Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
cargo to the highest navigable point on the Río Chagres, where it was transferred to dugout
canoes to be carried downriver to the coast.
The flow of wealth attracted the attention of Spain's enemies, and the Caribbean coast was
under constant threat from European
pirates
, the first of whom, the Englishman
Francis
Drake
, successfully raided Nombre de Dios. He received support from the
cimarrones
, com-
munities of escaped African slaves that lived in the jungle and often collaborated with pirates
in ambushing mule trains and attacking their former masters. In the most daring assault, in
1671, Welshman
Henry Morgan
and his men sailed up the Río Chagres, having destroyed
the fortress at San Lorenzo at the river mouth en route, and crossed the isthmus to ransack
Panama City. Though Morgan is generally blamed for the fire that then engulfed the place,
it was more likely due to the detonation of the city's gunpowder supplies ordered by the de-
feated Spanish governor.
The city was rebuilt in 1673 on today's Casco Viejo behind defences so formidable that it
was never taken again, but the raiding of the Caribbean coast continued, until finally in 1746
Spain rerouted the treasure fleet around Cape Horn. With the route across the isthmus all but
abandoned, Panama slipped into decline.
Independence from Spain
Independence movements in South America, headed by
Simón Bolívar
and
José de San
Martin
, were gathering pace by the turn of the nineteenth century. Though the isthmus ini-
tially remained fairly detached from the process, it was not devoid of nationalist sentiment.
On November 10, 1821, the tiny town of La Villa de Los Santos unilaterally declared that
it would no longer be governed by Spain, in what was known as the
Primer Grito de
Independencia
(First Cry for Independence); the rest of the country soon followed suit, de-
claring
independence
on November 30. It retained the name of Panama, as a department of
what historians have subsequently termed “Gran Colombia”; with the secession of Ecuador
and Venezuela it quickly became Nueva Granada. Almost immediately conflicts emerged
between the merchants of Panama City, eager to trade freely with the world, and the distant,
protectionist governments in Bogotá, leading to numerous, if half-hearted, attempts at sep-
aration. As the century wore on, US influence asserted itself, most notably in the 1846
Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty
, which granted the US government rights to build a railroad
across the isthmus and, significantly, accorded them power to intervene militarily to suppress
any secessionist uprisings against the New Granadan government - a theoretically mutually
beneficial accord that was to seriously backfire on Bogotá.
The
discovery of gold
in California in 1849 sparked an explosion in traffic across the isth-
mus. Travel from the US east coast to California via Panama - by boat, overland on foot,
and then by boat again - was far less arduous than the trek across North America, and thou-
sands of “Forty-niners” passed through on their way to the goldfields. In 1850 a US company
