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It is a good harbour for all winds, and offers every convenience for the careening of vessels. The surveyor thought it in every way a superior harbour. "Neither," he writes, "will so many die there as there daily doe in Nombre de Dios." By the middle of the seventeenth century the ruins of the old town were barely discernible; but all traces of them have long since disappeared.
Immediately on landing, the brothers were informed that the president had already left the place; on which they went to the house of Martin Ruiz de Marchena, treasurer of the province, where they took possession of the money in the royal coffers, amounting to 400,000 pesos in base silver, which had been left there by the president in consequence of not having sufficient means of transporting it to Nombre de Dios along with the rest.
The Lion remained at sea for a few days, when she captured a frigate laden with "maize, hens, and pompions from Tolu." She had the Scrivano of Tolu aboard her, with eleven men and one woman. From these they learned that the fleet was certainly at Nombre de Dios, as the Indians had informed them.
Pushing forward, therefore, he crossed the rugged Isthmus, and, after a painful march, arrived in safety at Nombre de Dios. The event justified his apprehensions. He had been gone but three days, when a ruffian horde, after murdering the bishop of Guatemala, broke into Panama with the design of inflicting the same fate on the president, and of seizing the booty.
Who first of all Britons helped to humble the pride of the Spaniard at Rio de la Hacha and Nombre, and first of all sailed upon those South Seas, which shall be hereafter, by God's grace, as free to English keels as is the bay outside.
He thus usurped supreme and absolute authority, paying not the smallest regard to the laws, or even to the external forms of justice. The licentiate Vaca de Castro, who was at Panama when Bachicao arrived, fled immediately across the isthmus to Nombre de Dios on the Atlantic, where he embarked accompanied by Diego Alvarez de Cueto and Jerom Zurbano.
On Wednesday the ninth of November we sailed from Porto Bello eight leagues to the eastwards, but were driven back four leagues next day by stress of weather, and put in among some islands near the continent where the town of Nombre de Dios now stands; and because all these small islands were full of grain, the admiral called this place Puerto de Bastimentos, or Port of Provisions.
The Spanish way, as we have seen, was overland from Nombre de Dios to Panama, more or less along the line of the modern Panama Canal. In the end Drake got away quietly enough, on the 15th of November, 1577. The court and country were in great excitement over the conspiracy between the Spaniards and Mary Queen of Scots, now a prisoner of nine years' standing. Drake's flotilla seems absurdly small.
No sooner was the last Spaniard out of the ship, than the men scattered to look for plunder. Ned was standing on the poop, watching the boats rowing away, and thinking to himself that, so crowded were they, if a breeze were to spring up there would not be much chance of their reaching Nombre de Dios.
Yet it struck George as somewhat strange that an air of such absolute security should seem to pervade the port; for things had been said during his visit to San Juan de Ulua which must have caused the authorities there to more than suspect the intention of the Englishmen to descend upon Nombre; and there had been time enough for a fast dispatch boat to make the voyage from the one city to the other, warning Nombre to be on the alert.
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