If, as we have said, the approach to the Republic of Venezuela at La Guayra seems forbidding and inaccessible, it must not be inferred that this is an inevitable characteristic of the coast. The Caribbean Hills are splendid in their aspect from the sea. They are forbidding in their grandeur. The mighty ramparts rise almost sheer from the ocean for thousands of feet, with cloud-veils flung across them at times, and if, from the steamer's deck, we may wonder how access to the hinterland can be gained, we shall find that Nature has furnished her passes, and some of the early English adventurers of the Spanish Main scaled these, as we may read in the stirring pages of Hakluyt.[4] Personally, I retain strong impressions of these cool-appearing, towering ramparts of Nature seen whilst sweltering in the tropic heat on shipboard.
Moreover, the great spurs of the Andes die out into the sea as we go east, and so Nature has broken down the rampart, giving vent to her marvellous hydrographic forces, which here triumph over the orographic, in the Gulf of Paria and the delta of the Orinoco, clothed with the densest of tropical vegetation, the home of wild beast and wild man, as shortly we shall observe.
There are further memories of British activity in regard to Venezuelan seaports, more modern, less picturesque than those we have already remarked. For, in the year 1903, the loans and arrears upon interest, the defaulted payments and disputed interpretations of contracts, in railway construction and other matters, and alleged arbitrary behaviour on the part of Venezuelan Government officials, came to a head, with the result that Great Britain, Germany and Italy sent a combined fleet to blockade the seaports, and an enforced settlement of the creditors' claims was brought about.
However, these unfortunate incidents are of the past. Venezuela has shown a desire for more cordial relations with the outside world. Lately she sent a representative to London with the purpose of inaugurating closer commercial relations with Britain.[5]
We have now to explore the great river of Venezuela, the famous Orinoco.
The Orinoco, which pours its huge volume of water into the Atlantic on the northern shore of the continent, through a vast delta of over thirty mouths, a volume derived from over four hundred tributaries which descend from the spurs of the Andes or from the wild and mysterious forests of Guiana, flows through what might be one of the richest valleys of the earth's surface, and doubtless in the future may so become. But, like the valley of the Amazon, its resources are comparatively little utilized at present. Devastating floods, malarious forests, ferocious crocodiles are some of the elements the traveller encounters on the higher waters of this great stream, notwithstanding that Columbus wrote to his Spanish sovereign that he had "found one of the rivers flowing from the Earthly Paradise."
Unfortunately it may be said that the Spaniard and his descendants have wrought destruction rather than benefit here, and the population of the valley is less now than it was four centuries ago.
We may ascend the Orinoco, in the stern-wheel steamers which ply thereon, for about four hundred miles to Ciudad Bolivar, which town forms the chief and indeed almost the only trade centre, and in the rainy season, when the river is high, which is generally from June to November, by smaller craft up the lengthy affluents. Such are the Apure, the Meta, the Arauca and the Guaviare, many hundreds of miles in length, rising far away to the west amid the Cordillera, the cold eastern slopes of whose lofty summits condense and pour down torrents of water into an extraordinary network of rivers which flow across the plains of Colombia and Venezuela, flooding enormous areas of land in their passage to the main stream. Boats and barges may reach the Andes, whose beautiful landscape forms the water-parting of this remarkable fluvial system.
THE MAINLAND FROM TRINIDAD, AND VIEW IN THE DELTA OF THE ORINOCO.