Venezuela : General History and Natural Features

This book presents the general history of Venezuela, from its conquest,
settlement and colonial period to the modern days; and the natural features of
the country. Venezuela is a republic of South America, facing the Caribbean
sea. "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..."