Excerpt from Southern California: Comprising the Counties of Imperial, Los Angeles, Orange Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Ventura

And all this was literally true, as now we know, ai though it remained for an alien race to find it so, long after Spain had let fall her grasp upon the full half of the globe. When her swords had rusted and her armadas were sunk a thousand fath oms deep, the blue-eyed alien came upon the pathways which Spanish prows had made at sea and the trails that Spanish feet had dared and conquered across forest and desert wilderness, to possess what was once Spain's alone and to make real the dreams that her sons in vain had visioned.

It was in the far-away time of the year 1542, fifty years after the dis covery of America by Christopher Columbus, that the first white men beheld with wondering eyes our California of the South. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator, sailed in that year from Navidad on the Peninsula by orders of Cortez the Conqueror, with a fleet of two galleons flying the flag of Spain. Other admirals had sailed before him to challenge the same unknown seas, but they were all either driven back defeated or they found watery graves. But the fates were kinder to Cabrillo. How, or by what miracles, he managed to voyage so far against such fearful odds, is now a thing at which we of this day well may marvel. His ships were the merest little tubs on which men would not now venture anywhere, let alone to dare a vast, uncharted and unknown ocean.

Cabrillo and his crews remained in the Port of San Diego for a matter of six days basking in the glory of endless sunshine as countless thousands since have done. Then he sailed northward as far as Cape Mendocino, putting in at every harbor on the way.

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