Molten Sulfur Blog

In the 1500s, long before the Isthmus of Panama was crossed by a canal, it was crossed by a road: an awful, terrifying road plagued by pirates and freedom fighters. Yet vast wealth from the Spanish conquests and slave mines of South America flowed along this road. Raiding, defending, or merely traversing a fictional route based on the Spanish road across Panama makes a great RPG adventure.

The Kickstarter for my next full RPG, Ballad Hunters, is still on schedule for March! You can read more about it here! I’m also doing a monthly design diary leading up to the Kickstarter. The first entry, about the game’s super-cool Compass Verse mechanic, is here.

This post is brought to you by beloved Patreon backer Joel Dalenberg. Thanks, Joel—you rock!

In 1531, Spain launched a campaign to subjugate the Inca Empire of western South America. This bloody-handed conquest generated untold revenue, first from plunder, then from taxes, trade, and mining. But all that money (and all those trade goods) bound for the Spanish government and for private citizens in Spain first had to travel from the Pacific coast of South America to Europe.

There were several possible routes, and they all had serious problems. You could sail south around the tip of South America, but it has some of the worst weather on earth. Ships in the 1500s were primitive, fragile, and frequently destroyed when attempting this route. You could sail west across the Pacific and Indian Oceans to the Atlantic, but the journey was long and full of Spanish enemies. Ships often just disappeared. The best way was usually to put your stuff on a mule and truck it overland to the Atlantic Ocean. But land travel was expensive. You wanted to keep the overland leg as short as possible. So your best bet was often to put your stuff on a ship, sail to the Isthmus of Panama, carry everything across the narrow isthmus, and charter a ship on the other side.

Panama was no picnic. It was only 40 miles as the crow flew, but you had to cross high mountains, dense jungle, and (in the rainy season) raging rivers. Panama was full of diseases that tended to kill Europeans, so the colonial outposts remained small. That meant minimal defenses against pirates and raiders.

Efforts to turn the dirt track across the Isthmus into a paved road began in 1525, before the Inca Empire was even attacked. This required vast amounts of labor, which Spain did not have. So the authorities purchased enslaved prisoners from two Nicaraguan kingdoms and put them to work. This incentivized the two Nicaraguan kings (Nicoya and Nicatlnauac) to imprison more people to sell. From 1526 to 1540 (when the road was completed) an estimated 100,000 Nicaraguans were sent to Panama. This greatly depopulated Nicaragua. A 1548 Spanish tribute assessment found a population of about 60,000 people remaining. Enslaved prisoners were cheap in the 1530s, costing about as much as one and a half bushels of corn, so it made economic sense to work the road-builders to death, then replace them.

In the 1500s, there were two main Spanish outposts on the Isthmus of Panama. The town of Panama (modern Panama City) lay on the Pacific side. The town of Nombre de Dios lay on the Caribbean side. In the 1600s, it would be replaced by the new port of Portobelo.

The primary road, the Camino Real between Panama and Nombre de Dios, was paved with cobblestones. In its good sections, it was eight feet wide and built atop a causeway three feet high. In its bad sections, it was three feet wide and abutted a 500-foot drop off the side of a mountain. Bridges crossed the major rivers, but not the stream beds that were dry in the dry season. In the wet season, those flooded, making the road impassable. Some parts of the road were so steep that you had to go on hands and feet. Even the famously sure-footed mules, who carried the actual cargo, struggled on the slick cobblestones. The jungle pressed right up to the edge of the road. In 1540, when the road was complete, the 50-mile journey took four days. By 1700, bad upkeep had doubled that time.

The were a second road: the Camino de Cruces. It started in the town of Panama and ran north over the Continental Divide to the outpost of Cruces (really just a collection of warehouses) on the Chagres River. Goods at Cruces were loaded on barges and floated downstream to the Caribbean, then along the coast to Portobelo/Nombre de Dios. Only low-value cargo was sent by the Camino de Cruces, as the waterborne parts of the trip were vulnerable to pirates. Pirates sailed right up the Chagres as far as Cruces, and also targeted barges making their way along the coast. Fort San Lorenzo was built at the mouth of the Chagres around 1600, but it couldn’t protect you once you left the river, and pirates still destroyed the fort twice.

Then there was the matter of the freedom-fighters. A typical mule train on the Camino Real had 24 trains of 50 mules each, with each mule supervised by an enslaved handler. That meant 1,200 mules and 1,200 enslaved handlers. Both had to be imported. With the Indigenous population reduced (and benefiting from greater Spanish legal protection after 1536), enslaved Africans were brought in instead. Many escaped into the rainforest, where they created hidden and often fortified villages. From their strongholds, these “maroons” waged guerrilla wars against the Spanish. Both roads made tempting targets. When pirates raided Panama, they often teamed up with the maroons for the benefit of both. 

The tightest bond between pirates and maroons was probably the 1572–73 alliance between Captain Francis Drake and Chief Pedro Mandinga. The two worked together on an unsuccessful attack on Nombre de Dios. When that was repelled, Mandinga and 30 other maroons helped Drake and 20 pirates cross the Isthmus’s jungles and mountains undetected to the town of Panama. They attacked a mule train along the Camino Real, but it was only carrying supplies for the garrison at Nombre de Dios. The attack alerted Panama to the presence of Mandinga and Drake, and they had to flee. Back on the Caribbean coast, they teamed up with a French Huguenot pirate crew led by Captain Guillaume le Testu. They snuck through the jungle to attack another mule train. This time, they were successful, though Testu was killed. The soldiers defending the mule train went to Nombre de Dios for reinforcements. Needing to move fast and light to stay ahead of those reinforcements, the allies buried most of their silver on the banks of the Chagres. What they were able to carry, they later divvied up among them. Drake sailed back to Plymouth, but not before giving Mandinga Testu’s sword as a token of goodwill. The sword had previously belonged to King Francis I of France. Even Drake’s departure didn’t set the Spanish at ease. They were convinced he’d left behind troops in a secret maroon castle somewhere in the jungle, waiting for the right moment for a big attack.

I’ve touched on it, but it’s worth noting how lightly defended the isthmus was. Even once castles were built at either end of the road, pirates still repeatedly sacked them. Spain couldn’t afford to properly guard the Camino Real. The empire generated immense revenue, but the cost of defending it was also vast. Much of the empire was actually revenue-negative. Furthermore, Spain was constantly financing European wars of religion through this period. So even though the empire controlled a literal mountain of silver (Cerro Rico/Potosí, Bolivia), it was surprisingly cash-strapped.

The isthmus faded into irrelevance around 1700 for financial reasons. It was just too expensive. The price of enslaved Africans rose. Mules had to be imported; for whatever reason, the climate made it hard to raise them in Panama. The owners of the mule trains formed a cartel so they could charge outrageous prices. All this meant it was actually 47 times more expensive (per pound) to use the Camino Real than to go from ocean to ocean in Mexico, between Acapulco and Veracruz. Even the long trip over the Andes from Peru to Tucumán (in modern Argentina) and then down the river to Buenos Aires was cheaper than crossing in Panama.

At your table, an adventure site based on the isthmus in the 1500s is an obvious winner: a lightly-defended treacherous road, secret jungle villages, pirates, freedom-fighters, and vast sums of wealth. Put a colonial governor in the castle at either end of the road and make them rivals. Each suspects that pirates and freedom-fighters in the wilderness have created a secret stronghold, that the other governor knows where it is, and that their rival is withholding that information to make them look bad. They might hire the party to go scout out this supposed stronghold. That gives the party an opportunity to meet pirates and freedom-fighters in the jungle and be tempted to join them.

In addition the above, news flows along the road, so it’s a great place to gather information. And maybe an earlier bandit attack based on the Mandinga-Drake attack resulted in buried treasure (as the Mandinga-Drake one did) that’s never been recovered. Maybe there’s some sort of MacGuffin being moved on the Camino Real that the party might want to spring. And with a foot in two worlds—the oceans on either side of the isthmus—it’s a great jumping-off point for other adventures.

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Sing and fight magical folk ballads in 1813 England and Scotland! Ballad Hunters is the sequel to Shanty Hunters, winner of a 2022 Ennie Award (Judge’s Choice) and nominee at the Indie Groundbreaker Awards for Most Innovative and Game of the Year. And it’s coming to Kickstarter in March!

The game has:
– Investigative adventures centered around the lyrics of traditional British ballads
– Simple, story-driven rules inspired by the GUMSHOE engine
– A historical setting that is grim but hopeful
– Magic where characters make ballad verses come to life

You can download the free early-access version of the game from DriveThruRPG or Google Drive.

The final game will be published by Pelgrane Press, the people behind 13th Age and GUMSHOE games like Trail of Cthulhu, Swords of the Serpentine, and The Yellow King. You can read more about it on their website and sign up to be notified when it’s available for purchase by putting yourself on my mailing list.

Sources:
The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal by Carlos Yu and Noel H. Maurer (2010)
Black Rebels: The Cimarrons of Sixteenth-Century Panama by Ruth Pike in The Americas (2007)
Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500-1750 by Kris Lane (1998)