Answer: Balboa: Finder of the Pacific is technically a biography, as it relates most of the important events in the life of a famous figure, but Sir Ronald Syme has created a narrative that resembles an adventure story more than a personal documentary. Rather than beginning at Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s birth or tracing his family background, the story starts with a scene between the seventeen-year-old Balboa and his father at the point in his life when Balboa’s career as an explorer began. The ensuing narrative follows his life by marking out the stages of that career: It is in Balboa the explorer only that Syme is interested.
