Dushi Korsou: Alonso de Ojeda, 1499, and the Island of the Giants

Dushi Korsou · Unda mi lombrishi ta derà

A tribute to Curaçao, the island where I was born and where I grew up most happy until I was eighteen, when I left to study geology at the University of Leiden.

Marcel P. T. Chin-A-Lien · GLIAG

On 18 May 1499 Alonso de Ojeda sailed from Puerto de Santa María with the pilot Juan de la Cosa and the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci. He carried the chart of the coast of Paria that Columbus had found on his third voyage, in the summer of 1498. In the summer of 1499 his fleet reached an island they called the Island of the Giants: Curaçao. In this video Ojeda tells the voyage himself, in the first person and day by day, while the map shows the winds and currents of the season.

What the video shows

• The crossing from the Canaries on the north-east trades, in a little more than three weeks.
• The run of about two hundred leagues along the Guiana coast to Paria, past the coast of present-day Suriname, in Ojeda’s own words from his 1512 testimony.
• Trinidad, the Gulf of Paria, Margarita and the fight at Puerto Flechado.
• A close-up of Curaçao: Santa Ana bay, Christoffelberg and Westpunt, with Aruba and Bonaire. Ashore, Vespucci’s men find great footprints, five huts and the tall people who gave the island its name.
• Cabo San Román, the village on stakes that gave Venezuela its name, Lake Maracaibo, Cabo de la Vela and the landfall at Yáquimo on Española on 5 September 1499.

The dates. No log of Ojeda survives. Five dates are fixed by the sources: 18 May, 9 August, 24 August, 30 August and 5 September 1499. 26 July 1499, Saint Anne’s day, is the traditional date for Curaçao; the sources do not record the day itself. All other days in the video are estimated and marked as such on screen.

Method. The video applies the GLIAG TRJ-01 method, as in The voice of Columbus. No wind or current measurements exist for 1499, so modern climatology stands in: 10 m winds from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (1991-2020) and NOAA Global Drifter Program currents. It is a model and a best estimate, not a historical record.

The voice. The first-person narration is a dramatised reading after the sources: Ojeda’s testimony in the Pleitos colombinos, Vespucci’s letters and the Fundación Empresas Polar chronology of 1499. It is not a verbatim quotation. The voice is AI-generated, the same voice as Columbus.

Sources. Fundación Empresas Polar, Cronología de la historia de Venezuela, 1499; M. Donis Ríos, Venezuela y el ejercicio de la soberanía (UCAB, 2023), for Ojeda’s testimony; P. Omodeo, Amerigo Vespucci (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari), for Vespucci’s account of the giants.

Spanish version: Dushi Korsou: Alonso de Ojeda, 1499, y la Isla de los Gigantes.

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Created by Marcel P. T. Chin-A-Lien, Zoetermeer & Paramaribo.
© 2026 Marcel P. T. Chin-A-Lien. All rights reserved. No reproduction, download for redistribution, re-upload or adaptation of this video, its script or its images without the prior written permission of the rights holder. Linking to this page is permitted.