Page:California a guide to the Golden state-WPA-1939.djvu/77



ITHIN the half century after Christopher Columbus discovered the new world, Europeans discovered and named California. In 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the Pacific coast at Panama; twenty-two years later another Spaniard, Hernando Cortés, discovered a land he named California; and in 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator, rode at anchor in San Diego Bay, the first white man to see any part of the region now known as California.

The chain of events that led to California started with the search by Columbus in the Caribbean in 1493 for the island Mantinino, which he had been told "was peopled merely by women." Columbus thought this might be Marco Polo's Amazonian island "near the coast of Asia." He failed in his search, but the fabulous isle fascinated other navigators during the next decade. After Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo published his romance Las Sergas de Esplandián in 1510, Spanish navigators were familiar with both the legend and with the name California. A passage reads: "Know that, on the right hand of the Indies, there is an island called California, very near to the Terrestrial Paradise, which was peopled with black women. . . . Their arms were all of gold."

Spain's dominion in the new world was extended to the western coast of Mexico by Cortés' conquest of the empire of Montezuma. In an attempt to push it farther west and north Cortés sent two ships commanded by his kinsman Diego Hurtado de Mendoza on a "voyage of discovery" in 1532. Mendoza got as far north into the Gulf of Rh