Paradise Lost

In August 1834 the nineteen-year-old Richard Henry Dana, his eyesight impaired by measles, took time off from Harvard and signed on as a merchant seaman aboard the Pilgrim, bound for the Alta California. What he found was a Pacific Ocean already teeming with American merchant and whaling ships and a sparsely populated landscape technically part of, though only lightly governed by, the new republic of Mexico. In Monterey he saw the Presidio built by Spanish troops in the 1770s and the Royal Presidio Chapel, constructed of sandstone by Indian laborers; Cortez had established Spanish rule of Mexico in 1521, but few settlers or officials had trekked over the hundreds of miles of desert or had fought the contrary ocean currents to get to California for 250 years. At Point Loma, the peninsula overlooking San Diego harbor, Dana worked with native Hawaiians curing hides, taken from overflowing herds of wild cattle, for sale back in Massachusetts. Sailing to San Pedro in the Los Angeles basin, he noticed that the smoke from the Indians’ campfires—there were maybe 10,000 people living in the Los Angeles basin where 10 million live now—seemed to linger, low over the ground. Read Full Article »