Sailors—trade winds—ships—what lurking thoughts of adventure, realized or denied, do they not summon in all of us?
Historic Background
In 1579, before Jamestown, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, or New
Amsterdam were settled, Sir Francis Drake, British explorer, careened
and repaired his ship, the Golden Hind, on the shore of what is now
Drake's Bay, an indentation on the California coast just north of the
Golden Gate. This was nearly two hundred years before Padre Junipero
Serra led his band of zealots and soldiers up out of New Spain into Alta
California.
At Drake's Bay the chaplain of the Golden Hind held the first religious service in the English language on the American continent—a service that is commemorated by a Celtic cross set up on a hill in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Though close by, Drake did not find the Bay and site of San Francisco.
It was not until October 31, 1769, that the peninsula and Bay of San Francisco were discovered by an expedition headed by Don Gaspar de Portola, Governor of Baja or Lower California. This expedition had set out overland from San Diego for the purpose of locating Monterey Bay, discovered in 1603 by Sebastian Vizcaino, Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain.
Six years after the Portola discovery, Don Juan Manuel Ayala sailed the first vessel, the San Carlos, through the Golden Gate. The following year the first permanent settlement by white men on the site of San Francisco was made when Colonel Juan Bautista de Anza established a military post at the Presidio beside the Golden Gate. In this same month, July, 1776, the Liberty Bell was ringing in Philadelphia. But there was no thought then that the embattled farmers of the Atlantic coast should inherit before many years this potential Spanish settlement on the Pacific.
In October, 1776, Padre Junipero Serra founded the Mission Dolores, the third of the chain of missions extending from San Diego. Subsequently a settlement was made at Yerba Buena Cove, and there was established the pueblo of Yerba Buena which has grown into the city of San Francisco.
Things moved slowly in those days—so slowly that in 1784 the pueblo had but fourteen houses and sixty inhabitants.
Let us turn back the hands of the clock to the time when the pueblo straggled over the sand hills which faced the water of the bay of Saint Francis, under the shadow of Loma Alta. What do we see? Where today the Merchants Exchange Building, central office of San Francisco's commercial life, heaves its bulk into the air was the cabin of Jacob Leese, trader. Houses were few and far between, and business was something to be done when there was nothing else to do.
From the Plaza, then but a block or so from the waterside, two main roads trailed off through the sand dunes. One went to the southwest, winding among the hills toward the Mission Dolores, and the other in a generally northwesterly direction out past the lagoon of the washerwomen to the Presidio of San Francisco, the seat of the military government. Sleepy, content to bask in the sunshine that flooded its sand hills and kept back the banks of fog that loomed above the higher eminence's separating the cove from the ocean, Yerba Buena dreamed, not of the future in store for it, but of the next fiesta, of the coming barbecue at Miguel Noe's rancho, or of the projected cock fight on Sunday at the Mission Dolores.