Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/476

 Santa Barbara Channel. Santa Barbara, on its practical side, has devoted more attention than most places to the culture of the olive—an industry still much in its infancy. Some of the cultivators have provided themselves with a machinery, which costs about a thousand dollars, for expressing the oil. As a condiment the fruit is not pickled green here, like the Spanish olive, but ripe and black. It may be that a special education is needed for liking each variety of olives, as it is for acquiring the taste in the beginning. Those here are of a small variety, descending from the old mission times, and it is hard not to find them either insipid or bitter. The leading shipment from San Buenaventura is honey. A million pounds per annum from Ventura County, of which it is the capital, is not an unusual product.

I sailed from Wilmington to San Diego. I embarked in the evening in a small tug, which steamed down the tortuous windings of the channel, past black lighters that Whistler would have liked to etch, and past Dead Man's Island, and transferred us on board a coast steamer waiting without. Next morning we were at our destination, a hundred miles below. San Diego, rising on a gentle slope, makes a pretty appearance from the water. A United States barracks (yellow), with a flag-staff rising in the centre, is the most prominent object in front. You round an immensely long, narrow sand-spit of a peninsula, which contributes to form the excellent small harbor, and make fast to an immensely long mooring wharf. It is a feature of all California ports to have immensely long wharves. To the left is "Old Town," its beach where Dana once loaded hides in his famous "Two