The stone ruins of the original city, Old Panama, or Panama Viejo, still stood several miles down the bay. The site had been abandoned after the city was sacked and burned by the pirate Morgan in 1671, and the present Panama, a walled city, was begun three years later, at the head of the bay, on a narrow tongue of volcanic rock with water on three sides. “Panama is a very miserable old town . . . fast crumbling to pieces,” an American sea captain noted in his journal, at the start of the gold rush, having brought the California, the first of the San Francisco steamers, around the Horn. “The
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