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1. Spanish Era: Vizcaino to Father Serra
- University of Nebraska Press
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1 It is mid-December 1602. Idled in a thick coastal fog, the three Spanish ships wait for favorable weather to continue their journey northward. The ships and their crews have been at sea more than eight months with only an exploratory stop at San Diego. The men are sick with scurvy. Many have died. One ship is the Santo Tomas, a multideck commercial galleon of immense size. The second ship is the smaller frigate Tres Reyes, a square-rigged warship. The third is the San Diego, the fleet’s flagship. Sebastian Vizcaino, a fifty-nine-year-old explorer and leader of the small fleet, is aboard the San Diego. He is searching for a port that can safely harbor Spain’s Manila Fleet from pirates and storms on its way from the Philippines to Acapulco. Windless in the fog, only the distant lolling sound of surf washing ashore reaches the ships and their crews. In the dense gray light, there is no hint of a shoreline that might hold a safe port for anchor. When the fog finally lifts, Vizcaino orders the ships to stand nearer to shore so he can see if there is a harbor. What he sees instead is a mountain range rising abruptly out of the ocean. The mountains are high with white ridges that turn reddish at the edges and are covered with woods. He calls the mountains Sierra de Santa Lucia and then sails north past the mouth of a little river emptying into a small bay. A Carmelite friar aboard the San Diego notes in his journal that the river “falls into the sea among rocks.” The ships round the tip of a peninsula and at last drop anchor in a large harbor. The next 1 spanish era Vizcaino to Father Serra 2 One morning, December 17, the fog is back and the weather is bitter cold, but Vizcaino, his expedition, and three Carmelite friars, go ashore and offer Mass under a gigantic oak tree. Not far from the oak is a fresh spring where they replenish their dwindling supply of water. Vizcaino rests his crew for nearly two weeks while he maps the immediate terrain, noting its animals, people , and the general lay of the region. He claims the land in the name of the king of Spain and he names the large bay where they are at anchor after his benefactor, the Count de Monte Rey, viceroy of New Spain. On January 1, 1603, the temperature drops so low that the springs freeze. Two days later Vizcaino and a small contingent, including the three Carmelite friars, hike southward over the hill from Monterey Bay looking for freshwater. There, on the other side, they discover another, smaller bay where a “river of very good water but little depth” flows to the sea. Vizcaino asks the friars to give the river a name and they call it El Rio de Carmelo in honor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, their patron and the expedition’s protector. Vizcaino’s discovery of the Carmel River more than four hundred years ago set in motion the eventual development of California ’s Monterey Peninsula, which ultimately placed relentless demands on the region’s only source of freshwater—the Carmel River. His discovery of Monterey Bay meant that Spain’s galleons would have a safe port on their return voyages to Manila. Unfortunately for Vizcaino, advancements in the design and building of faster ships reduced the time it took to cross the Pacific and his discovery of Monterey Bay as a stopover port and source of freshwater from the Carmel River became unnecessary . As a result, his maps of El Rio de Carmelo and the region languished in the files of the colonial bureaucracy in Mexico City for 160 years before early colonization of Alta California began. The Spanish did not return to Monterey and El Rio de Car- [35.175.236.44] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:41 GMT) Spanish Era 3 melo until 1770, when Gaspar Portola arrived overland from San Diego with orders to build a fort at a site overlooking Monterey Bay. A week later Father Junipero Serra, founder of the mission chain in Alta California, arrived by ship, anchoring in Monterey Bay and going ashore at the same spot where Vizcaino and his expedition landed 168 years earlier. Father Serra’s instructions were to convert the Indians into loyal, obedient subjects of the Spanish crown, and on June 3, 1770, he...