Page:Vol 3 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/578

558 as eggs. Enciso was also informed that Zenu was the burial-place for all the surrounding tribes, and that their sepulchres contained many of the most precious ornaments which had been buried with their dead. The hostilities of the natives prevented their penetrating the country, but the reputed wealth of the province, the ornamented bones of the sepulchres, and the fishing for gold with nets, long afterward excited the cupidity of the Spaniards, and led to subsequent disastrous expeditions. And when the same astute bachiller drove the cacique Cemano from his village on the western shore of the gulf of Darien, he found secreted in the houses and deposited in caverns along the banks of the River Atrato golden ornaments, bracelets, breastplates and anklets, to the value of ten thousand pesos.

Vasco Nuñez de Balboa in 1511 sacked the villages of Ponca, and found "certaine poundes weight of gold, graven and wrought into sundry ouches." The Pacific Ocean, as we well know, was first called by the Spaniards the South Sea. The circumstances which led to this appellation are these: In the year 1512 Balboa, then governor of Antigua, a Spanish settlement on the gulf of Darien, with eighty men, visited an Indian province some thirty leagues to the westward. The province was governed by a cacique named Comagre, whose eldest son, called Panciaco, was remarkable for his intelligence and lofty bearing. In order to appease their avarice, Panciaco presented the Spaniards with a large sum of gold, in the division of which they fell to quarrelling. Panciaco, overcome by disgust, stepped forward, and struck the scales a blow which sent the glittering gold flying in every direction. He then told them that it was unnecessary to fall out for such a trifle, for if they would cross those mountains, pointing toward the south, they would discover a mighty sea, where was gold in abundance. A sea