CHAPTER V
HOW PEDRARIAS THE CRUEL BUILT OLD PANAMA
ENCISO'S complaints had decided the king to appoint a new governor, who should call Balboa to account. As usual, he picked a court favorite, Pedro Arias de Avila, called for short, Pedrarias Davila. He had served bravely as a colonel of infantry, and as he was now seventy years old, the king thought he could be counted on to attend strictly to the royal business, without having time to become dangerously powerful. But Pedrarias lived long enough to do more evil than any other man who ever came to the New World, before or since.
The news of Balboa's first successes brought in recruits, who were particularly attracted by the tale of a river so full of gold that the Indians strained it out with nets. Fully fifteen hundred crowded into the ships, instead of the twelve hundred sought for. Light wooden shields and quilted cotton jackets took the place of the steel armor that must have killed more men with sunstroke than it saved from the Indians' arrows. A Spanish historian of the time calls this expedition "the best equipped company that ever left Spain."
When the fleet reached Darien, the silk-clad messengers, sent on shore to seek Balboa, found him sitting in his underclothes and slippers, overseeing some Indians
