Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SPANISH IN PANAMA HISTORIANS have noted that certain members of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms have played a vital part in the discovery and colonization of the Americas. Columbus, the master spirit of his age, had the noble, imaginative conception of the earth's rotundity which he wished to demonstrate to mankind, but his immediate impulse was to find the shortest passage to the East Indies, where the spices so much prized on the dining tables of Europe could be obtained and brought back more expeditiously than by the long trip around the Cape of Good Hope. To the North, more than a hundred years later, tobacco was the main product that held the English colonists to Virginia in the face of hostile savages and exile from home. Smoking spread over Europe like an epidemic, making the rewards from the cultivation of the weed immediate and profitable from the start. The members of the mineral kingdom which held the venturesome mariners to their new found lands, despite every discouragement, human and natural, were gold and silver. No sooner had these precious metals crossed the European vision than their first love, spices, faded completely out of the imagination.Thenceforth, the Spaniards and the Portuguese ransacked an isthmus, a continent, and the islands of the sea with frenzied and appalling barbarities and with splendid success. Thus spices, tobacco, gold, and silver have been the unheroic causes of epochal movements in the human family. Columbus kept his vision above the sordid greed for gold to the last. On the fourth attempt he made to find a passage to the East Indies he cruised along the Isthmian coast from September, 1502, to January, 1503, entering and naming the harbor of Porto Bello on November 2, 1502, and visiting Nombre de Dios o...