The best Spanish authorities are agreed in considering that the Sovereign, owing to various causes, the chief being peculation and smuggling, was defrauded of about one half of the colonial revenue which legitimately belonged to him. But, notwithstanding corruption and illicit importation, the revenue derived by the Spanish monarch from his American possessions was still very considerable. It arose from taxes, which may be divided into three branches. The first includes what was paid to the King as Lord Superior of the New World, namely, the duty on the produce of the mines and the tribute exacted from the natives. The second branch comprehended the duties upon commerce. The third included such dues as came to the King in his capacity as temporal head of the colonial Church and as administrator of its funds. It is estimated that _Peru_ yielded to the Crown a revenue of about a million sterling, one half of which may have been consumed in the expense of the provincial establishments. This amount, or whatever it may have been, it is to be remembered, accrued to the Spanish Crown from this important colony, _in addition_ to the wealth derived from it by the parent state by means of its exclusive trade. 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.