Aruba - Adventure Guide to Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao - page 58

guished himself as a good sailor who was daring, but excessively
cruel in clashes with natives living in the New World.
In 1499, he set out again as commander of his own fleet of three
ships. One of his crew members was Amerigo Vespucci, the Ital-
ian director of a ship company that supplied vessels for long voy-
ages. They reportedly explored the north coast of South America
and went on to Cuba, Hispaniola (Dominican Republic/Haiti), and
the Bahama Islands. When Vespucci got back to Spain, he
boasted of his findings, including the exploration of islands off the
coast of South America, near the mouth of the Orinoco River.
This is perhaps how some historians came to consider Vespucci
the discoverer of the ABC Islands.
De Ojeda's third expedition included Francisco Pizarro, the future
conqueror of Peru. (Hernando Cortes, who later triumphed in
Mexico, would have been among the soldiers on this venture, but
he became ill and couldn't sail.) When de Ojeda reached the South
American coast, he found the natives very hostile and lost many of
his men in battle. He escaped, but was shipwrecked on his way to
Hispaniola, and died in 1508.
Soon after de Ojeda and Vespucci returned to Spain from their
voyages with tales of their discovery of South America and islands
off its northern shore, other Spaniards began arriving on all three
islands to simultaneously enslave and convert the native inhabit-
ants. They set up ranches and military camps on tiny Aruba, but
conducted government and business dealings from Curaçao.
European Influence & Control
From 1636 until 1816, Aruba's fate was closely tied to complicated political
events in Europe. In 1636, Holland got the upper hand during the Eighty-
Year War with Spain, and the Dutch took over Aruba, Bonaire, and
Curaçao. They ruled under the charter of the Dutch West India Company
until 1805, when England took the islands from the Dutch Republic, which
had fallen to the French in 1795 and was annexed to France in 1810 during
the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon met his final defeat at Waterloo in June,
1815, and new boundary lines were drawn up for many countries. The
Kingdom of the Netherlands was established in 1816, and Aruba was soon
returned to Dutch rule.
Gold was indeed discovered near 560-foot Jamanota, the island's highest
point, in 1824. A population and financial boom followed, but the small
cache was depleted around 1916. After that, the economy struggled along,
dependent on aloe production for the most part, until a large oil deposit
was found 20 miles across the sea in the Lake Maracaibo area of Vene-
zuela. Aruba seemed an ideal location for processing the crude oil, and
Esso Lago built a huge refinery at San Nicolas in 1924.