Journey to the Sun by Gregory Orfalea

Author:Gregory Orfalea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Crespí map of “immense arm of the sea, San Francisco Bay,” 1772.

On April 5, within days of his arrival at Monterey, Crespí was immediately sent to address the hunger in San Diego, leaving with a twenty-two-mule train. When Crespí arrived he was stunned to find the cows withered and giving only dribbles of milk, the corn sere, the tallow for candles and wine for Mass long gone. There was only one priest (Luis Jayme), traumatized by soldier misbehavior on a scale even worse than San Gabriel; the other Franciscan had gone off to Baja in desperate search of food. This must have sent Crespí—who suffered, according to a French Serra biographer, from a form of clinical depression (neurasthénie)—into a tailspin.

Serra tried to sweeten the bitter pill of giving Crespí exactly what he wanted—more sun—by promising him that this was his chance to found San Buenaventura once and for all. But on arrival in San Diego, Crespí found that Father Dumetz had taken stores intended for San Buenaventura to San Gabriel, where food was also scarce and Indian-Spanish relations were still chilly a year after the rape-and-decapitation incident. The thick population of souls in the central coast was once again spared its saving. Crespí, manic at this point, wrote Serra, begging to return to the fog of Carmel. Exasperated, Serra replied (in a lost letter) that Crespí and Dumetz should both repair to Carmel.

But something changed. Instead of waiting—not the most common word in the Serra vocabulary—Junípero decided to leave for San Diego himself. Even more astounding, he went with his mortal enemy, Pedro Fages. And, having been warned by Verger from San Fernando to put the brakes on his mission founding, he founded a fifth mission on the way. Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa was thus a product of a rift in Serra’s closest friendship, carried out under the eye of his chief antagonist waiting for a misstep, amid the heaviest concentration of grizzly and brown bear in California. A wealth of sufferings indeed! In despair, Serra wrote Palou just before leaving that what he had described as a plentiful and wondrous garden in California was nothing but “these desert waste lands.”

• • •

With Crespí darting up and down the coast, and San Buenaventura being once again postponed, for the first time in his missionary life in the New World, Serra found himself alone (at Carmel). For four months he was in his dreaded solitude, without a Franciscan in sight and the soldiers five miles up the road at the presidio in Monterey. He turned out most of the thirty Indian families who lived in their tule homes near the makeshift chapel made of poles and adobe to forage for themselves in the teeth of the famine of 1772. They would be gone for weeks at a time, and when they did return, his heart sank. They were dirty, covered with paint, their Spanish clothes torn off.

Serra knew that if San Diego failed, the rest would wither and die.

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