Unamuno's voyage of 1587 in search of Rica de Oro was no more productive on the eastern shores of the Pacific than in its western waters. He did find a new port, San Lucas, near the present San Luis Obispo, but this seems to have made no impression on the authorities: the current Viceroy of New Spain, Manrique, was simply not interested, although the projected voyage of Juan de la Isla in 1572 and Gali's actual one of 1584 had certainly envisaged exploring the American coast north of 35–40°N.^[1] The younger Luis de Velasco, Viceroy in 1590, was however much concerned with the sickness and privations normal in the latter stages of the Galleon passage, and secured authority to investigate this coast to see if there might not be some fit port of succour. To this end the Portuguese Sebastian Rodriguez Cermeño sailed from Manila in the 200-ton San Agustin on 5 July 1595.

Cermeño's first objective was Cape Mendocino, which seems to have been known from a disastrous Galleon crossing in 1584.^[2] On 6 November, two days after his landfall somewhat north of the Cape, he was at Drake's Bay, which he named Bahia de San Francisco—one may be sure with no intention of a compliment to his predecessor, who was in these waters sixteen years earlier. Here he lost the San Agustin in a squall, but assembled a prefabricated launch, and on 8 December sailed south, crossing Monterey Bay (his Bahia de San Pedro) and near Point Concepcion meeting Indians who knew the words ‘Mexico’ and ‘Christiano’, probably from Unamuno's party. Food was very short—largely- 111 -acorns bartered from the Indians—but despite strong pressure from his crew Cermeño insisted on examining the coast. At Isla San Martin, off Baja California, they were saved by finding a stranded fish said to have been big enough to support seventy men for eight days. Finally he reached Chacala on 7 January 1596.^[3]

Cermeño had done his best, but the wrecking of the San Agustin robbed him of any reward. She carried (legally) private merchandise, and the ensuing enquiries into its loss concluded that he had crossed promising inlets instead of examining them properly, though it was allowed that he was driven to do so by hunger. The new Viceroy, the Conde de Monterey, drew the sensible inference that further investigation should be made not by trading vessels from Manila but by a special expedition from New Spain.

Sebastian Vizcaino is not an attractive figure, though it may be harsh to say with Wagner that ‘there was hardly any Spaniard of his day … who wrote more and accomplished less’—in view of the Spanish mania for paper and the many fiascos, this is no small claim. A merchant, Vizcaino had like Cermeño been on the Galleon Santa Ana when Cavendish took her, and his letter to his father mentioning this misfortune gives a strong impression that his main interest in life was to make money; as a message from a distant son to an anxious parent, it lacks appeal.^[4] Yet he completely supplanted the much finer Cabrillo, most of whose work seems to have been forgotten; only his harbour of San Miguel remained on the maps, until Vizcaino typically renamed it San Diego.^[5]

Vizcaino's first voyage, June to December 1596, was financed by a partnership, on a quite substantial scale: three ships, one of 500 tons, and 230 men, with twelve cannon. The aims were colonisation in Baja California, and pearling; a town was founded at La Paz, Cortes's Santa Cruz, but half of it was burnt down, and the infant settlement was abandoned after two months. Vizcaino, clearly a smart operator, bluffed himself out of this fiasco: all that was wrong was the timing of the start, and there were numberless Indians crying out to be saved. …

The second expedition, in 1602, was much more tightly controlled by officialdom. The objective was definitely the exploration of the coast up to Cape Mendocino, and if possible beyond it; the Gulf of California and its pearls were strictly barred, unless on the return Vizcaino should find that he had time, good winds, and enough food to explore it—and on past form this last condition surely amounted to a veto.^[6] The chronicler of the voyage, Fray Antonio de la Ascension, alleges ulterior aims, notably Quivira and the Straits of Anian. The Father, however, was obviously more romantic than well informed: he was responsible for reviving the idea that Baja California was an island, an idea which had been abandoned as long ago as 1539–40 but now persisted for most of the century—and indeed, despite new evidence that should have been conclusive against it, well into the eighteenth.^[7] To Fray Antonio, the channel insulating California communicated with Anian. But he makes good reading: a gruesomely detailed description of scurvy is followed, without transition, by- 112 -rhapsodies on Monterey and its ‘affable Indians of good disposition and well built [too significant words!] … [who] would have much pleasure in seeing us make a settlement in their country. Those who come from China in need of relief could very well resort to this port.’ The good Father was also very much taken by the loving kindness of the pelicans in feeding their sick and maimed, and from compassion released one that the Indians were using as a decoy.^[8]

Vizcaino sailed from Acapulco on 5 May 1602, with three good ships, 200 selected men, and provisions for a year. Progress against head winds was slow, and it was not until 10 November that he entered San Diego, which he described in nearly the same words as Cabrillo's party; and here, as with Cermeño's nomenclature, he breached his clear instructions to retain already given names; since he had with him one of Cermeño's pilots, he must have known at least the latter's names.^[9] On 15 December, seven years after Cermeño, he came to Monterey Bay, which he and Ascension greatly over-rated as a port for the Galleons. At the end of the year Vizcaino sent back the worst of the sick in the almiranta (twenty-five of the thirty-four died) and himself went on with the San Diego and the launch Tres Reyes; he called in at Cermeño's Bahia de San Francisco (renamed ‘Don Gaspar’) and reached Cape Mendocino on 12 January 1603. The Tres Reyes was driven north to Cape Blanco, reporting a great ‘Rio de Martin Aguilar’ (named for her dead commander) which was probably either the Mad or the Rogue River of today. Despite their striking names, neither of these is of special note, but in the eighteenth century Aguilar's river became inflated into a mighty estuary, the entrance into the Strait of Anian.^[10] Vizcaino was back in Acapulco by 21 March.

Considering his resources, and the aid of the pilot Bolaños who had been with Cermeño, Vizcaino's achievement compares unfavourably with that of Cabrillo sixty years earlier; but the work of his forerunners was for the time effectively blanketed by his new toponymy. However, in October 1603 the Marques de Montesclaros succeeded the Conde de Monterey, and the new Viceroy was not impressed by the glowing reports on the Bay named in honour of his predecessor. Although in 1606 a royal decree was issued naming Vizcaino to command a Galleon returning from Manila to ‘ascertain in what manner the said port of Monterrey can be colonised and made permanent’, it arrived after he had left for Spain, and the project lapsed in favour of another search for our old friends Rica de Oro and de Plata.^[11]

Interest in the Californias, till near the end of the seventeenth century, relapsed into concentration on pearling ventures in the Gulf.^[12] Vizcaino made large claims for Monterey; he also claimed to have been near China and Japan, an old illusion stemming from a supposedly marked northwestward trend of the coast of Alta California. The later riches of the modern State of California, except perhaps for timber, were not apparent from the coast; as Brebner says, the neglect of Alta California was not accidental, and even with the greater resources of the- 113 -eighteenth century, there was very little economic development, extensive stock-rearing apart, in the three-quarters of a century of Spanish and Mexican rule.^[13] Simply for rest and refreshment of the Galleon crews, a port on this

coast would- 114 -have been helpful; but it would have meant delays unacceptable to the mercantile interests of New Spain. In any case, Cabrillo's San Miguel (San Diego) would have been more to the point than Monterey, which is within the area of fog risk and, as a colony, would have been much more isolated and vulnerable.

Three hundred leagues from New Spain the east-bound Galleons saw the first

- 115 -of the senas or signs of land—various seaweeds which appeared in a regular order, seals and dogfish—and then

There were handsome tips for the first sailor to sight the senas, and a boisterous court was held, as for ‘crossing the Line’. Careri brings the scene before us vividly, the release from tension when at last they knew where they were; life on the passage was poor, nasty, brutish—and long, so long!

The senas were indeed regarded as a reliable indicator of longitude. From this point the Galleons trended southeast until making a landfall; the coast was usually in sight, but it was regarded as dangerous and the people as hostile, so no landing was made: ‘The prospect … of Acapulco, “the safest and finest port in all the North parts”, was too strong an inducement’.^[15] The very few landings which were made, under stress of weather, in sterile Baja California provided no inducement for sojourn.

As for the argument for a defensive base north of New Spain, Montesclaros disposed of it in a letter of 4 August 1607 from Acapulco, and in almost the same terms as Manrique had used twenty years before: the security of these parts lay simply in their inaccessibility. An isolated settlement would be but an added target for intruders, a bait rather than a bulwark; Dutch or English ‘would find Spaniards with whom to treat and trade … as they do in the north of Santo Domingo’—that is, on the island which was the first base of Spanish power in the Indies: a give-away sentence indeed! Hence each Manila ship would need two armed escorts.… In short, as Wagner puts it, a Spanish settlement ‘would have been of more service to the English than one of their own even if they could have maintained it’.^[16]