The original city of Panama had been founded in 1519, or just six years after Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific, and by an extraordinarily treacherous individual, Pedro Arias de Ávila, usually referred to as Pedrarias, who had been governor of Castilla del Oro, as the Central American isthmus was known, and who, to solidify his power, had Balboa beheaded on a trumped-up charge of treason.
