Great enthusiasm was naturally kindled in Spain by the news of the discovery of a mainland (_Tierra Firme_) west of the islands, and it was decided to send a special exploratory expedition. Hence we have Alonso de Ojeda setting sail in 1499, and landing several times on what is now the Peninsula of Paria, though he knew it by the native name of Maracapana. The region generally he designated Nueva Andalusia. Encouraged by what he had seen, he sailed on westwards as far as Cabo de la Vela (now in Colombia), and entered the Lake of Maracaibo or Coquibacoa. Here there were at that time, as now, Indian pile-dwellings on the shores of the lake, which so far reminded Ojeda of Venice or Venezia, that he gave to the region the name of Little Venice, or Venezuela. Thus we have the mainland of the New World or the Indies first sighted by Columbus and partly examined and named by Ojeda, but we may here turn aside from the story of Venezuela for a moment to see how, by a great and successful geographical fraud, the whole of the continent came to be called America. There was on Ojeda’s ship a Florentine merchant by name Amerigo Vespucci, who appeared to have contented himself on this voyage with gazing from the deck at the shores of the new countries. After returning to Europe, he developed sufficient zeal to make a voyage on his own account to Brazil, and wrote a clever joint account of both voyages, in which he represented himself as a leader in the first expedition which effected a landing on the mainland of the New World. This _suggestio falsi_, if it deserves no harsher term, led Martin Hylacomylus in his “Cosmographia,” published in 1509, to say of the discovery of the different parts of the globe: “_Alia quarta pars per Americū Vesputium ... inuenta est: qua non video cur quis iure vetet ab Americo inventatore ... Amerigen quasi Americi terram, siue Americam dicendam._”[2] Thus it comes that a third of the land of the globe bears the name of a man who had no claim to be considered as of any particular importance on the ship which bore the first Spanish explorers who set foot in Venezuela. Meanwhile, close behind Ojeda there was travelling an expedition including Pedro Alonso Niño, Luis Guerra, and Christobal Guerra, who visited Margarita and the adjacent islands of Cubagua, where they had some intercourse with the natives and obtained from them by barter a number of pearls. Next they touched the Cumanagoto coast, not far from where Barcelona now stands, and sailed from there to the Coro district. Here again they were well received by the natives, and exchanged European trinkets with them for gold and pearls. They continued their voyage as far as the Goajira Peninsula, but found the people there of a fierce and menacing aspect, so they returned to Spain, bearing news of the wealth of the West.