Volume 2 / Book 2 — CHAPTER IX. VICEROYALTY OF NEW GRANADA; CAPTAIN-GENERALSHIP OF VENEZUELA. 1535-1790.

For some time after the disastrous failure of the attempt of Las Casas to found a colony on the Pearl Coast of Cumaná, the northern portion of Spanish South America, from the Orinoco westwards, is almost lost to history. The powers working for good had signally failed, and the powers of evil seemed to have it almost all their own way. The regions discovered by the Spaniards were so vast, in proportion to the numbers of the discoverers, that many of them were long lost to view, and probably to memory. Such was the fate of the territory which borders the Orinoco, a great river flowing from the Cordilleras, and which throws itself and its many tributaries by forty outlets into the ocean.

It was in the year 1535 that the Spaniards first attempted to ascend this stream; but, not finding the mines they sought, they looked on it with indifference. Nevertheless, the few Europeans there sown applied themselves with such energy to the culture of tobacco that they were enabled to supply, yearly, some cargoes of this plant to the foreign vessels which came to purchase it. But this traffic was forbidden by the mother-country; whilst some enterprising corsairs twice pillaged this establishment, which could not defend itself. These disasters caused it to be forgotten.

Lying behind these extensive coasts to the westward in the interior, is the region to which the Spaniards gave the name of the kingdom of New Granada, the name being applied in consequence of a resemblance which was detected between the plain around Santa Fè de Bogotá and the royal Vega which adjoins the historical Moorish capital. New Granada was a most extensive region, comprising as it did the entire country from sea to sea in the north, lying between 60° and 78° longitude, and from 6° to 15° of latitude.

1526.

Bogotá was attacked, from the south, by Benalcazar, the governor of Quito; whilst Ximenes de Quesada, who had disembarked at Santa Marta, marched against it from the north. They did not fail to meet resistance, which, however, was no match for Spanish discipline, arms, and valour; and the above-named leaders had the renown of adding another grand possession to the South-American dominions of their sovereigns. In the course of time the more distant provinces, of which Bogotá was the centre, became subject to its government. There were, however, a number of the inhabitants of this vast and varied mountainous region who either retained, throughout, their barbarous independence or who regained it from time to time.

1535.

Ximenes de Quesada came to America about the year 1535, in the suite of the Governor of Santa Marta, by whom he was selected to lead an expedition against the Chibchas, who dwelt on the plain of Bogotá and around the head waters of the Magdalena. Setting out in April 1536 with eight hundred men, he succeeded in pushing his way through the forest and across innumerable streams. He contrived to subsist for eight months, during which he traversed four hundred and fifty miles, enduring meanwhile the very utmost exertions and privations that human nature could support. It was not given to this leader to meet with an adversary sufficiently powerful or wealthy to confer upon him by his capture the splendour which has attached itself to the names of the conquerors of Montazuma and of Atahualpa; but it may be doubted whether, in so far as may be judged by reading the accounts of their several exploits, one or the other of those adventurers had more difficulties to surmount than had Ximenes de Quesada.

When he and his men had at length reached Barranca, they were arrested by a downpour of rain, which literally covered the country; but, in face of such discouraging circumstances, Ximenes persisted in proceeding. Sending on a party of twelve men, under Captain San Martin, he remained with the rest of his detachment, sleeping at night in the tops of trees, and subsisting on a small allowance of maize and horse-flesh daily.

On the return of San Martin with a favourable report of a cultivated country beyond, Ximenes boldly determined to pass over the mountains of Opon, in which attempt he lost twenty-one men in gaining a height of five thousand five hundred feet above the sea. He had recourse to ropes for pulling his horses up. On the summit a land of abundance awaited him; and as, like other Spanish conquerors of the New World, he held the convenient creed that the heathen had been given to him for his inheritance, he felt no scruple at all from the fact that the region which he and his followers meant to appropriate afforded the means of subsistence to a numerous population, which it would be necessary to dispossess.

When he had surmounted the natural difficulties in his path, his remaining force consisted of but one hundred and sixty-six men, with sixty horses. On March 2nd, 1537, he resumed his advance; and, as usually happened, the mere sight of his horsemen terrified the Indians into submission. At Tunja, according to the Spanish historians, he was treacherously attacked whilst resting in the palace of one of his chiefs. That he may have been so is of course possible; but the fact would commend itself the more readily to our belief had it been narrated by a Chibcha writer. In any case, the chief was taken, and, after much slaughter, Ximenes found himself the absolute possessor of immense riches, one golden lantern alone being valued at six thousand ducats.

From Tunja Ximenes marched upon the sacred city of Iraca, where two Spanish soldiers accidentally set fire to the great Temple of the Sun. The result was that, after a conflagration which lasted for several days, both the city and the temple were utterly destroyed.

But the inhabitants of this new region of the votaries of the Sun were not yet fully subdued; and, on his return towards Tunja, Ximenes had to encounter the force of twelve thousand desperate natives. His arms and his horses were again successful; and, after his victory at Borja, he received the submission of several caciques, and was enabled to divide among his soldiers no less a booty than forty thousand pounds in gold and eighteen hundred emeralds.

Ximenes de Quesada was neither more nor less particular than was Cortez or Pizarro in the means which he employed in order to gain his end. His object at present was to obtain information as to the retreat of a chief, whose property it was his intention to appropriate. With this view he seized upon two youths, whom he ordered to be tortured. One of them died under the operation; but by the other, who was either stronger or less courageous, Ximenes was conducted to the retreat of the chief, who was killed in the skirmish which ensued. His people fought desperately for their independence, but were overcome by the invaders, by the aid of an alliance with a pretender to the succession.

This traitor to his country’s and his race’s cause soon met the fate which he deserved. Imitating the Roman policy of sparing the weak and battling the powerful, the Spaniards in America were ever on the watch to take advantage of local jealousies; to which cause they owed their conquest of Mexico and many of their successes in the southern continent from Peru to Araucania. On this occasion the aspirant to the Chibcha crown swore allegiance to the King of Spain, the proof required of his sincerity being that he should deliver up the treasures of his predecessors. In the usual vaunting style of a barbarian king, he undertook to fill, within six weeks, a whole room with gold and emeralds. That he should have failed to do so was probably inevitable; but that his failure was owing to bad faith to the Spaniards was obviously an absurd imputation. He had, however, aroused their lust for plunder, and his fault was not to be forgiven. He was accordingly put to death with those refinements of cruelty of which the Spaniards were such masters.

On the 9th of August, 1538, was founded the city of Bogotá. Ximenes was soon here joined by Frederman, a subject of the Emperor Charles V., with one hundred and sixty soldiers, with whom he had been engaged in conquering Venezuela; and likewise by Benalcazar, the conqueror of Quito. This latter warrior had crossed the continent in triumph at the head of a hundred and fifty Spaniards, together with a multitude of native followers.

In such a wholly-unprecedented state of affairs, it is not to be wondered at that these Spanish captains, elevated severally from a humble condition to the rank of independent generals and governors, should have departed from all subordination, and should have taken for their principle that might makes right. Accordingly, it was the first idea of Benalcazar to combine with Frederman in order to expel Ximenes from his conquests. But, as he might perhaps have foreseen, the same idea had already occurred to the other, and the adventurers from Venezuela were, in consideration of the payment of ten thousand dollars to Frederman, enrolled amongst the forces of Quesada.

Benalcazar, in turn, entered into an arrangement with the two others to appoint a governor of all their territories during their absence from America, for the purpose of laying their claims before Charles V. In this representation they were not all equally successful. Benalcazar was declared independent of Pizarro, and was made governor of Popayan; Ximenes de Quesada was fined to the amount of one thousand ducats; was banished for one year, and was suspended for five years from office; whilst Frederman was judged to be an interloper, and obtained nothing. Shortly afterwards, however, the Emperor remitted the punishment against Ximenes, and appointed him marshal of the kingdom of New Granada. On his return to Bogotá in 1551, he, to his credit, exhibited an energy in protecting the people of the country against their invaders, equal to that which he had displayed in effecting their conquest.

Ten years later he commanded a force, organized to repel an attack from the ruler of Venezuela; shortly after which he was appointed Adelantado of the kingdom of New Granada. He devoted three years, and an enormous amount of toil and money, to an absurd expedition in quest of the fabled El Dorado. To the search of this myth were devoted three hundred Spaniards, two thousand Indians, and twelve hundred horses; of which martial array only twenty-four men and thirty-two quadrupeds returned, mutely to tell the tale of the supreme folly of their leader.

Of the life of a man who had shown himself possessed of such great qualities, in whatsoever way they had been applied, as had Ximenes de Quesada, all prominent details are interesting. It may therefore be noted that, after having founded in 1572 the city of Santa Agueda, this conqueror and knight-errant died of leprosy, leaving behind him debts to the amount of sixty thousand ducats, which circumstance would seem to have rendered it somewhat unnecessary for him to insert in his will his desire that no expensive monument should be erected over his grave. His body was transferred to Bogotá.

The importance of New Granada in the eyes of the Spaniards lay in its being the source whence the best emeralds were procured. Many of these had found their way into Peru; but the rude conquerors, who were under the impression that emeralds were as hard as diamonds, having submitted them to the test of the hammer, came to the conclusion that they were valueless. In this manner many were destroyed; and the loss became the greater owing to the fact that it was impossible to discover the mine whence the Incas had procured them. The discovery of New Granada luckily supplied this important want. The provinces of Popayan and Choco had the further merit of supplying gold; which was found on the surface of the earth, and which could therefore easily be gathered by the simple means of washing.

1718.

The court of Madrid was dissatisfied that a region which had been lauded as possessing great natural advantages should furnish it with such few commodities, and those in so small quantities. It drew therefrom the conclusion that the country under the superintendence of the Viceroy of Peru was too vast for all parts of it to receive due attention, and that the development of the northern region would be better assured under a separate government. Accordingly, in the year 1718, the Viceroyalty of Peru was divided into two portions, the northern region, from the frontiers of Mexico as far as to the Orinoco, and on the Southern Sea from Veragua to Tumbez, forming the Viceroyalty of New Granada, of which the capital was Bogotá. To this region, likewise, was assigned the inland province of Quito. The Viceroyalty of New Granada, in fact, comprised what now forms the Republic of Venezuela, the United States of Columbia, and the Republic of Ecuador.

Although this was undoubtedly a step in the right direction, its good results were not at once apparent. It might have been foreseen that it would take some time as well to form capable administrators as to call order out of confusion, and to instil the habits of industry into people long used to idleness and free-living. Nevertheless, the change of things was not without effect, and the good results became by degrees apparent in Spain. Here, as elsewhere in those imperfectly-controlled regions, smuggling was the rule; and it is said that half of the gold amassed by the colony was fraudulently sent abroad, chiefly by way of the rivers Atrato and Hache. With a view to stopping this traffic, forts were erected on these streams; which, however, were ineffectual in securing the end in view.

Communication between one province and another, even between one town or village and another, was difficult or impracticable. Every traveller was more or less exposed to be robbed or to be killed by the independent Indians; but these enemies, formerly fierce and implacable, yielded by degrees to the efforts of the missionaries, and to the acts of good-will on the part of the strangers, which replaced the barbarities of a more savage age. Notwithstanding the bounties of nature in this region, many of its provinces drew their subsistence from Europe or from North America. The cost of transport from place to place forbade the culture of grain in the interior beyond the amount requisite for each individual locality.

1774.

The town of Santa Fè de Bogotá is situated at the foot of a height at the entrance to a vast plain. In 1774 it possessed three thousand two hundred and fifty families, or about sixteen thousand inhabitants. It was the residence of an Archbishop, holding a jurisdiction of immense extent, and who, as Metropolitan, was inspector of the dioceses of Quito, Panamá, Caracas, Santa Marta, and Carthagena. It was by way of the last-named place, although it was distant three hundred miles, and by the river Magdalena, that Santa Fè de Bogotá communicated with Europe; whilst the same route led to Quito.

The province of Quito was likewise of immense extent, but was for the most part covered with forests, or composed of marshes or deserts, inhabited here and there by wandering savages. Spaniards can only be properly said to have occupied and governed a valley of some eighty leagues in length and fifteen in breadth, formed by two branches of the Cordilleras.

Quito is one of the most lovely regions which the world possesses. Being in the centre of the Torrid Zone, it enjoys a perpetual spring. Nature has here gathered together all the influences which can modify the heat of the tropics, the neighbouring mountains being covered in their vast extent by snow; whilst constant breezes refresh the plains throughout the year. But, as might be expected, so elevated a region, and one having an atmosphere so charged with electricity, is often the scene of the most violent tropical thunder-storms, the terrors of which are not unfrequently added to by earthquakes. The excessive humidity at one time is often fatal to the cultivation of grain; whilst, on the other hand, contrasting seasons of heat produce dangerous maladies. Nevertheless, on the whole, the climate is a very healthy one. The air is perfectly pure, and is free from the presence of the disagreeable insects so prevalent in other parts of the continent.

The humidity of the atmosphere, and the action of the sun, succeeding each other in constant alternation, and being always sufficient for the development of plants, an almost perpetual succession of vegetation ensues; for no sooner is one plant gone than another begins to arise in its place. The trees are covered perpetually with green leaves, and adorned with sweet-smelling flowers, or laden with tropical fruits in every stage of development. This province was said to be the most populous in America. It possessed a number of towns with populations varying from ten to thirty thousand. The people of Quito had, fortunately for themselves, escaped the lot of labouring in the mines; since those which this district possessed were too poor to pay the expenses of working them. They must have been poor indeed, since the Spaniards consented to relinquish a mode of acquiring riches which cost them nothing but the blood of their slaves. Freed from this source of labour, the inhabitants of Quito were more usefully employed in manufactures, the produce of which was exchanged for wine and oil, and other commodities which were foreign to this elevated region. Notwithstanding, however, its natural advantages, Quito, in the latter part of last century, had sunk into an extreme degree of poverty.

This province possessed, in quinine, one production which has been ever since its discovery of the highest value to the human race, and which formed, in the colonial period, the sole article of export. The only precious portion of the quinquina tree is its bark, which requires no other preparation for its use than being dried. At one time the quinquina was supposed to be peculiar to the territory of Loxa, the finest quality being produced on the mountain of Caganuma. Later researches, however, prove that the same tree exists at Riobamba, at Cuenca, and at Bogotá. Europe is indebted for the introduction of this most precious article to the Jesuits, who made its invaluable qualities known at Rome in the year 1639. In the following year its use was established in Spain by Juan de Vega, physician to the Vice-Queen of Peru, its price being a hundred crowns a pound. The price which the invaluable article commanded and deserved, led, as a matter of course, to adulteration; and even the distant inhabitants of Loxa, being unable to supply the demand for genuine quinquina, filled up the void by a mixture of the bark of other trees. This proceeding, however, rebounded on themselves, since it deprived their special product of its unique reputation; whilst, at the same time, it led to a more diligent search for the same plant elsewhere. The natives of the region which furnished quinquina were in the habit of using a simple infusion of the bark in cases of fever, before they were taught by M. Joseph de Jussieu to produce the extract.

1728.

1731.

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.