Fray Juan Crespi: Missionary Explorer on the Pacific Coast 1769-1774

Fray Juan Crespi was among the great missionary-explorers of the Pacific Coast. Traveling by foot, mule, horseback, and ship, the Mallorcan Franciscan journeyed across Mexico, throughout Alta California, and into the waters of the North Pacific during Spain’s eighteenth-century expansion into the Americas. His detailed journals remain among the most important firsthand accounts of early California exploration.Originally compiled and published in 1926 by renowned California historian Herbert Eugene Bolton, this volume gathers Crespi’s diaries, letters, and related documents into a single work. The journals chronicle the Portolá expeditions, the founding era of California’s missions and presidios, encounters with Indigenous communities, and the geography of a rapidly changing frontier world.This new edition includes a modern introduction and extensive historical endnotes by maritime historian Bradley Angle, providing contemporary context, analysis, and commentary on the people, politics, and consequences surrounding the Spanish colonization of California.While the Spanish colonial system brought violence, upheaval, and suffering to Native Californians, Crespi himself often emerges in these pages as a careful observer and unusually gentle presence amid a brutal Spanish enterprise. These diaries offer readers both an essential historical record and a deeply human window into the defining period of Spanish California. . Read more