Fray Juan Crespi (1721-82)

Level as the Palm of the Hand

From Fray Juan Crespi: Missionary Explorer on the Pacific Coast, [Trans. Herbert Eugene Bolton], 1927

Spanish explorers and missionaries learned a lot about the California coast. But as the Spanish first established their missions and presidios, the vast interior beyond the Coast Range was yet terra incognita.

Father Juan Crespi—a veteran of Spanish exploration along the California coast—was with Pedro Fages during his expeditions through the Salinas Valley and along the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay. In 1772, on the shoulders of Mount Diablo, Crespi was one of the first Europeans to record seeing the astonishing panorama of the Sacramento Delta.

We ascended a pass to its highest point in order to make observations, and we saw that the land opened into a great plain as level as the palm of the hand, the valley opening about half the quadrant, sixteen quarters from northwest to southeast, all level land as far as the eye could reach. Below the pass we beheld the estuary that we were following and saw that it was formed by two large rivers. Where these united to form the estuary we saw a good-sized island; each one of the rivers seemed to us to have a width of about a quarter of a league. We saw also that one of these rivers, the one to the south, was formed by two other rivers as wide as the principal one, a quarter of a league, and that the place where they united must be about eight leagues distant from the pass.

Father Crespi's diaries were translated in 1927 as Fray Juan Crespi: Missionary Explorer on the Pacific Coast.