. . . Like stout Cortez when...

. . . Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific--and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise -- Silent, upon a peak in Darien. --John Keats, 1816

I used to be an angry man.

Even 300 years after my head was cut off, my ghost--which still haunts the rain forest of Panama--bellowed in derisive rage, shaking down leaves and terrifying monkeys, when that Englishman wrote his poem.

Cortez indeed! It was I, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, who discovered the Pacific. I led 190 Spaniards and hundreds of Indian bearers across that accursed isthmus, hacking our way through the jungle and over the mountains, bedeviled by heat and snakes and insects and fevers, until we sighted the ocean in September, 1513.

A few years later, I had a fleet of ships built on the Caribbean shore and hauled over the isthmus in pieces. The heavy burdens ground men into the mud. But I was in a fury of haste--itching, like Pizarro, to explore the lands to the south where immense treasure was said to await us.

I hated the rain forest, just as I hated any human being who tried to stand in my way.

When the colonial governor hindered my freedom of action, I tried to depose him, and he, in turn, had me seized and executed in 1519.

Among the charges brought against me at that farce of a trial was that I had mistreated the Indians.

It has taken me most of the centuries since--and this must be why my spirit was condemned to remain here--to realize that this charge, however cynically motivated, was true. I did mistreat the Indians. I tortured them to give up their gold. I had our attack dogs tear them to pieces. I saw them only as obstacles--not as people who, like myself, had a right to live.

So now that you norteamericanos are about to discuss “The Disappearing Rain Forests of Costa Rica and Panama” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Santa Monica Public Library, 1343 6th St., with a free lecture and slide show by Deborah Horton (information: (310) 458-2295), let me urge a little humility.

*

Have anger and greed vanished from the world? I think not. In the 19th Century, you treated Indians hardly better than I did. And when you built the Panama Canal for your commercial and military advantage--motives I know well--and your workers were floundering in the swamps and dying of yellow fever, didn’t you still look on nature as an enemy?

True, the rain forest must be saved. I know that now. All I ask is that you consider the shift in consciousness required.

It’s even harder, perhaps, than learning to see other races as human (something you still have trouble with, by the way). It’s necessary to break habits of mind formed through the ages when nature truly did seem powerful, inexhaustible--habits that became obsolete, in historical terms, a mere eye blink ago. A soul-shaking change.

Like climbing a mountain and seeing a whole new ocean.