud and choked by debris, barely wide enough for two mules to pass, the road plunged in a tangle of switchbacks between crag and swamp and back again. Traversing it terrified the Spaniards—the forest, one chronicler complained, swarmed with “lions, tigers, bears, and jaguars.” Screaming monkeys threw rocks from trees. Fer-de-lances and bushmasters, two of the planet’s most deadly snakes, were active at night. Travelers could paint themselves from head to foot with oil and mud to ward off mosquitoes but were helpless against the bats—“biting so delicately on the tips of [sleepers’] toes, and the hands, and the end of the nose, and the ears,” an Italian moaned, “that one is never the wiser, and gnawing that little mouthful of meat, and sucking the blood that comes from it.” They couldn’t be warded off, he said, because the heat made it necessary “to sleep naked atop the covers.” Even in the dry season it was sweaty going for men in European armor, a necessary precaution against Indian attack. During the rainy season, the road was flat-out impassable; travelers had to pole barges up or down the Chagres River, navigable when swelled by rain but dangerous for the same reason. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe simply did not have the means and technology to maintain an adequate highway in these conditions. It remained “an extremely bad road, the worst that I have seen on my travels,” one annoyed voyager wrote in 1640, 120 years after its initial construction.

>To convey the king’s silver across the isthmus required many hands. As ever, labor was in short supply. Few Spaniards would leave their homes to toil in a remote forest. To would-be silver transporters, there was an obvious recourse: Indian slaves. At the time that Núñez de Balboa saw the Pacific, the isthmus of Panama was filled by perhaps a hundred small, fractious polities, honeycombed so tightly together that the sixteenth-century historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés claimed the native population “surpassed two million, or they were uncountable.” Modern estimates are much lower: because most seigneuries (as I am calling them) had no more than three thousand people, researchers say, the total population must have been at most a quarter of a million. The exact figure almost doesn’t matter, though, because the isthmus was rapidly depopulated. By the time Potosí began exporting silver, historians estimate that fewer than twenty thousand people lived there. Even if the remaining Indians had allowed themselves to be captured, there simply weren’t enough hands to satisfy European demand. In consequence, the empire imported slaves from the Andes, Venezuela, and Nicaragua—so many that in Spanish areas they quickly became more numerous than locals.

>After Spain banned Indian slavery, the colonists turned to Africa—beginning with Núñez de Balboa, who before his death took thirty African captives to the Pacific to build ships. Soon Africans were pushing barges on the Chagres River, eighteen or twenty straining men on each one, twenty or more vessels in a row. Mule trains, scores of animals tied nose-to-tail, were crossing between the oceans, driven by dozens of whip-toting Africans, themselves driven by gun-toting Spaniards. Sometimes the journey took as long as a month. The path, the bat-hating Italian said, was lined with the corpses of mules and men.

>Africans outnumbered Europeans seven to one by 1565. Unsurprisingly, Europeans found it hard to control their human property. Runaways grouped hundreds strong into multiethnic villages that were joined by escaped Indian slaves from the Andes and Venezuela and the remnants of free Indian groups from the isthmus. United by their loathing of Spaniards, they liberated slaves, slew colonists, and stole mules and cattle. Sometimes they abducted women. Losses mounted. Spain had a dreadful maroon problem.

>The issue was noticed as early as 1521, but the first serious effort to eliminate a maroon settlement in the isthmus didn’t occur for another thirty years, after a young slave known as Felipillo, a pearl harvester in the islands outside Panamá, led a group of fugitive Africans and Indians into the mangrove thickets of the Gulf of San Miguel. Their entire village was wiped out in 1551, after two years of freedom. Other maroons learned a lesson from Felipillo’s fate: don’t hide out in the lowlands, which were too accessible.

>That same year, the municipal government of Nombre de Dios complained to the crown that 600 maroons were robbing and killing travelers on the road to Panamá. Two years later the havoc was worse and the number had risen to 800. Two years after that it was 1,200. In the isthmus, not only slaves but escaped slaves outnumbered Europeans. Maroons wiped out the first two Spanish expeditions against them, in 1554 and 1555. In Nombre de Dios, they stole so many captive Africans and Indians that surviving colonists feared to send their slaves outside to fetch water. Most residents fled to Panamá, returning to Nombre de Dios only when the silver fleet came into view.

>Leading the maroons was a man whose name has come down to us as, variously, Bayano, Bayamo, Vallano, Vayamo, and Ballano. Like Aqualtune, he seems to have been a captured military leader. “Burly and fierce, coarse and stalwart, rudely dressed and roughly witty,” the poet Juan de Miramontes described him, Bayano was “agile, bold, sudden, and sharp”—a man with a “warrior spirit.” He oversaw the construction of a palisaded fortress atop a cliff-ringed hill in the ridges overlooking the Caribbean. Guards stood ready to roll stones down into the marshy ravines that were its only entrances. Located far enough from Nombre de Dios that Spaniards would be unlikely to discover it, the stronghold was mainly populated by young men whom Bayano ordered about with soldierly dispatch. Farther away was a second village for the community’s women, children, and elderly. Mixing Indians from Peru to Nicaragua and a dozen African ethnicities, Bayano’s mini-kingdom was an extraordinary cultural potpourri, one sixteenth-century priest remarked, with “every different mixture of people, all dissimilar in color to their fathers and mothers.” Their religion, too, was an equally various jumble of Christian, Islamic, and indigenous traditions, according to Jean-Pierre Tardieu, a historian at the University of La Réunion whose work I am relying upon here. Nobody knows what language they spoke together.

>A new viceroy of Peru traveled to Nombre de Dios in 1556 en route to Lima. Infuriated by Bayano’s depradations, he established a fund to hire an anti-maroon force. Nobody accepted the offer. Finally the viceroy filled the roster by visiting the prison in Nombre de Dios and telling the inmates that they could either wage war against the ex-slaves or effectively become slaves themselves and be sent to the galleys. The response was positive. Seventy armed ex-convicts went out in October 1556, led by Pedro de Ursúa, an experienced soldier whom the viceroy had persuaded to take on Bayano.

>Guided by a captured maroon who had become an informer, Ursúa’s troops hiked through the forest for twenty-five days to reach Bayano’s hilltop. Realizing that he could not successfully lay siege, Ursúa instead persuaded the maroon leader to negotiate. He offered to split the isthmus into two kingdoms, one ruled by Felipe II of Spain, one ruled by Bayano I of Panamá. Bayano accepted the flattering offer and the Spaniards hung around for weeks, hunting and fishing with the former slaves and amusing themselves with contests of strength and skill. Just before leaving, Ursúa threw a celebratory feast. Bayano and forty of his court attended. The Spaniards drugged their wine, incapacitating them. The maroons were hauled back to Nombre de Dios and returned to slavery. Ursúa took Bayano in chains to Lima as a trophy for the viceroy. Maroons learned a lesson his fate: Spaniards cannot be trusted.

>The maroon problem did not go away. Not only did the remnants of Bayano’s community regroup, but others sprang up in its wake. Eradicating them, the colonists realized, would require a long-term military campaign with as many as a thousand soldiers, most of whom would have to be sent from Europe. To obtain a thousand soldiers, the government would have to import as many as two thousand, because new European arrivals fell at horrific rates to malaria and yellow fever (part of the Columbian Exchange). Nombre de Dios in particular became so unhealthy that European visitors gave it a bleakly rhyming nickname: “Nombre de Dios, Sepultura de Vivos”—Buried Alive. The king, appalled at the dying, ordered the populace moved entire to a new location, Portobelo, in 1584. It was scarcely less deadly. Visiting the new city in 1625, the English priest Thomas Gage noted that the silver fleet, once landed there, “made great haste to be gone”; nonetheless, the ships’ two-week stay in the “open grave” of Portobelo was enough to kill “about five hundred of the soldiers, merchants, and mariners.”

>Nobody could agree on who should pay for it. Europeans in the isthmus were mainly agents for Seville merchants. Unlike the Portuguese sugar growers who fought Palmares, few of the Spaniards in Nombre de Dios and Panamá town intended to create permanent establishments; instead the goal was to make a quick killing and leave. Naturally enough, these people did not want to spend much of their potential profit on a project—expunging maroons—that would accrue most of its benefits after their departure. Instead they asked Madrid to ship in and maintain the soldiers. As the king stood to lose most from the attacks, the merchants reasoned, he stood to gain most from their suppression, and therefore he should foot the bills. The crown, for its part, was too far away to monitor expenditures closely. With no way to ensure that the isthmus’s short-termers wouldn’t pocket funds designated for the anti-maroon campaign, the king was reluctant to, so to speak, sign the check. The conflict was a version of what economists call “principal agent” problem: when one party pays another to act on its behalf but can’t readily measure its performance. And it was enough to stall large-scale action against the maroons, even though the stakes for Spain kept rising.

>From the colonists’ point of view, it was bad enough when nude, grease-smeared ex-slaves and Indians swept into Panamá town with their “very big and strong bows” and iron-tipped arrows, as one colonial official wrote in 1575, stealing cattle, carrying off slaves, and “usually killing the [Europeans] they meet.” Worse, the maroons, out of spite, threw whole shipments of silver and gold into the river. But then the maroons joined forces with the man who would become Spain’s most hated enemy: Francis Drake, the English pirate/privateer.

>Drake, then on his first major independent voyage, came in July 1572 to the isthmus, looking to loot Spanish treasure. Finding African slaves loading wood on an island outside Nombre de Dios, he asked them about the town’s defenses. (The slaves had been left by their owners, who presumably intended to return for them; Drake set them ashore, so that they could run away.) The English attacked at 3:00 a.m. on July 29 in a flurry of gunfire. The exchange wounded Drake badly enough that his men pulled back, regretfully leaving behind, according to his authorized biography, “a pile of barres of silver, of (as neere as we could guesse) seventie foot in length, of ten foot in breadth, and twelve foot in hight.” Drake was not discouraged. Just after he set off for Nombre de Dios, the men whom he had left behind to guard his ships were hailed by an African—a maroon offering the assistance of his fellows.

>After some fumbling about, Drake met in September with a maroon captain, Pedro Mandinga. To the dismay of the English, Mandinga told them that the flow of silver from Peru had stopped for the year. The next shipments would not occur until March, when the rainy season ended. Drake decided to wait. With Mandinga, he devised a plan to steal silver not on the coast, but in Venta de Cruces, a transshipment area on the Chagre River where mule trains were unloaded onto barges. Mandinga sent spies into Panamá to find out when the silver ships would arrive. Meanwhile, the English hid from Spanish eyes in a cove west of Nombre de Dios, their victuals largely provided by maroon bows and fish hooks. Waiting was riskier than the English anticipated; yellow fever killed half their number in December. Among the victims was Drake’s younger brother, Joseph. (Another brother had died a few weeks before.)

Early in February 1573 Mandinga and twenty-nine other maroons led Drake and eighteen surviving buccaneers through the forest toward the Pacific. They moved in total silence, military style, maroons deploying ahead of the English, to mark the trail, and behind, to cover their tracks. After reaching Venta de Cruces in the morning of February 14, the party waited for the silver in the long grass by the side of the highway. Because the first stretch of the road on the Pacific side passed through low, open grassland, the mule trains traveled by night, to avoid the sun. (Later, in the deep forest, they traveled by day.) Within a few hours of Drake’s arrival one of Mandinga’s spies in Panamá delivered some news. The treasurer of the regional government in Lima was leaving town with fourteen mules, nine of them laden with gold and jewels. Behind him would follow two mule trains, each of fifty to seventy animals, carrying silver.

The pirates and maroons split into two groups, one led by Drake, the other by Mandinga, about fifty yards apart from each other on the road. Drake’s group would let the mule train pass until it could be ambushed by Mandinga’s group. Then Drake and his men would close in from the rear, trapping the convoy fore and aft. Late in the evening the attackers heard the bells on the harnesses of the approaching mules. As soon as they came into view, an English sailor in Drake’s group charged drunkenly out of hiding, waving his weapon. One of the maroons yanked him back into the grass, but the damage was done—a Spanish advance scout had spotted the sailor’s white shirt in the moonlight. The scout wheeled about his horse, galloped back to the mule train, and told the treasurer to turn back to Panamá. The chagrined English rampaged through Venta de Cruces, wrecking warehouses and spoiling stores. But they found little and so fled to the coast, led by Mandinga. The maroons learned a lesson: Europeans were unreliable allies.

>While Drake pondered his next move, his men spotted a ship belonging to a French pirate named Guillaume le Testu, who had learned that the English were on the isthmus and had been trying to find them for weeks. A fine cartographer who had helped found a short-lived French colony near Rio de Janeiro, Testu had been jailed for four years in France because of his Protestant faith. Freed after protests to the king, he had accepted a privateering commission, probably from Italian merchants. Now he hoped to join with Drake in swiping Spanish treasure. Drake, Testu, and Mandinga agreed to work together and take a silver convoy as it descended the hills in the outskirts of Nombre de Dios.

>Again maroons led Europeans in a silent march through the forest, arriving at the ambush site on April 1. Again they split into two groups fifty yards apart along the road. In midmorning the waiting pirates and maroons heard bells—120 mules, the biography said, “every [one] of which caryed 300. Pound weight of silver, which in all amounted to neere thirty Tun.” This time the scheme succeeded. The guards fled, leaving the convoy in the hands of the pirates. Giddy but too weary to lug all the silver through the hills, the Anglo-Franco-Afro-Indian force stripped the mules of their glittering burden and in true pirate fashion buried the booty at the bottom of a nearby stream. They carried away a few silver bars as trophies. Not until they were miles from the ambush did they realize that a Frenchman was missing. Later they learned that he had gotten drunk while burying silver and missed their departure. He was caught by Spanish troops and revealed, under torture, the location of the silver. From Nombre de Dios, the biography reported, “Neere 2000. Spaniards and Negroes [went out] to dig and search for it.” They tore apart the area, found the precious metal, and transported it to Nombre de Dios. Drake’s men, returning, were only able to find “thirteen bars of silver, and some few quoits of Gold”—less than 2 percent of the shipment.

>Decades later, Philip Nichols, who had served as Drake’s chaplain and become a friend, compiled surviving sailors’ reminiscences of the expedition, passed the manuscript by Drake for editorial approval, and published the result—the authorized biography I have been quoting—under the curious title of Sir Francis Drake Revived. The book portrays Drake’s sojourn in the isthmus—a time when he failed three times to seize large quantities of silver and lost half his men to disease and battle, including two of his brothers—as a rousing success. This view is not entirely wrong. The assaults were a triumph—for the maroons.

friendly bump

bump

I like the picture

After the Introduction time for some specific stories.
Also some other info was dumped here . Look at green/yellow posts with the cats.


“CAPITULATIONS”

>Reports of the maroon-pirate alliance appalled the Spanish crown, especially given that the Nombre de Dios merchants who reported the seizure of the silver shipment neglected to inform the government that they in fact had recovered almost all of the stolen money. (Much of the silver was tax payments for the court, so its disappearance truly stung.) Colonial officials used the incident to demand that the king send the fleet to clean out the maroons. “What grieves us most is to see with our own eyes the ruin of this realm imminent unless your majesty remedy the situation promptly,” the governors of Nombre de Dios claimed a month after the attack. The court, justifiably fearful of being cheated, dragged its feet. While colonial officials dithered, sometimes trying to negotiate with Afro-Indian communities, sometimes seeking to raze them, maroons continued to steal cattle, free slaves, and kill Spaniards. Some of the dead Spaniards were priests; in their hatred of Catholic Spain, the maroons had happily let Drake convert them to Protestantism. (No evidence exists that they actually changed their previous religious practice.) Even when the two sides finally committed to negotiating, their mutual suspicion and hostility made progress agonizingly slow.

>All the while, English, French, and Dutch pirates were coming to the isthmus, asking the maroons to help them as they had helped Drake. Most didn’t get any assistance—the maroons seem to have acquired a low opinion of European competence. Nonetheless, Spanish fears of a maroon-pirate alliance continued to grow, reaching a kind of frenzy in 1578 and 1579, as the now-infamous Drake sailed up the Pacific coast of South America on another voyage, wrecking Spanish possessions along the way. Colonial officials approached Domingo Congo, leader of the regrouped maroons in Bayano’s territory, with a deal: if his maroons promised to be loyal to the king, they would be given good farmland, cattle, and pigs, tilling and harvesting equipment, a year’s worth of maize seed, and—most important—their liberty. As lagniappe, the colonists promised to exempt them from the taxes paid by Spanish residents. The terms were attractive, but Domingo Congo hesitated to accept—every maroon knew what had happened to Bayano when he negotiated with Spaniards. The colonists, for their part, were leery of rewarding people whom they viewed as thieves, murderers, and stolen property. Despite their distaste, though, they issued similar offers to the scatter of runaway groups in the hills outside Panamá town and the bigger, more centralized maroon “kingdom” near the planned location of Portobelo.

>Portobelo’s “king” put his mark on the treaty on September 15, 1579. The action delighted Felipe II, king of Spain. Four months later, when Domingo Congo’s maroons in Bayano hadn’t followed suit, the king urged the colonial government to close the deal:
>Because of the great importance of subduing the maroon blacks for the peace and quiet of these lands, we took great contentment in learning from your letter of the good state you have reached with them in Portobelo and we expect that their example can make those of Bayano understand the great favor that they will have from pardoning their crimes and the safe places they will live in and the other benefits that will follow the capitulation that you will send to our Council of the Indies.

>“Capitulation”? From today’s perspective, the king’s choice of words is amazing. The Spanish government described giving the maroons almost everything they wanted in exchange for ending a notional alliance with foreign pirates as a surrender—by the maroons. True, the maroons did not get to return to their African homes. But that would have been next to impossible; even had the colonists not reenslaved the maroons once they were confined on a ship, they wouldn’t have known where to return them. Moreover, many maroons by this point had wives from other parts of Africa and the Americas. For better and worse, the isthmus had become their home. By “capitulating,” they won the lasting, if uneasy, freedom to live as they wished, tax-free, in their own communities.

>Two years later, Domingo Congo signed the treaty, as did the maroons outside Panamá. These agreements did not stop future escapes, as Tardieu, the University of La Réunion historian, has noted. Indeed, runaways continued to disappear into the forest until the end of the slave trade. Many escapees filtered into free maroon villages. By 1819, when the isthmus won its freedom from Spain, these communities’ origin had been almost forgotten. Maroons had won the highest kind of liberty—they were ordinary citizens.4

>The story is not exceptional. Although governments throughout the Americas wiped out many maroon groups, others won their freedom—along with the later anonymity that was its concomitant. A few examples are worth listing, if only because slaves’ prospects for autonomy are all too often portrayed as completely dependent on the goodwill of their masters.

Interesting read, makes me want to go research Pizarro's contest and what average life was like for a european colonist.

I have some material about Inca/Pizarro/silver trade I could post it later when I finish this one.

Sounds good dawg

Mexico

>Even as Spain was giving in to Africans who menaced the silver road in Panamá, it was facing Africans who menaced the silver road in Mexico. Sporadic, small-scale violence in the sugarlands of Veracruz flared into full-scale revolt after about 1570, with the escape of Gaspar Yanga or Nyanga, said to be a prince and general in what is now Ghana. Like Aqualtune in Palmares, he may actually have been one. Yanga, by all accounts a compelling, canny figure, united hundreds of Africans into a confederation in the mountains outside Veracruz. Driven by a kind of serene fury toward the people who had taken him in chains across the ocean, he led countless raids of sugar plantations, gleefully snatching slaves and provisions. Most important to New Spain, the maroons attacked convoys carrying silk and silver on the Veracruz–Mexico City road. Horrified colonists spread rumors that the maroons killed anyone who saw their faces and drank their victims’ blood in Satanic ceremonies.

>The colonial government, confounded by the rugged terrain, did little about the assaults until Yanga’s forces committed the unforgivable sin of destroying a shipment of the most recent fashions from Europe. A military expedition of a hundred soldiers, an equal number of Indians, and two hundred colonists and their slaves charged into the mountains in January 1609. Six weeks later they occupied Yanga’s base—and accomplished nothing, because the maroons had evacuated to a second, more remote base. Yanga dispatched a Spanish prisoner with eleven nonnegotiable demands, chief among them “that all those who escaped before last September will be free.”

>The discouraged colonists accepted all eleven. Like the maroons of Bayano and Portobelo, Yanga’s people were presented with their own domain: San Lorenzo de los Negros. Later renamed Yanga, honoring its founder, it was the Americas’ first sunset town: Europeans were legally prohibited from staying the night there. Yanga and his descendants prospered so much that local Spaniards eventually paid them the ultimate compliment and moved in, ignoring the ban on whites. As a result, the town of Yanga is now almost completely “Mexican.”

>Two other, legally free African towns are known in Mexico proper, one in the mountains west of Veracruz and one on Mexico’s west coast. But the maroons’ greatest success may have occurred in the eighteenth century, on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. A hotbed of maroon activity, it was assaulted by Spain until its militia ran out of soldiers—a problem the government solved by replacing the militia with the Afro-Indian groups they were attacking. Once they controlled the army, the maroons used subtle threats to persuade officials to remove the last vestiges of slavery.

Nicaragua

>English Pilgrims launched two colonies: the famous Plimoth, the first successful colony in New England, in 1620; and a short-lived effort in Providence Island, 140 miles off the coast of Nicaragua, in 1631. Unlike their brethren in non-malarial New England, the Providence Pilgrims imported African slaves in numbers and with enthusiasm. As many as six hundred escaped when Spain drove out the Pilgrims in 1641. Landing in what is now Nicaragua by either shipwreck or design, they ended up mixing with Miskitu-speaking Indians and a small number of Europeans. More African and Indian refugees kept trickling in, swelling the ranks of the Miskitu, as these hybrid people came to be called. Viewing Spain as the biggest potential threat, they allied with the English who had previously enslaved some of their number. Riding with English buccaneers, armed with English swords and English guns, they raided Spanish plantations from Costa Rica to Panama, capturing Indian and African slaves and selling them to English sugar plantations; once the Miskitu even sent troops to Jamaica to help the English put down a maroon rebellion. London sealed the alliance by staging coronation ceremonies for Miskitu kings in Jamaica, Belize or, occasionally, England. “King” was the word used at the time but is perhaps misleading; the Miskitu “kingdom” was a collection of four allied polities along the coast ruled by (from north to south) a “general,” a “king,” a “governor,” and an “admiral.”

Francisco de Arobe (middle) led Esmeraldas, an independent maroon society on the north coast of Ecuador. In 1599, two years after signing a treaty in which de Arobe accepted nominal Spanish sovereignty in return for a free hand in Esmeraldas, the colonial governor commissioned Andrés Sánchez Gallque, an Indian trained in Quito, to make this portrait of the leader, his twenty-two-year-old son, and a friend.

As European diseases took their toll on Miskitu with native-American ancestry, all four areas became more African, genetically speaking. Culturally speaking, though, they increasingly claimed to be “pure” Indian—a claim that seems strangely at odds with their kings’ habits of performing their functions in gold-spangled military uniforms with white satin or cotton vests, breeches, and stockings, leaning on the gold- and silver-headed walking canes that had become a symbol of their office. Thousands of Britons moved into the area in the nineteenth century, paying taxes to Miskitu governments and promising to obey Miskitu laws. If they began to throw their weight around, the Miskitu would remind the British of the usefulness of having an ally on the otherwise solidly Spanish expanse of Central America. The kingdom thrived, controlling its own destiny, for more than three centuries. Only in 1894 did the now-independent nation of Nicaragua formally incorporate it.

The United States


>Maroons were fewer in the United States than farther south, because slaves could escape bondage altogether if they traveled north of the Mason-Dixon line. In addition, they found it harder to survive on their own in unfamiliar temperate ecosystems. Nonetheless, maroon encampments were common in places like the valley of the Savannah River, the Mississippi River delta, and, especially, the Great Dismal Swamp, a peat bog that then sprawled across more than two thousand square miles of Virginia and North Carolina. (It is now smaller, because much of the swamp was drained in the nineteenth century.) To escape European incursions, Indians moved there in numbers after about 1630, living in scattered, small settlements of ten to fifty houses. Africans soon followed. Thousands eventually made their base there, according to the historians John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, building villages on raised “islands” in the rarely seen heart of the swamp. Hidden from slaveholding society, some maroons had children who reportedly went their entire lives without encountering a European. This happy isolation ended at the end of the seventeenth century, when Virginia initiated big swamp-drainage projects, sending thousands of slaves to dig drainage canals in wretched conditions. Would-be maroons and would-be maroon-hunters alike used the canals to penetrate the marsh, setting off low-intensity guerrilla warfare that did not truly let up until the end of U.S. slavery. (Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, wrote her second novel, Dred, about the Great Dismal Swamp in that time of conflict.) By that time, though, the establishment of the “underground railroad” to freedom in the north had robbed the swamp of much of its allure.

>Farther south, the best hope for slaves who wished to rid themselves of their bonds was the Spanish colony of Florida. Carolina was founded in 1670 (I described this in Chapter 3). Large numbers of slaves began to arrive a few years after. Quickly they began to escape, also in large numbers, crossing the border into Spanish Florida. A few Europeans, fleeing for one reason or another from their colonial governments, took refuge there as well. Seeing the military potential in these England-hating maroons, the Spanish king promised in 1693 to grant automatic liberty to all Africans who came to Florida from the Carolinas and Georgia, provided that they (1) agreed to convert to Christianity; and (2) promised to stand by Spain and fight any English invasion. Near the Spanish capital of St. Augustine the colonial government in 1739 established a new town, Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, to house what amounted to a militia of ex-bondsmen—the first legally recognized free African-American community north of the Rio Grande. (Other free maroon communities surely existed, but were not officially viewed as legitimate.) Most Florida maroons, though, went deep into the interior of the peninsula, territory dominated by Seminole Indians, a group that had split off from the Creeks decades before, taking over land that had been depopulated by disease. In this low, sandy area, a savannah that had been annually burned for hundreds of years, the two groups formed a strong but carefully delineated alliance.

>That any two groups of Indians and Africans would cooperate was not a given—just north of Florida, the main body of the Creek enthusiastically hunted maroons and sold them to the English. Ultimately the Seminole established more than thirty towns, some with thousands of inhabitants, all surrounded by farmland, polycropped in the indigenous mode. Four of those towns were mainly inhabited by Africans—Black Seminole, as they are often called. The relationship between “red” and “black” Seminole was complex, beginning with the fact that some Africans were “red” and some European refugees were “black.” Under Seminole law, most Africans in those towns had the legal status of slaves, but native bondage resembled European feudalism more than European slavery. Seminole slaves owed little work; instead they were supposed to provide native villages with tribute, usually in the form of crops. The burden, though of course unwelcome and resented, usually was not onerous. Many of the slaves were African soldiers, disciplined and organized as one would expect from prisoners of war in wartime. Determined to establish themselves, maroons opened up trade with the Spanish and as a group became more prosperous than their Indian owners. For the most apart they lived adjacent to but carefully separate from the Seminole, unincorporated into the big kinship-linked clans that were a principal aspect of Indian social networks. Yet they willingly joined their owners in common fights, of which there were, alas, all too many.

>European societies invariably portrayed their conflicts with maroons as victories. The Battle of Okeechobee, fought on Christmas Day, 1837, during the Second Seminole War, ended with the U.S. forces being driven back with twice as many dead and many more wounded than the Seminoles. Much of the blame for the disaster belongs to Col. Zachary Taylor, the commanding officer and future president, who foolishly insisted that the Seminoles would flee if attacked directly. Yet this typical engraving from 1878 depicts the Seminoles melting away before Taylor’s heroic, bayonet-wielding charge. (Photo credit 9.2)

>The Seminole faced a parade of adversaries. England took over Florida in 1763; the Seminole resisted all efforts at incorporation. Twenty years later, the United States came into existence; the English stopped seeking to dominate the Seminole and instead asked them to ally with them against the new nation (England had held on to Florida after the revolution). In 1812, the Seminole violently opposed U.S. efforts to annex Florida. Another flareup occurred in 1816–18; many Seminole, black and red, were driven south to new settlements, the biggest of which, Angola, was at the mouth of the Manatee River in Tampa Bay. Some fled to the Bahamas. In both cases the Seminole received covert support from British guerrillas. Conflict grew more intense still when the United States took over Florida in 1821 and the government, responding to popular pressure, planned to “remove” the native peoples of the Southeast, the Seminole among them, to Indian Territory, a big reservation in what is now Oklahoma. Overt war began in 1835. Maroons joined in, fighting as allies but under their own command.

>The Seminole strategy was twofold: First, they destroyed the plantations that supplied U.S. troops, capturing their slaves to bolster the native army. Second, they waited for yellow fever and malaria to kill northern soldiers. If they got in a jam, they pretended to negotiate until the onset of the “sickly season” forced U.S. forces to withdraw. It was so brilliantly successful that in 1839 Thomas Sidney Jesup, commander of the U.S. army in Florida, wrote to Washington, D.C., to ask permission to give the Seminole everything they wanted if they would simply stop wrecking plantations. The idea was indignantly rejected, but Jesup did come up with what would eventually become a winning strategy: he promised that any Africans who gave up fighting and consented to settle in the West would be given their liberty. Slowly the offer pried apart the Seminole-maroon alliance. Its success was understandable, as the abolitionist Joshua Gibbons recognized, for it gave the maroons “that security for which they had contended for a century and a half.” After seven years of increasingly brutal war, the conflict ground to a halt with a cease-fire. Several hundred Seminole remained, unconquered, on the land they had fought to keep; the rest had accepted offers of land and liberty, establishing communities that still exist in Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico.

Haiti


>A French possession with about eight thousand plantations rich with sugar, coffee, and yellow fever, eighteenth-century Haiti was a true extractive state: forty thousand fabulously rich European colonists atop half a million seething African slaves. St. Domingue, as the colony was then called, was shaken by the advent of the French Revolution in 1789. Liberté, egalité, fraternité!—the resonance, for an island of French slaves, was obvious. Paradoxically, though, the loudest local supporters of the revolution were French sugar growers, slaveholders who had long chafed at royal restrictions on the slave trade. (Freedom, to them, meant the freedom to enslave.) Fearing the consequences of planter rule, Africans opposed the forces chanting “Liberté, egalité, fraternité!” Seizing the moment, they launched a revolution against the revolution.

>The new republic in France, ensnarled in internecine battles, became involved in a war with England and its allies. Wanting to deny sugar revenues to France, England seized Haiti’s main cities in 1793. Its troops proved welcome hosts to that malign participant in the Columbian Exchange, the yellow fever virus. According to J. R. McNeill, the Georgetown historian of mosquito-borne disease, the British army lost roughly 10 percent of its troops every month between June and November of 1794. Survivors of yellow fever were prostrated by malaria. The army hung on, helped by reinforcements, until the next summer, when the monthly death rate rose to as high as 22 percent. “The newly arrived died with astonishing quickness,” McNeill wrote, “seemingly disembarking from ships straight to their graves.” Again they were reinforced: 13,000 more troops arrived in February 1796. In weeks 6,000 were dead. The British abandoned Haiti in 1798

>All the while the slave revolt continued, led by the brilliant, charismatic, and dictatorial Toussaint Louverture. Toussaint, as he is known, had little time to savor Britain’s defeat. Napoleon Bonaparte had staged a coup in France and determined to retain the immensely profitable sugar and coffee plantations of Haiti. A French force of perhaps 65,000 landed in February 1802. Toussaint had barely half as many men and so little equipment and weaponry that his army was, he said, “naked as earthworms.” He ordered his rebels to retreat to the hills and await the fever season. Toussaint was captured and imprisoned but his strategy prevailed. By September some 28,000 French were dead; another 4,400 were hospitalized. Two months later the French commander died. His army struggled on, but it was trying to conquer its own cemetery. The effort collapsed in November 1803, having lost 50,000 of its 65,000 troops. As McNeill noted, the same malaria and yellow fever that had done so much to promote African slavery here helped Africans to destroy it. Napoleon, his hopes for a Caribbean empire in ruins, sold the United States all of France’s North American territories: the Louisiana Purchase.

>In the centuries of the slave trade, flight was frequent and often successful. Mixing with native groups, escaped Africans and their descendants scattered across the hemisphere.

>Many formed Afro-Indian polities, microstates that often won de facto independence from Spain—a tenacious struggle for liberty that created large free areas in the Americas decades and even centuries before the U. S. Declaration of Independence.

>Independent Haiti, an entire maroon nation, became a global symbol that terrified slaveholders throughout the world, including the United States. Europe and the United States put a punishing economic embargo on Haiti for decades. Deprived of the trade in sugar and coffee the nation’s economy collapsed impoverishing what had been the wealthiest society in the Caribbean.

Suriname


>A few Dutch and English adventurers showed up in coastal Suriname, north of Brazil, in the early seventeenth century, intending to grow coffee, cocoa, tobacco, and sugarcane. Because the Europeans had valuable trade goods, indigenous rulers initially tolerated their presence—they could be expelled at any time. Indeed, one imagines the Indians watching with amusement as the tiny Dutch and English colonies promptly went to war with each other over their notional possession of the area. The struggle was part of a worldwide battle between the English and Dutch over the part of global trade not dominated by Spain. In 1667 a treaty was hammered out on terms favorable to the Dutch. The Netherlands won Suriname, with its rich potential. As a kind of booby prize, the English received official title to a cold, thin-soiled island known to its original inhabitants as Mannahatta.

I really need either better pictures or post something more interesting as it looks nobody even read this. I will finish Surinam at last.

>Quickly the Dutch set to work. Ships full of imprisoned Africans docked at the minute port of Paramaribo, at the mouth of the Suriname River. Slave-rowed barges conducted them thirty miles upstream, to sugar plantations centered on the village of Jodensavanna (Jews’ Savanna), founded by Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition.5 There the Indians’ managed forest was replaced by waving expanses of Dutch sugarcane. Interspersed with the cane were fields of African rice. As in the Caribbean, logging and farming benefitted mosquitoes, especially Anopheles darlingi, which I noted in Chapter 3 was South America’s most important malaria vector. Slave ships introduced Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito. The slaves themselves brought falciparum malaria and yellow fever. All went upstream to Jodensavanna. A. darlingi likes to breed in recently cleared land, where it can dash back and forth between the edge of the forest and human houses. As the colonists forced slaves to cut trees, European death rates soared. Dutch landowners responded by staying home and hiring overseers to manage their properties. “Managing properties” mainly meant importing Africans. About 300,000 landed on Suriname’s shores. Another way of saying this is that a colony about the size of Wisconsin absorbed nearly as many slaves as the entire United States. For each European, the colony had more than twenty-five Africans.

>As one would expect, the few malarial Dutch were unable to prevent their captives from escaping. Africans ran away by the thousands, mixing with native groups and establishing outlaw hybrid societies in the boondocks. Guerrilla war broke out in the 1670s and continued for almost a century, the Dutch slowly losing. In 1762 the colonial government signed a humiliating peace treaty—the Dutch signatories, following African custom, reluctantly guaranteed the peace by cutting themselves and drinking their blood. The maroons’ main concession was to promise that they would give back new escapees. As a result, runaways went to other parts of the forest and established new communities. Efforts to pursue them ignited a second guerrilla war. Suriname’s planters begged for help.

>More than a thousand soldiers came across the Atlantic in 1772, among them John Gabriel Stedman, born in the Netherlands to a father who had fled Scotland’s famines. Stedman kept a diary that is an encyclopedia of medico-military calamity. Soon after landing he “became so ill by a fever—that I was not expected more to recover.” None of the other soldiers helped him: “Seekness being so common in this Country, and every one having so much ado to mind themselves, that neglect takes place betwixt the nearest acquaintances.”

>Stedman was lucky enough to survive his seasoning and go upstream. The once carefully managed Indian landscape was now a nightmare of pests. Stedman’s diary fairly pulses with complaint about the “inconceivable numerous” mosquitoes—insects in such thick, buzzing clouds that they smothered candles and made it impossible to see or hear people a hundred feet away. Stedman once clapped his hands together and killed thirty-eight.

>Sick, miserable, insect-bitten, dressed in tatters, Stedman’s force futilely chased runaway slaves through the forest for three years. They fought exactly one battle. They won that battle, as the adage goes, but lost the war. “Out of a number of near twelve hundred Able bodied men, now not one hundred did return to theyr Friends at home,” Stedman wrote sadly, “Amongst whom Perhaps not 20 were to be found in perfect health.” All the others, he said, were “sick; discharged, past all Remedy; Lost; kill’d; & murdered by the Climate, while no less than 10 or 12 were drown’d & Snapt away by the Alligators.”

>Eventually the Dutch and the maroons reached a kind of accommodation. The Europeans kept shipping in Africans and growing cane, accepting that a certain number of slaves would escape each year. Meanwhile, most of the Dutch colonists stayed as little as they could; in 1850, after two centuries of colonization, Suriname had perhaps eight thousand European residents, most of them agents for sugar planters who lived safely in the Netherlands. Not residing in the colony, the growers had little interest in creating the institutions that underlie a productive society. Every scrap of profit went back to the home country; education, innovation, and investment in Suriname were almost entirely ignored. When Suriname became independent in 1975, it was one of the poorest countries in the world.

>Naturally, the new nation sought development. Suriname has large deposits of bauxite, gold, diamond, and oil and more tropical forest per capita than any other nation. The cash-strapped government—both the military dictatorship that seized power in 1980 and its civilian successor, which began in 1992—awarded mining and timber rights to foreign companies. In the 1960s, the colonial government had let Alcoa, the big aluminum company, build a six-hundred-square-mile lake to feed a hydroelectric dam for aluminum refining. Now the independent government awarded China International Marine Containers, the world’s biggest container-manufacturing firm, the rights to log almost eight hundred square miles to make wooden shipping pallets. Other firms followed suit. By 2007 some 40 percent of the country’s surface area had been leased for logging.

>All the while the government was fending off environmentalists’ criticism by creating parks. At a joint press conference in 1998 with Conservation International, the nation announced that it had set aside six thousand square miles—10 percent of its territory—to create the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, the world’s biggest protected tropical forest. “Suriname’s example,” The New York Times editorialized, is “a small ray of hope.” UNESCO named the park a World Heritage Site in 2000, lauding it as “one of the very few undisturbed forest areas in the Amazonian region with no inhabitants and no human use.”

>Beginning with the blood-drinking treaty of 1762, the Dutch had recognized the autonomy of six maroon groups, of which the biggest today are the Saramaka and Ndyuka, with about fifty thousand people each. None had been apprised beforehand about the logging and mining concessions, though many were on their land. None had been consulted about the dam, which inundated maroon villages (in a further insult, the turbines silted up and are now useless). Nor had they been asked about the park, which includes part of the homeland of the Kwinti, the smallest of the six maroon groups, who have been in that area since about 1750. (It also houses an Indian group called the Trio.) The government’s actions led a coalition of Saramaka leaders to file a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in October 2000. Angered, Suriname’s president charged that the Saramaka petition showed that they wanted to ally with Columbian narco-guerrillas to foment civil war. The government vowed to continue opening land to logging and mining, a stance it reiterated when the commission ordered that the process be suspended, and reiterated again in November 2007, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights demanded that Suriname give the Saramaka control over their resources.

>The nation has not complied, as of the time of this writing. Indeed, the jousting among maroons, governments, and large corporations seems likely to last for years. The stakes are nothing less than the future of the tropical forest itself, and the maroons are not fighting only in Suriname.

I will also post link to this interesting article:
>penn.museum/sites/expedition/guerilla-warfare-in-eighteenth-century-jamaica/

What is interesting about it?
Use of mixed or black slave or freemen troops against marooned slaves societies.
As white troops could just not operate here with great success(or at all).

>banned indian slavery
>after spreading their pestilence which killed 90% of Amerindians for centuries and destroyed Amerindian cultures

got any source?

>Núñez de Balboa early life, stowing away: Las Casas 1951:vol. 2, 408–15 (“educated man,” 408); Altolaguirre y Duvale 1914:xiii–xv (“energetic spirit,” xiv); López de Gómara 1922:125; Oviedo y Valdés 1851–53:vol.2, 425–28.
>Oviedo says that he rolled himself up in a sail, rather than a barrel.

>Núñez de Balboa seizes power: Araúz Monfante and Pizzurno Gelós 1997:23–27, 100–101 (Indian slavery and gold); Las Casas 1951:vol. 2, 418–31; López de Gómara 1922:vol. 1, 131–37; Altolaguirre y Duvale 1914:xv–lxxxvi; Anghiera 1912:vol. 1, 209–225; Oviedo y Valdés 1851–53:vol.2, 465–78.
>I have greatly simplified a complex tale of political maneuvering and multiple betrayals.

>Visit to Comogre: Las Casas 1951:vol. 2, 572–74; López de Gómara 1922:vol. 1, 137–39; Anghiera 1912:vol. 1, 217–23 (“little boats,” 221); Oviedo y Valdés 1851–53:vol.3, 9; Núñez de Balboa, V. 1513. Letter to the King, 20 Jan. In Altolaguirre y Duvale 1914:13–25.

>First Africans in Panama: Fortune 1967; López de Gómara 1922:vol. 1, 144; Anghiera 1912:vol. 1, 286 (dec. 3, bk. 1, chap. 2); Oviedo y Valdés 1851–53:vol. 3, 45 (bk. 29, chap. 10); Colmenares, R.d. 1516? Memorial against Nuñez de Balboa. In: Altolaguirre y Duvale 1914: 150–55, at 155; Ávila, P., et al. 1515. Report to King, 2 May. In: idem:70–72 (“crooked hair,” 70).

>Núñez de Balboa’s fate: López de Gómara 1922:vol. 1, 158; Altolaguirre y Duvale 1914:clxxv–cxc

>Altolaguirre y Duvale, A. d. 1914. Vasco Nuñez de Balboa. Madrid: Intendencia é Intervención Militares.

97% is probably closer to truth.
It also truth that plenty of Amerindians societies get hit by wave of diseases before they even seen white man - thanks to network of well maintained trade routes that stretch from one continent to another.
Spaniards landing meet inland civilizations already affected by diseases that they completely did not know how to resist. Not even mention all disorder and succession/civil wars that diseases caused.
It was like fall of Byzantines but much faster as Amerindians were much more susceptible to diseases and have more homogeneous population that Eastern Romans. And diseases never stop. Also Spaniards were more effective in taking advantage of local pretenders to power than Ottomans.
It was inevitable to happen on contact. Still its a shame. Damn shame.

brap

What posseed you to post your dissertation on Veeky Forums

Its shame that nobody recognize from where its from
>real state of Veeky Forums

>tfw i study in the same University as the man who is leading the archaeological prospections on Santa María la Antigua del Darién.

Feels good man, gonna have class with him next year.