The Crossing of Panama

Legend has it that Rodrigo de Bastidas, nobleman and direct descendant of the king, was awoken at night by the shiniest of lights in his native Triana. There stood in dream Penelope, his beautiful angel mother pointing west with three fingers surrounded by a luminous aura. Bastidas, scared that it might be a warning of death as punishment for the dissolute life he conducted, fasted ten days and ten nights wondering alone through the torrid Sevillan summer. But upon arriving in the port town of Cádiz he suddenly realized what his defunct parent had meant. There sailed a ship west, headed for what was then, and what is now known as the New World. Rodrigo de Bastidas, was going to be the man who would discover and explore and exploit Panama–the unfathomable isthmus limb of Central America. [...] To this day, adventurers go in search of his "path of gold"; a fabled trail immersed deep in the jungle paved entirely with gold that the very Bastidas had ordered built before the mutiny that took his life. [...] His intense existence never seemed to walk astray from that apparition on a summer night. Many facts remain unknown, but perhaps the most haunting is the way with which the number three recurred in his deeds as a joust between by God and the Devil. Only upon death did he compel his troubled soul to come to terms with his destiny.

Reads his elegy in the Caribbean island of Cuba:

Three were the cities that bore my name,
and each one sat on a bed of gold.

Three were my ships by the shipworm sunk,
three times mutiny, scurvy and malady

Three were my poor mother's blessings
Plagued three times by the Devil's claws

But as long as my gold trail under the jungle rests,
my condemned soul will torment he who charts the uncharted.

written for Z.D.