The Conquistadors Begin: Balboa, Cuba and Magellan

From Caribbean Foothold to Continental Push

By 1510 Spain had built a colony on Hispaniola but had not yet pushed onto the mainland. Within a decade that changed completely. In 1513 Vasco Nunez de Balboa walked across the isthmus of Panama and saw the Pacific Ocean. Between 1511 and 1515, Diego Velazquez conquered Cuba and made it the staging post for everything that came next. In 1519–22 Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition sailed across the Pacific and the surviving ship circled the globe. By 1520 Spain had a Caribbean base, a Pacific shore, and a transpacific reach — the platform Cortes and Pizarro would use for the great mainland conquests of Mexico and Peru. This lesson follows the three steps that made the launch pad.

Balboa Reaches the Pacific (1513)

Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the unlikeliest founder of a Pacific empire. A failed pig farmer on Hispaniola, in debt, he stowed away in a barrel on a 1510 expedition to the Caribbean coast of South America. By the time the barrel was discovered at sea, the expedition had no choice but to take him on. Within a year he had become governor of Spain’s small foothold at Darien, in present-day Panama, by ousting his rival in a coup. From local Indigenous informants Balboa heard that, just over the mountains to the south, lay another sea and a kingdom rich in gold — what we now call Peru.

On 1 September 1513, Balboa set out with around 190 Spaniards, several hundred Indigenous porters and a pack of war dogs. They cut their way through 65 miles of mountainous tropical forest. On 25 September 1513, alone on a peak, Balboa saw a glittering ocean to the south. He came down to the shore, waded into the surf in full armour, and claimed the entire ocean — which he called the South Sea — for the Spanish Crown. He was the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas.

Balboa’s discovery transformed Spanish strategy. The Pacific was no longer a rumour; it was a Spanish ocean. Crucially, the rumours of a southern empire of gold became official intelligence at the Spanish court — planting the seed of what Pizarro would harvest in 1532. Yet Balboa himself had a short reward: in 1519 his rival Pedrarias Davila, sent as the new royal governor, had him beheaded on a trumped-up charge of treason. The man who claimed the Pacific did not live to use it.

The Conquest of Cuba (1511–15)

While Balboa was crossing the isthmus, another conquistador was conquering an island. In 1511 Diego Velazquez landed on Cuba with around 300 Spaniards and a force of Tainos from Hispaniola. The campaign that followed lasted three years and was brutal. Cuban Tainos resisted under a remarkable cacique called Hatuey, who had fled the slaughter on Hispaniola to warn Cuban communities of what was coming. He told them that the Spanish god was gold, and that if they did not hide it the Spanish would destroy them.

In 1512 Hatuey was captured and burned at the stake. As the flames were lit, a Franciscan friar offered him conversion to Christianity, promising that he would go to heaven. The friar Bartolome de las Casas later recorded Hatuey’s reply: he asked whether Spaniards went to heaven, and when told they did, said he would not go there — for he wanted nothing to do with such cruel people. Hatuey’s martyrdom became one of the most powerful indictments of the conquest in Las Casas’s writings.

Velazquez completed the conquest by 1515 and founded Spanish towns including Santiago de Cuba and Havana. The encomienda system was carried over from Hispaniola, and the Cuban Taino population collapsed under it within a generation. But for Spanish purposes Cuba was now what Hispaniola had been: a base. From the harbours of Santiago and Havana, the next wave of conquistadors — including a young Hernan Cortes — would launch into the mainland. Without Cuba, there is no Mexico in 1519.

Magellan’s Voyage (1519–22)

The third leg of the conquistador platform was not a conquest but a voyage. Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese navigator who, after falling out with the Portuguese Crown, offered his services to the young King Charles I of Spain (later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V). Charles wanted a westward route to the Spice Islands of the East Indies — the source of the cloves, nutmeg and pepper that fed Europe’s appetite for spices — that did not infringe Portugal’s eastward route around Africa under the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494).

Magellan sailed from Seville on 10 August 1519 with five ships and around 270 men. After mutinies, ice storms in the south Atlantic and the discovery of the strait that still bears his name at the southern tip of South America, he crossed the Pacific in 99 brutal days — some crewmen ate leather and rats — and reached the islands he named for Saint Lazarus, today the Philippines. There, in April 1521, he was killed in a skirmish at the Battle of Mactan after intervening in a local power struggle.

The expedition continued under his Basque second-in-command, Juan Sebastian Elcano. Of the five original ships and around 270 men, only one ship, the Victoria, and 18 men returned to Seville on 6 September 1522. They had become the first humans known to have circled the globe.

Why It Mattered

The Spanish claim to the Philippines, founded on Magellan’s voyage, would last until 1898 and gave Spain a foothold in Asia that pulled silk, porcelain and spices through Mexican ports across the Pacific. The Pacific was now visibly a Spanish ocean — reached by Balboa from the east, crossed by Magellan from the west. Combined with Cuba as a Caribbean staging post, Spain had the geography it needed for the next, biggest moves: Cortes’s expedition to Mexico in 1519 (launched from Santiago de Cuba while Velazquez tried in vain to recall him), and Pizarro’s push into Peru in 1532 (built on the rumours Balboa had collected on the Pacific shore).