man who, it was feared, knew the whereabouts of the Strait of Anian.

To meet the emergency, Cermeño, commander of one of the Philippine galleons, was sent on his return from Manila to seek a port on the California coast, but he was wrecked in Drake's Bay (1595). His cargo of beeswax and fine porcelain still lies at the bottom of the bay, awaiting a modern treasure seeker.

At the same time Sebastian Vizcaíno was commissioned to colonize Lower California as a defensive outpost. Vizcaíno was a prosperous merchant in the Manila trade. He had been aboard the Santa Ana when Cavendish attacked her. Because he did not belong to the aristocratic class from which Spain selected her conquerors, even Velasco was opposed to him and chose him chiefly for want of any one else suitable for the work. Vizcaíno

planted a colony at La Paz in 1597, but the Indians broke it up. He returned, defeated but not disheartened, and secured a new contract, after several years of delay, having at last won over the new Viceroy, the Count of Monterey, who was forced to admit that Vizcaíno possessed more ability than he had expected to find in a mere merchant. When Vizcaíno had finally made his

way through the maze of red tape to the command of three vessels and a company of soldiers, the Spanish monopoly in the Far East had received a shock; for the British East India Company, formed in 1600, had carried the trade war into the Orient, whereby reason of the recent union with Portugal - Spain had thought herself secure. Thus did the importance of the direct route to the East magnify from year to year.

On May 5, 1602, Vizcaíno sailed from Acapulco. He made detailed explorations along the outer coast and among the islands and was retarded frequently by high winds, so that it was November when he dropped anchor in San Miguel Bay, to which he gave its present name of San Diego.

On the 16th of December occurred the capital event of the voyage, the discovery of Monterey Bay. At seven in the evening Vizcaíno entered the harbor. On the next day he sent an officer ashore "to make a hut where Mass could be said and to see if there was water, and what the country was like. He found that there was fresh water and a great oak near the shore, where he made the hut and arbor to say Mass," writes Father Ascensión, who accompanied the expedition. Because of the shortage of men and supplies, Vizcaíno

decided to send a ship back to Mexico from this port asking for more men and provisions.

Vizcaíno proceeded northwards, making careful examination of the coast, yet missing that treasure of waters lying behind the great pillars of Golden Gate, and came to anchor in Drake's Bay, from which he was driven almost immediately by offshore winds. On January 12, 1603, he reached Cape Mendocino, which his orders cited, in very general terms, as the northern limit of his explorations. Off the Cape he encountered so furious a wind, "together with so much rain and fog, as to throw us into great doubt whether to go forward or to turn back, for it was as dark in the daytime as at night." A council was held to decide whether to continue or to return; and the condition of the crew seemed to make retreat imperative. For a week, however, storms from the south prevented the return; and on the seventeenth, at night, Vizcaíno's ship was struck "by two seas which made it pitch so much that it was thought the keel was standing on end, and that it was even sinking." The violent motion threw "both sick and well from their beds." Vizcaíno was flung with such force upon some boxes that he "broke his ribs with the heavy blow." The diarist concludes that "the

currents and seas" were carrying them "rapidly to the Strait of Anian," for they were in forty-two degrees of latitude, when a light northwest wind enabled them to head southward and "brought us out of this trouble."

Though the friendly Indians of Monterey signaled to them with smoke as they passed, they did not enter the harbor because the state of health aboard was so bad, "and the sick were clamoring, although there was neither assistance nor medicines, nor food to give them except rotten jerked beef, gruel, biscuits, and beans and chick-peas spoiled by weevils."

Vizcaíno and his crew arrived at Mazatlan in February, 1603, "in the greatest affliction and travail ever experienced by Spaniards; for the sick were crying aloud, while those who were able to walk or to go on all fours were unable to manage the sails." Here Vizcaíno himself, regardless of his feeble condition, set off inland on foot to bring relief from the nearest town to his companions. In a month they were able to set sail for Acapulco where they arrived on the 21st of March, and learned that most of the men on the ship which Vizcaíno had sent back from Monterey for more men and supplies, had died on the way. Later,

on reaching the City of Mexico, they found the crew of the third ship, a frigate, which they had believed lost in the hurricane off Mendocino. It seems that the frigate had sailed one degree farther north, to a point named in the diary Cape Blanco: and her crew told of a large river which they had seen.

By placing that "river" several degrees too far north, the mapmakers and historians of that day set going another myth which was to rival the Strait of Anian- the myth of the River of the West. And as the fable of the Strait was to lead to the discovery of Bering Strait, so the myth of the River of the West was to end with the later discovery of the Columbia.

The Count of Monterey immediately planned to occupy the port bearing his name and naturally selected Vizcaíno to lead the enterprise. But, during the inevitable delays between plan and action, a new viceroy succeeded Monterey, and the plan was abandoned for a project to found a port in the mid-Pacific. With this in view, in 1611 Vizcaíno was sent out to explore some islands called suggestively Rica de Oro and Rica de Plata Rich in Gold and Rich in Silver. Nothing came of this venture; and so Vizcaíno, ruined in