Spaniard, Alvaro de Saavedra, a kinsman of Cortés’, who supposedly “meant to have opened the land of Castilla del Oro . . . from sea to sea.” There had never been any serious possibility of a canal during Spanish times. “There are mountains, but there are also hands” was the lovely declaration of a Spanish priest of the sixteenth century, “and for a king of Castile, few things are impossible.” The priest, Francisco López de Gómara, was the first to raise the issue of location, naming Panama, Nicaragua, Darien, and Tehuantepec as the best choices, in a book published in 1552.
