Ceramic Production in Early Hispanic California: Craft, Economy, and Trade on the Frontier of New Spain

3. Craft and Commodities of Early California

3 Craft and Commodities of Early California Four hundred and seventy years ago, in 1542, California’s prehistoric veil was briefly lifted when Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo and the crews of his three small ships, the San Salvador, the Victoria, and the San Miguel, first navigated the often-fog-shrouded littoral of what would come to be called Baja and Alta California. Searching for lands rich with valuable minerals and filled with people to extract wealth, Europeans gazed for the first time upon San Diego Bay, the Channel Islands, Monterey Bay, and the Mendocino coast and met the Chumash of the Santa Barbara area, among other peoples. For the Spanish, Alta California was not the end of the earth. One could, however, see it from there. Cabrillo and those who followed him for the next three centuries missed the gold and silver found by later generations and instead encountered a hostile rock-strewn shoreline punctuated by fabulous protected deep-water bays. Cabrillo found one of these natural harbors, which he named San Diego. Otherwise, from the evidence found on this expedition, California was perceived to be an impoverished land of few rivers occupied by semi-sedentary, nonagricultural peoples. The area was perceived to be of no real interest to the Spanish or other European colonial nations for the next two centuries (Fagan 2003, 359). Nonetheless, the coast of this terra incognita was gradually brought into cartographic “reality” over the next 60 years as four other Europe- 24 Part II. Tradition and Transformation of Alta California ans expeditions came to the area. Three visited the Miwok north of San Francisco Bay. These included Francis Drake, who stopped to make repairs on the Golden Hind in 1579, and two Spaniards. The first, Pedro de Unamuno, was sent in 1587 to reconnoiter the coast for safe harbors for the Acapulco-bound vessels of the Manila galleons on their long eastward voyage to Mexico from the Philippines (Wagner and de Unamuno 1923). The second, Sebastián Rodriguez Cermeño, was the survivor of the San Agustín, a Manila galleon that was lost in Drake’s Bay in 1595. Finally, in 1602 Sebastián Vizcaíno, following up on the earlier reports of Unamuno and Cermeño, made his way to Monterey Bay and there met the ancestral Ohlone. Few observations regarding the Native peoples were recorded from these visits (Fagan 2003, 357–59). There were a few comments about clothing, weapons, housing, boats, and foods, but the most telling observation was that this place was very remote and seemed to be bereft of precious commodities. Interest in the physical occupation of the region waned for the next 167 years, until the last third of the eighteenth century and the arrival of the “Sacred Expedition” of 1769. Why California? During Spain’s brief participation (1761–1763) as an ally of France and Russia in the Great War for Empire (aka the Seven Years’ War; 1756– 1763), it suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of Great Britain. British naval expeditions captured two of Spain’s most valued ports—Havana, Cuba, and Manila in the Philippines. Spain regained these ports only after “ransoming” them through the evacuation and ceding of Spanish Florida and the payment of reparations (Gatbonton 1985, 12; Wright 1971, 108). These catastrophic defeats underscored the vulnerability of Spain’s far-flung empire and caused its rulers to reconsider the occupation of California. With the defeat of France in the same conflict on battlefields in Europe , India, the Caribbean, and North America, Great Britain became a global empire. The Pacific Ocean, once a “Spanish Lake,” now facilitated the growing presence of the Russian empire in America and the unchallenged expansion of British fur-trading interests across Canada to the shores of the Pacific. There was a realization that if California was not occupied by Spain it would most assuredly be occupied by one of the other colonial powers, which would result in a strategic loss that would jeop- Craft and Commodities of Early California 25 ardize Mexico, the valued productive portion of New Spain (Williams 2009). To forestall these potential interlopers the region would have to be quickly and economically occupied. This occupation consisted of a few hundred soldiers, civilians, and Christianized Indians and a few dozen Roman Catholic priests from the mendicant Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, in order to establish a growing military and civilian presence that would be concentrated...