“In the grand scheme of Spanish settlement in the New World, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo played only a supporting role.” With these words Harry Kelsey concludes his exhaustive, yet concise, study of the man who was the first European to explore the Pacific coast of the United States, a man who has been either forgotten or ignored. No city bears his name in Central or North America. Historians and reference works have slighted him; he received one column (a half page) in the D. A. B. and two sentences in Boies Penrose’s Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420-1620 (1952), one of which erroneously credits Cabrillo with the discovery of San Francisco Bay (p. 151)! Indeed, Kelsey’s bibliography of more than 200 printed sources contains fewer than 20 which directly relate to the subject. Of necessity, therefore, this is a “life and times” biography with heavy, but not undue, emphasis on the latter word.

Fortunately, some primary sources do exist. In addition to a wealth of archival material, there is a contemporary relación which was not written, as is usually stated, by one Juan Páez or by the royal chronicler Juan Páez de Castro. Rather, it was a “scissors and paste” assemblage compiled by Juan León, secretary to Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, who utilized Cabrillo’s account of the expedition’s first five months together with his own debriefings of the survivors. The original, which is lost, was copied by Fray Andrés de Urdaneta, used by Antonio Herrera y Tordesillas in his Historia general (1615), and is an example of how historical errors are perpetuated as time goes by. (There also was a publication by Cabrillo, Relación del espantable terremoto . . . [Mexico City, 1541], a report of the earthquake which took place in Santiago, Guatemala in 1541. Referring to this work, the first secular publication in the New World, Kelsey laments that the original Mexican edition “seemingly does not now exist in a public collection” [p. 213]).

Who was Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo? Samuel Eliot Morison begins a four-page account of the man by repeating the erroneous story of Cabrillo’s Portuguese birth and by misattribution of the aforementioned printed primary source. (The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, 1492-1616 [1974], pp. 628-632). Cabrillo was not born in Portugal. Indeed, Kelsey devoted the first chapter to establishing Cabrillo’s Spanish nationality—and rightly so. For far too long, Portugal and Portuguese historians have claimed Cabrillo as one of their own even though no evidence exists to corroborate this. Furthermore, Cabrillo (or Cabrilho) does not exist as a surname in Portugal. Kelsey also establishes Cabrillo’s place of burial as the island of Capitana, off the California coast.

Cabrillo served with Pánfilo de Narváez in the conquest of Cuba, and in the conquest of Mexico with Cortés, for whom he built the ships for use on Lake Texcoco to conquer the Aztec capital and its emperor, Montezuma. Thus, he was the contemporary and companion of Francisco López, Bernal Díaz, Las Casas, and Pedro de Alvarado. He was also one of the richest men in Guatemala, having been, variously, a merchant, an encomendero, an army officer, and a mariner. His wealth was derived mainly from gold and cacao, the author sagely reminding us that “the real money crop of that time was cacao” (p. 59).

Not until page 123, of a 163-page narrative devoted to the story, does the book deal with the accomplishment for which Cabrillo has taken his place in history; namely, the discovery of what is now California. His expedition left Navidad in Mexico on June 27, 1542, rounded Cabo San Lucas on July 8, passed the Coronado Islands on September 27, and crossed into California (off modern San Diego) on September 28. Cabrillo died of an infection, after breaking his shoulder and possibly a leg, on January 3, 1543. The expedition, under Bartolomé Ferrer, reached its northernmost point on February 26, either the Rogue River in Oregon or Klamath, California.

Kelsey is scrupulous and careful, although he does err in the length of a Spanish league; it is 2.82 nautical miles. Where details do not exist, he says so. He uses words like “probably,” phrases such as “it is not certain,” and writes that “much of this is speculation . . . but the facts fit the story,” and the facts are buttressed with almost 50 pages of footnotes and a final historiographical chapter. My major complaint is the lack of a modern map showing present-day points of reference and landfalls, which would have made the chronology of the expedition easier to follow, especially in view of a misprint where October is substituted for November (p. 156). Most of the old maps reproduced in the book are useless; place names are illegible, as are the reproductions of portions of old documents. Never mind. Take an atlas from the shelf and plot the expedition’s course yourself.