Morgan met with no opposition in his first visit to Panama, but, with his men, lived at free quarters in rioting and debauchery, committing those atrocities that pirates alone can commit, until, their appetites and their passions being satiated, they returned to the Gulf coast, taking with them the plunder of a city which was then the depository of the treasures drawn from South America. They returned a second time to Panama, as Cortéz did to Mexico. This time they met with resistance, but they carried the town by assault, and devoted it to utter destruction. Their efforts were seconded by a terrible earthquake, from which the people fled, and built a new city at a distance of a few miles from the ruins.
For more than two hundred years the rank vegetation of a tropical forest has been driving its massive roots beneath its foundations, and yet the ruins of Panama still bear the marks of having once been a city of much magnificence. Two massive stone bridges, a pavement, diverse broken walls, and a solid tower standing up above the tops of the tall forest-trees, proclaim the incontrovertible fact that the traces of a large city can not be altogether blotted out in the course of a few centuries.
Morgan has never gratified the world with a narrative of his adventures, nor has any of his gang enlightened us with a history of the conquest of Panama, nor has any Saxon bishop Lorenzana yet been found so lost to all moral sense as to commend the piety of such infamous men. And yet, in the boldness of his enterprise, in the courage of its execution, in the amount of plunder realized, in military talent and prowess, Morgan the pirate was incalculably superior to Cortéz the hero.