Had those natives only kept their pearls and golden trinkets from the sight of these first genuine explorers, the history of Venezuela might have been very different. The white men who next visited Venezuela were little, if anything, more than rapacious brigands, consumed with a lust for gain, before which any shreds of morality or good feeling they may once have possessed went for nothing. In the year 1500 some fifty adventurers, sailing from Hispaniola, established a settlement on Cubagua for the pearl fisheries, and soon a horde of nondescripts from all the countries of Europe flocked to this source of easily won treasure, which under their uncontrolled and extravagant exploitation began to fail rapidly. With appetites whetted, these spoilt children of fortune turned to look for other means of acquiring wealth, always provided these did not entail any honest toil, and from this time begins the long black record of Spanish cruelties in the Indies, with the fabricated excuses of cannibalism and ferocity among the Indians. To appreciate the position we must recall the infamous decree of Charles V. of Spain, which permitted the Europeans in the Indies to capture and enslave the natives who in any way opposed the “colonisation” of the new countries, or who practised cannibalism. The Indians being found most reprehensibly innocent of either of these crimes, the Cubaguans pronounced their very presence an evidence of opposition, and further assumed that they must all be cannibals. Carefully avoiding the possibility of arousing the wrath of the fine and stalwart Guaiquerias of Margarita, who lived in uncomfortable proximity to their town, they took steps to enslave some of the more remote Indians of the mainland. While the world, the flesh, and the devil had been having things to themselves on Cubagua, the Church had been entering upon the new field of missionary work on the mainland, and three Franciscan monks settled on the Cumaná coast in 1513, while some Dominicans established a little community at Manjar, near Píritu. At both places the monks were on the most friendly terms with the natives, on whom, at that date, their influence was wholly for good.