Cabrillo's Landing and the Contested First

On September twenty-eighth, fifteen forty-two, a Portuguese navigator sailing under the flag of Spain brought his ships into the bay below this point and named it Puerto de San Miguel. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo recorded it as the first European landing on the California coast. That framing, the first, has shaped the monument above you and every plaque attached to it.

The Kumeyaay, who had been living on these shores for at least twelve thousand years, met Cabrillo's ships from the beach. From their perspective, this was not a discovery. It was a visit, and not necessarily a welcome one.

Cabrillo himself never set foot on this specific peninsula. The monument on Point Loma was established in nineteen thirteen. Portugal commissioned a statue of Cabrillo in nineteen thirty-nine, but it was not installed at the monument until nineteen forty-nine, and it was replaced in nineteen eighty-eight with a version meant to better represent Cabrillo's actual Portuguese appearance. He died in January of fifteen forty-three on the Channel Islands, from a gangrenous injury he suffered during his expedition, and was buried on San Miguel Island. His ships continued north under the command of his pilot, Bartolome Ferrelo. The California coast he charted was the first European documentation of its existence; the people who lived on it had their own documentation, which did not require him.

The monument here is to European priority. That is a specific and limited claim. The Cabrillo National Monument, managed by the National Park Service, also interprets the Kumeyaay presence that predated Cabrillo's arrival, which makes it one of the few federally administered sites in California that treats the notion of discovery with any real honesty. The monument overlooks the bay he entered. The bay had a name before he gave it one.