His men, gazing eagerly upward, saw him rise and beckon them, while with his other hand he pointed wildly westward. With springing steps they rushed to his side, and joined in his delight and his thanks to God as the marvellous spectacle met their eyes. Heaps of stones were piled up to show that they had taken possession of this spot for his sovereign, and as they went down the farther slope they carved on many trees the name of King Ferdinand of Castile, as the lord of this new land.
Let us repeat here the closing lines of Keats’s famous sonnet to Homer, in which a great poet has admirably depicted the scene, though, by a strange error, giving the credit to Cortez instead of Balboa:
"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
Twelve men were sent on in advance to seek the easiest and shortest path to the sea, one of them a man destined to become still more famous than Balboa,—Francisco Pizarro, the future conqueror of Peru. Reaching the shore, they found on it two stranded canoes, into which stepped two of the men, Blaze de Atienza and Alousa Martine, calling on their comrades to witness that they were the first to embark on that sea.
For three days the remaining men waited advices from their pioneers, and then followed the guides sent them to the shore, Balboa, armed with his sword and buckler, rushing into the water to his middle, and claiming possession of that vast sea and all its shores in the name of his king, for whom he pledged himself to defend it against all comers.
Such was the discovery of the great South Sea, as Balboa named it, the Pacific Ocean, as Magellan soon after called it. The people of the coast told the Spaniards of a rich and mighty kingdom that lay to the south, and whose people had tame animals to carry their burdens. The form of these they drew on the sand, their long necks convincing Balboa that they were camels, and that the land indicated must be Asia. They really represented the llama of Peru, an animal resembling the camel in form.
After remaining for some time on the coast, gathering all the information he could obtain, Balboa led his travel-worn men back to Darien, resolved to return with a stronger force next year and seek that distant land of gold. But this exploit was left for Pizarro, one of the ablest and bravest of the men who took part in this pioneer expedition.