How many people does it take to move 190 Spaniards across an isthmus? That's the figure that stuck with me — 190 — and it only counts the men whose names got written down. So I went and looked for the rest.
Roughly a thousand porters, guides and carriers came from the Careta and Ponca chiefdoms, walking ahead and alongside. Dogs as well, Balboa's Leoncico among them. They set out in early September 1513 and were about twenty-five days on the crossing, which over sixty-odd kilometres in a straight line works out at a crawl — swamp, river, hill, and everything on somebody's back. The direction came from local people in the first place. The chronicles have a young man of Comagre's household telling them plainly that there was another sea to the south, and roughly how to reach it.
So the list reads: about 190 Spaniards, about 1,000 Indigenous men who knew the ground, dogs, and no map worth the name. Balboa went up the last of the ridge on his own, which is the bit everyone kept. I'd rather have the names of the men who cut the path to the foot of it, and nobody took those down.
Twenty-five days for sixty-odd kilometres sounds about right once you've been in that kind of forest, Inés. It isn't the hills, it's the mangrove mud and the insects — botflies lay on a mosquito and let the mosquito deliver them to you. The ridge is the easy hour of the whole walk.
About sixty-five kilometres across at that point, and twenty-five days on foot. Four centuries later a ship does the same crossing in a day through the locks, with a pilot aboard from end to end. The porters had no pilot house and carried the lot.