He travelled through modern-day Guyana, Venezuela, Trinidad, Tobago, Curaçao, Aruba and Colombia, at times with Amerigo Vespucci and Juan de la Cosa.

He is famous for having named Venezuela, which he explored during his first two expeditions, for having been the first European to visit Guyana, Curaçao, Colombia, and Lake Maracaibo, and later for founding Santa Cruz (La Guairita).

Fearing for their safety (the islanders were suspected of being cannibals), Columbus sent Ojeda ashore with an armed contingent to search for the lost group.

The missing party eventually showed up on their own but Ojeda's search turned up additional evidence that the Caribs on the island did practice cannibalism.

[4] They reached Hispaniola at the end of November and discovered the fort, Navidad, constructed during the first voyage was in ruins and all the Spaniards left behind were dead.

Columbus established a fort, Santo Tomas (named as a rebuke to those who doubted the presence of gold), to serve as a trading post and as a base for further prospecting.

Pedro de Margarit [es], a nobleman from Aragon and a confidant of the king, was put in command of the fort when Columbus returned to Isabela.

Columbus wanted de Margarit to take the bulk of the soldiers and search the island for gold, seize food from the natives, and capture Caonabo.

At an important river crossing controlled by a friendly tribe, Ojeda arrested the local cacique and other officials with the allegation that some clothes had been stolen during a previous expedition.

[6] After de Margarit's refusal to capture Caonabo, Columbus ordered Ojeda to find the cacique allegedly responsible for destroying the original Spanish settlement at Navidad.

According to Bartolomé de las Casas, Ojeda presented Caonabo with a fine set of polished brass manacles and shackles and convinced him to wear them as a symbol of royalty.

An account of the battle written by Las Casas states that the native army comprised ten thousand warriors, while there were only some four hundred Spanish soldiers.

On leaving Spain the flotilla sailed along the west coast of Africa to Cape Verde before taking the same route that Columbus had used a year before on his third voyage.

It also visited the peninsulas of Paria and Araya, the islands of Trinidad and Margarita and traveled along the continental coast, always in search of a passage towards India.

A few days later the expedition left Cabo de la Vela for Hispaniola with some pearls obtained in Paria, a little gold and several slaves.

The expedition also gave Juan de la Cosa the chance to draw the first known map of the area now known as Venezuela, as well as being possibly the first journey that Vespucci made to the New World.

Even so, the voyage was not financially successful, netting some fifteen thousand maravedis in profit to be divided among the fifty-five crew members surviving from the original three hundred.

Note, that since forty maravedis per day was an average wage for skilled labor at this time, they could have made more money staying at home.

On this occasion, he kept his distance from the Gulf of Paria and made landfall on Margarita Island where, according to some sources, he tried to obtain gold and pearls from the indigenous people using several different methods.

[citation needed] However, the colony did not last for more than three months, as the new arrivals started attacking the indigenous villages in the area, causing constant conflict with them.

He was released following an appeal made by Archbishop Rodríguez de Fonseca, although he had to pay a costly indemnity, which left him with little money.

Both candidates had good reputations and sympathizers at court, so the King decided to divide the region into two governorates: Veragua to the west and New Andalusia to the east as far as the Gulf of Urabá.

Due to the disputes regarding the extent of each of the two governorates, Juan de la Cosa decided that the River Atrato would form the boundary between the two regions.

An eyewitness account recorded by historian Bartolomé de las Casas notes, "The Spaniards worked an incredible slaughter on that village, they spared no one, women, children, babies or not.

Francisco Pizarro was placed in charge of the fort and ordered to stay there for the fifty days that it would take for Ojeda to travel to and return from Santo Domingo.

Ojeda eventually returned to Santo Domingo in the brig of a Spanish pirate called Bernardino de Talavera who was fleeing from Hispaniola and passed by the port.

A little later, and with only a dozen men and the pirate Talavera still surviving, he arrived in the district of Cueybá where the chief Cacicaná provided food and shelter.

From Jamaica Ojeda returned to Hispaniola where he learned that Fernández de Enciso had been able to relieve the colonists who had stayed in San Sebastián.

Las Casas records of his death, that "He died sick and poor, he didn't have a cent to bury him, I think, for all the pearls, the gold he had … stolen from the Indians, for all the slaves he had made of them the times he hit the mainland.

The Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez tells the story of the life of the conquistador in his novel El Caballero de la Virgen (1929).