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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
One of the twentieth century's great humanists and a hugely popular fiction writer, Stefan Zweig's historical works bring the past to life in brilliant Technicolor. This collection contains ten typically breathless and erudite dramatizations of some of the most tense and important episodes in human history. From General Grouchy's failure to intervene at Waterloo, to the miraculous resurrection of George Frideric Handel, Zweig's selection is idiosyncratic, fascinating and as always hugely readable.
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Seitenzahl: 310
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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SHOOTING STARS
TEN HISTORICAL MINIATURES
STEFAN ZWEIG
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY ANTHEA BELL
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
NO ARTIST is an artist through the entire twenty-four hours of his normal day; he succeeds in producing all that is essential, all that will last, only in a few, rare moments of inspiration. History itself, which we may admire as the greatest writer and actor of all time, is by no means always creative. Even in “God’s mysterious workshop”, as Goethe reverently calls historical knowledge, a great many indifferent and ordinary incidents happen. As everywhere in life and art, sublime moments that will never be forgotten are few and far between. As a chronicler, history generally does no more than arrange events link by link, indifferently and persistently, fact by fact in a gigantic chain reaching through the millennia, for all tension needs a time of preparation, every incident with any true significance has to develop. Millions of people in a nation are necessary for a single genius to arise, millions of tedious hours must pass before a truly historic shooting star of humanity appears in the sky.
But if artistic geniuses do arise, they will outlast their own time; if such a significant hour in the history of the world occurs, it will decide matters for decades and centuries yet to come. As the electricity of the entire atmosphere is discharged at the tip of a lightning conductor, an immeasurable wealth of events is then crammed together in a small span of time. What usually happens at a leisurely pace, in sequence and due order, is concentrated into a single moment that determines and establishes everything: a single Yes, a single No, a Too Soon or a Too Late makes that hour irrevocable for hundreds of generations while deciding the life of a single man or woman, of a nation, even the destiny of all humanity.
Such dramatically compressed and fateful hours, in which a decision outlasting time is made on a single day, in a single hour, often just in a minute, are rare in the life of an individual and rare in the course of history. In this book I am aiming to remember the hours of such shooting stars—I call them that because they outshine the past as brilliantly and steadfastly as stars outshine the night. They come from very different periods of time and very different parts of the world. In none of them have I tried to give a new colour or to intensify the intellectual truth of inner or outer events by means of my own invention. For in those sublime moments when they emerge, fully formed, history needs no helping hand. Where the muse of history is truly a poet and a dramatist, no mortal writer may try to outdo her.
FLIGHT INTO IMMORTALITY
THE DISCOVERY OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN
25 September 1513
A SHIP IS FITTED OUT
When he first returned from the newly discovered continent of America, Columbus had displayed countless treasures and curiosities on his triumphal procession through the crowded streets of Seville and Barcelona: human beings of a race hitherto unknown, with reddish skins; animals never seen before; colourful, screeching parrots; slow-moving tapirs; then strange plants and fruits that would soon find a new home in Europe—Indian corn, tobacco, the coconut. The rejoicing throng marvels at all these things, but the royal couple and their counsellors are excited above all by a few boxes and baskets containing gold. Columbus does not bring much gold back from the new Indies: a few pretty things that he has bartered with the natives, or stolen from them, a few small bars and several handfuls of loose grains, gold dust rather than solid gold—the whole of it at most enough to mint a few hundred ducats. But the inspired Columbus, who always fanatically believes whatever he wants to believe at any given time, and who has been so gloriously proved right about his sea route to India, boasts effusively and in all honesty that this is only a tiny foretaste. Reliable news, he adds, has reached him of gold mines of immeasurable extent on these new islands; only just below the surface, the precious metal, he says, lies under a thin layer of soil in many fields, and you can easily dig it out with an ordinary spade. Farther south, however, there are realms where the kings drink from golden goblets, and gold is worth less than lead at home in Spain. The ever-avaricious king listens, intoxicated to hear of this new Ophir that now belongs to him. No one yet knows Columbus and his sublime folly well enough to doubt his promises. A great fleet is fitted out at once for the second voyage, and now there is no need for recruiting officers and drummers to find men to join it. Word of the newly discovered Ophir, where you can pick up gold from the ground with your bare hands, sends all Spain mad; people come in their hundreds, their thousands to travel to El Dorado, the land of gold.
But what a dismal tidal wave of humanity is now cast up by greed from every city, every village, every hamlet. Not only do honourable noblemen arrive, wishing to gild their coats of arms, not only are there bold adventurers and brave soldiers; all the filthy scum of Spain is also washed up in Palos and Cádiz. There are branded thieves, highwaymen and footpads hoping to find a more profitable trade in the land of gold; there are debtors who want to escape their creditors and husbands hoping to get away from scolding wives; all the desperadoes and failures, branded criminals and men sought by the Alguacil justices volunteer for the fleet, a motley band of failures who are determined that they will make their fortunes at long last, in an instant too, and to that end are ready to commit any act of violence and any crime. They have told one another the fantasies of Columbus, repeating that in those lands you have only to thrust a spade into the ground to see nuggets of gold glinting up at you, and the prosperous among the emigrants hire servants and mules to carry large quantities of the precious metal away. Those who do not succeed in being taken on by the expedition find another way: never troubling to get the royal permission, coarse-grained adventurers fit out ships for themselves, in order to cross the ocean as fast as they can and get their hands on gold, gold, gold. And at a single stroke, Spain is rid of troublemakers and the most dangerous kind of rabble.
The Governor of Española (later San Domingo and Haiti) is horrified to see these uninvited guests overrunning the island entrusted to his care. Year after year the ships bring new freight and increasingly rough, unruly fellows. The newcomers, in turn, are bitterly disappointed. There is no sign of gold lying loose on the road, and not another grain of corn can be got out of the unfortunate native inhabitants on whom these brutes descend. So hordes of them wander around, intent on robbery, terrifying the unhappy Indios and the governor alike. The latter tries in vain to make them colonists by showing them where land may be had, giving them cattle, and indeed ample supplies of human cattle in the form of sixty to seventy native inhabitants as slaves to work for every one of them. But neither the high-born hidalgos nor the former footpads have a mind to set up as farmers. They didn’t come here to grow wheat and herd cattle; instead of putting their minds to sowing seed and harvesting crops, they torment the unfortunate Indios—they will have eradicated the entire indigenous population within a few years—or sit around in taverns. Within a short time most of them are so deep in debt that after their goods they have to sell their hats and coats, their last shirts, and they fall into the clutches of traders and usurers.
So in 1510 all these failures on Española are glad to hear that a well-regarded man from the island, the bachiller or lawyer Martín Fernandez de Enciso, is fitting out a ship with a new crew to come to the aid of his colony on terra firma. In 1509 two famous adventurers, Alonzo de Ojeda and Diego de Nicuesa, received the privilege from King Ferdinand of founding a colony near the straits of Panama and the coast of Venezuela, naming it rather too hastily Castilla del Oro, Golden Castile. Intoxicated by the resonant name and beguiled by tall stories, the lawyer, who knew little about the ways of the world, had put most of his fortune into this adventure. But now no gold comes from the newly founded colony in San Sebastián on the Gulf of Urabá, only shrill cries for help. Half the crew have been killed in fighting the native people, and the other half have starved to death. To save the investment he has already made, Enciso ventures the rest of his fortune, and equips another expedition to go to the aid of the original one. As soon as they hear that Enciso needs soldiers, all the desperadoes and loafers on Española exploit this opportunity and take ship with him. Their aim is simply to get away, away from their creditors and the watchful eyes of the stern governor. But the creditors are also on their guard. They realize that the worst of their debtors intend to disappear, never to be seen again, and so they besiege the governor with requests to let no one travel without his special permission. The governor grants their wish. A strict guard obliges Enciso’s ship to stay outside the harbour, while government boats patrol the coastal waters to prevent anyone without such permission from being smuggled aboard. And all the embittered desperadoes, who fear death less than honest work or their towering debts, watch as Enciso’s ship leaves on its venture with all sail set.
THE MAN IN THE CRATE
And so, with all sail set, Enciso’s ship leaves Española and steers towards the American mainland. The outlines of the island it has left behind are already merging with the blue horizon. It is a calm voyage, and there is nothing in particular to be said about its early stages, or at most we may note that a huge and extremely powerful bloodhound—a son of the famous Becericco, who has become famous himself under the name of Leoncico—prowls restlessly up and down the deck, sniffing around everywhere. No one knows who owns the mighty animal or how he came on board. Finally the crew notice that the dog cannot be prised away from a particularly large crate of provisions that was brought aboard at the last minute. But lo and behold, this crate unexpectedly opens of its own accord, and out climbs a man of about thirty-five, well armed with sword, helmet and shield like Santiago, the patron saint of Castile. He is Vasco Núñez de Balboa, giving us the first evidence of his astonishing boldness and resource. Born in Jerez de los Caballeros of a noble family, he had sailed for the New World with Rodrigo de Bastidas as a private soldier and finally, after many wanderings, was stranded off Española along with his ship. The governor had tried in vain to make Núñez de Balboa into a good colonist; after a few months he had abandoned his allotted parcel of land and was bankrupt, and at a loss for a way to escape his creditors. But while the other debtors, clenching their fists, stare from the beach at the government boats that prevent them from getting away on Enciso’s ship, Núñez de Balboa circumvents Diego Columbus’s cordon by hiding in an empty provisions crate and getting accomplices to carry him aboard, where no one notices his cunning trick in all the tumult of putting out to sea. Only when he knows the ship is so far from the coast that the crew are unlikely to sail back to Española on his account does the stowaway emerge, and now here he is.
The bachiller Enciso is a man of law, and like lawyers in general has little romanticism in his soul. As Alcalde, chief of police in the new colony, he does not intend to put up with dubious characters. He brusquely informs Núñez de Balboa that he is not going to have him on his ship, but will put him ashore on the beach of the next island they pass, whether or not it is inhabited.
However, it never comes to that. For even as the ship is making for Castilla del Oro it meets—miraculously, in a time when only a few dozen vessels in all sail these still-unfamiliar seas—a heavily manned boat under a commander whose name will soon echo through the world, Francisco Pizarro. The men in the boat are from Enciso’s colony of San Sebastián, and at first they are taken for mutineers who have left their posts of their own accord. But to Enciso’s horror, they tell him there is no San Sebastián left, they themselves are the former colonists, their commander Ojeda has made off with one ship, the rest, who had only two brigantines, had to wait until all but seventy colonists had died before they could find room for themselves in the two small boats. One of those brigantines has been wrecked in its own turn; Pizarro’s thirty-five men are the last survivors of Castilla del Oro. So now where are they to go? After hearing Pizarro’s tale, Enciso’s men have no taste for braving the swamp-like climate and the natives’ poison-tipped arrows in the abandoned settlement; turning back to Española seems to them the only option. At this dangerous moment, Vasco Núñez de Balboa suddenly steps forward. He explains that after going on his first voyage with Rodrigo de Bastidas, he knows the whole coast of Central America, and he remembers that at the time of that voyage they found a place called Darién on the bank of a gold-bearing river where the natives were friendly. They should found the new settlement there, he suggests, not in this unhappy place.
At once the whole crew comes down on Núñez de Balboa’s side. In line with his proposition, they steer for Darién on the Panama isthmus, where they first indulge in the usual slaughter of the natives, and as some gold is found among the goods they rob, the desperadoes decide to found a settlement here, in pious gratitude naming the new town Santa María de la Antigua del Darién.
A DANGEROUS RISE
The unfortunate financier of the colony, the bachiller Enciso, will soon be sorry he did not throw the crate overboard with Núñez de Balboa inside it, for after a few weeks that audacious man has all the power in his hands. As a lawyer who grew up believing in order and discipline, Enciso tries to administer the colony on behalf of the Spanish Crown in his capacity as Alcalde, the chief of police of the governor, who cannot be found just now, and enacts his edicts as sternly in the wretched huts of the Indios as if he were sitting in his legal chambers in Seville. In the middle of this wilderness where no humans have ever trod before, he forbids the soldiers to haggle over gold with the natives, gold being reserved for the Crown; he tries to force this undisciplined rabble to observe law and order, but the adventurers instinctively back a man of the sword rather than a man of the pen. Soon Balboa is the real master of the colony; Enciso has to flee to save his life, and when Nicuesa, one of the governors appointed to the mainland by the king, finally arrives to enforce the law Balboa refuses to let him land. The unhappy Nicuesa, hunted out of the land allotted to him by the king, drowns on the voyage back.
So now Núñez de Balboa, the man from the crate, lords it over the colony. But in spite of his success he does not feel very comfortable about it. He has openly rebelled against the king, and can hardly hope for pardon because it is his fault that the appointed governor is dead. He knows that Enciso, who has fled, is on his way to Spain with his complaints, and sooner or later he, Balboa, will be brought to trial for his rebellion. All the same, Spain is far away, and he has plenty of time left, all the time it takes for a ship to cross the ocean twice. Being as clever as he is bold, he looks for the only way to hold the power he has usurped for as long as possible. He knows that at this time success justifies all crimes, and a large delivery of gold to the royal treasury may well moderate or delay any punishment. So first he must lay hands on gold, for gold is power! Together with Francisco Pizarro, he subjugates and robs the indigenous people of the vicinity, and in the midst of the usual slaughter he achieves a crucial success. One of the natives, Careta by name, suggests that as he is already likely to die he might prefer not to make enemies of the Indios, and instead conclude an alliance with Careta’s own tribe, offering him his daughter’s hand as a pledge of his own good faith. Núñez de Balboa immediately recognizes the importance of having a reliable and powerful friend among the natives; he accepts Careta’s offer, and—what is even more surprising—he remains an affectionate lover of the Indian girl until his last hour. Together with Careta he defeats all the local Indios, and acquires such authority among them that in the end the mightiest of their chieftains, Comagre by name, respectfully invites him to his home.
This visit to the powerful Indio chief ushers in a decision of great importance to international history as well as to the life of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who has hitherto been only a desperado and bold rebel against the Crown of Spain, destined by the law courts of Castile to die by the axe or the noose. Comagre receives him in a stone house with spacious rooms, a dwelling that astonishes Vasco Núñez by the wealth of its furnishings; and, unasked, the chieftain makes his guest a present of 4,000 ounces of gold. And now it is Comagre’s turn to be astonished, for as soon as the Sons of Heaven, the mighty and godlike strangers whom he has received with such reverence, set eyes on the gold there is an end to their dignity. Like dogs let off the chain they attack one another, swords are drawn, fists clenched, they shout and rage, every man wants his own share of the gold. The Indio chief watches the disorder in scornful surprise; his is the eternal amazement of children of nature the world over at those cultured people to whom a handful of yellow metal appears more precious than all the intellectual and technical achievements of their civilization.
At last the native chief addresses them, and with a shiver of greed the Spaniards hear what the interpreter translates. How strange, says Comagre, that you quarrel with each other over such small things, that you expose your lives to the utmost discomfort and danger for the sake of such a common metal. Over there, beyond those mountains, lies a huge lake, and all the rivers that flow into it bring gold down with them. A people live there who have ships like yours, with sails and oars, and their kings eat and drink from golden vessels. You can find as much of this yellow metal there as you want. It is a dangerous journey, for the chieftains on the way will certainly refuse to let you pass, but it would take only a few days.
Vasco Núñez de Balboa feels his heart contract. At last he is on the track of the legendary land of gold, the land that they have dreamt of for years and years; his predecessors have hoped for a sight of it in the south and the north, and now, if this native is telling the truth, it lies only a few days’ journey away. And at the same time he had proof of the existence of that other ocean to which Columbus, Cabot, Corte-Real, all those great and famous seafarers, have sought the way in vain, and the way around the globe is discovered too. The name of the man who is first to see that new sea and take possession of it for his motherland will never perish on this earth. Now Balboa knows what he must do to absolve himself of all blame and win everlasting honour: he must be first to cross the isthmus to the Mar del Sur, the southern sea that is the way to India, and conquer this new Ophir for the Spanish Crown. That hour in the chief Comagre’s house has determined his fate. From now on, the life of this chance-come adventurer has a higher meaning, one that will outlast time.
FLIGHT INTO IMMORTALITY
There can be no greater happiness in the life of a man than to have discovered his life’s purpose in the middle of its span, in his years of creativity. Núñez de Balboa knows what is at stake for him—either a pitiful death on the scaffold or immortality. First he must buy peace with the Crown, in retrospect legitimizing and legalizing his crime when he usurped power! So the rebel of yesterday, now the most zealous of subjects, sends Pasamonte, the royal treasurer on Española, not only the one-fifth of Comagre’s gift of gold that belongs to the Crown by law, but as he is better versed in the practices of the world than that dry lawyer Enciso he adds to the official consignment a private financial donation to the treasurer, asking to be confirmed in his office as Captain-General of the colony. In fact Pasamonte the treasurer has no authority to do so, but in return for the gold he sends Núñez de Balboa a provisional, if in truth worthless, document. At the same time Balboa, wishing to secure himself on all sides, has also sent two of his most reliable men to Spain to tell the court about all he has done for the Crown, conveying the important information that he has induced the Indio chieftain to support him. He needs, Vasco Núñez de Balboa tells the authorities in Seville, only a troop of 1,000 men, and with those men he will undertake to do more for Castile than any other Spaniard before him. He engages to discover the new sea and gain possession of the Land of Gold, now located at long last, the land promised by Columbus that never materialized but that he, Balboa, will conquer.
Everything now seems to have turned out well for the man who was once a rebel and a desperado. But the next ship from Spain brings bad news. One of his accomplices, a man whom he sent over to defuse the complaints at court of the robbed Enciso, tells him that such a mission is dangerous for him, even mortally dangerous. The cheated bachiller has gone to the Spanish law courts with his accusation of the man who robbed him of his power, and Balboa must pay him compensation. Meanwhile, the news of the nearby southern sea, which might have saved him, has not arrived yet; in any case, the next ship to cross the ocean will bring a lawyer to call Balboa to account for the trouble he has caused, and either judge him on the spot or take him back to Spain in chains.
Vasco Núñez de Balboa realizes that he is lost. He has been condemned before his message about the nearby southern sea and the Golden Coast arrives. Naturally news of it will be exploited even as his head rolls into the sand—someone else will bring his deed to completion, the great deed that he dreamt of. He himself can hope for nothing more from Spain. They know there that he hounded the king’s rightful governor to his death, that he personally drove the Alcalde out of office—he will have to consider the verdict merciful if it is merely imprisonment, and he does not have to pay for his deeds on the block. He cannot count on powerful friends, for he has no power of his own left, and his best advocate, the gold, has too soft a voice to ensure mercy for him. Only one thing can save him now from the punishment for his audacity, and that is even greater audacity. If he discovers the other sea and the new Ophir before the lawyers arrive, and their henchmen take him and put him in fetters, he can save himself. Only one kind of flight is open to him here at the end of the inhabited world: flight into a great achievement, into immortality.
So Núñez de Balboa decides not to wait for the 1,000 men he asked Spain to send for the conquest of the unknown ocean, still less for the arrival of the lawyers. Better to venture on a monstrous deed with a few like-minded men! Better to die honourably for one of the boldest ventures of all times than be dragged shamefully to the scaffold with his hands bound. Núñez de Balboa calls the colony together, explains, without concealing the difficulties, his intention of crossing the isthmus, and asks who will follow him. His courage puts fresh heart into the others. A hundred and ninety soldiers, almost the entire defensive force of the colony capable of bearing arms, volunteer. There is not much equipment to be found, for these men are already living in a state of constant warfare. And on 1st September 1513 Núñez de Balboa, hero and bandit, adventurer and rebel, intent on escaping the gallows or a dungeon, sets out on his march into immortality.
AN IMMORTAL MOMENT
They begin to cross the isthmus in the province of Coyba, the little realm of the chief Careta whose daughter is Balboa’s companion; it will later turn out that Núñez de Balboa has not chosen the narrowest place, in his ignorance thus extending the dangerous crossing by several days. But for such a bold venture into the unknown, his main concern is to have the security of a friendly Indian tribe, for support or in the case of a withdrawal. His men cross from Darién to Coyba in ten large canoes, 190 soldiers armed with spears, swords, arquebuses and crossbows, accompanied by a pack of the much-feared bloodhounds. His ally the Indian chief provides Indios to act as guides and bearers, and on 6th September the famous march across the isthmus begins, a venture making enormous demands on the will-power of those tried and tested adventurers. The Spanish first have to cross the low-lying areas in stifling equatorial heat that saps their strength; the marshy ground, full of feverish infections, was to kill many thousands of men working on the building of the Panama Canal centuries later. From the first they have to hack their way through the untrodden, poisonous jungle of creepers with axes and swords. The first of the troop, as if working inside a huge green mine, cut a narrow tunnel through the undergrowth for the others, and the army of conquistadors then strides along in single file, an endlessly long line of men, always with weapons in their hands, on the alert both day and night to repel any sudden attack by the native Indios. The heat is stifling in the sultry, misty darkness of the moist vault of giant trees as a pitiless sun blazes down above them. Drenched in sweat and with parched lips, the heavily armed men drag themselves on, mile after mile. Sometimes sudden downpours of rain fall like a hurricane, little streams instantly become torrential rivers, and the men have to either wade through them or cross them over swaying bridges improvised from palm fibres by the Indios. The Spanish have nothing to eat but a handful of maize; weary with lack of sleep, hungry, thirsty, surrounded by myriads of stinging, blood-sucking insects, they work their way forward in garments torn by thorns, footsore, their eyes feverish, their cheeks swollen by the stings of the whirring midges, restless by day, sleepless by night, and soon they are entirely exhausted. Even after the first week of marching, a large part of the troop can no longer stand up to the stress, and Núñez de Balboa, who knows that the real danger still lies in wait for them, gives orders for all those sick with fever and worn out to stay behind. He means to brave the crucial venture only with the best of his troop.
At last the ground begins to rise. The jungle becomes less dense now that its full tropical luxuriance can unfold only in the marshy hollows. But when there is no shade to protect them, the equatorial sun high overhead, glaring and hot, beats down on their heavy armour. Slowly and by short stages, the weary men manage to climb the hilly country to the mountain chain that separates the narrow stretch of land between the two oceans like a stone backbone. Gradually the view is freer, and the air is refreshing by night. After eighteen days of heroic effort, they seem to have overcome the worst difficulty; already the crest of the mountain range rises before them, and from the peaks, so the Indian guides say, they will be able to see both oceans, the Atlantic and the still-unknown and unnamed Pacific. But now of all times, just when they seem to have overcome the tough, vicious resistance of nature, they face a new enemy: the native chieftain of that province, who bars the strangers’ way with hundreds of his warriors. Núñez de Balboa has plenty of experience of fighting off the Indios. All he has to do is get the men to fire a salvo from their arquebuses, and that artificial thunder and lightning exerts its proven magical power once again over the local population. Screaming, the terrified warriors run, the Spanish and their bloodhounds in pursuit. Instead of enjoying this easy victory, however, Balboa, like all the Spanish conquistadors, dishonours it by terrible cruelty, having a number of defenceless, bound prisoners torn apart alive by the hungry dogs, their flesh reduced to scraps, a spectacle staged as a substitute for bullfights and gladiatorial games. Dreadful slaughter shames the last night before Núñez de Balboa’s immortal day.
There is a unique, inexplicable mixture in the character and manner of these Spanish conquistadors. Pious believers as ever any Christians were, they call upon God from the ardent depths of their souls, at the same time committing the most shocking inhumanities of history in his name. Capable of the most magnificent and heroic feats of courage, sacrifice and suffering, they still deceive and fight one another shamelessly; yet in the midst of their contemptible behaviour they have a strong feeling of honour, and a wonderful, indeed truly admirable sense of the historic importance of their mission. That same Núñez de Balboa who threw innocent, bound and defenceless prisoners to the bloodthirsty dogs the evening before, perhaps caressing the jaws of the animals in satisfaction while they were still dripping with human blood, understands the precise significance of his deed in the story of mankind, and at the crucial moment finds one of those great gestures that remain unforgettable over the ages. He knows that this day, the 25th of September, will be remembered in the history of the world, and with true Spanish feeling the hard, thoughtless adventurer lets it be known how fully he has grasped the lasting gravity of his mission.
Balboa’s gesture is this: that evening, directly after the bloodbath, one of the natives has pointed out a nearby peak, telling him that from its height you can see the other ocean, the unknown Mar del Sur. Immediately Balboa makes his arrangements. Leaving the injured and exhausted men in the plundered village, he orders those still capable of marching—sixty-seven of them in all, out of the original 190 with whom he began the expedition in Darién—to climb the mountain. They approach the peak at ten in the morning. There is only a small, bare hilltop yet to be scaled, and then the view must stretch out before their eyes.
At this moment Balboa commands his men to stop. None of them is to follow him, for he does not want to share this first sight of the new ocean with anyone else. After crossing one gigantic ocean in our world, the Atlantic, he alone will be, now and for ever, the first Spaniard, the first European, the first Christian to set eyes on the still-unknown other ocean, the Pacific. Slowly, with his heart thudding, deeply aware of the significance of the moment, he climbs on, a flag in his left hand, his sword in his right hand, a solitary silhouette in the vast orb. Slowly he scales the hilltop, without haste, for the real work has already been done. Only a few more steps, fewer now, still fewer, and once he has reached the peak a great view opens up before him. Beyond the mountains, wooded and green as the hills descend below him, lies an endless expanse of water with reflections as of metal in it: the sea, the new and unknown sea, hitherto only dreamt of and never seen, the legendary sea sought in vain by Columbus and all who came after him, the ocean whose waves lap against the shores of America, India and China. And Vasco Núñez de Balboa looks and looks and looks, blissfully proud as he drinks in the knowledge that his are the first European eyes in which the endless blue of that ocean is mirrored.
Vasco Núñez de Balboa gazes long and ecstatically into the distance. Only then does he call up his comrades to share his joy and pride. Restless and excited, gasping for breath and crying out aloud, they scramble, climb and run up the last hill, they stare in amazement and gaze with astonishment in their eyes. All of a sudden Father Anselm de Vara, who is with the party, strikes up the Te Deum laudamus, and at once all the noise and shouting dies down, all the harsh, rough voices of those soldiers, adventurers and bandits uniting in the devout hymn. The Indios watch in astonishment as, at a word from the priest, they cut down a tree to erect a cross, carving the initials of the King of Spain’s name in the wood. And when the cross rises, it is as if its two wooden arms were reaching out to both seas, the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and all the hidden distance beyond them.
In the midst of the awed silence, Núñez de Balboa steps forward and addresses his soldiers. They did right, he says, to thank God who of his grace has granted them such honour, and pray to him to continue helping them to conquer that sea and all these lands. If they will continue following him faithfully, he adds, they will go home from these new Indies the richest Spaniards ever known. He solemnly raises his flag to all four winds, to take possession on behalf of Spain of all the distant lands where those winds blow. Then he calls the clerk, Andrés de Valderrabáno, telling him to write out a certificate recording this solemn act for all time to come. Andrés de Valderrabáno unrolls a parchment that he has carried in a closed wooden container with an inkwell and a quill all the way through the jungle, and commands all the noblemen and knights and men-at-arms—los caballeros e hidalgos y hombres de bien—“who were present at the discovery of the southern sea, the Mar del Sur, by the noble and highly honoured Captain Vasco Núñez de Balboa, His Majesty’s Governor”, to confirm that “this Master Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the man who first set eyes on that sea and showed it to his followers”.
Then the sixty-seven men climbed down the hill, and since that day, the 25th of September 1513, mankind has known of the last and hitherto undiscovered ocean on earth.
