Alonso de Ojeda
Alonso de Ojeda was the captain of the expedition of 1499 on which Amerigo Vespucci sailed, the first voyage after Columbus's to reach the South American mainland, which followed the coast of Guiana and Venezuela from the Orinoco to Cabo de la Vela and found on the way the stilt villages of Lake Maracaibo that gave the country its name. He was a small, fierce man from Cuenca who had sailed with Columbus on the second voyage, captured the cacique Caonabo by a trick with a pair of polished manacles he presented as a gift, and ended his life a beggar in Santo Domingo after the failure of his own colony on the Gulf of Uraba, the first Spanish settlement on the mainland. He had been a page in the household of the Duke of Medinaceli and was known at court for feats of agility, one of which, walking out along a beam from the top of the Giralda in Seville, Isabella watched. Columbus took him to Hispaniola in 1493 and sent him inland to find the gold of the Cibao, where he built the first fort in the interior and took Caonabo. In Spain in 1499 he got from Bishop Fonseca, who wanted to break Columbus's monopoly, a licence to explore the coast the Admiral had reported the year before, and sailed in May with four ships, Juan de la Cosa as pilot and Vespucci as a merchant investor, which is how the Florentine came to be on the voyage that made him famous. They reached the coast near the Orinoco, coasted west past Trinidad and the island of Margarita, into the Gulf of Venezuela and Lake Maracaibo, fought the Indians at several landings, and turned north to Hispaniola. There Ojeda quarrelled with Columbus's men and went home in 1500 with pearls, brazilwood and a few slaves, which did not pay for the ships. A second voyage in 1502 ended with his partners arresting him for embezzlement. In 1508 the crown made him governor of New Andalusia, the coast from the Gulf of Uraba east, and he founded San Sebastian de Uraba in 1510 with three hundred men, lost most of them to poisoned arrows and hunger, was wounded himself, sailed for help and was shipwrecked in Cuba, walking across it. The colony was abandoned and refounded by Balboa across the gulf as Darien. Ojeda died in Santo Domingo about 1515, in poverty, and asked to be buried under the threshold of the Franciscan church so that everyone who entered would tread on him.
- Lived: 1466 CE – 1515 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: explorer, conquistador, navigator
