273. Panama’s Brutish Conquistador Who Found The Pacific and Lost His Head (Part 1)

Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnim. I'd be. Will you? Now, inadvertently, Donald Trump has given us a a theme. Quite a few of these mini series. How grateful we are. Yes, yeah. Thanks him. But we decided that we would work down his shopping list. You know he's been expressing interest in buying all sorts of things, and uh, you know, we started with Greenland, uh, we moved on to Canada, and now we are heading south to Panama in Central America.

And we want to really try and understand why this former Spanish colony has made it onto his list. And we've got that brilliant man with us again. You love him, we love him, brilliant maritime historical archaeologist Mark Horton, who has given us some absolute jaw-dropping scoops on this podcast, let me tell you. Do you know the last time you were on, Mark, uh Willie and I just had to pinch ourselves because we thought we knew a story. And then you kept dropping new facts on us that basically left us shook. Shook down to our little shoes, it did. So you will remember from Mark's wonderful appearance on the Roanoke episode that uh Mark has a habit of uh falling on major archaeological sites in in rather nice parts of the world where he can where he can go on holiday. You're making it so much trips over stuff in sunny climbs.

This man is meticulous and finds things that nobody else can find. As someone who's who has worked in the field with Mark with my trowel, I I know how Mark likes to uh a lot of his work was centered around the lovely uh Kenyan beach resort of Lamu for a long time. Yeah, that's all right. He's he's taking me to the Bahamas, aren't you, Mark? That was the agreement, Mark. That was the agreement. You and me and a trowel going to the Bahamas. Now look, let's talk about um this oldest Spanish colony in mainland America. How did you come to be digging around with your trowel over there? It it ties into the Scots. So we were doing a big expedition looking for the abandoned Scottish colony, the famous Daring Colony. Exactly, which of course Empire listeners who plugged into our Scottish Empire Episodes last year we'll know all about. But just give us a quick a quick sketch of that before we move on, Mart. The Scottish Colony was an attempt to create a uh entrepot on the Atlantic coast. Scotland was financially bankrupt. And the idea, and this is the theme that's going to come through all this about crossing the Isthmus. And a

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