“Blessed be the Saints.  It is the Punta de Los Reyes.”  The speaker was a bearded man of middle years.  A certain nobleness about him like an ermine garment of authority was purely of the spirit, for he was neither of imposing height nor of commanding presence.  His clothing hung about him loosely and recent illness had drawn haggard lines upon his face.  But his eyes flashed like an eagle’s, and the hand which pointed northward, though it trembled, had the fine dramatic grace of one who leads in its imperious gesture.  He swept from his head the once magnificent hat with its scarred velour and windtorn plume, bending one knee in a movement of silent reverence and thanksgiving.  This was Gaspar de Portola, October 31,1769.

Near him stood his aides.  All of them were travel-stained, careworn with hardship and fatigue.  Following their chieftain they uncovered and knelt.  To one side and a little below the apex of a rocky promontory that contained the little group, Christian Indians, muleteers and soldados crossed themselves and looked up questioningly.  In a dozen litters sick men tossed and moaned.  A mule brayed raucously, startling flocks of wild geese to flight from nearby cliffs, a herd of deer on a mad stampede inland.

Portola rose and swept the horizon with his half-fevered gaze.  To the south lay the rugged shore line with its sea-corroded cliffs, indented at one point into a half-moon of glistening beach and sweeping on again into vanishing and reappearing shapes of mist.

Far to the northwest a giant arm of land reached out into the water, high and stark and rocky; further on a group of white farallones lay in the tossing foam and over them great flocks of seabirds dipped and circled.  Finally, along the coast to the northward, they descried those chalk cliffs which Francis Drake had aptly named New Albion, and still beyond, what seemed to be the mouth of an inlet.

Dispute sprang up among them.  Since July 14th they had been searching between this place and San Diego for the port of Monterey.  “Perhaps this is the place,” said Crespi, the priest, reluctantly.  “Vizcaino may have been amiss when he located it in 37 degrees.”

“Yes,” spoke Captain Fernando de Rivera, “these explorers are careless dogs.  One seldom finds the places they map out so gaily.  And what do they care who dies of the hunger or scurvy—­drinking their flagons in Mexico or Madrid?  A curse, say I, on the lot of them.”

Portola turned an irritated glance of disapproval on his henchmen.  “What say you, my pathfinder?” he addressed Sergeant Jose Ortega, chief of Scouts.

“That no one may be certain, your excellency,” the scout-chief answered.  “But,” his eyes met those of his commander with a look of grim significance, “one may learn.”

Portola laid a hand almost affectionately on the other’s leather-covered shoulder.  Here was a man after his heart.  Always he had been ahead of the van, selecting camp sites, clearing ways through impenetrable brush, fighting off hostile savages.  Now, ill and hungry as he was, for rations had for several days been down to four tortillas per man, Ortega was ready to set forth again.