He was with Balboa in his famous march across the mountains to the Pacific, which no European eyes had hitherto beheld; and shared with him the joy of that discovery, which Keats wrongly ascribes to Cortes, when the hardy band, first beholding the unknown ocean outspread before them--
"Looked at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
He remained with Balboa on the isthmus until the death of that valiant commander, when he united his fortunes with those of the governor, Pedrarias, and headed various expeditions along the Pacific coast and to the islands beyond, in quest of pearls and gold. He was occupied in this way, or in cultivating with the aid of Indian slaves a malarious tract of land he had acquired near Panama, when a new career invited him.
Rumors of a rich empire far to the south, where gold was as common with the natives as iron was with the Spaniards, had long inflamed the imaginations of the colonists; then news came of the prodigious exploits of Cortes in Mexico. Pizarro burned to emulate his kinsman. Having formed a partnership with Diego de Almagro, a soldier of experience, and Hernando de Luque, a priest supplied with worldly means, he secured an old vessel that had been designed by Balboa for a similar expedition, refitted it with Luque's money, and with a hundred adventurers sailed from the port of Panama in November, 1524; leaving Almagro to follow in a smaller vessel.
Pizarro was then more than fifty years old, but still in possession of all his masterful qualities. And he had need of all, amid the perils of sea and land, the tempests, swamps, battles, sickness, and famine, which rendered his first voyage down the coast a deplorable failure. Almagro met with no better success. Both returned to the isthmus buffeted, baffled, humiliated, but too stout of heart to be cast down. They brought back but little gold, but with that little they had gathered evidence of the indubitable existence of the opulent empire they sought.
The governor was hugely dissatisfied with the results of the expedition, of which he had expected to share some of the profits; and his consent to another could hardly have been obtained, but for the persuasive eloquence of the priest, backed by the offer of a sum in ready cash. For a thousand pesos de oro Pedrarias gave his consent, and signed away his right to the spoils of an empire.