At the head of a victorious army of Colombians and Argentines, Sucré could naturally do as he liked with Ecuador and an assembly of the people of Quito accepted incorporation into the republic of Colombia. Bolivar, meanwhile, had had some hard fighting with the stubborn loyalists of Pasto, and the issue remained doubtful until news of the victory of Pichincha was received. The Spanish commander surrendered; Bolivar came on to Quito, and thence proceeded to Guayaquil. The inhabitants of this important city were divided. Many wanted to be independent; others preferred incorporation with Peru, to being tied up with Colombia, a country whose capital could only be reached by months of tedious travelling; others, however, were willing to maintain the ancient political connection with New Granada. As a matter of fact, discussion was useless, for Bolivar threw into the scale the weight of his military power. Guayaquil and the adjacent coast region became a department of Colombia, while the southern plateau provinces—Cuenca andLoja—were also erected into a department of Bolivar's vast confederation. This completed the division of the old presidency of Quito into four parts—Pasto and the northern provinces, Quito and the central, Cuenca and the southern, and Guayaquil with the coast, and in all of them the influence of Bolivar's satraps was predominant.
Shortly after his arrival at Guayaquil Bolivar and San Martin had their famous interview. The latter came up from Lima hoping to arrange plan of joint campaign, but he quickly saw that Bolivar would never consent to share the glory of driving the Spaniards from their last strongholds. The great Argentine magnanimously determined to retire, and returning to Lima, resigned the presidency of Peru. San Martin once out of the way, Bolivar was eager to lead a Colombian army to Lima, but the Peruvians declined his assistance. Alone, however, they had little chance against the able Spanish generals, and, aghast at the progress of the enemy, they soon sent to Bolivar begging his assistance on his own terms. The selfishly ambitious liberator gladly accepted, and within a month Sucré was on his way south at the head of a fine army of Colombian veterans. Bolivar himself followed with reinforcements, and though hampered and delayed by the revolt of the Callao garrison, Sucré's military ability backed by Bolivar's tireless energy and large resources produced their legitimate results. Bolivar in person advanced to the plateau and August 6, 1824, won the cavalry action of Junin which compelled the retirement of the Spanish army to Cuzco. Bolivar returned toLima leaving Sucré in command, and on the 9th of December the latter annihilated the main body of the enemy in the battle of Ayacucho—the crowning victory of the war of South American independence.
Bolivar was supreme from the Caribbean to Potosí. As president of the United States of Colombia he ruled Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador, he himself was dictator of Peru, and his faithful lieutenant exercised supreme power in Bolivia. The realisation of his cherished plan for the union of all South America into one great confederacy, with himself as life-president, seemed near at hand. But successful soldier though he was—heroic, resourceful, and unwavering in reverse—his statecraft was short-sighted and impracticable. The moment of his apogee marked the beginning of his decline. He failed to appreciate that the spirit of South America was profoundly democratic and local, and that the war of independence owed its beginning and successful prosecution to a deeply rooted impulse toward division, liberty, and anarchy among the Creoles. To build a tower out of sand would have been easier than to create a stable union between the recently liberated provinces of Spanish America. Viewed in the light of subsequent events the wonder is that territorial disintegration stopped where it did, and that South America did not split into twenty instead of nine separate countries.
Bolivar's partisans in Colombia were unsuccessful in their intrigues to replace the Constitution of Cucutá with one drawn up after the plan their chief had imposed upon Bolivia and Peru. Neitherleaders nor people, army nor professional classes, showed any disposition to concede him greater powers. His attempts to interfere in the affairs of Argentine and Chile were repulsed, Peru became restless under his dictatorship, Bolivia only waited a favourable opportunity to expel Sucré, the very troops he had brought from Colombia to Peru became mutinous, his pan-American congress at Panama turned out a fiasco. He remained two years in Peru, until the news of a great uprising in Venezuela made it necessary for him to hurry to the north. Hardly had he left Lima than the military chiefs in Peru virtually disavowed his authority. Under the leadership of their officers the Colombian troops in Lima revolted, and the Peruvians, delighted to be rid of these embarrassing guests, paid their pecuniary demands, and to the number of over three thousand despatched them in ships for the north. They disembarked in Ecuador, where one division took possession of Guayaquil and another of Cuenca. Bolivar was so occupied with the troubles in Venezuela that he could personally take no measures against this defection, but General Flores, a Venezuelan whom he had appointed commander of the military forces of the three southern provinces of the old Quito presidency,—Guayaquil, Cuenca, and Quito,—proved energetic and fortunate. His intrigues sowed discord among the officers of the revolting troops. A counter-revolution occurred in his favour at Cuenca, and after a short period of virtual independence Guayaquil also returned to its old connection with Quito.
The movement against Bolivar from Colombia proper involved Pasto and Popayan—the northern division of the old Quito presidency—while Quito and the southern provinces were left largely to their own devices. General La Mar, who had succeeded in making himself president of Peru, conceived the idea of enlarging the limits of that country by the acquisition of Guayaquil and Cuenca, and he was the more enthusiastic because the latter was his native province. In 1828 war broke out between Colombia and Peru. Peruvian ships blockaded Guayaquil, and in January, 1829, forced the surrender of that place, while a Peruvian army seven thousand strong invaded the Ecuadorean plateau and penetrated beyond Cuenca. Flores and his rivals united in face of the common danger, the Colombian veterans scattered through the country rallied to the banner of Sucré, who came in person to take command, and the decisive battle was fought at Tarqui in February. The Peruvians were so badly defeated that they sued for peace, and agreed to surrender Guayaquil and the greater part of the southern provinces.
GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR.GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR.
By this time, however, Bolivar's own position had become desperate. Venezuela had already separated from the confederation, and when on the 12th of May, 1830, Flores proclaimed the Quito presidency independent, it was little more than the announcement of an existing fact. He attempted to disarm jealousy against Quito by christening the country by the fanciful name of Ecuador, and by decreeing that each province should have an equal vote in thelegislative assembly. Flores was merely one of a multitude of military chiefs who had been fighting among themselves since the expulsion of the Spaniards. Though married to a Quito lady he was a Venezuelan and could rely on few local friendships or sympathies, and the Colombian veterans, who swarmed over the country devouring the substance of the people and eager for pay and plunder, regarded him as one of themselves and were ready to desert him for any chief who might offer higher wages.
Now that Bolivar was overthrown and Sucré murdered on a lonely mountain road by hired assassins, the sentiment of loyalty to their old chiefs tardily revived among the fickle Colombian regulars. They received Flores's declaration of independence with indignation; an insurrection broke out among the garrison at Guayaquil; and the veterans marched to the plateau. Flores had no force capable of making headway against them, and was compelled to negotiate a treaty, agreeing to support Bolivar in case the latter should remain in South America. On the other hand, the troops consented to recognise Flores if Bolivar should go into exile. Hardly had the treaty been signed than word was received of the lonely death of the great Venezuelan at Santa Marta. Most of the veterans took service under Flores, and he pursued the recalcitrants with relentless and bloody severity. Pasto and Popayan, composing the province of Cauca, the northern division of the old Quito presidency, wavered as to whether they would cast their lot with Ecuador or NewGranada. The government at Bogotá sent an army into the disputed territory, and Flores tried to organise a force large enough to beat it, but he was hampered by mutinies, conspiracies, and poverty, and after a year of expensive though nearly bloodless operations withdrew and consented to a treaty by which Ecuador gave up all claim to Pasto and Popayan, losing a third of the territory and population of the old presidency of Quito.
COSTUMES OF NATIVES NEAR QUITO.COSTUMES OF NATIVES NEAR QUITO.
Flores, however, managed to hold Guayaquil and Cuenca as well as Quito and must therefore be regarded as the founder of Ecuador, though hisreactionary, absolute, and violent government was hated by all that was young, intelligent, and liberal in the country. The Indian peasants groaned under the burden of taxes imposed to subsidise a horde of functionaries. Finances were in deplorable confusion; the public debts left unpaid; population decreased, especially in the Andean region; agriculture, industry, and commerce remained stationary, except in the cacao districts on the coast. The lower classes had a hard struggle for bare existence, and the parasitical ruling race was solely pre-occupied with political war and intrigue. But it cannot fairly be said that Flores or any other one man was responsible. The lamentable condition of affairs resulted inevitably from the long struggle with Spain and from the situation, character, and ideals of the people. But such a janizary system of government was too burdensome, unwieldy, and wasteful not to fall by its own weight sooner or later. The people were simply unable to pay the taxes which Flores levied vainly trying to satisfy his troops. Mutinies broke out among the latter, and the liberals were encouraged to organise.
A revolutionary society was formed in Quito whose ramifications extended among the enthusiastic youth in every part of the republic. In Guayaquil, the wealthiest and most commercial city, the demand for better financial administration became universal. In 1833 Vicente Rocafuerte, the foremost of Ecuadorean liberals and the most accomplished public man in the country, openly assumed the leadership of the opposition to Flores. Electeda member of congress he bravely defied the dictator, who sentenced him to banishment. But when he reached Guayaquil the troops and citizens of that city arose to support him. Flores led an army down the Andes and attacked and captured Guayaquil, Rocafuerte and his partisans escaped and kept up the struggle at different points of the coast, while sympathetic insurrections broke out on the plateau in Flores's rear. Though the dictator finally succeeded in capturing Rocafuerte, the only use he was able to make of his victory was to secure better terms from the liberals. Rocafuerte and he formed an alliance and together they pacified the country, the former becoming president and the latter retaining command of the army. Ecuador enjoyed her first real respite from civil war and tumult since 1809, and Rocafuerte's inauguration in 1835 marks the beginning of civil and constitutional government.
President Rocafuerte was not only animated by revolutionary principles, imbued with liberal ideas, and a student of the best political and economic writers, but he proved to be a good administrator—practical, cautious, and sure—and earned the title of the greatest of Ecuador's reformers. His first step was to summon a constituent assembly which divided the country into provinces and parishes, outlined a rational scheme of administration, and made a substantial beginning toward substituting civil for military government. Although he did not attempt to carry into practice the dreams of radical liberals—impracticable among a population nine-tenths Indians in semi-bondage, and in a country where the clergy were dominant—he reformed the taxing system, set in order the finances, so far as his means and knowledge would permit, earnestly encouraged industry, agriculture, and commerce, repaired and built roads, promulgated a new and humane criminal code, and established schools. He set up the pyramids of the French geographers, showing that tenderregard for his country's repute abroad which is rarely absent in statesmen of high character and noble aims. Under his administration Ecuador assumed the payment of her proportion—twenty-one and a half per cent., or one million eight hundred thousand pounds—of the debt contracted by the defunct United States of Colombia during the war of independence. However, this debt proved a burden too great for her resources. Interest fell behind and the principal has been scaled down repeatedly. Only in 1900 was an arrangement satisfactory to the bondholders finally reached.
His efforts made Ecuador the second South American republic whose independence was formally recognised by Spain. In religious matters he proved true to his liberal convictions, and while never persecuting the clergy always advocated religious freedom for the individual. But though he set his country's feet in the path of progress, the steps were slow, short, and uncertain. His alliance with the military element as represented by Flores, and the religious and social conservatism of the bulk of the people, hampered rapid progress. The radical liberals conspired against him, but their plots were sternly stamped out. Government remained essentially military and aristocratic, and active participation was confined to the educated and military classes. Nevertheless, a sort of equilibrium between the demands of the governing caste and the capacities of the producing masses was reached, and a certain degree of order replaced the indiscriminate exactions and tyranny which the proletariat hadendured ever since the first Spaniard had landed. When Rocafuerte finished his term in 1839, Ecuador was at peace and had recovered much of the material prosperity lost during the long wars. On the plateau the Indians cultivated their wheat and potatoes in security, while on the low coast lands the cacao industry flourished, making Ecuador one of the chief sources of the world's supply of chocolate and multiplying Guayaquil's population and wealth.
ECUADOR PEON'S HOUSE.ECUADOR PEON'S HOUSE.
Flores's command of the army insured him the succession to the presidency. Though his return to power meant political reaction, the beneficent effects of Rocafuerte's system had been too obvious to be entirely ignored and hastily abandoned. Flores's first measures were moderate, but his irrational ambition quickly led him into an expensive and fruitless intervention in the Colombian civil war of 1840. His financial difficulties and a return to military habits caused him to adopt measures continually more arbitrary, and he went stubbornly ahead with his schemes to make his dictatorship permanent. He forced the adoption of a new Constitution lengthening the presidential term to eight years, and caused himself to be declared elected in 1843. The conflict with the liberals became acute; Rocafuerte protested and was forced to fly for his life. The young radicals of Quito plotted the tyrant's assassination, while the villagers of the plateau arose in revolt against the gatherers of an obnoxious poll-tax. In 1845 a liberal revolution broke out at Guayaquil. Flores descended from the table-land, but the liberal army met and defeated him at the foot of the mountains, and he accepted the offer of twenty thousand dollars in cash and a pension to leave the country.
The better elements of the triumphant party were not able to keep the upper hand. A new Constitution was hastily adopted and the mulatto Ramon Roca installed as president. For four years he ruled while the gulf between liberals and conservatives widened day by day, and factional jealousiesand ambitions within the dominant party became menacing. The congress of 1849 quarrelled bitterly over the presidential succession and was unable to agree on any one. Ambitious chiefs got arms and men together, and after a year of uncertainty General Urbina, of Guayaquil, issued a pronunciamento declaring Diego Noboa provisional head of the government. A convention called for the purpose adopted a new Constitution and elected Urbina's nominee president for the full term. To the consternation of the liberals he recalled the Jesuits and gave asylum to the defeated conservatives from Colombia, going so far as to send troops to the frontier to aid in their restoration. But Urbina, to whose command these forces had been entrusted, proclaimed himself dictator and exiled Noboa. He promulgated a new Constitution—Ecuador's sixth in twenty-two years,—persecuted the conservatives, and ruled for four years as an ultra-liberal. At the expiration of his term in 1856 he named his friend Robles as his successor, who maintained himself against the conservative attacks until in 1859 his government became involved in a war with Peru. When Robles and Urbina went to the Peruvian frontier the conservatives rose behind them. As a matter of fact the country was tired of the misrule of the military chiefs, miscalled liberals, whose government was a compound of oppression for their enemies and license for their friends. The clericals armed their adherents in the northern villages and marched on Quito. The partisans of the administration at the capital could oppose no effective resistance, and the insurgents entered the city, and on May 1st installed a provisional government with Garcia Moreno at its head. The latter at once pushed on south with a small force, and, though defeated by Robles, he escaped to Peru, where he received help for new operations. In spite of Moreno's temporary reverse his friends retained possession of Quito, and the Peruvian blockade of Guayaquil absorbed the president's attention. The forces under Robles soon crumbled away, and he resigned and went into banishment. Urbina, the real chief of the liberal party, had a small body of troops in Cuenca with which he tried to maintain the unequal contest, but his position soon became untenable and he followed Robles into exile.
Moreno was now master of the whole Andean region. Guayaquil, however, remained in the hands of a liberal chief; the Peruvian government had tired of its bargain to support the Ecuadorian clericals; the blockade was abandoned, and the Peruvian ships retired after making a treaty with the Guayaquil authorities. This rid Moreno of an embarrassing entanglement with a foreign power, although it left the Guayaquil insurgents free to employ all their forces against him. Descending with all the forces he could muster, his mountaineers defeated the coast troops in every encounter, and on the 2d of September, 1860, Moreno captured the great seaport, putting an end to open opposition in all Ecuador. Every successful revolutionist in those days made his own Constitution, so it is a waste of words to tell that Moreno summoned a convention whichpromulgated a new fundamental law for the republic. During the next fifteen years he remained the dominant personality in Ecuadorian history. His biography is typical of the careers of the higher class of Creole statesmen, and profoundly interesting to a student of South American history as illustrating the difficulties with which men of constructive minds and a passion for order have been obliged to contend. A scion of one of the oldest and proudest Spanish families, he had been proscribed in his youth, and spent the years of his exile studying in the old world. He returned with his naturally fine mind stored with the fruits of study and observation, but with his prejudices of caste and religion unshaken. The clericals set all their hopes on this brilliant young advocate, and his public life, his opinions, and his personality résumé the reactionary characteristics of Ecuador. Nevertheless it is hard for an unprejudiced outsider to study the history of his country during his time without retaining a strong admiration for his abilities and force, even if not convinced that his career made for the moral uplifting of the republic.
He found the finances in a wretched state. Salaries were unpaid, the revenue amounted to less than a million pesos, and the government was living from hand to mouth on twenty-per-cent. loans. He directed his activity principally toward effecting urgent material reforms—increasing the revenue by systematising taxation, suppressing frauds and contraband, founding a mint and hospital at Quito, building the great waggon-road from Quito to thesouthern provinces, and connecting that remote and mountain-locked capital by a telegraph line with Guayaquil. The whole of his own salary he devoted to the public use, the laws were better enforced, life and property became safer, and material prosperity increased. The government was centralised, the semi-independency of the departments abolished, the Jesuits recalled, the rights and privileges of the clergy restored and increased, and a Concordat signed with the Holy See which virtually freed the Ecuadorian Church from all secular control.
The Concordat was denounced throughout the continent as treason to South American independence, and his relations with European diplomatic representatives were so cordial and frank that rumours of his willingness to accept a foreign protectorate or even annexation by Spain were rife in the other capitals. The publication of his personal correspondence with a French diplomatist raised such a storm against him that other countries plotted his overthrow, and the democrats of Colombia, victorious in the civil war of 1863, sent an army to the frontier, proclaiming that their purpose was "to liberate the brother democrats of Ecuador from the theocratic yoke of Professor Moreno." His army was defeated in the battle of Cuaspud, but he stood firm and his people showed no eagerness to accept Colombia's invitation and re-enter that confederacy. Her army was unable to follow up its advantage, and the danger quickly passed. When war broke out between Spain and Peru he, like the Emperor of Brazil, refused to follow Chile's example and takesides, against the mother country. In a word, his foreign policy was a selfish but intelligent opportunism, and he was not influenced by vague sentimental considerations and blind chauvinism.
In 1864 Urbina, with the countenance and assistance of Peru, invaded the southern province, Loja, but the insurrection was promptly crushed. Next year Moreno's term expired, and he named a disciple and friend to be president in his place, but his own political preponderance was so unquestioned and his prestige so enormous in the barracks, convents, and pulperias that he continued the real ruler of the country. His understudy did not please him and he demanded and received a resignation. The incumbent next selected proved insubordinate and had to be displaced by force. When Moreno declared himself provisional dictator the Guayaquil liberals undertook an armed resistance, but by 1869 he was firmly in the saddle once more. He kept his hold on the government, apparently becoming more securely entrenched each year in the love and confidence of the soldiery, the priests, and the common people. From the safety of exile the liberals wrote crushing pamphlets against him and his despotism, his favouritism toward the clergy, his steady, relentless policy of conservatism and reaction. But their attempts at insurrection were feeble and in 1875 he was re-elected as a matter of course. The liberals, hopeless of ending his domination constitutionally or by open war, had recourse to assassination. On the 6th of August a party of young Creoles deliberately killed him at midday on the principal squareof Quito in the presence of the populace and the soldiery.
The murderers were executed and the vice-president succeeded to the vacancy. However, no one appeared big enough to fill Moreno's shoes, and his death made civil war inevitable. After a few months the vice-president was deposed; then one of Moreno's ministers remained at the head of affairs for a short time; but finally Antonio Borrero was selected president in constitutional form. He proved not to possess the resolution requisite to cope with the situation. General Veintemilla, commander of the troops in Guayaquil, revolted in the name of the liberal party, defeated Borrero, and went through the usual form of summoning a convention, adopting a new Constitution, and having himself named president. He held power insecurely and by the aid of a personal party from 1878 to 1883, but neither conservatives nor liberals were satisfied. The radicals attacked him furiously for not putting in practice anti-clerical principles, and the conservatives never trusted him. When his constitutional term expired, the army proclaimed him dictator, but he soon fell before the combined forces of his enemies. During the fighting José Camano came to the front, and now seized the presidency. Alfaro, the principal liberal leader who had co-operated with Camano in overthrowing Veintemilla, made war against his late ally, but was defeated. The new president, once securely in his seat, formed close relations with the clergy and the old partisans of Moreno, and though the liberal chiefs kept up aguerilla warfare in the forests and swamps, he finished out his term. In 1888 he was succeeded by Antonio Flores, who followed his predecessor's policy in the main, and was in his turn succeeded by another friend of Camano's—Luis Cordero. It was not until 1895 that the liberals were able to gather their forces for a formidable rebellion. Camano was then governor of Guayaquil, and the immediate occasion of the outbreak was the charge that he had taken part in the sale of the Chilean iron-clad,Esmeralda, to Japan, then at war with China. It was claimed that Ecuador had acted as a go-between and committed a wilful breach of the rules governing the conduct of neutral nations. President Cordero's prestige was seriously compromised by this incident. His forces were defeated in several actions and he resigned. Alfaro, who had been in exile since 1883, returned, took possession of Guayaquil, was proclaimed dictator, and finally completely overthrew the conservatives in the battle of Gatajo. His election to the presidency followed in 1897, and he was succeeded four years later by the present incumbent, General Leonidas Plaza.
PRINCIPAL STREET IN GUAYAQUIL.PRINCIPAL STREET IN GUAYAQUIL.
The Ecuador coast is one of the most fertile and lovely regions on the earth. It already furnishes a considerable proportion of those tropical products of which the great nations of the temperate zone demand more every year. Like a Luzon which has been stranded at the foot of the Andes, its green shores refresh the eyes of the north-bound traveller tired of the dreary desert that stretches from Valparaiso to the Gulf of Guayaquil; it possesses the best harbour on the Pacific south of Panama and one of the few in all South America which is not mountain-locked. Between the Cordillera and the sea there is room for untold millions of cacao and coffee trees. In spite of civil war and political upheavals which have made her custom-house so often the prey of irresponsible bandits, masquerading under the name of dictators, Guayaquil's population and wealth have increased until she has outstripped the hoary old capital, which, enthroned on a volcano side, overlooks a narrow strip of cultivable land. Nevertheless the plateau is still predominant in theEcuadorian state, and supports a vast majority of the population. Nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the Andean region are Indians, mostly in a condition not far removed from bondage, by circumstance and their own distrustful natures shut up within the narrow limits of an existence which has no outlook over the mountains. None the less, they are sturdy fellows, admirably suited to the climate of those high altitudes, and though their numbers have been practically stationary since the Spanish conquest, the failure to increase has been rather due to lack of room than to misgovernment, vice, or the want of the qualities that make for success in the struggle for existence. In that day, now near at hand, when a great railway shall connect the string of towns on the Ecuador plateau with Peru and Colombia, and when branches shall run to the ports and take the place of the well-nigh impassable trails down the tremendous, rain-soaked slopes of the Andes, the mountain region of Ecuador may be transformed and revivified by new systems of agriculture, and the artistic taste and remarkable ingenuity of the people may find a market and a reward. The railway from Guayaquil long stopped at the foot of the mountains, but within the last three years the almost insurmountable difficulties of the ascent have been overcome by American engineers, and the line is being rapidly built along the plateau to Quito. Ecuador already supplies the world with Panama hats, and other manual industries may flourish when unfavourable transportation conditions are removed. Not only are the common people patiently industrious, but they possess innate good taste and artistic feeling. Such a people has special aptitudes, sure to give it a place in that vastly complicated workshop into which the multifarious needs of modern civilisation are transforming the earth. The plateau of Ecuador does not, however, offer room for any considerable immigration, and its wheat, barley, and potatoes do not and will not much more than suffice for local consumption. Ecuador's great future lies in the beautiful and as yet sparsely peopled Pacific plain, and in the vast and absolutely unknown forests which stretch east from the Andes.
VENEZUELA
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 pilesnear 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 ofthe 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. Fiveyears 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 numberof Europeans and negroes replaced those who were slain. Finally, however, the majority submitted, and were incorporated as peasants into the Spanish system.
By the end of the sixteenth century the Spaniards had obtained undisputed possession of that lovely strip of mountainous country which extends from Cape Codera west between two parallel coast ranges to Barquisimeto and thence west-south-west nearly to the head of Lake Maracaibo—a belt some four hundred miles long and fifty or seventy-five wide. They also held the great peninsula east of Maracaibo Gulf, and had established outlying settlements in the llanos south of the mountains, besides the two isolated ports—Cumaná on the eastern coast and Maracaibo on the western. Notwithstanding the sack of Caracas in 1595 by the daring British buccaneer, Amyas Preston, the colony prospered. Unlike the Pacific coast, it had easy and direct communication with the Antilles and Europe; the altitude was great enough to ensure a healthful climate, while its fertile valleys could be reached from the sea in a few hours over easy passes, far different from those formidable gorges which are the only ways of reaching the table-lands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The interior, instead of being a heavily forested plain like that of the Amazon, practically inaccessible behind tremendous rain-soaked declivities, was an open prairie into which the mountains sank gently, and whose grassy expanses afforded pasture for innumerable herds. These geographical and topographical features havebeen determinative of Venezuela's development and history, political as well as industrial.
In the early years of the seventeenth century the long-neglected Cumaná district on the eastern coast began to be developed. The city of Barcelona was founded in 1617 near a magnificent body of grazing land and in the best tobacco country in Venezuela, where the Indians had grown the plant for untold generations. Barcelona soon became an important centre of population, and the starting-point for missionaries to the interior tribes. The gold placers which had attracted the first adventurers to the mountains west of Caracas became exhausted within a few decades. Nevertheless, the fertile lands, distributed among the Spaniards in encomiendas, continued to be cultivated by Indian and negro labour, but, although maize, bananas, potatoes, and in the higher valleys even wheat, as well as the vine and olive, with the cattle introduced by Europeans, furnished an abundant supply of food, to say nothing of tobacco and sugar, Spain's blind colonial policy virtually prevented export of agricultural products. The Spanish authorities wanted nothing from their American dominions but gold and silver, and when Venezuela's placers were exhausted the colony was neglected. It was in spite of the prohibition of the Spanish government that cacao trees were introduced, and the exportation which soon grew up—the first of any importance from Venezuela—was mostly clandestine. Practically all the goods legally imported had to be procured from the Cadiz monopoly, and were sent to the Isthmus andthere transhipped into coasting vessels, paying enormous freight charges, profits, and duties. Tobacco and salt were monopolised by government concessionaires, and not a chicken could be sold in the markets without paying an exorbitant tax.
Education was completely neglected. It was not until 1696 that a priests' school was established in Caracas, and when the city of Merida asked a similar boon, it was denied because "His Catholic Majesty did not deem it wise that education should become general in America." So the Creoles grew up nearly as ignorant as the Indians around them, although retaining all the fierce pride of their Spanish descent, acknowledging no man as superior, and retaining very dim sentiments of loyalty to the mother country. Nevertheless, the ancient municipal forms, traditional among peoples of Spanish descent, survived, furnishing the framework of civil government, while the priesthood constituted a moral and intellectual tie binding the Creoles to their Castilian ancestors.
The repressive regulations against commerce could not be perfectly enforced. Although the arrival of a ship from Spain was a real event, British, Dutch, and French traders frequented the coast, opening markets with their swords, and often turning buccaneers and sacking a town when not satisfied with their reception. But the burning of a few coast hamlets was more than compensated by the advantages of practical free-trade, and Venezuela owed much of the prosperity she enjoyed during the seventeenth century to these semi-pirates. Thesettlements crept along the Andean valleys to the Colombian frontier; the Creoles ventured farther and farther into the wide plains of the Orinoco and their cattle were soon roaming half-wild in the immense and luxuriant pastures stretching south of the agricultural strip. From the mixture of the Indians of the llanos with Europeans sprang a new race of men, the semi-nomadic llaneros, whose hardiness, courage, horsemanship, and prowess as hunters of big game have given them equal celebrity with the gauchos of the Argentine, the cossacks of the Russian steppes, or the Texas cowboys. The buccaneers and smuggling traders were especially active in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In 1654 Frenchmen were repelled in an attack on Cumaná, but in 1669 the Britisher, Morgan, sacked Maracaibo, and in 1679 the French pillaged Caracas itself. The paralysis suffered by Spain during the war of the Spanish Succession nearly destroyed Venezuelan commerce, and it did not recover with the peace of Utrecht. Only five ships arrived in the first thirty years of the eighteenth century, and from 1706 to 1721 not a single vessel sailed for Spain.
The Spanish government determined to try if another system would not bring a larger revenue into the royal treasury. The Guipuzcoa Company was granted an exclusive franchise to buy and sell in the colony, and the operations of this powerful corporation galvanised commerce into a certain activity. In order to stimulate the receipt of hides, and prevent the incursions of wild plains Indians, trading posts were established in the llanos, and soon theprairies south of Valencia and Caracas rivalled the Barcelona country in cattle, and the ranches extended up the Apuré, the great western tributary of the Orinoco, to the foot of the Colombian Andes. Meanwhile expeditions penetrated up the Orinoco from its mouth, and in 1764 the city of Angostura was established four hundred miles from the sea. The operations of the Guipuzcoa Company did not aid in establishing a more friendly understanding between the home government and the Venezuelan Creoles. The independent merchants constantly quarrelled with the company's agents; the low prices for which they were compelled to sell their stock outraged the ranch owners; the farmers resented the monopolisation of tobacco and the restrictions on sugar-culture; exorbitant prices were demanded for imported goods. Protests became so loud that special commissioners were sent from Spain to investigate, but they gave no satisfactory relief. Shortly after the foundation of the Guipuzcoa Company, Venezuela had been raised to the dignity of a captaincy-general. The increased efficiency of the administration assisted the monopoly in suppressing clandestine trading, and the feeling grew to such a height that in 1749 a Creole leader, named Leon, menaced Caracas itself at the head of six thousand armed men, demanding the suppression of the company and the expulsion of its factors. The captain-general was forced to yield and the revolutionists dispersed, but his promise was never redeemed. The active measures of the company effectually shut off foreign trading-ships, and the ports were so fortifiedthat the British expeditions retired defeated from the attacks they made in 1739 and 1743 on La Guaira and Puerto Cabello, although in 1797 they captured the island of Trinidad and menaced the entrance to the Orinoco. It was not until 1778, when the Spanish government finally abandoned the monopolistic colonial system and opened all the ports of South America to free commerce with each other and with Spain, that the Guipuzcoa Company retired from business. Six years before this the provinces of Maracaibo, Cumaná, and Guiana—as the lower Orinoco region was called,—all of which had heretofore been directly dependent upon the viceroy of Bogotá, were placed under the jurisdiction of the captain-general of Caracas, fixing the modern boundaries of Venezuela.