He looked his inquiry.
"Spanish for Pelican," I answered, seating myself on a rock. "Ayala, the captain of the 'San Carlos,' the first ship to enter the bay, named it from the large number of the birds he found on it, and the big island to the right that looks like a portion of the main land is Angel Island, abbreviated from Ayala's Isla de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles."
"And Goat Island?" he questioned as he threw himself down on the grass.
"Yerba Buena," I corrected. "The other name was colloquially applied when Nathan Spear, being given some goats and kids by a Yankee skipper, put them over there. There were several thousand on the island in forty-nine, but the Americans killed them all off by night in spite of Spear's protests."
"Not all of them," he denied as he shied a stick at a white head reaching from below for a grassy clump.
"'And th' goats and chicks and brickbats and sticks
Is joombled all over the face of it,
Av Telegraft Hill, Telegraft Hill,
Crazy owld, daisy owld Telegraft Hill,'"
I laughed.
"I suppose the Spaniards must have had a name for this sightly hill," said the Bostonian, his eye tracing the rugged skyline across the bay, along the Tamalpais Range on the north, and the San Antonio Hills on the east.
"Yes, Anza christened it in 1776 when he climbed up here for a view after selecting the sites for the Presidio and the Mission. He called it La Loma Alta, and the High Hill it remained until the Americans put it to commercial use in forty-nine. The little town on the edge of the cove in the hollow of the hills was unconscious of a ship entering the harbor until she rounded Clark's Point, the southeast corner of this hill, and dropped anchor in full view—"
"Any relation to Champ?" he interrupted.