Monterey was an old name on the crude maps of the Mexican frontier. Eighteen years before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, Don Sebastian Vizcaino had rounded the pine-edged promontory that hides the harbor of Monterey, and, anchoring in the bay, went ashore and with sacred rites named the port in honor of Count de Monterey, the reigning Viceroy. For more than a century and a half the spot was not revisited save by savage hunters. Efforts to relocate the harbor were without success.

[ TWILIGHT—MONTEREY BAY.]

Back of the concealing peninsula the bay of Monterey sweeps in a great crescent to Santa Cruz, thirty miles away, and to exploring navigators, shunning possible shoals, the coast presented a seemingly unbroken line. It came to be the scientific belief that some geologic upheaval had altered the contour of the coast. Mariners were mystified. Efforts to rediscover Monterey assumed the nature of crusades. No less a personage than Gaspar de Portala, with a retinue of sixty-five persons, set out overland from Loreto in 1769 to find the vanished harbor. Without identifying the haven he sought, he camped on its tree-rimmed beaches and erected a cross under the ancient oak in whose shade Vizcaino had partaken of the sacrament.

A year later came the seer and scholar Junípero. Long before, in his college in Majorca where he graced with distinction the chair of philosophy, he had read and treasured the description Vizcaino had given. Now he recognized the surviving oak and the neighboring springs, and, turning, he saw unrolled before him the bay which, in its vastness, had to other eyes seemed only a part of the open sea.

Inspecting Portala's wooden cross, Junípero saw that at the base were votive offerings of birds, shells, strings of fish newly caught, and in a beaver-skin quiver a cluster of arrows tipped with obsidian. Here were signs and portents which to Junípero were ever a source of inspiration. In after years he learned that the Eslenes, or Monterey Indians, had for ages handed down a tradition that some day a messiah would come to them; and that just before the advent of Junípero, the cross which Portala had reared seemed to rise in the sky at night until its splendor filled the heavens; and that then the tribes, believing their deliverer was at hand, came with gifts of food and trinkets to this unaccustomed altar and, in token of the peace they felt, tied a quiver of arrows to the cross.

In the fertile valley of Carmel just over the pine-clad cordillera that conceals the bay, on a slope above the thundering surf, Junípero dedicated the Mission that was to be named San Carlos in honor of the King. Hanging his bells on a cypress branch, he chimed the tidings of the gospel he was to preach.

[ SAN CARLOS CHURCH.]

"Why sound this call?" protested his companions; "there are no heathen here."

"Would that these bells might be heard around the world!" replied Junípero.

Few events in Spanish history since the expulsion of the Moors three centuries before had occasioned the joy that greeted the news of the rediscovery of Monterey. In the Mexican capital cathedral bells pealed throughout the night, rockets flared in the sky, and guns in the forts kept up a cannonade. Later, in Madrid the rejoicing was even more tumultuous. Royal salutes were added to the acclaim and the King declared a public holiday. A sandalled monk, seeking neither gain nor temporal glory, the leader of a handful of Franciscan pioneers, had restored a fabled harbor to the world.