" ... TOO MUCH CONFIDENCE AND UNARM'D."
1
The first trails to Oregon were sea-lanes, the wakes left by Spanish caravels and fragatos with lateen sails bulging in ferocious winds and masts bent perilously as they blundered along the Pacific coast of North America in pursuit of obscure missions approved by the viceroy of Mexico.
A Portuguese soldier in the service of Mexico, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, led a two-ship expedition from the Pacific port of Natividad in June 1542, searching for fables: the "Coast of Cathay," believed to be a large island somewhere in the north; the seaport of Quivira and its Seven Cities of Gold; and the Strait of Anián, a northwest passage across North America to the Atlantic. Cabrillo's flagship Victoria, a stout and sizable vessel, and the smaller San Salvador, a frigate, sighted the California coast in July and in the same month sailed into a "closed and very good harbor" he named San Miguel, subsequently known as San Diego.
The bold soldier-sailor sailed on in October, threading through the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. He avoided the terrifying seasoff Big Sur and led his ships north past the Farralon Islands and past the great headlands, shrouded in fog, that hid inside them a magnificent bay, to an anchorage at 38 degrees north latitude, just above the entrance to the Golden Gate. He named this cove Los Pinos for the great green mantle of pines that surrounded it, and spent some days there before sailing a short distance north to Bodega Bay.
Cabrillo hoped to proceed north along the coast but battering seas off Bodega forced him to direct his ships south to a winter anchorage at San Miguel Island in the Santa Barbara Channel. In January 1543 the former crossbowman in Hernan Cortes's conquest of Mexico died after a shipboard accident, and it fell to his handpicked successor, an Italian Levantine named Bartolome Ferrelo, to continue the voyage.
Ferrelo led the Victoria and the San Salvador past Cape Mendocino--the westernmost point on the California coast--and north at least as far as latitude 41 degrees 30 minutes off Klamath, California. He may have sighted the Oregon coast above 42 degrees before gales drove him back, to return to Natividad in April.
Insofar as finding gold and silver, the Seven Cities, or the Strait of Anian, the expedition was a failure, but Cabrillo and Ferrelo had charted a real seacoast as fabulous as any Quivira of the imagination.
Francis Drake, the bold son of Devonshire and corsair of the Spanish Main, may have exceeded the Victoria and San Salvador's northernmost mark when he brought his Golden Hind along the California coast thirty-six years after Ferrelo returned to Mexico.
Drake sailed from Plymouth in December 1577, with a syndicate sponsoring him as captain-general of a six-ship expedition. His backers expected him to sail through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific and seek the Northwest Passage, the all-water route connecting the two great oceans, a lodestone that lured mariners and trade-minded politicians for more than four centuries.
Exploration, however, was incidental to Drake's work as a privateer, a pirate with governmental sanction, so he plundered Spanish ports at Valparaiso, Chile, and Callao, Peru, as he made his way up the Pacific coast. By his own account, the Hind approached land between 42 and 48 degrees north latitude before retreating downcoast. In Hakluyt's Voyages, published in 1589, Drake is credited with a northern limit of 42 degrees (the latitude of the California-Oregon boundary), which he reached on June 5, 1579. Historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, who studied the sources on Drake's voyage, concluded that the privateer "was probably, though not certainly, the first discoverer of the western coast from Cape Mendocino to the region of Cape Blanco, including fifty or sixty miles of the Oregon coast."
Drake spent five weeks in June and July on the western coast and, like Cabrillo, missed sighting the foggy entrance to San Francisco Bay as he proceeded to an anchorage north of the Golden Gate--Cabrillo's Los Pinos--subsequently named Drake's Bay.
Somewhere, at Drake's Bay, Bodega Bay, or farther north, perhaps near Cape Mendocino, the Hind was beached and careened, and in the process the captain-general and his men were visited by a number of Miwok Indians. The naked "sauvages" were presented with gifts of trinkets and in return brought broiled fish; a supply of a lily root they dried, ground into a meal, and ate; and such gifts as shells, sea-otter and gopher skins, and bird feathers.
Drake named the country New Albion (Albion being the Greek name for England) after passing an area of white cliffs that reminded him of the south coast of his home country.
On July 23, Reverend Francis Fletcher, a member of the expedition, said the Miwoks "tooke a sorrowfull farewell of us" and the Hind sailed west to Mindanao, the Indian Ocean, and home to Plymouth, arriving there, after nearly three years' absence, in September 1580, completing the first English circumnavigation of the world.
2
In 1596, a letter was published in Europe purportedly written by a Greek explorer in the service of Spain. Apostolos Valerianos, who adopted the name Juan de Fuca, claimed to have sailed a small caravel into the Pacific for the viceroy of Mexico in 1592 and to have found the western opening of the Northwest Passage, a broad inlet on the northern coast between 47 and 48 degrees north latitude. He told of "sailing inland" for more than twenty days and of finding a people who wore the skins of beasts and a land rich in silver, gold, and pearls.
His story was probably a fiction, common enough in the day, but mapmakers put his "opening" in the latitude he described. Two hundred years later, the Juan de Fuca Strait, separating Vancouver Island from the Washington mainland and leading into Puget Sound, was discovered not many sea miles distant from de Fuca's 48 degrees north.
Visions of the Northwest Passage continued to draw mariners along the Oregon coast of America. In 1602, the Spaniard Sebastian Vizcaino led the San Diego and the Tres Reyes out of Monterey on the California coast as far north as the 43rd parallel, searching for Quivira and the Strait of Anian.
Nor were all the explorers Spaniards and Englishmen. Peter the Great of Russia had conquered Siberia by 1639 and reached the Pacific, and in 1741 Vitus Bering, a Dane, sailed in the St. Peter from Kamchatka to the coast of North America near Sitka. In the 1765--68 era, the Russians were on the move south along the coast, slaughtering sea otters and coastal Indians with equal rapacity.
In 1774, at the time when the First Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, Spain sent an expedition to the Oregon coast. Among other accomplishments, it discovered Nootka Sound, on the west coast of what became Vancouver Island.
By 1812, with the consent of Spain, Russian hunters out ofSitka founded Fort Ross on Bodega Bay in California and later another fort in the Sandwich Islands. American politicians considered these outposts dangerous in their implications, especially due to their proximity to San Francisco Bay, and in 1816 James Monroe proposed a treaty of amity in North America with the 49th parallel as the boundary between the interests of the two countries. Monroe did not mention England in his proposal, but in any event the idea was not pushed to...
