The little Spanish vessel making its way from Uraba to Panama in 1510 had a
stowaway on board who was fleeing his creditors. Unfortunately for the co-owner
of the ship, a conquistador named Martin Fernandez de Enciso, the stowaway
convinced all on board that he was so capable a seaman that he should be put in
charge of the ship's company. For when Enciso got to Darien (in what is today
Panama) and established a colony there, the stowaway - Vasco Nunez de Balboa -
deposed him and sent him back to Spain as a prisoner. A few years later, in
1513, Balboa marched across the isthmus and claimed for the Spanish crown el Mar
del Sur the 'south Sea," which later became known as the Pacific Ocean.
But Balboa was not the first to sight the Pacific, nor was Hernando Cortez, so
credited by Keats in his poem On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. The first
European to see the Pacific was the Portuguese navigator Antoine de Abreu, who
sailed there via the Indian Ocean in 1511.