The South American Republics, Part 2 of 2

by Thomas Cleland Dawson

CHAPTER I

CONQUEST, SETTLEMENT, AND COLONIAL DAYS

On his third voyage in 1498 Columbus sighted the Venezuelan coast just south of the Windward Islands. A year later, Alonso de Ojeda saw the mainland at about the same place and skirted the coast for four hundred miles west without finding any important break in a line of mountains which rose almost directly from the sea to a height of three to nine thousand feet, covered to their very tops with luxuriant vegetation. But there was no such barrier as that made by the main Andes on the Pacific; the passes were only half a mile instead of nearly three miles high; the slopes were not dry and desolate as in Peru, or covered with a tangled mass of forest as in Pacific Columbia and Ecuador. Just beyond the harbour where Puerto Cabello now stands, the coast-line turned abruptly to the north-west, leaving the mountains farther inland, but the intervening plain was swampy and uninviting. Still following west, Ojeda rounded Cape San Roman and turned south into the great Gulf of Maracaibo. There he saw Indian villages of houses built on piles near the shallow shores, and he called the place Venezuela—"little Venice,"—a name shortly extended to the whole coast from the mouth of the Orinoco west to the forbidding and uninhabitable peninsula of Goajira, which forms the western promontory of the Gulf of Maracaibo.

There is no record that either Columbus or Ojeda effected a permanent landing, and it was not until 1510 that some adventurers founded a settlement on the small island of Cubagua, in the channel between the large island of Margarita and the mainland. This was a mere nest of pirates who persecuted the Indians of the shore, kidnapping and selling them as slaves to the Spaniards on the Antilles, and it was shortly abandoned. In 1520, on the coast just opposite, was founded the settlement of Cumaná, the oldest city on the South American continent, which, though destroyed by the natives, was rebuilt in 1525, when valuable pearl fisheries were discovered in the neighbouring waters of Margarita. However, the place remained of little importance and did not become a centre for the colonisation of the adjacent country, the Spaniards attaching little value to this region because it contained no gold washings.

The real colonisation of Venezuela began four hundred miles farther west with the foundation in 1527 of the city of Coro on the narrow neck of land which separates the Gulf of Maracaibo from the Caribbean Sea. Thence there was easy access by water to the shores of the great lagoon, or by land over the coast plain to the north-western slopes of the Andean range which runs south-west to the giant plateau of Pamplona just over the Colombian border. The Andean valleys were filled with gold, and among the higher mountains lay fertile plateaux, cultivated by tribes of semi-civilised Indians. Altogether the region was well calculated to stimulate the cupidity of adventurers.

Charles V. granted the Venezuela coast to the Welser family of Augsburg, the greatest merchants of their time and his heavy creditors. Under their commission the first adelantado, Alfinger, took possession of Coro and conducted various expeditions south-west along the Andes, perishing near Pamplona about 1531. His successors continued these murdering, kidnapping incursions into the interior, often being led to their ruin among remote mountain fastnesses by tales of a mythical Eldorado, where the rivers ran over silver sands, the palaces were of solid gold with doors and columns of diamonds and emeralds, and the Indian king every morning covered his body with gold dust and bathed in precious aromatic essences.

Eighteen years, however, elapsed before the Spaniards established a permanent settlement in the interior, and only in 1545 was the city of Tocuyo founded in a beautiful Andean valley a hundred and fifty miles south of Coro. But the cruelties of the proprietors' agents scandalised public opinion. Charles V. declared their concession cancelled and a governor, responsible directly to the government, was appointed in 1547. Thenceforward the settlement of Venezuela proceeded more rapidly. Five years later the city of Barquisimeto, fifty miles north of Tocuyo and near the point where the Andes join the coast range, was established on a secure footing after hard fighting with the Indians; in 1555 the Spaniards penetrated east a hundred miles along the lovely plateaux of the coast mountains, and founded Valencia. The following year they settled Trujillo, fifty miles south-west of Tocuyo, and two years later Merida, a hundred miles farther in the same direction and not far from the Colombian frontier.

To the east of Valencia lay valuable gold washings, and to work these the Spaniards fixed a camp at San Francisco in the Aragua Valley about 1560. This is the garden spot of Venezuela, and the warlike Teques Indians, under their terrible chief, Guaicaipuro, massacred the miners and defeated several expeditions from Valencia and Barquisimeto. It was not until 1567 that the Spaniards succeeded in establishing their power in the valley of Caracas, which, a hundred miles east of Valencia, lies close to the shore, although three thousand feet above sea-level and separated from the ocean by high mountains. The defensibility of the site as well as the fertility of the soil pointed it out as the best place for the seat of government. A city was founded which ten years later replaced Coro as the capital of the province, and shortly thereafter a port was opened at La Guaira giving direct communication with Spain. The savage tribes fought more pertinaciously than the civilised natives of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile and Argentina, and a greater number of Europeans and negroes replaced those who were slain. Finally, however, the majority submitted, and were incorporated as peasants into the Spanish system.