oldest
European city now standing on the mainland of the two Americas.
In the year 1515, the story goes, Pedrarias Davila, governor of Castilla del Oro, despatched from Santa Maria de la Antigua del Darien, the first settlement of the Spaniards on the mainland of America, situated on the gulf of Darien, then called Uraba, but whose traces are now wholly obliterated, Antonio Tello de Guzman, a native of Toledo, with one hundred men, and instructions to cross the Isthmus to the South Sea, and establish there a settlement from which to prose- cute discoveries along the shores of the Pacific. After several conflicts with the natives the journey was ac- complished. As he approached the borders of the southern sea, Tello de Guzman heard much of a place called by the natives Panamd,, famous, as the Spaniards supposed, for its wealth ; but in truth, only a collection of fishermen's huts, the name signifying in the aborig- inal tongue, "a place where many fish are taken."
This was the discovery and origin of the site of old Panamd ; and although nothing further was accom- plished toward a settlement during this expedition, subsequently, from the reports given by Tello de Guzman, Pedrarias founded the metropolis of his government. There, after the chivalrous Vasco Nunez and his comrades had been beheaded at Ada, the surly old governor quarrelled with Oviedo, and plotted against his best friends. Thence Pedrarias proceeded to pacify Nicaragua, and thence Francisco Pizarro and his bloody crew sailed for the conquest of Peru. "Very noble and very loyal" Charles V. called the town in those days, meaning thereby very much gold, very much gold! Now the spot is so si- lent and dead, so crumbled and forest-enclosed, that on one side 3^ou may pass within ten steps of its ancient walls and discover no city, while from the bay a soli- tary ivy-covered tower is seen, which marks the tomb of crumbled splendor scattered round its base. In 1671 the buccaneers under Henry Morgan, sacked
