Continued from the previous post of a reader who seems to delight in attacking our website, so we are taking a few articles to respond:
• Comment: About five kilometers inland from the island of Molatupu in the autonomous Guna Yala Comarca in the San Blas Islands of Panama is a broad plain once called Acla (Place of Bones) in the extinct Cueva indigenous language.
Guna Yala, formerly known as San Blas, is a comarca indígena in northeast Panama. Guna Yala is home to the indigenous people known as the Gunas
Response: Gaigirgordub, called El Porvenir until July 1, 2016, is the capital of the Panamanian comarca of Guna Yala. The settlement is located on a small island and contains a landing strip, a museum, a hotel, government offices, and an artisans' cooperative—there is also a small beach. In fact, threre are some 1600 islands within the range of Panama.
Culebra Cut (Gaillard Cut): Passage across the region and through Gaillard Cut was made possible by damming the Chagres River at Gatun. It created the massive Gatun Lake wich manages the differences in the river’s rate of flow. Note the closeness of the cuts to the Panama Canal
Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa helped establish the first stable settlement on the South American continent at Darién, on the coast of the Isthmus of Panama. Balboa (which means “beautiful valley,”) was born in 1475 in Jerez de los Caballeros, a town in the Spanish region of impoverished Extremadura—an area which also produced other famous New World conquistadors, including Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto and Francisco de Orellana.
Balboa’s father was considered a nobleman, he was a descendant of the Lord mason of the castle of Balboa, on the borders of León and Galicia; however, the family was not wealthy, so Balboa tried farming and fell heavily into debt. Fleeing the consequence of the debt, he sought, like many of his class, to seek his fortune in the New World and stowed away on a ship which landed in Colombia.
He immediately began exploring the coast of Colombia (along the Caribbean Sea), and wrangled a sponsored by the Spanish crown. King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile sponsored Balboa during his exploration of the New World.
Hearing of gold and other riches in a wealthy Empire to the south (evidently in Peru), Balboa decided to cross Panama to get to what the Spaniards called the Mar del Sur (South Sea) and what Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in the employ of Spain called this body of water pacific, due to the calmness of the water at the time ('pacific' means peaceful).
Magellan began his journey across the Atlantic Ocean to seek a western route to the Spice Islands via South America. After long months of battling the Atlantic Ocean, he finally entered the Pacific and found it so calm and tranquil that he named these waters pacific ('pacific' means peaceful).
Covering approximately 59 million square miles and containing more than half of the free water on Earth, the Pacific is by far the largest of the world's ocean basins—all of the world's continents could fit into the Pacific basin.
The Culebra Cut. An artificial valley along the Pacific Ocean to Gatun Lake and eventually the Caribbean Sea. Water level here is 85 feet above sea level, with Contractor's Hill on the left and Gold Hill on the right
In September 1513, leaving from Darién, Balboa led an expedition of some 190 Spaniards and hundreds of Indians southward across the Isthmus of Panama. He hoped that if he was successful, he would win the favor of Ferdinand, the king of Spain, and therefore gain his sponsorship.
They marched across the isthmus through dense jungles, rivers, and swamps. Finally, on September 27, 1513, after ascending a hill by himself, Balboa sighted the South Sea, or the Pacific Ocean. The journey covered 45 miles, and took three weeks to cross through the thick jungles of Panama. After hacking his way through the jungle Balboa was still not able to see the Pacific Ocean until he climbed a mountain peak—becoming the first European to see the eastern shore of the great South Sea (the Pacific Ocean), on September 13, 1513. It was several days later that he actually reached what he later called San Miguel.
While he is often erroneously credited for naming this sea, it was actually named by Magellan during his circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan named it as such because its waters seemed so calm in comparison with the Atlantic Ocean that he named it Pacifica (meaning peaceful).
Balboa claimed the Pacific Ocean and all its shores for Spain, which delighted the Crown—an act which brought fame to Balboa as well as a sponsorship of the Spanish king.
This one act opened the way for Spanish exploration and conquest along the western coast of South America, giving Spain a solid foothold in this region of the world. It was through Balboa's conquest of this region and the information he gained through exploration that conquests further south could be made, such as that over the Incas.
Some days later he reached the shore of the Pacific at the Gulf of San Miguel and took possession of the South Sea and the adjacent lands for Spain.
At this time, Acla was a Spanish colonial town founded by order of the Governor of Castilla de Oro, Pedrarias Dávila, in 1515. It was located on the central coastline of the modern-day Kuna Yala, to the northeast of Panamá.
The ground was strewn with bones
The town's name means “bones of men” in Acla, the indigenous language. The name comes from the large number of bones strewn about the nearby plains, which supposedly came from the conflicts between two indigenous brothers who fought to become chiefs of the region.
The town was established principally to be the Caribbean anchor of a trail that was planned to lead to a future town on the Gulf of San Miguel on the Pacific Ocean, which had recently been discovered by Balboa. This town is mostly famous because it was the site of the judgement and decapitation of Balboa in 1519 at the hands of Governor Dávila.
Due to the unhealthy nature of the climate and terrain surrounding the town, and especially after the founding of Panama City and Nombre de Dios a few months later, it was slowly abandoned until it was left totally deserted in 1532.
Comment: In the north end of the plain is a 500 feet tall hill, which is small compared to the nearby mountains. Beneath the soil and occasionally on the soil surface, thousands of human bones extend for as far as the eye can see. Five-hundred years ago, Balboa passed across this plain and wrote of these bones during his expedition to the Pacific side of the isthmus. He recorded that skulls and other parts of human skeletons filled the plain. The Cueva tribesmen with his expedition…explained that the name "Acla" comes from the large number of human bones strewn about the plain, which supposedly came from a time when two mighty nations destroyed each other in a great battle of mutual annihilation.
None of these hills match what Mormon wrote about the hill Cumorah where the final battle took place
Response: First, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, there are an estimated100,000 missing persons, people’s whose bodies have not been found. Second, no doubt there are hundreds of such incidents where nations, that is paranoid and narcissistic leaders of two groups of people who fought to the death of everyone—we see two of these in the Book of Mormon (“Over 100,000 missing people is a global crisis, says Red Cross,” India Today Magazine, New Delhi, 2018,
The issue is that the information should match Mormon’s description of the events, which the battles at Acla simply do not.
(See the next post for more information about this battle Mormon mentions and the lack of connection to the hill at San Blas)
Two brothers fighting for the kingdom. Sounds more like one of the Jaredite wars 'in the land northward. Might not be the Corincumr final battle but one of many.
ReplyDeleteBones exposed to the elements and on fertile ground can take about 20 years to decompose. In arid climates, it can take a few hundred years for bones that are exposed to the dryer elements to decompose (particularly in sand).
ReplyDeleteMummification can preserve bones much longer. Fossilization can preserve bones indefinitely but does not happen under normal circumstances.
Any bones that Balboa walked over in the 1530's would not have been there since 400AD, and especially not from BC times. Panama has a hot, humid, tropical climate. Bones lying there in open air for long periods would decay. Balboa likely witnessed the remains of a relatively recent event of mass carnage.
There's no reason to believe that the bones of any Book of Mormon war would still be lying on the ground, exposed to the elements.
Thanks for the details on Panama.
ReplyDeleteKnowing the effects of tropical rain forest soils on bones, it is unlikely that the bones Balboa saw on his trek to the Pacific in 1513 were very old. First, human skeletal remains would not have lasted long in jungle conditions. They would have been destroyed by termites and the hot acidic soil environment within a few decades.
In 1966 to 1968, two sets of LDS missionaries served on the island of Mulatupu (then called Molatupo) and the adjacent mainland town of Sasardí. Elders Lynn Roundy and Floyd Baum were there for a very short time before Roundy insulted the village Saila, and he kicked them off the island. They never got to the place of bones. Roundy and Baum were replaced about a year later by Elders Frank Sandoval and Norece Hatch. Sandoval and Hatch reported to Central American Mission President Teddy E. Brewerton that about a four hour trek west into the interior from Mulatupu with Guna (then called Cuna) farmers, took them to to a place where land clearing and tillage almost immediately turned up several large human bones including a pelvis. The farmers reinterred the bones and immediately left and marked the area so no one would disturb the area again. The Gunas apparently did not have a name for the place. The report is probably in the Church records of the Central Amercan Mission.
It also is unlikely that the bones Sandoval and Hatch saw with the Guna farmers were very old. It is practically impossible that they had remained there since the time of Balboa. Their shallow burial in the forest soil suggests that they cannot have been there for more than couple of hundred years. Termites and acidic soil would have reduced them to a crumbly masses. These conditions are hampering the Vietnamese government's efforts to identify the remains of war dead after more than 60 years in the jungle. Bones of U.S. soldiers recovered in the philippines after 80 years are in bad condition. But the larger, denser bones of the skull, legs and pelvis are in good enough condition to be identified from military records.
Balboa started his 23-day trek across the isthmus on September 6, 1513, from the town of Careta, sometimes called in his record Acla, meaning "bones of men". The town was the capital of the indigenous Cueva kingdom ruled by the Cacique Chima, whom Balboa also called Careta when referring both to the man and the town. Careta actually was several hundred meters inland from the coast. The Spaniards located their enclave, which they fortified and called Acla, on the coast within walking distance of Careta. And the town of Sasardí on the mainland, across from the island of Mulatupu, is built exactly over the top of the old Spanish colonial enclave of Acla (Mena-Garcia & Cachero-Vinuesa 2019, p. 513). The Spanish town of Acla was abandoned in 1532 and occupied by the Guna less than 25 years later. The place the Cueva people called Acla (bones of men) was about 1.5 leagues (6.3 km) to the west of Sasardí.
REFERENCE
Mena-García, C. and M. Cachero-Vinuesa. 2019. Es Un Mundo Pequeno: Movilidad y Redes Empresariales en el Proceso de Colonizacion Americana. Revista de Historia Economica - Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 37(3):507-537. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/revista-de-historia-economica-journal-of-iberian-and-latin-american-economic-history/article/es-un-mundo-pequeno-movilidad-y-redes-empresariales-en-el-proceso-de-colonizacion-americana/D006DA53173FF3708AEF7B4B20E9F287)