Venezuela

by Leonard V. Dalton

We emerge from these regions of conjecture into the definite historical period rather more than five years after the first discovery of the islands of the New Continent by Columbus, when the great explorer, on his third westward journey, coasted along the south side of the Peninsula of Paria on July 31, 1498. He did not land there, but his son tells us that from the ships they could see men on the shore dressed in vari-coloured turbans and loincloths. When he entered the Gulf of Paria, he had expected to be able to pass out on the west side, believing the peninsula to be an island; realising his error, he turned back and entered the Caribbean through the Boca del Draco, “giving thanks to God who delivered him from so many troubles and dangers, still showing him new countries full of peaceful people, and great wealth.” On his way across to Hispaniola (Santo Domingo), he passed by an island which he named Margarita, knowing nothing, as it seems, of the rich pearl fisheries which later rendered the name so appropriate.

Great enthusiasm was naturally kindled in Spain by the news of the discovery of a mainland (Tierra Firme) west of the islands, and it was decided to send a special exploratory expedition. Hence we have Alonso de Ojeda setting sail in 1499, and landing several times on what is now the Peninsula of Paria, though he knew it by the native name of Maracapana. The region generally he designated Nueva Andalusia. Encouraged by what he had seen, he sailed on westwards as far as Cabo de la Vela (now in Colombia), and entered the Lake of Maracaibo or Coquibacoa. Here there were at that time, as now, Indian pile-dwellings on the shores of the lake, which so far reminded Ojeda of Venice or Venezia, that he gave to the region the name of Little Venice, or Venezuela.

Thus we have the mainland of the New World or the Indies first sighted by Columbus and partly examined and named by Ojeda, but we may here turn aside from the story of Venezuela for a moment to see how, by a great and successful geographical fraud, the whole of the continent came to be called America.

There was on Ojeda’s ship a Florentine merchant by name Amerigo Vespucci, who appeared to have contented himself on this voyage with gazing from the deck at the shores of the new countries. After returning to Europe, he developed sufficient zeal to make a voyage on his own account to Brazil, and wrote a clever joint account of both voyages, in which he represented himself as a leader in the first expedition which effected a landing on the mainland of the New World. This suggestio falsi, if it deserves no harsher term, led Martin Hylacomylus in his “Cosmographia,” published in 1509, to say of the discovery of the different parts of the globe: “Alia quarta pars per Americū Vesputium ... inuenta est: qua non video cur quis iure vetet ab Americo inventatore ... Amerigen quasi Americi terram, siue Americam dicendam.”[2] Thus it comes that a third of the land of the globe bears the name of a man who had no claim to be considered as of any particular importance on the ship which bore the first Spanish explorers who set foot in Venezuela.

Meanwhile, close behind Ojeda there was travelling an expedition including Pedro Alonso Niño, Luis Guerra, and Christobal Guerra, who visited Margarita and the adjacent islands of Cubagua, where they had some intercourse with the natives and obtained from them by barter a number of pearls. Next they touched the Cumanagoto coast, not far from where Barcelona now stands, and sailed from there to the Coro district. Here again they were well received by the natives, and exchanged European trinkets with them for gold and pearls. They continued their voyage as far as the Goajira Peninsula, but found the people there of a fierce and menacing aspect, so they returned to Spain, bearing news of the wealth of the West.

Had those natives only kept their pearls and golden trinkets from the sight of these first genuine explorers, the history of Venezuela might have been very different. The white men who next visited Venezuela were little, if anything, more than rapacious brigands, consumed with a lust for gain, before which any shreds of morality or good feeling they may once have possessed went for nothing.

In the year 1500 some fifty adventurers, sailing from Hispaniola, established a settlement on Cubagua for the pearl fisheries, and soon a horde of nondescripts from all the countries of Europe flocked to this source of easily won treasure, which under their uncontrolled and extravagant exploitation began to fail rapidly. With appetites whetted, these spoilt children of fortune turned to look for other means of acquiring wealth, always provided these did not entail any honest toil, and from this time begins the long black record of Spanish cruelties in the Indies, with the fabricated excuses of cannibalism and ferocity among the Indians.

To appreciate the position we must recall the infamous decree of Charles V. of Spain, which permitted the Europeans in the Indies to capture and enslave the natives who in any way opposed the “colonisation” of the new countries, or who practised cannibalism. The Indians being found most reprehensibly innocent of either of these crimes, the Cubaguans pronounced their very presence an evidence of opposition, and further assumed that they must all be cannibals. Carefully avoiding the possibility of arousing the wrath of the fine and stalwart Guaiquerias of Margarita, who lived in uncomfortable proximity to their town, they took steps to enslave some of the more remote Indians of the mainland.

While the world, the flesh, and the devil had been having things to themselves on Cubagua, the Church had been entering upon the new field of missionary work on the mainland, and three Franciscan monks settled on the Cumaná coast in 1513, while some Dominicans established a little community at Manjar, near Píritu. At both places the monks were on the most friendly terms with the natives, on whom, at that date, their influence was wholly for good.