The stories referred to here are real and unusual events, very well documented, that occurred between 1515 and 1545, which are equivalent to a small laboratory, sample of what is happening today on a large scale on Earth.
Few people know what Cubagua is, except us Venezuelans, and even so, most people do not know what happened there 500 years ago. Cubagua is an island located in the northeast of Venezuela, very close to the eastern coasts, it is part of the insular group Margarita, Coche and Cubagua, discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1498. Its barely 6 km long by 4 km wide, its Lack of fresh water and waste soil, they were in no way sympathetic to its economic importance, due to the immense quantity of splendid pearl oysters that it hid under its waters, the most coveted wealth at the time, as appreciated as gold at that time, that the abundant golden metal of the Aztec empire would only appear before European eyes in 1519 and that of the Inca in 1532.
Starting in 1523, many settlers from Hispaniola and prominent businessmen from Europe and Spain moved to Cubagua, bringing their families with them. Overnight Nueva Cádiz flourished, an elegant city with straight and well-laid streets. The main one was three hundred meters long. Some houses were luxurious, tall and turreted, built of stones, with spacious warehouses and docks, as well manufactured as if that pearl resource would be infinite and the city thought for a thousand years.
The intensity of the exploitation of pearl pleasures, between 1520 and 1525, was such that ten thousand marks of pearls were declared, equivalent to about 2.27 tons. At that time there was no notion about the mother-of-pearl reproduction cycle and no ban was decreed to grant them a truce to reproduce. 1527 was the year of greatest extraction, with almost 1.4 tons declared. Since then production has plummeted. Between 1537 and 1540, an average of less than 12 kilos of pearls per year was declared.
In 1530 two streets of Nueva Cádiz were already depopulated; in 1532 the possibility of moving the city to the mainland was discussed, the following year they asked the judge of residence to go to Margarita; in 1537 this same request was formalized to the emperor and in 1539 several lords of canoes, the owners of the fisheries, obtained permission from the Crown to move to Cabo de la Vela, a small cove located in what is now Colombia's Goajira. The canoes were manned by fifteen or twenty Indians and extracted between six and seven marks of pearls daily, on average double what they took in Cubagua. The activity there also declined rapidly, although not only due to the exhaustion of mother-of-pearls but also due to the belligerent attitude of the Goajiro Indians.
It took less than 20 years to fleece a work formed over millions of years by nature. From 1545 onwards, Nueva Cádiz was a cemetery. The enormous, robust and elegant buildings, thought for a millennium, were left alone in less than two decades, as silent witnesses of the great depredation made by exotic beings called homo sapiens-sapiens, something like the wise men who think.
But those men did not think about the future, just as some humans of today do not think, like those who are cutting down the trees of the jungles of Borneo and Amazon at full speed, without reflecting that they are the two largest lungs in the world. Thousands of times it has been repeated that this gift that nature gave us are the air purifiers of the entire planet, but just like five hundred years ago, everything indicates that, at the rate of destruction, in less than a hundred years the magnificent Jungles will turn into deserts, and if these mega depredations don't stop, then humans will witness the greatest planetary catastrophe ever imagined.
But what happens in the Amazon and in Borneo, with the destruction of its prolific ecosystems, not only happens in these privileged jungles with all their species, many already in terminal phase. The oceans are also becoming depopulated, as we know from news of the rapid decline of whales, fish and other edible species, which can lead to a major biological imbalance. It is possible that, due to its complexity, science does not have an answer nor is it capable of constructing a model that allows us to anticipate the future.
In conclusion, it is worth emphasizing that Cubagua, with its early ecological catastrophe, its small size, its only valuable and abundant species, and the speed with which its mother-of-pearl population was extinguished, can serve as an example for us to understand the problem of extinctions in all their magnitude and meaning. Due to its simplicity, the Cubagua Case can be taken as a Comprehension and Measure Unit to understand and quantify the intensive and excessive extraction of natural resources from our planet by humans.
Note:
The historian Enrique Otte made a monumental work, a 620-page book, very well documented on Cubagua and what happened there, which can be useful for an in-depth study.
Sources
- Otte, Enrique, (1977), The Pearls of the Caribbean: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua, Caracas, Venezuela: Fundación John Boulton.Gerendas-Kiss, Sandor Alejandro. (2015) Colonial History of Venezuela. The birth of a country. 1506-1561.
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Website: https://sgerendask.com/es/
Twitter: @sgerendaskiss and @sandorgerendask
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