Panama Canal: Did you mean...?

The Council of the Indies (El Real y Supremo Consejo de las Indias) operated from 1524 to 1834 and was the supreme governing body of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and Spanish East Indies. Reporting directly to the monarch...

Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595 CE) was an Elizabethan mariner, merchant and naval administrator who has the inglorious (if not wholly accurate) record of being England's first slave trader. In the 1560s CE Hawkins trafficked slaves...

François L'Olonais (also spelt L'Olonnais or L'Ollonais, c. 1630-1668), real name Jean-David Nau, was a French buccaneer and pirate who operated from Tortuga on Hispaniola. In 1667, he famously attacked Venezuela, then part...

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was an agreement signed in August 1928 by 63 countries, which all promised, after the horrors of the First World War (1914-18), to regard war as an illegal instrument of...

Adelantado was an office awarded by the Spanish Crown to conduct military campaigns in the medieval period but then repurposed during the Age of Exploration to grant an individual the right to privately fund expeditions of discovery...

A digital reconstruction of the fortifications at Portobelo-San Lorenzo, originally built in 1597 CE. This fort was one of many built by the Spanish Empire on Panama's Caribbean coast to protect...

The staggering quantity of gold the conquistadors extracted from the Americas allowed Spain to become the richest country in the world. The thirst for gold to pay for armies and gain personal enrichment resulted in...

The buccaneers who roamed the Spanish Main and the pirates who plundered the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean during the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) needed a place of refuge where they could share out and...

The apparatus of colonial government in the Spanish Empire consisted of multiple levels, starting with the monarchy and Council of the Indies at the top and moving down to the viceroy, audiencias, mayors, and...

The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto (c. 1500-1542) landed on the west coast of Florida on 30 May 1539, hoping to find wealthy kingdoms to conquer and plunder. His crew journeyed for over four...