Penthesilea's Wish [Vol.1]

Chapter Thirty-six

(Bancroft Library; Doe Library; Art History and Classics Library, University of California, Berkeley)

By mid-morning, and armed only with the urgency of shedding any new light on the Bixby Bridge discovery, Nicasio had begun digging into three of Cal's most renowned collections of historical resources. Though the overarching focus of the inquiry would remain the mystery of the tomb's 'who' and 'why,' it was for now a more a search for 'which.' Which of the earliest expeditions to explore California's otherwise sleepy, uncharted coastline, visited this specific stretch of coastline near the Bixby site late in the sixteenth century? And apparently with an unimaginable agenda.

Nicasio was living proof that these expeditions by ship, which first perused this far-flung shore, had been heavily researched over the past centuries by both international as well as American scholars. Through his own previous work toward his dissertation on the Englishman Drake, and as a student of Early Modern Europe and specifically the Age of Global Voyages, he was patently familiar with the men who were most likely to have made landfall during that window of time the professor had set as the arrival and assembly of the tomb. The time corridor of their focus was now tightly based on the evidence of the Spanish silver coin, the soldier doublet buttons, and the armor buckles found inside the tholos amid centuries of dust and debris. This window of time was also coupled with the fact that any earlier-known European involvement in the area was undocumented and most probably non-existent.

Using these albeit fragmentary leads as a reference point, he and the professor also surmised the tomb's existence on the coast would most likely not be before 1542 when the first recorded European explorer, Portuguese Capitan Rodriguez Cabrillo, ventured northward into uncharted waters of California. He had sailed along the coast from Navidad, New Spain (Mexico) northward up the uncharted edge of the continent. His historical voyage was the first to explore San Diego Bay, and beyond to Santa Catalina Island in the Channel Island chain. Cabrillo's two ships then proceeded onward northeastward to SanMiguel Island, roughly just off the coast of Santa Barbara today.

Since the professor's first revelations of the time and place of this curious find, Nicasio had considered Cabrillo and his exploratory sweep up the coast as a potential conspirator in some association with the tomb. According to the two ships' logs of the expedition, which had been lost for well over a century, but then rediscovered, his voyage was established to be the first European incursion into the coastal waters of what is now from south to north-central California.

A copy of these documents was housed in Berkeley's Bancroft Library, the incomparable repository for primary resources on California and the West. As a result of his research security clearance, available since his status as a doctoral candidate, Nicasio would have no difficulties accessing them. His cursory reexamination of the logs in Spanish, in fact, revealed that Cabrillo had indeed passed near the coastal river mouth area which now features the majestic Bixby Bridge. He then sailed on northwesterly up to the treacherous coastline to Point Reyes, above present day San Francisco. Like several of the subsequent mariners to explore this region over the next two centuries, he and his crew, due to coastal fog, completely missed sighting the mouth of the immense San FranciscoBay.

Nicasio spent the morning determining through a summary of Cabrillo's lost and rediscovered logs, written by Andrés de Urdanteta in his original Spanish, that the three ships on the expedition—a galleon, a caravel and a fragata, had all progressed as far north as today's Russian River before separating in a storm and being blown back southward. They eventually took refuge near SanMiguelIsland. This event was very close to Christmas Day, 1542.

It was logical that Cabrillo certainly would have passed again along the Big Sur coastal site while returning to winter on the southeast side of SanMiguelIsland. It was a common practice to flee bad weather on the leeward side of islands and the wealthy and experienced Cabrillo was a prudent captain. In this case he also saw the need to attend to his crew's exhaustion and their overall protection from an extremely cold winter, also documented in the journal as seeing the Sierra Mountain range in the distance from the cliffs as snow-capped—a rare site, even today from the sea.