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Venezuela 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
(see
fig. 2). 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 (see Glossary), 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.
Data as of December 1990
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