50 Dollars - Elizabeth II Spanish conquistador Alonso de Hojeda

Alonso de Hojeda's 1499 voyage along the Venezuelan coast — made with Juan de la Cosa and Amerigo Vespucci aboard — was one of the first Spanish expeditions to reach the South American mainland after Columbus. Hojeda himself was a figure of genuine violence and administrative failure: he tortured indigenous leaders, was repeatedly jailed for misconduct in Hispaniola, and died destitute in Panama around 1515. Cook Islands issued numerous gold commemoratives throughout the early 1990s targeting the collector market around the 1992 Columbus quincentenary cycle, packaging peripheral figures from the Age of Discovery into a broadly marketable series.