DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST
Christopher Columbus first sighted Venezuela during his third
voyage to the New World, when he saw the Península de Paria from
his ship at anchor off the coast of the island of Trinidad .
Three days later, on August 1, 1498, Columbus became the first
European to set foot on the South American mainland. Unaware of
the significance of his discovery and of the vastness of the
continent, he christened the territory Isla de García. He spent
the next two weeks exploring the Río Orinoco delta. Fascinated
with the vast source of fresh water and the pearl ornaments of
the native population, Columbus believed that he had discovered
the Garden of Eden.
A second Spanish expedition, just one year later, was led by
Alfonso de Ojeda and the Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci. They
sailed westward along the coast of Tierra Firme (as South
America was then known) as far as Lago de Maracaibo. There,
native huts built on piles above the lake reminded Vespucci of
Venice, thus leading him to name the discovery Venezuela, or
Little Venice. Subsequent expeditions along the north coast of
South America were driven largely by a lust for adventure,
power, and, especially, wealth.
Pearls and rumors of precious metals were the initial
attraction of Venezuela. By the 1520s, however, the oyster beds
between Cumaná and the Isla de Margarita--at the western end of
the Península de Paria--had been played out. The next of
Venezuela's native riches to be extracted by the Spanish was its
people. Slave raiding, which began in the Península de Paria and
gradually moved inland, helped supply the vast labor needs in
Panama and the Caribbean islands, where gold and silver bullion
from Mexico and Peru were transshipped. These slave raids
engendered intense hatred and resentment among Venezuela's
native population, emotions that fueled more than a century of
continual low-intensity warfare. Partly as a result of this
warfare, the conquest of Venezuela took far longer than the
rapid subjugations of Mexico and Peru.
The prolonged nature of the conquest of Venezuela was also
attributable to the area's lack of precious metals and the
absence of a unified native population. Venezuela had low
priority compared with regions of Spanish America containing
vast ore deposits. Moreover, the territory that comprises
present-day Venezuela contained no major political force, such
as the Inca or Aztec leadership, whose conquest would bring vast
resources and populations under Spanish domain. Rather, the
conquerors found a large number of relatively small and
unrelated tribes of widely varying degrees of cultural
sophistication. Some were nomadic hunters and gatherers; others
built cities and practiced advanced agricultural techniques,
including irrigation and terracing. A number of coastal
communities were reputed to be cannibalistic. One of the more
advanced tribes, the Timoto-Cuica, was from the Andean region.
The Timoto-Cuica (who apparently were not united, but rather
comprised a series of "chiefdoms") built roads and traded with
the populations of the
llanos, or plains, to the southeast, and the Maracaibo Basin, to the northwest.
Spanish slavers established bases at Coro and El Tocuyo,
south of Barquisimeto, in the western part of present-day
Venezuela. In 1528, however, they were dislodged by a most
unlikely competitor; a consortium of German bankers led by the
House of Welser, a german banking firm, had been granted a
concession by the deeply indebted Spanish crown to exploit the
area's resources. For the next twenty-eight years, a series of
German governors administered western Venezuela and engaged in a
futile search for the fabled riches of El Dorado. The Germans
showed no interest in settling the territory. Rather, they tried
to extract from it the maximum amount of human and material
wealth as rapidly as possible. In 1556, the House of Welser's
contract was terminated. The group had grown tired of its vain
search for a mountain of gold to match what the Spanish had
discovered in Peru and Mexico and the Spanish had become equally
weary of the behavior of their German concessionaires, which was
ruthless even by the ignoble standards of the conquerors.
Spanish explorers, in the meantime, pushed eastward from El
Tocuyo, founding Valencia in 1555. After more than a decade of
fierce fighting with the recalcitrant native population, forces
under Diego de Losada established the settlement of Santiago de
León de Caracas in 1567. The value of Caracas lay not only in
the fertile agricultural lands in its vicinity, but also in its
accessibility, through the coastal range, to the seaport that
would later become La Guaira.
The vast majority of what is today the territory of Venezuela
was left untouched by the Spanish conquistadors. Instead,
tireless Franciscan and Capuchin missionaries explored and
Hispanicized the Río Unare Basin to the east of Caracas, the Río
Orinoco, and much of the Maracaibo Basin during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Much of the western llanos and the
south bank of the Orinoco remained unknown territory to the
Spanish even at the close of the colonial period. |
