W. Michael Mathes and Theodore E. Treutlein have provided scholarly studies for publication by the California Historical Society. Both books are soundly researched and well written, and both contain excellent illustrations and beautiful maps.
In Vizcaíno and Spanish Exploration in the Pacific Ocean 1580-1630 Mathes admirably fills the need for a full-scale examination of Vizcaíno’s career as explorer, merchant, and diplomat both in New Spain and in Asia. Particularly noteworthy chapters deal with Vizcaíno’s charting of the California coast in the first decade of the seventeenth century and his fascinating career in the opening and closing of Spanish-Japanese relations between 1611 and 1617. He brings to his task a mass of primary sources from the archives of Spain and Mexico, and he presents a skillfully woven narrative of Vizcaíno’s contribution to Spanish expansion. Mathes makes full use of his own two-volume work Documentos para la historia de la demarcación comercial de California: 1583-1632 (Madrid, 1965), and he places these documents in proper context with other primary and secondary sources included in his impressive bibliography. A set of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps enhances the volume.
Treutlein’s San Francisco Bay Discovery and Exploration, 1769-1776 is a remarkably lucid account of the early history of exploration, mapping, and settlement in the San Francisco area based on carefully examined primary sources. He “has permitted the explorers and founders to speak for themselves in extracts from diaries, letters, and other official reports written by such participants as Father Junípero Serra, Miguel Constansó, Father Juan Crespí, and Juan Bautista de Anza” (dust jacket). He places his primary sources in excellent historical perspective and organizes the material in such a way that the eyewitness reports come alive for the reader. Upholding the interpretation that San Francisco Bay was first discovered by an overland expedition in 1769, Treutlein rejects stories of Drake’s earlier discovery as unconvincing. Particularly interesting for the specialist are the chapters on the Rivera-Palóu exploration of the Peninsula in 1774 and on the “San Carlos” and the first nautical survey of the Bay in 1775. The study is rounded out by valuable documentary appendices on Russia in the North Pacific, a page of the famous coded Grimaldi letter of 1767, and a plate showing the Crespí map of 1772 with full commentary on the mystery associated with it. Even though Treutlein avows in his preface that this book contains “a many-times told tale,” this reviewer thinks it the best and most complete telling.
Both of these handsome volumes deserve a place on the bookshelf of your professional library.