-Vasco Nunez de Balboa (1475-1519):
Spanish sailor and conqueror, the discoverer of the Pacific Ocean. He was born in the frontier town of Jerez de los Caballeros (Badajoz). He embarked in 1500 for the New World in the expedition of Rodrigo de Bastidas, who explored the Caribbean coast from Cabo de la Vela in the Guajira peninsula to the Gulf of Darien. On his return in 1502 he passed Jamaica and settled in the Spanish, in the village of Salvatierra, where he lived for several years without any economic success and loaded with debt. In 1510 he embarked as a stowaway on one of the ships of the expedition that Martin Fernandez de Enciso proposed aid to reach its partner Alonso de Ojeda, in Marbella, on the Colombian coast of Uraba. Upon arrival, Enciso, a proposal from Balboa, the site moved to Darien in Panama coast. Here they founded in 1510 the first permanent settlement that lasted in America, the municipality of Santa María la Antigua del Darién, where the colonists deposed Enciso and elected a council. Diego de Nicuesa, governor of Veragua, future Castilla del Oro, considered the settlement an intrusion on their territory and decided to punish the colonists. Balboa defeated and thus not only able to win the sympathy of the settlers but also got in December of the same year, Viceroy Diego Colón, the highest authority in America, will appoint his lieutenant in Darien. The king, meanwhile, made him the December 23, 1511 Captain and acting governor of Darien.
The Amerigo Vespucci
is a training ship of the Italian Navy of Italy, built in 1930. It was designed by Francesco Rotundi, Lt. Col. Navale Genius. The October 15, 1931, in the port of Genoa, received the battle flag in the hands of its first commander, Augusto Radicati di Marmorito.
Its task was to accompany the sailboat Cristoforo Colombo in the work of training until the end of the Second World War.
Ferdinand Magellan
In 1505, when Ferdinand Magellan was in his mid-20s, he joined a Portuguese fleet that was sailing to East Africa. By 1509, he found himself at the Battle of Diu, in which the Portuguese destroyed Egyptian ships in the Arabian Sea. Two years later, he explored Malacca, located in present-day Malaysia, and participated in the conquest of Malacca's port. It was there that he acquired a native servant he named Enrique. It is possible that Magellan sailed as far as the Moluccas, islands in Indonesia, then called the Spice Islands. The Moluccas were the original source of some of the world's most valuable spices, including cloves and nutmeg. The conquest of spice-rich countries was, as a result, a source of much European competition.
Juan Sebastián Elcano
Spanish navigator who completed the first circumnavigation of the world (Getaria, Guipúzcoa, 1476 - Pacific Ocean, 1526). The first news we have of him show him as a Basque sailor with ample nautical knowledge, who participated in the expedition of Cisneros to Algiers (1509) and the Italian campaigns of the Great Captain.
In 1518 he met in Seville to the Portuguese navigator Magellan, who was preparing an expedition to the service of Spain to find the route to the Indies by sailing west. Elcano enlisted in the expedition, which departed from Sanlucar de Barrameda in 1519 and explored the Rio de la Plata and Patagonia; there Elcano helped quell a first riot, but participated in a second attempt against Magallanes, who spared his life, is not to consider him or find him guilty essential to continue the journey (1520).
