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There is no doubt that Columbus sailed into this bay, where to-day is the Atlantic entrance of the Panama Canal, on his fourth and last voyage, in 1502; or that he was the first white man to enter it. But there is no historical foundation for the generally accepted story that Columbus gave this body of water the name of "Naos" or the "Bay of Ships." Centuries afterwards, the bay was called by the Spaniards "Naos," and by the English and Americans "Navy Bay," a name gradually displaced during the last fifty years by the present one of "Limon (lemon) Bay." The earliest map on which the name "Naos" appears is Tirion's, in the middle of the eighteenth century. All the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century maps that give this bay any distinctive name, call it "Puerto de las Galeras," or "Port of the Galleys." Neither Ferdinand Columbus nor any other contemporary historian of the fourth voyage mentions it at all.

The name of this village is popularly supposed to be derived from the Spanish verb "matar," to kill, and "Chino," or Chinese; and to refer to the large number of coolies that died of fever or committed suicide there, during the construction of the Panama Railroad. But the same village with the same name is marked on the seventeenth-century maps Rh