Dry Venezuela Island Lived Boom-to-Bust Pearl Rush

Typography
Those who fear the world's economy will crash the day the Earth's oil reserves run dry can cite the "pearl island" of Cubagua as a lesson in how not to exploit a natural resource.

CUBBAGUA, Venezuela — Those who fear the world's economy will crash the day the Earth's oil reserves run dry can cite the "pearl island" of Cubagua as a lesson in how not to exploit a natural resource.


This parched, almost uninhabited, scrub-covered islet off Venezuela's eastern coast was once a booming Spanish colonial trade depot that sent shiploads of glittering pearls to Europe to adorn the rings, necklaces and robes of monarchs and popes.


Nearly five centuries later, all that remains of one of the first capitalist export centers of the New World is a dusty and crumbling patchwork of stone walls, strewn with garbage and littered with the husks of oysters and other shells.


"These are the ruins of New Cadiz ... Now it's just a cemetery of sea shells," said boatman Emilio Suarez, as he showed visitors around after a bone-jarring one-hour ride through choppy seas from the nearby island of Coche.


After discovering the Americas in 1492, Christopher Columbus encountered native Indians wearing strings of pearls in what is now eastern Venezuela.


Spanish adventurers started using Indian divers to bring up pearls from the rich oyster banks off Cubagua and founded a city there, New Cadiz, which was granted its own charter in 1528 by Spain's King Charles V.


After starting out as a frontier camp of palm thatch huts, New Cadiz blossomed into a thriving commercial settlement of 1,000 inhabitants, complete with two-story stone houses laid in a gridiron pattern, a church and a Franciscan monastery.


Such was the fame in Europe of Cubagua's pearls, reported to be "the size of hazelnuts," that Italy's aristocratic Medici family even kept a permanent representative there.


But in an orgy of greed and unbridled exploitation lasting two decades, the Spanish exhausted Cubagua's pearl banks at the cost of the lives of hundreds of Indian and black slave divers who died from fatigue and drowning or were devoured by sharks.


"Cubagua had a fleeting life ... By 1540, its production of pearls had plummeted because of irrational exploitation which did not allow oysters to reproduce," said Graziano Gasparini, one of Venezuela's leading historians and architects.


DIVINE PUNISHMENT?


In 1541, after the city had survived attacks by pirates and Indians, a Caribbean hurricane destroyed New Cadiz in what some contemporary observers saw as divine punishment for the abuses committed against nature and humanity.


Since then, Cubagua, which has no fresh water source, has been largely abandoned, populated only by a few fishermen. Local islanders still sell natural pearls to visitors.


"As the whole city was drowned, no one else has wanted to settle here," said Suarez.


He and other locals say a section of the old city of New Cadiz was submerged under the sea in 1541 and that its outline can still be made out in the sand and coral.


Gasparini, who took part in one of the first major excavations of New Cadiz nearly 50 years ago, dismisses this as a popular myth. "People say you can still hear the bells of the city ringing underwater ... It's pure fantasy," he said.


He complained that despite appeals made to successive Venezuelan governments and local authorities, it had been impossible to obtain even the most minimal protection for what was one of the first European cities in the New World.


"It's little better than a public latrine now," he said.


While important artifacts like the city shield, seals and elaborately carved gargoyles have been preserved in museums, the ruins have suffered heavy pilfering by souvenir-hunters.


"DEVIL'S EXCREMENT"


Archeologists and historians have studied the rise and fall of New Cadiz as a one of the first documented examples of how European capitalism, based on a trade monopoly and slave labor, devastated a natural resource in the Americas.


"It was the most expensive city in the world," Gasparini said. Fresh water for Cubagua was fetched by boat from a river on the mainland and a fort was built to protect this source. Fruit and vegetables came from the island of Margarita nearby.


"To sustain a city like that, completely artificially, was only justified by the production of pearls," Gasparini said.


In their scramble for the pearls, the Spanish adventurers paid far less attention to a small spring of dark oily liquid that dribbled into the sea from a tip of the island.


One traveler, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, said local inhabitants called the viscous liquid in Latin "stercus demonis" (devil's excrement), or "petrolio". Fernandez reported some people said it could be drunk as a cure for gout.


"They didn't really know what it was ... they used it to caulk their ships," Gasparini said.


Centuries later, the development by U.S and European companies of Venezuela's vast reserves of this "petrolio" has made it one of the world's leading crude oil producers.


But that's another story.


Source: Reuters