A Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769-1770 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769–1770 W. Michael Mathes A Description of Distant Roads: Original Journals of the First Expedition into California, 1769–1770. By Juan Crespí . Edited and translated by Alan K. Brown . (San Diego: San Diego State University Press. 2001. Pp. xv, 848. $60.00.) Spanish settlement in the modern State of California, immediately following expulsion of Jesuit missionaries from Baja California in 1768, was primarily a task of the Franciscan Order. The triumvirate of initial establishment in Franciscan California consisted of friars Junípero Serra, the founder; Francisco Palóu, the chronicler; and Juan Crespí, the explorer. While Serra is well known internationally, and Palóu locally, Crespí is relatively unknown other than to historians. [End Page 814] To some degree this is the result of Palóu's and Serra's writings having been published in English translations by such scholars as Herbert E. Bolton, Maynard J. Geiger, O.F.M., and Antonine Tibesar, O.F.M., while, prior to the work reviewed herein, the complete diaries of Juan Crespí's travels in Alta California have been available only in manuscript form in Spanish in the Curia Generalizia Ordinis Fratrum Minorum, Rome, and Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico. Crespí, born in Palma, Mallorca, in 1721, studied with Palóu in its Franciscan college under Serra. Crespí accompanied both his mentor and his classmate to New Spain in 1749 and served with them in the Sierra Gorda missions in Querétaro until 1767, when they were assigned to replace Jesuit missionaries in Baja California. Destined to La Purísima Concepción de Cadegomó, shortly thereafter Crespí was named as clerical leader of the initial overland expedition for establishment of San Diego in Alta California under Fernando de Rivera y Moncada. Leaving La Purísima on February 26, 1769, Crespí reached the northernmost ex-Jesuit mission of Santa María de los Angeles on March 20 and from there he joined Rivera and José de Cañizares at Velicatá, whence they followed the 1766 route of Wenceslaus Linck, S.J., into the Sierra San Pedro Mártir and subsequently to San Diego Bay between March 22 and May 13. The journals of Crespí and Cañizares of this leg of the expedition were published in 2003, translated and annotated in detail by Harry W. Crosby. After some four decades of research, translating, and annotating, Alan K. Brown, a linguist-historian, has happily finally found a publisher for his exhaustive work on Crespí's complete journals of the first inland-overland exploration of Alta California. The documents are introduced with detailed and well-researched historical, bibliographical, and linguistic studies of them. The journals, containing a wealth of geographical, ethnographical, historical, botanical, and zoological detail, from newly-founded San Diego de Alcalá to the discovery of San Francisco Bay in sight of Point Reyes (July 14 to November 11, 1769), the return from San Francisco Bay to San Diego (November 11, 1769-January 24, 1770), from San Diego to the foundation of Monterey (April 16-June 3, 1770), and the scantily recorded sojourn in Monterey (June 3-November 11) noting freezing weather at the bay on November 9 and 11, are meticulously palaeographed into eighteenth-century Castilian and similarly translated into English, each version printed on facing pages. Annotations to variances between the two manuscripts are noted, and Spanish/English endnotes are provided as are annotations to suitable mission sites, and an exhaustive bibliography of writings and works relative to Crespí, journals and writings of Serra, Portolá, and Costansó, relevant contemporary manuscripts, and published documents and studies. A general topical, geographical, and nominal index is also included. While not a particularly handsome volume, the book is well composed, proofed, and bound. This reviewer finds only two grievous faults: a lack of detailed route maps to establish localities named by Crespí, and the determination of a tiro de mosquete as 300-350 yards (a lifetime shooter of numerous black-powder [End Page 815] muskets, I would be glad to stand all day at 300 yards and let a Spanish soldier shoot at me—75-100 yards is the...