There is an old saying that history is written by the winners. That isn’t really true. Academic historians from Western countries do almost the opposite. They specifically privilege race, gender, or class groups who they feel didn’t win, and tell history from that perspective. I prefer to try to learn what I can from history in a broader sense, which demands attempting to understand history from as many angles as I can – it requires at least attempting to look at events objectively, even if a completely neutral interpretation is technically impossible. It is a useful endeavor. In any case, most history – especially public history – has a teller – an institutionally approved or state approved voice in charge of relating events. In the United States, we are used to that voice being quite self-critical. National parks go above and beyond to include racial minorities, women, and others in the historical narrative. As I have related in my articles about museums in Vietnam, India, and even the Panama Canal Museum I visited earlier on this trip, this is usually not the case outside of the traditions emanating from Western Europe. They tend to give a highly state-centric interpetation.

On Thursday, I visited Old Panama. This original version of Panama City was the first European settlement on the Pacific coast of the Americas. It was established in 1519. Old Panama served as the area’s capital. It evolved into a Spanish settlement of a few thousand people, with the requisite multitude of buildings built by and for the different Catholic religious orders of the day. The stone buildings in Panama Viejo were mostly built in the early to mid 17th century, after the older wooden structures had been destroyed by fire a few times. This site was abandoned, however, when it was destroyed by “pirates,” the Panamanian state version says, in 1671.

One nation’s pirate is often another nation’s military hero. Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana accused the Texian settlers of being pirates as an excuse to execute every one he captured. Old Panama was destroyed by a company led by Henry Morgan, an English privateer. There is an important difference between pirates and privateers. Pirates were maritime criminals who sailed the seas, raiding and capturing ships, cargo, and sometimes slaves for their own personal gain.

Maintaining a navy during the Age of Sail was a monumentally expensive tasks. The wooden ships required specialized material, enormous amounts of skilled labor to create, and only lasted on average perhaps thirty years. Naval arms races necessary to protect maritime trade, colonial possessions, and the treasures extracted from them required levels of expenditure that many countries just couldn’t afford. From the early modern period all the way into the 19th century, countries that could not afford to fund or fully fund navies often resorted to a way of essentially subcontracting naval power. Private citizens who already owned ships built for other purposes were granted letters of marque, which was kind of like having a “pirate’s license,” and were what made you a privateer rather than a pirate. Privateers were allowed to keep most or all of what they could capture of enemy nations’ ships and resources. The letters of marque gave these private operators official state status, and made them prisoners of war rather than international criminals if they happened to be caught. It also required them to operate by some legal constraints.

Certainly, all of that meant little to the victims of these state sponsored raiders, but it meant a lot to the nations they served, and to the privateers and their crews if them happened to be captured or otherwise unsuccessful in their endeavors. It seems a bit disingenuous to call Henry Morgan a pirate when he, Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and so many others were actually acting on behalf of Spain’s enemy, England. I suppose at the time, the Spanish crown considered England and all of her royal family illegitimate, and considered the whole country a nation of pirates. But that is certainly a one-sided view.

So Old Panama was attacked by Henry Morgan and his group of privateers who had traveled overland from the Caribbean side in 1671. The Spanish governor of Panama, Don Juan Perez de Guzman y Gonzaga had Morgan outgunned and outnumbered, but completely mismanaged his defense. He was outmaneuvered, and his undisciplined troops became confused, thinking the privateers were retreating and mistakenly pursued them, pressuring Guzman to commit the rest of his troops to a disastrous counter attack. Once it was apparent the battle was lost, Guzman assumed the English were there to capture and occupy Panama rather than just raiding, though Morgan had no such intent. Guzman, then, had his own town burned to prevent the English from using it as a base. The fire ignited Panama’s gun powder stores creating a big explosion, doing even more damage.

In the aftermath, then, Panama’s capital was moved down the coast to the present site of Casco Viejo, which also has many very nice surviving colonial buildings. Panama Viejo is an archaeological site, with ruins to explore. Because the Spanish put such a heavy emphasis on Catholicism, all of the best preserved buildings were churches, cathedrals, or other buildings associated with religious orders such as hospitals and convents. Some ruins of residences survived, but even those were tied to Catholicism, with the crown often requiring that rents from certain buildings be used to support construction or repair of churches or other religions edifices.

The stone ruins are impressive to explore, and the signage does a pretty good job of explaining what has been learned through archaeology about each building. By far the most impressive structure is a seventy foot tall tower that has been preserved. It was part of the original cathedral, but was also used as a lookout. It is an iconic piece of Panama architecture, and appears on many national and corporate logos, postcards, and pieces of currency. It is a striking enough building that it’s hard not to include it in just about every picture of the area. Since the area is overseen by UNESCO, measures have been taken to historically preserve it in a responsible way. The building has a modern roof, but this needed to be essentially invisible, so it is small, and routes rain water down the center of the tower through pipes in order to prevent erosion without impacting the aesthetic appearance of the tower. They did a very nice job with this. The interior staircase is also hidden inside of the tower, and leads to platforms built about where the old interior floors of each level were so you can climb it. The views are very nice, and this is definitely the highlight of the visit. There is also a small museum with some interesting information about what the archaeological site helped us learn about 16th and 17th century life in a Spanish colonial city.

(Continued)