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Collection: Directories and Documents > Historical Clippings
Historical Clippings Book (HC-20) (169 pages)
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Page: of 169
groped his way past in a fog, and missed all indications of San
Francisco Bay. This may be significant, since Spain in the days
of Cortez, Pizarro, Balboa, and Cabrillo was a more forceful
institution than the Spain California learned to know, nearly two
hundred years later, when they did discover the Bay.
A generation of time passed after Cabrillo, during which no
interest was taken in California. 37 years later, the Golden Hind,
the English ship, appeared in the far south, commanded by Sir
Francis Drake, the most noted navigator and buccaneer in English
history. It sailed north, deeply laden with treasure of the value of
a million pounds sterling, taken from captured Spanish galleons
while Drake scanned the coast for safe harborage to repair his
ship.
In May of 1579, the English with Drake came to a meeting
with destiny at a crossroads in world history at the Golden Gate
of San Francisco Bay and missed the appointment. According to
Drakes Guild, Drake sailed by later to land twenty miles north
of latitude 38 degrees in a shallow open cove, now named Drakes
Bay. He landed and during 36 days careened and repaired his
ship, made friends with the Indians, and on June 17th, 1579 set
a brass plate on a post to claim possession of this land, which
he named New Albion, for his Queen Elizabeth.
He sailed away to the west, crossed the Pacific with his little
frail craft, and returned home with his treasure. Drake was the
first commander of a ship ever to return after completing the
mighty task of circumnavigating the globe. Two hundred years
elapsed before the English-returned to the California coast; but
what might have happened if Drake had been able to see or add
San Francisco Bay to his chart for use by English mariners during
the centuries of sailing ships when San Francisco Bay was the key
to possession of all California?
Once again, on January 17th, 1603 the explorer Viscayno, a
Spanish navigator sailed past the Golden Gate headlands and it
was not visited again until 167 years later when Don Gaspar
de Portola advanced north by land with a little military force for
Spain and in 1769, was the first to discover the secret of San
Francisco Bay, the key to California. It was 1776 before Spain
did anything serious to establish a foothold there and then De Anza
with a military force arrived to establish the San Francisco Presidio
to sustain the claim of Spain. Is it not remarkable, that at the
same time De Anza was engaged to build the Presidio to hold the
Pacific Coast, that a notable group of clear thinking Americans
were meeting the breadth of a continent away in a little hall in
Philadelphia to proclaim on July 4, 1776 a new conception of
national organization based on individual liberty, equality, and
representation in government?-.