Dabaiba, so the golden temple must be there to-day—if it ever was there at all.
Pedrarias, filled with fury at these defeats, took the field himself, but soon came down with a fever. Finally his alcalde, Espinosa, hurled himself with a sufficiently large force on the exhausted tribes and, by the beginning of 1517, established a Roman peace.
In the meanwhile, Balboa had been sent a royal commission as Adelantado of the South Seas, and Viceroy of the Pacific side of the Isthmus, but the jealous Pedrarias had held it up. Now Fonseca, the bishop, patched up a truce between the two. Balboa agreed to put away his Indian wife, and became engaged to the daughter of Pedrarias.
There was a place on the Atlantic shore, between Antigua and abandoned Santa Cruz, called by the Indians Acla, or "the Bones of Men," because two warlike chiefs of long ago had caused a great slaughter of their subjects there. Here Balboa cut down and shaped the timbers of four brigantines. These were carried by hundreds of Indians and a few negroes, over a rough trail to the headwaters of the Savannah River, down which they were rafted to the Gulf of San Miguel. It was an incredible piece of labor for the time, and none could have accomplished it but Nuñez de Balboa. When they came to set up the vessels, half the wood was found to be worm-eaten, and high tides and floods swept away much of the rest. But he persevered, until at last four fully equipped brigantines floated at anchor on the South Sea.
Then came word of a new governor sent from Spain to take the place of Pedrarias. Balboa confided to a
