Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III OCCUPATION BY THE SPANISH 1769 '""THE humble race of Californians, or at least that portion living about the Bay of San Diego, was again awakened from its long undisturbed lethargy by the appearance on April n, 1769, of another vessel. This time it was the San dntonio, under the command of Juan Perez, a Majorcan who had been in command of a Manila galleon. He brought his ship to anchor in the bay, and on that day the first European settlers landed who came to make a permanent home in California. To understand the origin of this expedition it is necessary for us to go back a little in time and many miles to the southward in distance. During the century and a half which had passed so quietly for California of the north, the Spaniards had been colonizing, improving, and organizing all parts of Mexico. One feature of this progress was the establishment of numerous missions for the conversion and education of the natives. Two large Catholic orders, the Jesuits and the Franciscans, had taken charge of this work. The latter had several missions on the mainland while the former had established a chain of these religious and educational institutions along the peninsula of Baja or Lower California. In the year 1767 the growing agitation in Europe for the overthrow of the Jesuit order resulted in the king of Spain sending instructions to the Mexican authorities to sequester the holdings of this order in the peninsula and turn them over bodily to the Franciscans, who were thought to be more tractable and obedient to the civil authority. The Order of Saint Francis, as the Franciscans were officially designated, was founded by Francis of Assisi at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In 1210 he had eleven followers and drew up a set of rules for their guidance. A...