In the year 1728 a body of merchants of Guipuscoa received an exclusive right to the commerce with Caracas and Cumaná, on condition of their clearing these coasts of interlopers—that is to say, of the Dutch, who, from their island of Curaçao, monopolized the lucrative trade in the nuts of the cacao-tree, thus compelling the Spaniards to receive from abroad the produce of one of their own colonies. The new company, which was under the necessity of landing its cargoes at Cadiz, conducted its operations with such success that the above-mentioned reproach was soon removed; whilst the inhabitants of Caracas received such an impetus to their industrial life that, ere the company had been three years in existence, it was deemed expedient to detach from the Viceroyalty of New Granada the provinces of Venezuela, Maracaibo, Varinas, Cumaná, and Spanish Guyana, and to form them into a separate Captain-Generalship, the residence of the ruler being fixed at Caracas in Venezuela.
1771.
In the year 1771 there were scattered on the banks of the Orinoco thirteen villages, which numbered amongst them four thousand two hundred Spaniards, half-castes or negroes, who possessed considerable property inland, besides twelve or thirteen thousand cattle, mules or horses. At the same period the Indians who had been detached from savage life were distributed in forty-nine hamlets. In all there were sixty-two centres of population, containing sixteen thousand six hundred people, three thousand one hundred and forty properties, and seventy-two thousand head of cattle.
Up to this period the Dutch from Curaçao monopolized the trade with this establishment. In return for the goods which they supplied, they received payment in tobacco, hides, and herds; all the affairs being concluded at St. Thomas. The Europeans and the negroes carried out their transactions themselves, but those affecting the Indians were conducted by the missionaries.
The province of Venezuela does not bear a high name for government, even amongst the States of South America; but, in estimating Spanish civilization in this quarter, it is only right to consider the state of things which it displaced. The tyranny, we are told, which was exercised by the savages along the banks of the Orinoco towards their women was such that infanticide of their female children became a common practice on the part of the latter; in order that their offspring might be spared a repetition of their own dreadful lot, which is thus described to a missionary by one of themselves:—
“Would that my mother had suffocated me at my birth! I should then be dead, but I should not have felt death, and I should have escaped the most miserable of lots. How much have I undergone, and who knows what sufferings are reserved for me! Figure to yourself, Father, the miseries which an Indian woman has to undergo amongst Indians. They accompany us to the fields with their bows and arrows: we go there bearing one infant which we carry in a basket and another at the breast. They go to hunt or to fish, whilst we dig the earth; and, after having undergone all the fatigue of culture, we have to undertake that of the harvest. They return in the evening unburdened: we bring, back roots for their food and maize for their drink. Once at home, they make themselves happy with their friends; whilst we go to gather wood and to bring water to cook their supper. When they have eaten, they go to sleep: we pass the greater part of the night grinding the maize and making their chica. And what is our reward for our vigils? They drink, and whilst they are in their cups they drag us by the hair and kick us about.
“You know, Father, if our complaints are well founded. What I tell you, you yourself see every day; but our greatest misfortune of all is one unknown to you. It’s a sad lot for a poor Indian woman to serve her husband like a slave, sweating with labour in the fields and deprived of repose at home. But it is still worse to see him, at the end of twenty years, take another wife, young, and without sense. He becomes attached to her, and she beats our children, orders us about, and treats us like servants; and if we make the slightest murmur of complaint we are beaten with the branch of a tree.... What has an Indian woman better to do than to withdraw her child from a servitude a thousand times worse than death! I repeat, Father, would to God my mother had loved me enough to bury me at my birth!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
In the year 1670 a party of buccaneers under Morgan reduced the castle of San Lorenzo at Chagres, and captured and burned the town of Panamá; for which reason the site of that settlement was transferred to the position it at present holds, being six miles distant from old Panamá. In the year 1680 the same Filibusters, under other leaders, having crossed the isthmus, took the city of Santa Maria; which proceeding led, five years later, to the closing of the mines of Cana. In the year 1698 one William Paterson undertook to establish a Scotch colony at Puerto Escaces on Caledonia Bay. Early last century several towns were established on the Atlantic Coast by Catholic missionaries, and likewise on the rivers flowing into the Gulf of San Miguel; but unfortunately all these were destroyed by the Indians, with whom, in 1790, a treaty of peace was concluded, in virtue of the terms of which the Spaniards abandoned all their forts in Darien.
Note.—Chapter IX. is chiefly founded on “Historia del descubrimiento y colonizacion de la Nueva Granada” (Paris, 1849), by J. Acosta; and “Memorias para la historia de la Nueva Granada” (Bogotá, 1850), by Antonio de Plaza.