The following is the most recent post from "W C Casey's blog" on Santa Cruz Patch. Since the departure of editor Brad Kava, SC Patch has been spiraling down. When this post failed to post, it seemed like the time had come to move on. This blog will be a temporary home for this post (sans images) until a dedicated blog and/or page is set up.
Post title:
Santa Cruz County History Update: the Explorers
Recently, I've been revisiting the
Portolà expedition
of 1769-70, so it seems like a good time to update this post from
August 12, 2011. The original plan for this blog was to proceed
chronologically through Santa Cruz County history, and this post was
third in that progression, after
an introduction and
the Ohlone.
The
impetus for a new look at Portolà came from the discovery that
translations of the three diaries kept by expedition members are now
available online (see the Wikipedia article for links). For a history
geek, it's fascinating to read those diaries and realize that they are
the first written descriptions of those places ever recorded, and that
the authors were actually camped at those unknown (to Europeans) places
as they wrote.
The briefest diary was by Portolà himself; a
longer one was written by military engineer Miguel Costanso, and the
most detailed was by Franciscan missionary
Juan Crespi. The Pacifica Historical Society has a great tool on its website - a
day-by-day account with entries from all three diaries
(watch out for a few transcription errors). At times, it would be
helpful to also have the original Spanish alongside the English
translations, but that project awaits some future web-savvy California
historian.
The translator of the online version of the Crespi
diary, Herbert Bolton, worked out the present-day locations of the
places visited by the expedition during its travels, and shares that
information in footnotes. That's very useful because:
- The native Californians had no written languages to record their names for places,
- Portolà and his companions were the first Europeans to see most of those places,
- the Spaniards of the Portolà expedition did not attempt to transliterate very many of the native names they heard, and
- very few of the Portolà names have survived.
As
noted in the original post, Santa Cruz was one of those few surviving
Portolà names. Furthermore, our county is the only one in the state that
preserves a Portolà expedition name (and it was almost
Branciforte County).
Wikipedia
provided a handy place to post information about the expedition's
stopping places, so there are now added bits of Crespi's diary in a
bunch of articles, and a new "category" (found at the bottom of WP
articles) called "
Places of the Portolà expedition", where links to Portolà expedition-related articles can be found.
Those
who also love geography already know about Google Earth. I had a great
time using GE, in conjunction with the diaries, to follow the day-by-day
progress of the explorers from San Diego to a
wind-swept ridge overlooking San Francisco Bay.
In many places, the exact route remains in dispute, so the
"geogrophiles" out there can have fun using zooming into the satellite
views to compare the different possibilities. Another useful site was
the USGS National Map, which combines current versions of all of the
"quadrangle" topographic maps into one zoomable online map. Many old
place names can be found on USGS maps.
Following is the original 2011 post, with inserted editorial comments enclosed in square brackets:
Original title: Names on the Signs in Santa Cruz: the Explorers
In
comparison to other parts of California, Santa Cruz was missed by the
early European explorers. The first voyage to come close was the
Spanish expedition led by
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who sailed north from Mexico in 1542 on a mission to explore the unknown coast.
Cabrillo gave names to many places in California, but, for some
reason, none of those names were retained by future Spanish explorers.
Cabrillo landed at places now known as San Diego, San Pedro and the
Channel Islands. He sailed past Point Conception, missed the entrances
to Monterey and San Francisco bays, and made it [one of his ships did,
anyway] as far north as the mouth of the Russian River before turning
back.
On the way south, he found and sailed into Monterey Bay but didn’t
land. Still, Cabrillo was the first European to come anywhere close to
Santa Cruz, so his is the oldest European name to appear on local signs:
at Cabrillo College. The section of Highway 1 running through Santa
Cruz County is known by some as Cabrillo Highway [it should really be
called Portolà Highway]. The photo is of a sign from San Mateo County,
but I haven’t found one locally. Maybe some observant blog reader knows
where there is one? [Portolà Highway is an even more appropriate name
because later explorers bypassed the coastal route in favor of the path
followed by today's Highway 101]
On the basis of Cabrillo’s
voyage, Spain claimed California as part of New Spain, a huge area that
included today’s Mexico and Central America in addition to much of the
southwestern and south-central United States. England also had colonial
ambitions, and Queen Elizabeth dispatched
Francis Drake
in 1577 to plant the British flag. During his round-the-world journey,
Drake also sailed north along the California coast. The exact location
of his landings is unknown, but no one has ever claimed he stopped in
Santa Cruz.
Spain moved to follow up on that brief flurry of exploratory activity. A second sailing expedition, led by
Sebastián Vizcaíno, arrived at the southern end of our bay in 1602. Vizcaíno named it
Bahia de Monterrey, after the Viceroy of New Spain. The name stuck, superceding Cabrillo’s
Bahia de los Piños
(Bay of Pines). Vizcaíno named lots of other places around Monterey and
further south, but never came to our end of the bay. His expedition
left without establishing a settlement, and our quiet bay was left to
the Ohlone once again.
Over 160 years later, Spain was
finally roused to action by the expansion of British and Russian trading
posts southward along the Pacific Coast from Alaska and Canada. In
1769, an expedition commanded by
Gaspar de Portolà
set out [by land and sea] from Mexico to rediscover the bay described
by Vizcaíno. They reached the coast [from the Salinas Valley] on a
typical summer day and found the view obscured by fog. They didn’t even
realize they were on a bay.
Thinking they had missed Monterey Bay, Portolà’s party turned north and [after crossing and naming the
Pajaro River] marched until they got to a large river which they [Crespi] named
Rio de San Lorenzo. Crossing the river, they explored the area and found a spring-fed creek, which they [Crespi] named
Arroyo Santa Cruz.
The creek, which flows into Neary Lagoon, is known today as Majors
Creek or Laurel Street Brook. Soon, Portolà moved on up the coast to
discover San Francisco Bay before turning around and marching back to
San Diego. He never returned to Santa Cruz, but those three names stayed
on. Portolà's name is memorialized on signs up and down the California
Coast, but not a lot in the Santa Cruz area. We have Portola Drive out
in Pleasure Point, but that's about it.
After Portolà, more than 20 more years were to pass before the
arrival of more European visitors. The next Spaniards, however, came to
stay. They were
the missionaries.
.png)
